Morning Light XVII

Subject: Simon Czaplinski.
Photographer: Paul Reitz.

Where the Mountain Hare Has Lain

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

W.B. Yeats

Image: Devon Biodiversity Action Plan.

The Domain of Eros

The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

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Homosexuality, in our culture, rather than forming an identity, is best understood as an unusual way of looking at the world, a paradoxical mode of being in the world. The paradox presents a special sensibility through which some men understand themselves and the world they live in. It is a sensibility that they can employ at various times, depending on the personal and social circumstances. A homosexual man is not just someone who has had a certain number of objectively homosexual experiences. Nor is he someone whose life can be understood primarily through his homosexuality. He is a man whose paradoxical intuitions of the myth of gender have given him a special sensibility.

I [draw] a distinction between objective and subjective homosexuality. Objective homosexuality is merely a matter of two persons of the same sex engaging in sexual activity. Objective homosexuality describes observable, physical behavior. Subjective homosexuality, on the other hand, refers to the psychic dimension of sexual experience. This psychic dimension . . . is the domain of eros. So, subjective homosexuality is the psychic world of homoeroticism. It’s possible for two men to engage in objectively homosexual behavior and not experience it as homoerotic. This is often the case in boys’ schools, prisons, the military, and other exclusively male environments where men engage in homosexual acts without finding it homosexually significant; they don’t think of themselves as homosexual and often don’t consider their objectively homosexual behavior as a homoerotic expression. It is just a substitute for sex with a woman. This is not to say that there aren’t men in prisons and the military who experience a homoerotic dimension in their sex with other prisoners, soldiers, or sailors. The point is, the act does not necessarily define the individual’s psychic experience.

Homoeroticism lies in the individual’s paradoxical interpretation of the myth of gender. . . . One of the effects of being paradoxical, of being gay, is estrangement. Gay men are estranged from the culture from which they themselves have emerged.

– Extracted from Pronger, B. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 81-82.

The Ghostly Mountain Hare

The following is excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

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The mountain hare is not very much bigger than a large rabbit. . . . Its summer coat is an excellent camouflage especially in flowering heather or the mosses and course grasses of the moors. On bare stony ground and against the blue shadows of lichened rocks on a sunny day it is perfect. In summer too there are many places where hares can hide in long old heather or grass. But the winter coat is a terrible danger to the hare unless there is snow.

. . . When he lived in Nairn [in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland] as a boy, [Norman Halkett] used to borrow his uncle’s field glasses and bicycle out to the moors, usually alone, but sometimes with a friend, and lie down to watch birds and animals.

. . . The mystery of the white hare sometimes frightened him. He says that when it was sitting or lying down it looked as if it had been frozen to death or stuffed in a hunched up position like a cat that is feeling the cold. Its staring eyes were like glass eyes. Then watching through field glasses he would ask his friend to clap hands or bang two stones together. The hare would crouch even further in its form. They would approach it cautiously. It would watch them stilly until they were very near. The friend would run on towards it, and he would see through his field glasses how it leapt from the form with a twist of its hindquarters and land about ten feet away in order to leave no scent from its paws. Then it would bound in an easy regular gait, a series of smooth unhurried jumps that reminded him of a horse gently cantering, to the summit of the nearest ridge usually less than a hundred yards away. It would sit up there with its ears erect and look back to survey the danger.


Sometimes when it ran on more level ground it would seem like a puff of smoke rising and falling, blown by the wind. It would often vanish suddenly near a rock or high clump pf heather. When [Halkett] tried to imagine the Holy Ghost he thought of the white hare. The mysterious sin against the Holy Spirit was to kill a white hare.

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 36-37.

Tan Lines VII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The March Hare of Wonderland

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

“There’s PLENTY of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.


“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.


– Excerpted from Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Image 1: Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1922.
Image 2: Arthur Rackham, 1907.
Image 3: Sir John Tenniel, 1865.

The Hare on the Bookshelf

Image: The Hare by Jill Mason on the Leveret’s bookshelf - November 2008.

Morning Light XVI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Hare in a Forest

“A Hare in the Forest”
by Hans Hoffman
German, about 1585
Oil on panel

Following is how the Getty Center in Los Angeles describes Hoffman’s “A Hare in the Forest.”

“Nibbling on a leaf pulled from a stalk of Lady’s Mantle, an alert hare sits at the edge of a pine forest. Unlike the darkness one would expect to find in a forest, Hans Hoffmann painted a theatrically illuminated scene. Each plant and insect – snail, cricket, beetle – is seen in vivid detail. The finely wrought leaves of the thistle, the sprawling fronds of a plantain, and the bright blue flowers of the Hare Bell attest to Hoffmann’s meticulous treatment of the subject. In fact, none of these plants could have co-existed in the natural world. Hoffmann imaginatively combined numerous individual nature studies in a single painting.

“Hoffmann’s golden-brown hare is based on Albrecht Dürer’s famous and influential watercolor which, much like his Stag Beetle, shows a hare against a plain ground. Hoffmann had seen Dürer’s hare while in Nuremburg. Later, when he went to work in the court of Emperor Rudolf II, he helped the Emperor acquire the watercolor for his Kunstkammer. Hoffmann’s hare differs from Dürer’s however, appearing amid a striking arrangement of elegant plants and insects. At the time it was painted, this arrangement of nearly life-size subjects was entirely unique, not only within Hoffmann’s body of work, but also within the tradition of German nature study.”

Autumn Beauty

Dressed in nothing more then a leaf, Randy Corona turns into the embodiment of the ever changing nature. But instead of preparing for winter, Randy turns into a blossoming branch with colorful leafs, maturing into a trunk and finally taking solid root. . . . Together with [body painter] Ricardo Muñiz, Randy Corona creates his own Garden of Eden in Central Park.

– Source

Images: Randy Corona.

Antipathy

Hares and rabbits do not fraternize. Hares feed on almost every kind of vegetation, even seaweed, mushrooms, puffballs, and the leaves of young conifers, but they will not graze on land used by rabbits. It is said that rabbits drive them off pugnaciously, but even when there are no rabbits about they will not feed there because rabbits make the grass seem foul for them, as it is for sheep, and as a pasture is for cattle after geese have been on it.

Charles Welling has seen ghastly evidence of antipathy: “What used to destroy most hares was rabbits. The buck rabbit used to go and bite the top of their heads when they found them. Of the leveret. Of the young. When you go – you find the form with three or two in it. But going back an jour later – you’d see the heads all smashed and eaten. You’d stand back and say, ‘Well, what’s done that?’ – and you’d suddenly see a buck rabbit come or a doe rabbit come, jumping out and go around and scratch them out of the nest after they’d killed them. So we’d know that that’s what they’d done.”

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 26-27.


Image: “Brown Hare Alerted” - Chatton Gallery.

Tan Lines VI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Sleeping Hare

Image: Curled Hare Brooch (pewter with a silver colored finish) by Sapphire Moon.

Morning Light XV

Subject: Rafael Branciforti. Photographer: Unknown.

The Year of the Hare

Writes Janet St. John of Arto Paasilinna’s novella, The Year of the Hare:

“A Finnish journalist and a photographer out on assignment one June evening suddenly hit a young hare on a country road. The photographer, ultimately unsympathetic, abandons his journalist companion Vatanen, who sets off to find the wounded hare. Vatanen develops a close bond with the hare and in their adventures together they witness people’s avarice, inhumaneness, hypocrisy, cruelty, participation in bureaucracy, and mere existence, rather than living, in the world. This last realization, in particular, is life altering for Vatanen: he quits his job, discards his hopeless marriage, sacrifices financial security, and sells his most prized possession (a boat). All this Vatanen replaces with a life of odd jobs and on-the-road experiences. This picaresque novel could simply depict a middle-age crisis, but it reaches beyond fantasy or fiction, becoming mythic in its universal themes. The story is inventive, satirical, and quite humorous. It is also refreshingly sentimental in the sense that Paasilinna reaffirms our connection with the animal world and our inherent need for happiness and freedom to maintain quality of life.”


Following is an excerpt from Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare.

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[Vatanen] took the hare in his arms and went out on to the ice, thinking he’d take a walk across the bay, sort his thoughts out and calm down. It was about half a mile to the farther shore.

When he was half-way across, the ravers loosed a couple of large hounds at him. They’d spotted the hare he was carrying. “After ‘em! After ‘em!” they shouted.

The yelping hounds tore across the ice in hot pursuit. The hare took to its heels, and, seeing it on the run, the hounds broke into a fierce baying. Their big paws slithered on the ice as they hurtled past Vatanen and vanished into the trees across the bay.

Vatanen pursued them to the headland, wondering how he could save his hare. What he needed was a gun, but that was hanging on a nail at Läähkimä Gulf.

Several men came running out of the villa, carrying guns. Bellowing as they run, they were like the hounds they’d loosed. The ice bent under their weight.

Vatanen concealed himself among the trees, for as soon as they got to the headland, they fired in his direction. He was lying in the slushy snow, hearing the peevish mumbling of drunken men.

The hare was already far off, the baying of the hounds scarcely audible. Their cry was actually a howl; so the hunt was still on, the hare still alive.

Vatanen’s brain was working overtime. This savage chase must stop, but how? How could such men exist? Where was the pleasure in a rough-house like this? How could human beings lower themselves so viciously?

The poor hare was circling back in terror. Suddenly it burst out of a gap in the trees, saw Vatanen and dashed straight into his arms. Two drops of bright red blood had oozed from its mouth. The baying of the hounds was getting louder.

He knew the hounds could rip the life out of him if he stood there in the forest with a hunted hare in his arms. Should he reject his beloved beast? Send it on its way, save his own skin?

No – the thought shamed him as soon as it came. He ran for a knoll, overgrown with thick-boled, gnarled and twisted pines. Quickly he clambered on one. It was tricky, climbing with a hare in his arms: bits of fur got stuck on the bark; but he was out of reach when the hounds came whirling up, snorting and sniffing the hare’s traces. They soon found their way to the foot of the tree and frenziedly reached up on their hind legs, yelping into the branches, clawing at the red bark with their paws. The hare thrust its head under Vatanen’s armpit, trembling all over.

Boozy voices were again drawing nearer, and soon five men stood at the foot of the tree. . . .

Tan Lines V

Image: Adam Raphael.

Autumn Hare

Image: The Leveret.

Morning Light XIV

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Boxing Hares

The following is excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

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Hares often stand upright on their hind legs to fight. They rely on their hind legs in most of their actions and their balance is superb as can be seen most clearly in the artic hare which does not touch the ground at all with its front paws at high speed. But it seems that they do not use their hind feet as weapons.


Norman Halkett has watched them boxing with their forelegs:

“The hind legs do not so much kick as thump the ground much in the same way as we would stamp our feet rather than give an outright kick. I have heard the thumps quite distinctly; the object seems to be to make a noise and therefore attract attention – possibly some kind of display before the female. Both fore and hind legs are armed with strong claws, sharp and long enough to inflict wounds.” Halkett never saw much damage done.

“I have heard them make funny noises with their feet, sort of thumping on the ground, and occasionally one punches another like kangaroo boxing, or again you couldn’t quite say it’s punching; it’s more like poking at the other fellow.”

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 52-53.


Image 1: “Boxing Hares” by James Lynch.
Image 2: “The Boxing Match” by Sara Richer.
Image 3: “Boxing Hares” by Hannah Giffard.

Wrestling: "The Heterosexually Acceptable Form of Homosexual Foreplay"

The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

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One man told me that, as a boy, wrestling brought him to his first awareness of homoeroticism and has remained a source of erotic fascination for him. . . . As a legitimate activity for boys, wrestling allowed him the opportunity to explore, unwittingly, the homoerotic potential of masculine physical contact.

. . . Another man remembered how his fascination with men’s muscles evolved into a desire for wrestling contact.

Boys and teenagers are intuitively aware of this kind of fun and wrestle with their friends. Some are content with the subtle non-genital expression of the paradox; others use it as a mutual masculine ruse or prolegomenon to a more transparent homoerotic seduction. As Gregory Woods said, “Wrestling . . . is the heterosexually acceptable form of homosexual foreplay.”


Often boys will wrestle with each other hoping for a more explicit homosexual action. Describing an ultimately frustrating teenage relationship with another boy who turned out to be more interested in orthodoxy, one man told me that he and his friend, “were very physical, we were always wresting, doing everything but having sex, and I think I just got tired of waiting for something to happen.”

Afraid of the homoerotic paradox, its power to undermine masculinity and the estrangement that may follow the pleasure of the paradox, some boys and men nevertheless manage to immerse themselves in the experience by disguising it as “orthodox” athletic combat.

On the other hand, in The City and the Pillar, a novel by Gore Vidal, boys wrestle their way to sex: “Somehow the violence released Jim from certain emotions and he wrestled furiously with Bob, made free, for the time, by violence.” In this story, the wrestling eventually gives way to genital sex, leaving Bob feeling uncomfortable and Jim feeling that he has found himself.


A man I interviewed remembered the problems that competitive wrestling in high school caused him. He said he found wrestling:

Very sexual. I’d often get hard. I’d often come. It was difficult to deal with: “How did you get hard-on off me?” That became a problem in high school so that I ended up, grade twelve . . . I stopped wresting. I was too afraid that I was going to get hard and someone would notice. Actually, it rarely happens when you are really wresting – it can’t physiologically because the blood is going to the muscles and it’s certainly not engorging the penis. So it has to be in a fooling-around sense, but still, it’s happened to me, so you tend to become really cautious about coming out in grade ten in front of the gym class, it’s not cool.

The homoerotic appeal of wrestling needn’t always result in erections. As the wrestler above pointed out, when one wrestles intensely the muscles get precedence over the penis for the supply of blood. That physical economy, however, may have little to do with the erotic focus of the athletic activity. The lack of an erection does not signify a paucity of homoerotic attraction. As Neil Marks said, “There is a unique excitement in being aware of your physical attraction to a man and sublimating it into an athletic maneuver.”

– Excerpted from Pronger, B. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 183-185.

The Fabled Hare

Image: The Fabled Hare: Esoteric Art and Supplies.

Tan Lines IV

Image: Ludovic Canot photographed by Dylan Rosser.

The Hare in Flight

The following is excerpted from The Hare by Jill Mason.

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A hare’s first line of defense when it spots danger is to lie low: to press itself down close to the ground in its form. Only taking flight when it is under imminent threat. Brown hares can run up to a speed of 45 mph (70 kms) and often zig-zag or turn at right angles when chased, to elude being caught. The action of a greyhound in full flight exactly mirrors that of a hare. The long hind legs are thrust forward and the fore legs backwards between them. When not in danger, a hare will casually rise and stretch before lolloping off and stopping to sit every now and then to look around, especially if it has passed through a hedge. Because of their build, chased hares usually choose to run uphill, which gives them an advantage over other animals. All hares possess larger hearts and a bigger volume of blood within their bodies than animals of comparable size; this gives them greater speed, endurance, and stamina.


Image: “Running Hare” by Roger Oakes.

St. Francis and the Hare

Little Flowers of St. Francis, a classic collection of popular legends first printed in 1476, contains numerous stories of St Francis of Assisi’s love of the poor and of nature.

Francis’ striking rapport with animals is perhaps the most well-known aspect of his legend. For centuries he has been regarded as the patron saint of animals and, more recently, the ecological movement.

Here is one example of Francis’ rapport with animals: Once, when he was staying in the town of Greccio, a hare was caught in a trap and brought live to Francis by a brother Seeing the hare, Francis was moved to pity and said, “Brother hare, come here. Why did you let yourself be fooled in this way?”

As soon as the hare was released by the brother he leaped over to Francis and settled into his lap. After the hare had rested for a while, Francis let him go so that he could return to the wild. Yet each time he was placed on the ground, the hare ran back to Francis. Finally Francis asked that the brothers carry the hare to a nearby forest.

In the Arena

The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s insightful book, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

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[S]ubjective experience rather than objective behavior is important. Viewed objectively, any sexual act involving persons of the same physical sex can be considered a homosexual act. But the simple physical fact of a man’s penis being in another man’s hand, mouth, or anus is, in itself, insignificant. In our culture, there is great importance attached to our saying that someone has been involved in homosexuality. What’s important is the meaning of homosexuality. What the homosexual act might mean to those involved, to someone who has caught them in the act, or to someone who suspects another of being homosexual can be highly significant.

To many high school coaches, the surprise discovery of two male athletes in flagrante delicto would have almost earth-shattering significance. To some, it would mean that the team has two faggots, pansies, boys who are less than real men. Having engaged in homosexual activity, the two young athletes have betrayed the pure aspirations of athletics: mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body. These boys have the potential to destroy the moral fabric of the team and perhaps the entire school. Even more importantly, their characteristically unmasculine behavior could undermine the macho competitive edge that many coaches work so hard to develop among their athletes.

For the boys involved, on the other hand, this sexual foray may have none of the significance that might overwhelm a coach’s vision. There is every possibility that the two lads were simply randy and were caught taking advantage of a warm and friendly hand in the shower, a welcome but not necessarily significant physical release of sexual energy. It is possible, however, that to one or maybe both of the boys, this sexual meeting had enormous personal significance, that it was the young expression of a profound and largely unexplored world of meaning.


Boys and men can engage in homosexual behavior with each other, but the content of that behavior depends on the subjective interpretation of those involved. It is actually the subjective meaning of the behavior and not the behavior itself that, from an orthodox view, is considered troublesome in our culture.

- Excerpted from The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex by Brian Pronger.

Surprisingly

Writes artist Martin Ridley:

There are many different strategies which animals adopt to cope with danger. The powerful legs of hares give a clue as to theirs.

Most animals hide away in cover for protection but hares rely on seeing any danger coming. With eyes placed high on their heads, hares have exceptional all round vision and, if a predator approaches, their speed will prevail and carry them to safety.

Brown hares are predominantly active during the hours of darkness, during the day they rest up in a shallow scrape in the ground called a form. Surprisingly the hare sits right out in the open and is only partly concealed.


Image: Benjamin.

Morning Light XIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Hare's Dream

On the twentieth of January and in the seventieth year
The morning being beautiful, charming, bright and clear
I being disturbed by dreams as I lay in my den
I dreamed of heathery mountain, high rock and low glen

As I sat in my form for to view the plains round
I being trembling and shaking for fear of the hounds
And seeing no danger appearing to me
I quickly walked up to the top of the Sligue

They hunted me up and they hunted me down
At the loop of the burn they did me surround
When up come the huntsman to end all the strife
He says, Leave the hare down and give her play for her life

Bad luck to all sportsmen, to Bowman and Ringwood
They sprinkled the plain with my innocent blood
They let Reynard go free, that cunning old fox
That ate up all the chickens, fat hens and game cocks

Yes now I’m for dying but I know not the crime
To the value of sixpence I ne’er wronged mankind
I never was given to rob or to steal
All the harm that I ever done was crop the heads of green kale

- Traditional

Image: Brown Hare by Carl Baggott.

Tan Lines III

Continuing The Leveret’s appreciation and celebration of tan lines . . .


Image: Carlinhos Freire, Tayrone Lemos, and Felipe Caffé photographed by Fernando Torquatto.