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.