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.