Hares at Play

Hares at Play
By John Clare

The birds are gone to bed the cows are still
And sheep lie panting on each old molehill
And underneath the willow’s grey-green bough
Like toil a-resting lies the fallow plough
The timid hares throw daylight fears away
On the lane road to dust and dance and play
Then dabble in the grain by nought deterred
To lick the dew-fall from the barley's beard
Then out they start again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts – dance – squat – and loiter still
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Jingle their yokes and start them in the corn
Through well-known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Starts quick as fear - and seeks its hidden lair

Sculpture 1: “Boxing Hares” by Paul Jenkins.
Sculpture 2: “Dancing Hare” by Paul Jenkins.

Morning Light V

Subject: Unknown.
Photographer: Fred Goudon.

The Hare on the Moon

The following is excerpted from AdlerPlanetarium.org:

Many peoples see pictures on the Moon, based on the dark and light patterns on the Moon’s face. One is the Man in the Moon. Another is the Rabbit in the Moon, or Hare on the Moon. A rabbit is not immediately obvious to modern Western eyes, but to the Chinese it has been a mainstay of mythology for centuries. The Chinese also see a Toad, who is the goddess Heng O.

The hare in the moon is a common symbol for sacrifice and rebirth. This story from India is fairly typical. It runs: A monkey a fox and a hare were out walking. They encountered a beggar in very bad shape. He told them he had not eaten for days and was about to starve. Now it was a holy day, when the rich would fast and give food to the poor, so the three friends decided to hunt for some food for the beggar. The monkey found some mangoes and the fox returned with a bird’s nest, which the beggar accepted gratefully. The hare, however could hunt nothing, since humans could not eat grass. Instead he offered himself as food. The hare lit a fire and jumped in. However, he found he did not burn. Instead the beggar revealed his true face as Indra, God of the Storm. Indra rewarded the hare’s courage and self-sacrifice by placing him on the Moon, where people would see him and forever remember his story.

An Aztec story says that the Gods needed to renew the Sun and the Moon. This required a pair of willing sacrifices. The second sacrifice, called Tacciztécatl or Conch Shell Lord, became reincarnated as the Moon, so one of the gods hurled a rabbit into the Moon’s clean face. The rabbit can be seen today as the emblem of Tacciztécatl’s sacrifice and rebirth.


Image: Joanna May.

Soft

Following is an excerpt from The Male Body by Susan Bordo:

No other part of the male body is so visibly and overtly mercurial as the penis, capable of such dramatic transformation from passivity to alertness. No wonder many cultures have worshipped the phallus as a magical being. The word “fascinate” has its origin in the Latin word fascinum, which meant “witchcraft” and derived from the phallic god Fascinus, worshipped by Romans, who sometimes wore an image of an erect penis around the neck as an amulet or hung one of the walls of their houses. . . .

We don’t quite regard the penis as a magical being, but we still find fascination in its mercurial nature. . . . “Hard” and “soft” are two dramatically different physiological states that have been endowed with even more dramatic – and varied – significance.

Non-erect, the penis has a unique ability to suggest vulnerability, fragility, a sleepy sweetness. It’s not just soft, it’s really soft. It lolls, can be gently played with, cuddled. . . .


In literature, tender descriptions of the penis are usually evoked when it is soft. The most famous is offered by D. H. Lawrence through the persona of Connie Chatterley, who murmurs to Mellor’s soft penis as through it were her infant baby, even a fetus.

“And now he’s tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!” she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. “Isn’t he somehow lovely! So on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He’s mine too. He’s not only yours. He’s mine! And so lovely and innocent!” And she held the penis soft in her hand.

Say what you will about Lawrence in his phallic postures; he’s truly captured a woman’s moment here.

All animals of course, are made of mostly soft stuff, requiring various kinds of protection, from horns to helmets, to help us get by. Human flesh is particularly vulnerable, but the soft penis seems especially so, not, I think, because (like the testicles) it is more easily hurt than other parts of the body, but by virtue of contrast with its erect state. No other body part offers that contrast.

Unfortunately, the relation between the hard and soft penis often determines whether the soft penis will be cherished like a sleeping baby or derided as a flaccid piece of failure. The vulnerability of Mellor’s soft penis touches Connie Chatterley, but only after she has known him in a more commanding mode; transfigured by satisfying sex, she looks with wonder at “the tender frailty of that which had been the power.” But fifty pages earlier, after unsatisfying sex, Mellor’s body appears a “foolish, impudent, imperfect thing,” the “wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis” of her lover to be “ridiculous” and “farcical.” Whether he’s a tender bud, full of promise, or a sad, wilted bloom, the full flower of manhood sets the standard.

– Susan Bordo
Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1999
pp. 43-45

NEXT: Hard
See also the related posts:
• Penis
• Phallus
• Rethinking the "Normal" Penis
• Rethinking the "Normal" Penis (Part II)

Recommended Off-site Link:
Give a Man Six Inches and He’ll Want a . . . - John Elder, The Age (Melbourne), August 13, 2006.

Image 1: Doug Koziak (photographer unknown).
Image 2: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 3: Geoffrey Kane (photographer unknown).
Image 4: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 5: The Leveret.

Hard

Continuing with excerpts from The Male Body by Susan Bordo:

The erect penis is often endowed with a tumescent consciousness that is bold, unafraid, at the ready. Gay art and literature and both straight and gay pornography are throbbing with such descriptions . . .

[A] lot of our ideas about the penis clearly come not from anatomical fact but from our cultural imagination . . . Most of our metaphors for the penis . . . turn it into some species of dildo: stiff torpedoes, wands, and rods that never get soft, always perform. These metaphors . . . may be a defense against fears of being too soft, physically and emotionally. But at the same time as these metaphors “defend” men as they joke with each other in bars or – more hatefully – act as a misogynist salve for past or imaginary humiliations, they also set men up for failure.

For men don’t really have torpedoes or rods or heroic avengers between their legs. They have penises. And penises, like the rest of the human body and unlike dildoes, feel things. . . .




- Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
by Susan Brodo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1999), p. 45 and pp. 64-67.


See also: Soft.

Image 1: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 2: The Leveret.
Image 2: Riley (photographer unknown).

Cutting of the Hare

Hares often hide in cornfields till the last reaping. The last sheaf is often called “the hare,” and its cutting called “killing the hare,” “cutting the hare,” or “cutting the hare’s tail off.” In some places the reapers would all stand around and throw their sickles at the “hare.” In many European countries there are traditions surrounding this “cutting of the hare” ritual.

Source: The Dancing Hare.

Image: “Hare Asleep in the Cornfield” by Hannah Giffard.

Morning Light IV

Animal Energies

The following is excerpted from Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing by Coleman Barks.

____________________________

I like to think of the first mystical poem as that figure incised, and painted, into the farthest wall of the cave called Les Trois Freres in southern France. The Animal. Joseph Campbell called him “god of the cave.” He does the dance of human and animal at once, owl, lion, horse, stag, man. He incorporates them all visually and looks out at you with your own menagerie, who have gone inward far enough to meet his gaze. Animals can live inside the landscape without our noisy self-consciousness. When we turn and go with them . . . we enter a silence and a transcendence. We perceive through their eyes with their energies. This is a metaphor, a tremendously important one, as well as an experience.

The Shaman in the Cave

Hazrat Inayat Khan says that seekers should “accomplish their desires that they may thus be able to rise above them to the eternal goal.” At the core of each person’s nature are unique seeds of desiring, which flourish through the development of personality, not through any suppression of it. We are not to become pale renunciate ciphers with no wantings. The animals of desiring . . . are not to be thwarted but lived, transmuted, and incorporated. This is the art of forming a personality.


Only when we live the animal powers do we learn that those satisfactions are not what we truly wanted. There’s more, and we are here to follow the mysteries of longing beyond where they lead. The purpose of desire is to perfect the longings, for at the core of longing is the Friend, Christ, Krishna, the emptiness, wherever it was that Igjargajuk, the Eskimo shaman, was when he came back from forty nights on the ice floes with one sentence: “There is nothing to fear in the universe.” The great love at the center of longing has no fear in it . . .

There is a witness who watches the obstreperous play of flame and eros and says, This is the dance of existence. A great mutual embrace is always happening between the eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. We are all writing the book of love. Everything goes in. All the particles of the world are in love and looking for lovers. Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber. Isn’t that the deal? We’re here to love each other, to deepen and unfold that capacity, to open the heart . . .


This region of animal energies is where sexuality enters love’s book most obviously, although eros, as Freud showed, is a powerful ingredient in many motions that draw us. Sex is a basic and nourishing to human beings as baking bread. Rumi implies as much in the heroic simile of the breadmaking poem. Lovemaking is going on everywhere among the forms, and in a startling variation of the golden rule he says, Remember, the way you make love is the way God will be with you.

Opening image: “Full Moon” by Hannah Giffard.

Man Pretending

“Man Pretending to Be a Rabbit” by Maggie Taylor.

Hare in the Snow

Hare in the Snow
by Helen Dunmore

Hare in the snow cresting
the run of winter, stretching
in liquid leaps over the hill,

then the wind turns, and
hare stands so still

he is a freeze of himself, fooling
the shadows into believing
he is one of them.

Image: “Snowshoe Hare and Chickadee” by Larry A. Smail.

Morning Light III

Subject: Unknown.
Photographer: Fred Goudon.

Sacred

I find it fascinating that just as the hare, throughout history and across cultures, has been considered sacred by some yet “unclean” by others, so too have expressions of human sexuality that depart from traditional gender roles and/or the norms of heterosexuality.

In many Native American cultures, for instance, the “two-spirited” ones were held in high regard, and their unique role in community life honored, even revered. They crossed boundaries, blending, for instance, the genders. Accordingly, they were often the shamans – the ones who communed with and traveled to the spirit realm, the ultimate boundary crossing.

Within the ancient Jewish culture, the hare’s ambiguity stemmed from the strange and erroneous belief that every hare was both male and female. Such perceived blending of the genders made the hare ritualistically impure and unfit to eat. Writing in the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne observed that the ancient Jews believed that all manner of vices resulted from eating the flesh of the hare, with its “mixture of sexes.” Two such “vices” were “unnatural venery” and “degenerous effemination.”

Expanding on such ideas, Christianity (though not Christ himself) later declared that sexual activity between members of the same gender was “sinful,” that it separated those who engaged in it from the sacred.


Especially symbolic

Of course, all creation is sacred – infused with the divine spark of life. Yet, without doubt, certain creatures, including the hare, have been considered especially symbolic to humans throughout history. In pre-urban cultures, for instance, many animals and other naturalistic figures were seen to spiritually represent a group of related people such as a clan. Such an animal was considered the clan’s totem.

In various trickster tales found from Asia and Africa to North America, rabbits and hares are both good and bad. The Algonquin tribes of North America had as their chief deity a great hare to whom they went at death. According to one account this mighty hare lived in the east, according to another, in the north. In his anthropomorphized form he was known as Menabosho or Michabo.

Terri Windling notes that in Egyptian myth, “hares were . . . closely associated with the cycles of the moon, which was viewed as masculine when waxing and feminine when waning. Hares were thus believed to be androgynous, shifting back and forth between the genders—not only in ancient Egypt and, as has been noted, Native American culture, but also in European folklore right up to the 18th century. A hare-headed god and goddess can be seen on the Egyptian temple walls of Dendera, where the female is believed to be the goddess Unut (or Wenet), while the male is most likely a representation of Osiris (also called Wepuat or Un-nefer), who was sacrificed to the Nile annually in the form of a hare.”



Greco-Roman, Teutonic, Norse, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, and Buddhist myths all feature the hare. The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian peoples used the hare as a sacred symbol in association with the nature goddess Freyja. In a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons associated the hare with Ostara or Eostre, the goddess of spring. Later, Christianity appropriated many of these symbols in its celebrating of Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.


The Easter Hare

There are unique associations in English folklore between hares and Easter. In 17th century Southeastern England, for example, there is evidence of a custom of hunting a hare on Good Friday, and in 18th century Coleshill there was a manorial custom in which young men tried to catch a hare on Easter Monday.

According to Stuart Buchanan, the English traditionally eat young spring lamb at Easter. Yet he suggests that “it was the early Christian monks who thought up the ‘paschal lamb’ as an alternative to the hare, totem of Oestre, pagan goddess of dawn, fertility and rebirth, whose annual festival took place, naturally enough, at the spring equinox.”

“The Easter Bunny,” says Buchanan, “is in fact the hare, one of England’s five noble beasts of venery under the ancient forest laws of William the Conqueror and his successors.”



Image 1: “I’m for the Hare that Runs by Night” (digital paint, 2003), part of Martin Herbert’s Totem Animal Series.
Image 2: Egyptian hare.
Image 3: “Hare” by Catherine Eaton Skinner.