Trickster-Hero

[In] the Great Lakes country and the upper Mississippi basin, we . . . encounter the trickster-hero typical of the West. For the Midwestern Siouans – the Winnebago, the Iowa, the Oto, the Omaha, the Ponca – this figure is Hare, called Mastshingke (rabbit) in the language of the Omaha. The Algonkian Ojibwa and Menominee call him Manabózho, or Nánabush, a variable name that has been translated Great Hare.

. . . In general, the Siouans de-emphasize the hero’s trickster aspect, relegating the coarser and more trivial to Ishjinki, who corresponds to the Inktomi of the Sioux proper. Food production results from ribald adventures of Ishjinki, whereas the Siouan Hare is a deliverer, if a lighthearted one, rescuing humanity from the cannibal bears, bodiless heads, giants, and swallowing monsters of the ancient time.

Today this sacred lore, largely forgotten, is best preserved in the far north, especially among the Cree, where Hoodwinked Dancers, Eye Juggler, and similar animals tales are still told.

Although hunting is losing out to wage occupations, and many now rely on government welfare, the Cree still think of themselves as hunters, and it is said that telling stories about animals is part of the “old agreement.” If game animals know that the myths are not being kept up, they will leave.

– John Bierhorst
The Mythology of North America
William Morrow and Company, 1985
Pp. 213-214

Image 1: “Nanabush” by Teiji Hayama.
Image 2: From Petroglyphs Provincial Park near Peterborough, Ontario.

Morning Light XXII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Camouflage and Speed

All hares rely on camouflage and speed for their survival and it is characteristic of the animal that when put to flight after running a distance they will stop and look round to ascertain where the danger now lies. Some species have been reported as reaching speeds of 50 mph (80 km) and maintaining speeds of 30 mph (50 km) over long periods. All hares have long legs, large hearts, and wide air passages for breathing and a lightly built skeleton. The feet are covered with fur and there are five digits on the fore feet and four on the back. These physical characteristics enable hares to be agile and to run very fast.

- Excerpted from The Hare
by Jill Mason

Image 1: “Hare Running in Pimpernel” by Mary Philpott.
Image 2: “The Willow Hare Makes a Bid for Freedom!” - Words and Willow.

The Art of Herbert List

The following is excerpted from Stephen Spender’s introduction to the book Herbert List: Junge Männer.

_______________________________________

Herbert came to signify for me the freedom and spontaneity which I associated with the Weimer Republic – today much despised, but in retrospect, I think, really a post-1918 interlude and idyll of humanist living.

Herbert’s values were personal. He wanted to live his physical and mental being rather than become a business or conventional social success. He was proud to be a good merchant, but, essentially, his success as a business man amused him merely, just as it would have amused him to play some game extremely well.

[When I first knew him in 1929] he did not want to be a professional photographer. A camera was to him an instrument for capturing the statue-like gesture of some beautiful young man. Looking at these photographs, the spectator has the sense of seeing beyond the photograph to the original moment which so captivated the eye rather than the lens of the photographer. This is art, the expression entrapped from a rare instant of reality, of Herbert’s vision of the original model, at a moment when reality as it were transcended itself. This is the fulfillment of Herbert’s inner life coinciding with his recognition of the external moment given.

Herbert’s friends were, I suppose, divided between those he was physically attracted to and those he loved for their vivid personalities, their conversation. Many of us are often aware of this kind of division of interest in our relationships with friends. But with Herbert when he was young this division seemed absolute. It had a quality of doom affecting his whole way of life. I remember him saying to me once at Schwimmbad: “The boys with beautiful bodies have uninteresting faces, and the boys with interesting faces do not have beautiful bodies.”

. . . This does not mean that Herbert was uninterested in the personalities of his living statues – some of them close friends, some of them casual acquaintances. In fact, his anecdotes about them, made up a good deal of his most amusing conversation. Moreover, with a privileged few, he was really in love. Nevertheless the beautiful young men always stuck me as trapezists and performers at some wonderful fare: like, perhaps, the circus people, dancers in early paintings, or drawings and etchings by Picasso.

Herbert List never tried to make his photography look like paintings. They exist entirely in terms of their own medium – photography. Yet within those terms he is very conscious of painting, and even more so of sculpture.

. . . His photographs of young men are much influenced by classical and Renaissance art. The young men selected by him for models are, for the most part, beautiful by the standards of Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and by the Renaissance ones of Michelangelo’s sculpture and of his figures of youths painted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. They remind us that the ideal of the art of the classical revival in Europe was the drawing of the nude male model, a center from which all other drawing radiated. List’s photographs exemplify standards derived from the Renaissance pencil or ink drawings and – almost as an extension of this – the black and white photography of German and Russian stills from the movies of the late Twenties and early Thirties. Color can only detract from these powerfully liner and chiaroscuro images. The figures themselves and their poses are often statuesque. This is heroic art related to Greek statues but also, in our modern times to the idea – present in Cezanne’s few paintings of male nude bathers, in Seurat, and in Picasso – that the male nude, usually of a working man, stands outside and beyond the bourgeois system of class, superior in the magnificence of the architecture of bone, the potency of flesh.

Garden Hare

Image: The Leveret.

Tan Lines XI

Image: Subjects and photographer unknown.

Purpose Unknown

Hares do not fraternize with each other as rabbits do, although they gather together in certain enclosed spaces – aerodromes and parklands – and on some occasions they appear to hold meetings the purpose of which is unknown.

– George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
p. 27

Image: Robert Wainwright