Thursday, January 31, 2008

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.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Morning Light V


Subject: Unknown.
Photographer: Fred Goudon.

Monday, January 21, 2008

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.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

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).

Thursday, January 3, 2008

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.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008