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.