(un)like a machine

an essay about why I don't go to the horse race track, Secretariat, and definitely not A.I.

Every summer, the non-depressive reverie and relief the season brings me is wrecked by the recurrence of my town’s signature event at its signature location, a big (the biggest) horse race at its racing track, when a town of horse statues, horse-named streets, and horse-themed dining establishments reaches the yearly zenith of its identity.

Of this identity, I have no part. Not once in the lifetime of years I have lived within the proximity of this event or its lesser occasions have I attended one of these races.

As someone proud of their regional heritage, I take part in disappointingly few of the major activities making the area worth living in. Horse racing is only the most preeminent of these. Over the years I’ve deflected various invitations from workplaces and friends and potential girlfriends alike, for reasons I am not quite sure of but outwardly present an immovable stance on, unsteady as they may be in their underpinnings.

There is the aspect of animal cruelty. Over the past few summers, dozens of horses have died at the track, either through injury, illness, or heat stroke. “These horses live better lives than some humans!” is the cry from the protectors of the local horse racing tradition, and as I drive past the barns and stables of these horses on the backroads of my area, it is hard to deny this might be the case.

Perhaps it has to do with the elitism of the event, the particular attending strata of society, although it’s not so much an activity exclusive to the elite; horse racing tracks are often also the dens of degenerate gamblers, drinkers, and other simple revelers without distinction, amongst whom I would feel at home. My track is a mix of both these types, blended together and indistinguishable from afar thanks to mutual acquiescence to a horrific dress code, as if everyone fell off a yacht: high socks and boat shoes and short shorts and polos for the men, sundresses and big hats for the women, the only distinguishing features between the classes of pretenders and legitimate high rollers being that the former look like their yacht is more of a pontoon boat.

Spurious reasons aside, my abstention from the track most likely has to do with the invasion of otherness to my quaint home and resultant simple resentment. Private jets rattle my windows as they land at the small airport by my house, suddenly a booming hub of the globetrotting elite. The line at my favorite local coffee shop becomes insurmountable. People from The City (and, indeed, The Cities of the World) roam the sidewalks and make it impossible to walk my dog without facing the constant distraction of their designer breeds and the stench of their inequity.

And yet.

Every year when the race rolls around, I find myself careening down a slick Wikipedia-hole of horse racing, clicking the hyperlinked sire and/or dame of each past winner of the race, the sires especially going almost a dozen links deep, all the way back to the 1700s, the records so immaculately kept in a sport in which heritage is the ultimate maker of talent. Almost all racehorses today can trace their lineage back to just three horses from the early 18th century, and the records of those horses, where they are from, the races they ran, are as well documented as an Napoleonic war campaign.

Inevitably, I land upon the story of the most famous horse of all: Secretariat. Secretariat was, to me, only a character in Bojack Horseman before I became fascinated this year with his real life achievements, mainly his running of the Belmont Stakes of 1973, in which he crushed the field by 31 lengths, breaking the record of 25 lengths held by the horse who sired him. This record still stands today, along with his record times in the other Triple Crown races. As a sports fan, that his records from the ‘70s still survive seem miraculous; every day, each human sport yields some new ridiculous breaking of some previously unbreakable record, the human body stretched and optimized to its greatest capacity and our methodologies evolving to meet our biological limits.

I watched this video of the race, containing sportscaster Chic Anderson’s excited pronouncement:

“Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!”

Like many of the faceless YouTube commenters, I found myself tearing up at this part of the video, his exclamation juxtaposed with the sight of Secretariat hauling ass around the corner of the track, leaving his nearest competitor, a horse (aptly?) called Sham in the literal dust, the climactic excitement from the crowd building to a frenzy.

What was it about this moment? There was something in it, I thought, worth investigating: Me who could never attend a horse race—who in fact sought excuses not to and could care less—was moved, nearly to tears, by one from 50 years prior.

It was the marvel in his voice, the roar of the crowd, how clear it was he was witnessing something he’d never seen before, and I had an empathetic response. Could it be so simple? Could I simply be so human as YouTube commentators as to enjoy something for so superficial a reason?

No. I am a writer, an astute interrogator of the way word choice moves us, or so I like to believe. There was something here, something deeper tickling my subconscious, something needing comprehension. “Tremendous” is a great adjective, especially for a sportscaster, unique at least, and the force with which Chic Anderson delivers it in the sort of strange non-accent accent (almost Mid-Atlantic?) makes him for a moment sound a bit like Charlie Chaplin in the speech from The Great Dictator.

More likely something within the larger simile spoke to me: like a tremendous machine. A machine. Secretariat, the result of hundreds of years of breeding, so genetically gifted his heart was of an inordinate size never again seen, compared favorably to the achievements...of a machine.

The tears, perhaps, were tugged by a nostalgia for a time—only a few years removed from the moon landing—in which the awe and wonder of technology could still be a standard for living things to aspire to. The 21st century’s capitalist corruption of humanism had yet to see its embrace of technology finally turn on its head with the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence, in an unexpected form beyond the physical.

We always imagined A.I. contained within bodies, manifestations far superior to ours, making us plucky little underdogs with weak biomass against untiring, formidable metals, with only our indomitable spirit to combat them. If only, we could rise to their level! If only, we could move like machines! To do so would be a miracle, the triumph of the vincible over the indefatigable, the human spirit lending itself to our bodies as whatever spirit drove Secretariat to greatness seemed to imitate the automobile, the steam engine, the rocket ship.

Instead, A.I. came about as a squib, an imposter of the human mind without a vehicle; fine for the drab and menial of mental executions, but by its nature unexciting, unable to pull ahead to anything close to 31 lengths, an approximation of the average person, the net denominator of the most inoffensive, mundane among us. Machines of both the physical and non-physical generally have a baseline competence; it is not their extra-capable capacities which make them remarkable, only their ability not to fail, to complete the task in the most rote and basic way. In some respects, they may seem competent, especially at first.

But it’s all a Sham. For all a machine without a body can do, the one thing it cannot be is you.

So should I go to the track, despite my misgivings? Am I there likely to experience the same rapture as so many did the day Secretariat smashed the field at the Belmont Stakes in 1973, to see organic mechanical triumph in the flesh? No, I don’t think so.

Fortunately, nowadays, to feel the same awe as Chic Anderson, all I need is to see human beings doing great things here in the final turn, the last great length of humanity’s courageous race, the products of all the things we do best within and without the confines of our bodies: watch great film, read great novels, hear great music, to recognize the result of thousands of years breeding, of sires and dames all the way back to the heart of Africa.

Secretariat is all alone! And so are you.

You are moving like a tremendous human-being!