Bel Homme XI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Dancing Hares

Image: OZinOH.
Sculpture: "Dancing Hares" by Sophie Ryder (Ballantrae Park, Dublin, Ohio).

Morning Light XLIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Winter Hare

Image: "Hare in Winter" by Philip Black.

Boys Will Be Boys

Introducing a new series celebrating the exuberant, playful, often erotically-charged energy of males together – gay, straight and everywhere in between. Enjoy!



Image: Subjects and photographer unknown.

Mysterious Assemblies

. . . [Norman Halkett] is one of the few people to have seen the mysterious circular assembly of hares. . . .

"No one has ever been able to explain to me fully just why hares do on occasion sit in a wide circle with one or two or even more of their number having a gambols or frolics inside the circle. . . . I have seen it at least three times in my life, from as small a circle as say ten or twelve, to as many as thirty or forty hares, all performing at once. Some standing up . . . bolt upright on their hind-legs, others sitting on their hunkers, as we say, and some actually lying down as though they weren't paying much attention. But it does happen and I would honestly like to know what it really means."

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare
by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
p. 53

Image: MajorWildlife.co.uk via WonderfulWorldOfImages.com.

Bel Homme

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Running Hare XI

Image: "Running Hare in Iron Oxide" by Sophy White.

Morning Light XLII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

An Extraordinary Capacity

Despite their reputation for rapid increase and hyper-sexuality, hares are not especially prolific breeders compared to rabbits – much less so compared to rodents. . . . But the brown hare does exhibit one extraordinary reproductive capacity which has provided, in the exaggerated descriptions given of it from Aristotle onwards, the basis for its reputation for unique and almost preternatural sexual proclivities and increase.

Unlike most mammals, both female rabbits and hares will continue to mate while pregnant. But only the brown hare is capable of conceiving a second time – of carrying two potential litters at different stages of development. Superfetation, as it is called, can occur as a rare event in most mammals, even in humans. It has been recorded in populations of brown hares in up to 13 percent of females, a remarkably high and probably conservative figure. For Aristotle it was a primary characteristic of hares – and subsequent writers almost competed with each other to emphasize and exaggerate its miraculousness.

– Simon Carnell
Hare
pp. 34-35

Halloween Hare

Image: "Halloween Hare" by Robin Seeber.

Tan Lines XXXIV

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Arabian Hare

The Arabian hare is the largest species of Cape hare and can be found in Syria, Lebanon, northern Israel, the United Arab Emirates and across the Arabian peninsula. Arabic names for hares in this region include arnab, arneeb, harneed and haineeb.

Arabian hares have exceptionally long ears and pale, almost bleached coats which serve as effective camouflage for their life in the desert.

Much smaller than their European counterparts, Arabian hares rarely drink water, but obtain moisture from the grasses and shrubs that they eat.


Images: Bernard Blesl.

Bel Homme IX

Following is one of several advertisements for Arisa - "the world's first gay Middle-Eastern party." Enjoy!








Recommended Off-site Link: Arisa on Facebook.

Elaborate Means

Hares have . . . developed relatively complex escape and concealment strategies in addition to speed, endurance and camouflage. . . . The brown hare in particular employs elaborate means to confuse its scent trail, including doubling back on its tracks; leaping sideways to break the trail; entering and leaving its form in ways designed to construct a 'maze' for predators hunting by scent. They also establish regular routes or 'racetracks' in the vicinity of their forms, and 'meuses' or gaps in hedges and fences facilitating rapid egress from enclosed fields.

– Simon Carnell
Hare
pp. 31-32

Image: "Run, Hare, Run" by Fresnay.

Morning Light XLI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Table Hare

Image: The Leveret.

Bel Homme VIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

A Different Dimension

To watch a hare in full flight is . . . to get an idea of the physical limitations of the human body. It seems to be moving in a slightly different dimension, or to cover the ground without the usual constraints of gravity and lateral resistance. Like 'the shadow of a wind-driven cloud,' or 'more like a low-flying bird than a running animal' . . . Even the word 'running' is not quite adequate to its bounding locomotion.

– Simon Carnell
Hare
p. 24

Image: "Young Brown Hare at Speed" by Andy Fisher (2009).

The Body: A Holy Place of Romp and Renewal

The soul expresses itself throughout the body, in its members, organs, nerves, and cells, in all actions of desire, daring, and droop, wherever you ache and wherever you soar. Every nook and cranny of yourself can flutter and stretch, exude and hum, in experiencing the pleasures and pain of being alive. The body is a holy place of romp and renewal. It is not the shameful sewer that orthodox religions insist upon. Novalis said, "There is only one temple in the world, and that is the human body." From your tiptoe to your topknot you are throbbingly alive in the dance of the divine mystery.

The genitals, the anus, and the perineum are the holy trinity at the root of your torso's experience. The penis is the exposed tip of the heart and the wand of the soul. The perineum animates all the chakras. The anus is the transforming and recycling volcano that fertilizes new growth.

The proper activity in a temple is worship. Open your temple to love.

– James Broughton
"Gaiety of Soul"
in Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature
(edited by Mark Thompson)

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Good Luck

Despite widespread beliefs that the sight of a hare was a bad omen, in a few parts of Britain hares were thought to bring good luck. Some regions held that if a hare was encountered then a wish could be made as soon as it had passed by. To see a black one was a sign of good fortune, although a white one brought bad luck.

. . . Cultures in the Middle East used the symbol of the hare to signify the good fortune of a great hero. In some ancient Bedouin legends the hare’s power to counterarct evil forces was specifically identified with the female hare called ‘Akrasha.’ It was believed that she gave protection against leopards and other predators.

– Jill Mason
The Hare
p.112

Image: "The Black Hare" by Julie Allen.

The Death of Antinoüs

By Mark Doty


When the beautiful young man drowned –
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,

mortality rinsed from him –
Hadrian placed his image everywhere,
a marble Antinoüs staring across
the public squares where a few dogs
always scuffled, planted
in every squalid little crossroad

at the farthest corners of the Empire.
What do we want in any body
but the world? And if the lover’s
inimitable form was nowhere,
then he would find it everywhere,
though the boy became simply more dead

as the sculptors embodied him.
Wherever Hadrian might travel,
the beloved figure would be there
first: the turn of his shoulders,
the exact marble nipples,
the drowned face not really lost

to the Nile – which has no appetite,
merely takes in anything
without judgment or expectation –
but lost into its own multiplication,
an artifice rubbed with oils and acid
so that the skin might shine.

Which of these did I love?
Here is his hair, here his hair
again. Here the chiseled liquid waist
I hold because I cannot hold it.
If only one of you, he might have said
to any one of the thousand marble boys anywhere,

would speak. Or the statues might have been enough,
the drowned boy blurred as much by memory
as by water, molded toward an essential,
remote ideal. Longing, of course,
becomes its own object, the way
that desire can make anything into a god.



Taken from Love Speaks It's Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems, selected and edited by J. D. McClatchy (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001).

For a video of Mark Doty talking about Hadrian and Antinoüs and reading his poem "The Death of Antinoüs," click here.


See also the previous posts:
Antinoüs
Ganymede and Zeus

Recommended Reading: Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.

Opening image: "Antinous" by Teotemerity.

Tan Lines XXXIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Lepus – Constellation of Hare

Blandine Anderson’s painted works employ both Acrylics and Oil-paint. More recently, she has favoured heavily textured oil paint, built up in thick layers, which is combed, scratched and scumbled - to echo the textural qualities found in her ceramic works.

As in her recent ceramics, these paintings explore Blandine’s interest in natural forms and are often initially inspired by seeds and leaves. From this starting point, similar shapes from other sources are assimilated. These may be plants, bones, the bodies of living creatures, a piece of circuitry from an electrical appliance, the contours of a map, or the shape of a field. The shapes become intermingled and abstracted in the sketch-book, so that what begins as a seed may very easily become a bird.

The resulting images are not intended to be illusory – they explore the qualities of paint on the surface of the canvas. They are merely evocative of recognizable shapes or subjects. For this reason they are usually un-framed – painted on deep-edged canvasses, which emphasize their actuality.

– Source

Image: "Lepus – Constellation of Hare" by Blandine Anderson.

See also the previous posts:
Even in the Heavens
The Hare on the Moon
Hare Moon
In the Light of the Moon
Moon-Struck
A Solstice Approaches . . .

Bel Homme VII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Even in the Heavens

Writes Simon Carnell in Hare:

Due to their relatively exposed way of living hares have an unusually high number of predators, with high mortality rates among their young. Adult hares live on average no more than one year, compared to a potential lifespan of up to twelve years. There is an epigram by Ausonius in which a hare hunted to the seashore by dogs and men cries out, before being eaten by a dog-fish, that "all rape of land and sea is on me/ even of the heavens, if there is a dog-star." An ironic conclusion, since in the southern night sky there is both a "dog-star" and a "lepus" constellation at the foot of the hunter Orian.

Merman V

Image 1: Artist unknown.
Image 2: DeZarin.
Image 3: Christina DeHoff.

Hare By the Sea

Image: Vince Cowell.

Bel Homme VI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Standing Erect

"Lepus" (giclée on canvas, 42" X 28") by Robert Bissell.

Says the artist: "This large portrait of a hare standing erect was one of a series of paintings based on 18th century French and English portraits by Boucher and Gainsborough. Designed to make their subjects appear larger than life and removed from the common, they’ve always struck me as ostentatious. I wondered how it would feel if the style were applied to animals that stand on two legs—looking directly down at us, challenging our place and way of thinking."

Morning Light XL

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.


See also the previous posts:
Hard
Tools of Attraction

The Hare's Unusual Attraction to Airfields

Note George Ewart Evans and David Thomson in The Leaping Hare . . .

One unusual feature of the hare’s behavior has caused a great deal of interest . . . both among naturalists and the general public. This is the hare’s frequent choosing of aerodromes on which to converge and, in fact, to live.

. . . Hares are to be seen on many airfields in many different countries: Prague, Frankfurt, Heathrow and so on. . . . This is the kind of behavior, contradictory and unpredictable as it is, that is nevertheless not too much out of character in the hare. For the common phrase hare-brained refers not so much to a lack of intelligence as to a wild impetuosity. Why, for instance, does such a shy and fearful creature choose the noisiest, most dangerous and most frequented spot in the modern urban complex to disport itself in?

There have been many attempts to explain why the hare appears to be so attracted to airfields. [Henry] Tegner [in his book on the hare] quotes a Natural History Museum expert as saying: “The hares seem to like the noise and the vibration.

. . . Others have put forward the theory that it is the abundant food they can get on the stretches of well-kept turf between the runways that has drawn hares to aerodromes. Good grazing is undoubtedly a factor in keeping them on an airfield; but it is questionable whether it is the main attraction. There is strong evidence that aircraft themselves attract the hares in the first place. For when in recent years an aerodrome frequented by hares was closed for repairs, the hares followed the aeroplanes to the satellite aerodrome which became the temporary landing place. But why should aeroplanes attract hares?

. . . Early reports of the hare following aircraft suggest that the hare’s reaction is inbuilt, an instinctive impulse to emulate the speed of the aeroplane by running alongside it: it suggests that the hare is purposefully ‘taking on’ the aircraft, responding to what it interprets as a challenge. This fits in well with what we know of the playfulness of the hare, of its delight in its own swiftness, and its readiness – in spite of its fear – to pit itself on occasion against a fast moving object. The hare’s main strength lies in its speed: it does not go to ground and relies on its speed to get itself out of trouble; therefore when it plays, as it appears to be doing when it courses alongside aircraft, it is likely that in showing its speed it is using one of its strongest instincts of self-expression.

– George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
pp. 28-31

Related Off-site Link:
Milan Airport Shut by Hare Plague – Mark Duff (BBC News, June 17, 2007).

Bel Homme V

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Anarchist Hare

Writes Simon Carnell . . .


Naturalists such as Ernst Haeckel were quick to explore the reactionary political implications of [Charles] Darwin's major work. The anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, in his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), set out to contest conceptions of a perpetual, selfish and bloody war between and with species by giving a thoroughgoing account of their co-operations. When he reaches the hare, he is forced to concede the fact that it is relatively asocial, is "not even endowed with intense parental feelings," and displays a marked antipathy towards its closet relative, the rabbit. Undeterred, however, it is at that point in his text that Kropotkin introduces the idea of the "pleasures" animals in general derive from playing together, asserting in particular that "our common hares . . . cannot live without coming together for play." To back this up he quotes a contemporary hare expert who testifies to the fact that they are such "passionate players" they have even been known to take an approaching fox for a playmate. What happens next to the hare is passed over in silence, in this almost subliminal reference to a pre-Fall or Golden Age. Kropotkin concludes with an ingenious explanation of the antipathy between hares and rabbits. Hares are "passionate, eminently individualist"; rabbits "placid, quiet and submissive": "their tempers are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship." Far from contradicting the general political argument with which he frames his natural history, then, the hare turns out, like Kropotkin, to be nothing less than a committed anarchist – with a natural scorn for the bourgeois conformism of the rabbit with its "family life . . . entirely built upon the image of the old patriarchal family."

– Simon Carnell
Hare
pp 17-19

See also the previous posts:
Unhoused
Buck
A Roaming Life
Antipathy
Much in Common


Image: Photographer unknown.

Tan Lines XXXII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Rabbit That's Actually a Hare

Notes National Geographic:

Jackrabbits are actually hares, not rabbits. Hares are larger than rabbits, and they typically have taller hind legs and longer ears. Jackrabbits were named for their ears, which initially caused some people to refer to them as "jackass rabbits." The writer Mark Twain brought this name to fame by using it in his book of western adventure, Roughing It. The name was later shortened to jackrabbit.

There are five species of jackrabbits, all found in central and western North America. They are speedy animals capable of reaching 40 miles (64 kilometers) an hour, and their powerful hind legs can propel them on leaps of more than ten feet (three meters). They use these leaps and a zigzag running style to evade their many predators.

To read more about jackrabbits, click here.


Image: Annie Griffiths Belt.

Morning Light XXXIX

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

An Extraordinary and Ancient Archetype

Notes artist Hester Cox:

The hare is an extraordinary and ancient archetype which is important to many different cultures and inspires countless artists today. In many mythic traditions, the hare is a lunar animal associated with femininity, longevity and rebirth. Look a little deeper and you find that the hare is a paradoxical creature symbolising both foolishness and intelligence, lust and purity, witchcraft and Christianity.

Image: "Swift as a Hare" by Hester Cox.

A Solstice Approaches . . .

. . . Unnoticed


By James Carroll

The Boston Globe
June 20, 2011

Once, humans were intimate with the cycles of nature, and never more than on the summer solstice. Vestiges of such awareness survive in White Nights and Midnight Sun festivals in far northern climes, and in neo-pagan adaptations of Midsummer celebrations, but contemporary people take little notice of the sun reaching its far point on the horizon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, the official start of the summer season, the fullest of light — yet we are apt to miss this phenomenon of Earth’s axial tilt, as we miss so much of what the natural world does in our surrounds.

In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before — earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur — as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”

To our ancestors in the deep past, that attention to nature was, well, natural. They made the evolutionary leap into human consciousness through close observation, among other things, of what heavenly bodies do in the sky. In a cosmos over which they had no control, paying attention to patterns of heat and cold, light and dark, rain and drought was a matter of survival. The invention of agriculture depended on awareness of seasons, so that times of planting and harvesting, herding and grazing, could be depended upon. Movements of the sun and moon were seen to have both influences on, and counterparts in, individual human experience — from mood swings to menstruation to aging. Astrology opened into astronomy, calculation into mathematics, scrutiny into science. Definitions of the calendar were essential to culture. The solstice was a marker of all this.

But this habit of regard for nature was essential also to the transition into modernity. Contemplation of the sun was nothing less than the incubator of our age. Copernicus and Galileo, after all, ushered humans into the breakthrough of testable knowledge by means of their study — one theorizing, the other experimenting — of Earth’s place in the solar system. The solstice, previously perceived as the sun’s standing still for a moment before reversing course on the horizon, would never be understood that way again. Heliocentrism initiated the maturing of science, which eventually would demonstrate that seasonal rhythms not only produce global dynamics of climate but also hormonal changes — daily, weekly, monthly — within the individual human body, each person biologically synchronized to the cosmic clock. Because of science, we were able to grasp the age of the earth — to know that there have been more than 4 billion summer solstices. Humans awakened to the full complexity of the universe.

Ironically, the accompanying social revolution of industrialization led to illusions of human mastery over nature, and ultimately to detached indifference toward it. Contemporary technological civilization became blinded to key phenomena of the living world, much as the night sky is blotted out by the artificial light of cities. Most recently, the cycles of time have given way to the eternal present of the computer screen — detachment squared. As humans came to know so much, we lost our grip on the knowledge with which we became human: our familiarity with the physical universe we live in. Imagining that we no longer needed nature, we ourselves became the great threat to nature. As our sense of the complexities of life quickened and deepened, our destructiveness of life also quickened and deepened. Through ambitions of unlimited growth, consumption, competitive manufacture, and self-expanding technology, we humans have become a mechanism of extinction. When we stopped noticing Earth, we began to destroy it.

Intimate awareness of nature and its cycles, as we saw, was an ancient mode of survival. But survival is at issue again. Noticing the length of light now, reveling in the sun’s achievement, rejoicing in Earth’s perfect balance, honoring the summer solstice — loving it: This is how we became human, and it is how we stay human.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Bel Homme IV

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Maximum Significance

Due to its historical multivalence, the archive of associations which it has generated, the hare is rip to be . . . squeezed for maximum, even ultimately uncertain or inchoate significance. Amongst the kinds of things which it has been made or co-opted to signify is, precisely, this poetically open-ended or resonant quality. That said, they tend to cluster around a number of areas more or less troped upon its natural history: sex, death, speed and vitality, super-sensitivity, elusiveness and cunning; untamed or unfathomable "wildness," with only their sinister portentousness bucking the trend.

– Simon Carnell
Hare
pp 45-46

Image: Catherine Hyde.

Bel Homme III

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Much in Common

The hare and the fox have much in common. They are both active by night, both symbols of the irrational, the intuitive, of cunning and the fickleness of the moon.

– George Ewart Evans and David Thomson
The Leaping Hare
p. 218

Image: Detail of "The Forest" tapestry by William Morris.

The White Hare

The White Hare
By Seth Lakeman

I heard her in the valley,
I heard her in the dead of night.
The warning of a white hare
Her eyes burning bright.

Careful you don’t catch her
Or give her right of way.
For she will look upon you,
Steal your soul away

For the white hare is calling,
Dancing in the night.
She’ll be out ’til the morning,
With eyes burning bright.
The white hare is calling you.

Out upon the heather
A shadow came onto me.
Her hair was hanging over,
Her face I could not see.

She ran behind the rocks,
I heard the hounds cry,
The image of a woman
With her head held up high.

For the white hare is calling,
Dancing in the night.
She’ll be out ’til the morning
With eyes burning bright.
The white hare is calling you.

If you go hunting,
Calling out your prey,
If you see a fair maid,
With her hair ash and grey.

Careful you don’t catch her,
Give her right of way,
For she will look upon you,
Steal your soul away.

Recommended Off-site Link:
Seth Lakeland's Official Website

Tan Lines XXXI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.