from the inside. I have to do it. That’s all.’
‘I understand interest from others is growing?’
‘They come from everywhere, from the US, from Canada, to learn.’
‘Why do people love it?’
‘If I can’t tell you why I do it, I can’t tell you why they love it.’
I saw why he had no patience with me. I was an outsider, the questions were dumb, and he was fiercely concentrated, not on me, but on what he was about to do, on its brutal physical and emotional demands. Itwas like approaching a top tennis player just before a Wimbledon final and expecting deep answers about the inner game of tennis. Besides, there was much more going on, which I was too busy with camera and tape-recorder to notice. Andi was a medical student: short-cropped hair, good on a horse, tall, lithe as a thoroughbred herself, and thoroughly, impregnably professional – or so I thought, until she talked later about the impression he made.
‘Yes, he could look scary. But his mood changed in a second. He has this nice smile. Then he was really funny. He swore. Like something was “bitchily good”, as we say. Then sometimes the way he looked . . .’ She was driving us along a flat, straight road over the puszta , but her mind was not on grasslands. ‘We have an expression, that when someone looks at you like that they can see your bones. That was how it felt. He could see my bones. He just looked at me and asked me a really simple question, and I had to think really hard, because he was looking into my eyes, and he was amazing.’ She paused. ‘He really was. Honestly.’
Clearly, there was more to Kassai than the scattered responses that came my way during that interview. It took me another meeting on his home ground, more talk, and respectful observation to understand. Mounted archery is his life’s work. To explain it to me would have taken weeks. Fortunately, he has already taken the time by writing his story in a book, Horseback Archery . But even that tells only half the story. The other half emerges in action, in teaching, inthe commitment that others give him. There could be no real understanding of him except in action, any more than there can be a real understanding of what it takes to be a mounted archer unless you become one.
He is a man whose life perfectly matches what he feels is his destiny. From this flows a steely self-assurance, a rock-solid sense of identity and purpose, hard-won in a world that he sees as obsessed by change, growth, novelty and ambitions which, once realized, must be replaced by new ambitions. Kassai, like a monk, heard the call, followed, and arrived at his goal. But, unlike a monk, he did not find the way and the goal through a teaching, or an organization, or a Master. They are his alone. And both have involved an extraordinary combination of physical and mental work. There is something of the Zen warrior in him, the fighter who achieves internal balance to hone his martial skills – except that he had to become his own Master, invent his own religion, as it were. It has taken him over 20 years.
I asked again: Why? He says he has no choice in the matter, as if mounted archery were in his very genes. Of course, it couldn’t be, because the skills of the mounted archer were not around long enough to work their way into the genetic code. For nomads, the roots lay not in nature but in nurture, in skills implanted in childhood and perfected over decades. Kassai did not have that advantage. He grew up in a world of collective farmers and city-dwellers and factory-workers. Perhaps, as a child, he experienced another sort of nurture, some unconscious need to escape the oppression imposed bythe Soviet-backed counter-revolution, the drabness of communism.
Escape lay in his imagination, sparked off in his childhood by a novel about the Huns, The Invisible Man , by Géza Gárdonyi. It is the story of a Thracian slave, Zeta, who travels to Attila’s court with the Greek civil servant Priscus (the
‘I understand interest from others is growing?’
‘They come from everywhere, from the US, from Canada, to learn.’
‘Why do people love it?’
‘If I can’t tell you why I do it, I can’t tell you why they love it.’
I saw why he had no patience with me. I was an outsider, the questions were dumb, and he was fiercely concentrated, not on me, but on what he was about to do, on its brutal physical and emotional demands. Itwas like approaching a top tennis player just before a Wimbledon final and expecting deep answers about the inner game of tennis. Besides, there was much more going on, which I was too busy with camera and tape-recorder to notice. Andi was a medical student: short-cropped hair, good on a horse, tall, lithe as a thoroughbred herself, and thoroughly, impregnably professional – or so I thought, until she talked later about the impression he made.
‘Yes, he could look scary. But his mood changed in a second. He has this nice smile. Then he was really funny. He swore. Like something was “bitchily good”, as we say. Then sometimes the way he looked . . .’ She was driving us along a flat, straight road over the puszta , but her mind was not on grasslands. ‘We have an expression, that when someone looks at you like that they can see your bones. That was how it felt. He could see my bones. He just looked at me and asked me a really simple question, and I had to think really hard, because he was looking into my eyes, and he was amazing.’ She paused. ‘He really was. Honestly.’
Clearly, there was more to Kassai than the scattered responses that came my way during that interview. It took me another meeting on his home ground, more talk, and respectful observation to understand. Mounted archery is his life’s work. To explain it to me would have taken weeks. Fortunately, he has already taken the time by writing his story in a book, Horseback Archery . But even that tells only half the story. The other half emerges in action, in teaching, inthe commitment that others give him. There could be no real understanding of him except in action, any more than there can be a real understanding of what it takes to be a mounted archer unless you become one.
He is a man whose life perfectly matches what he feels is his destiny. From this flows a steely self-assurance, a rock-solid sense of identity and purpose, hard-won in a world that he sees as obsessed by change, growth, novelty and ambitions which, once realized, must be replaced by new ambitions. Kassai, like a monk, heard the call, followed, and arrived at his goal. But, unlike a monk, he did not find the way and the goal through a teaching, or an organization, or a Master. They are his alone. And both have involved an extraordinary combination of physical and mental work. There is something of the Zen warrior in him, the fighter who achieves internal balance to hone his martial skills – except that he had to become his own Master, invent his own religion, as it were. It has taken him over 20 years.
I asked again: Why? He says he has no choice in the matter, as if mounted archery were in his very genes. Of course, it couldn’t be, because the skills of the mounted archer were not around long enough to work their way into the genetic code. For nomads, the roots lay not in nature but in nurture, in skills implanted in childhood and perfected over decades. Kassai did not have that advantage. He grew up in a world of collective farmers and city-dwellers and factory-workers. Perhaps, as a child, he experienced another sort of nurture, some unconscious need to escape the oppression imposed bythe Soviet-backed counter-revolution, the drabness of communism.
Escape lay in his imagination, sparked off in his childhood by a novel about the Huns, The Invisible Man , by Géza Gárdonyi. It is the story of a Thracian slave, Zeta, who travels to Attila’s court with the Greek civil servant Priscus (the
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