“Mister Bun”

There were many comments on “Mister Bun,” a photo of a headless baby rabbit. The first one I replied to came from Patsy Latscha. “It is very gross, besides that general fact, just a bad pghotograph, color, focus, it is just bad. Surely you can find something better to post than this.”

Patsy: My flower photos would please you more, I think, but to me there’s not much difference. Remember that cut flowers are the severed genitals of plants. To my mind, anyway, the flower photos are informed by the same irony as this one.

Later: More on "Mister Bun."

Robert Graves (1895-1985) literally worshipped women. In his last novel, Watch the North Wind Rise, he imagines himself (or a surrogate) waking up in a future where magic rules. Alone in the woods, with no warning, he meets the Goddess. She’s a skinny, smelly old woman dressed in dirty rags, walking with a stick. “Well?” she says.

“I instantly fell on my knees, seized and kissed her filthy claw.” (Quoting from memory.) She pats his head and says, “Yes, you’re a good boy.”

If I were sick enough to spout Aperture-speak, I’d say this photo was an act of devotion; but that’s not all it is. To cite another parable from the lore of the clerisy, James Joyce, at the height of his fame, was introduced to an excited fan. She tried to grab his arm, saying, “Let me kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses!” Joyce jumped back. “Oh no,” he said, “it did a lot of other things too.”

Yuri Skanavy, referring to the rules established by Qiang Li for his photo forum, wrote: “Just realized that, Qiang’s rules are quite clearly against this kind of subject matter. So, simply put Leslie shouldn’t have posted this photo here.”

It may be so. As old-timers already know, I honor Qiang and share my wife’s opinion that he’s one of the saints of photography. He deserves more respect than he gets here. If I had the energy and innate goodness to set up and run a critique site de bonae voluntatis, I’d rule like Attila or Stieglitz, chastizing my subjects with scorpions. (1 Kings 12:11.) This post may be close to his limit, but let’s not be too squeamish. It’s a rabbit, not a baby or a dog or cat. It looks no worse than what you find in any supermarket, except for the flies. And I’ve seen more flies at a picnic. Finally, if you’re not a vegetarian you should visit the factories that raise the animals you eat, then tour the slaughterhouse. It may not be all bad to remind people where food comes from. Few of us live on flowers.

Yuri replied: “...yes, we’re hypocrites (I hope I spell it right :)), we don’t like to see what we eat. But, the thing is that somehow your image doesn’t stike me as act of animal right activism. ”

Please! It’s not motivated by animal rights, human rights, civil rights or any other rights. Take it as given that I disbelieve in rights, period. Nor is it a Disney celebration of the Circle of Life, whatever that may be. (I think it has something to do with eating zebras.) Nor is it meant to epater les bourgeois.

Far more repulsive than a few flies to me is this perpetual quest for meaning, motive, agenda, purpose, intention, significance. Think what you’re saying. Is gravity heavy? Is speed fast? Is beauty beautiful? C’est à desesperer, sans blague!

During my photographic interregnum, around 1980 it was, I came across a little epiphany at the Kutztown Fair. That’s a country shindig held every year in Pennsylvania Dutch country. You can eat funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy and see how folks used to farm, and how a few still do. There was one exhibit labeled Chicken Science. It included a coop full of chickens and a sort of outdoor wood stove with a cauldron of boiling water, iron skillets, etc. I watched as somebody paid a dollar. A powerful lady put the bill in her apron, went to the coop, pulled out a chicken, walked over to a chopping block, chopped its head off, threw it on the ground and covered it with a bushel basket while it flopped around. Obviously the next step was to pluck and empty it and serve it up as Really Fresh Fried Chicken.

Standing ten feet away, holding hands and weeping copiously, were two tourist children, boy and girl. They’d suddenly learned something important about KFC. The truth was a kind of slander on their innocence.

Maybe it’s best to think of photos like this one as necessary follies, the heat engines that drive the rest of the machinery. Personally I think of the rest as window dressing and masquerade. Possibly both are true to a degree.

Some regular contributors defended me against Yuri’s comments. I answered in a doggerel sonnet:

Yuri’s sin, if sin it be,
Is the common sin of synecdoche.
I know it’s hard to break the habit,
But this photograph is not a rabbit.

So what does it mean? He’s got me there
By the congenital family hair.
It’s not an appeal to free the orcas.
It has no socially redeeming porpoise.

Is it empty of affect? Deeper than ether?
Chtonic? Ironic? Any of either?
Maybe the moral is, “Don’t do that!”
Or: “Curiosity fed the cat.”

Telling the truth is always slander.
Sauce for the goose is propaganda.

Ola S. noted: “Some things nature have learnt us to find repulsive: The stench of decompsing corpses, excrements, slimy worms, mutilated bodies... Provocations on this level are like opening a wound, not giving an opportunity for healing.

Any good photograph is provocative in a sense. Of course “Yuck” or “Yum” or heavy breathing isn’t what I’m after. It’s easy to elicit strong feelings, but what one wants are strong thoughts. I abominate photos, or movies or stories, that evoke pity or terror by showing you, say, a poor abused kitty with wounded paw and big eyes starving in an alley, or a nasty fierce man about to do naughty things to a helpless... You get the idea. It’s like making your audience cry by stepping on their toes – strictly from Woolworth’s. I’m snob enough to disdain facile ploys. Such work is sentimental in the sense defined by George Meredith: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” Rather than draw tears by working for them, you give the viewer a Three-Stooges eye-prong.

I know Ola’s just putting us on, but let’s pretend that last note was posted by his doppelganger. Ola! bah – it’s our parents, not Mother Nature, who taught us that excrement’s taboo. Many cultures are quite casual about it. Robert Mapplethorpe ate it with gusto, though it did give him stomach problems. I myself confess to a weakness for Limburger, Liederkranz and pont-l’eveque. As to decomposing corpses, this photo shows a perfectly edible rabbit, far fresher than anything you’d find at the store. It was alive and kicking five minutes before I made the picture. Some flies have landed on it, true – but they’ll light on your bagel too, if you eat it outdoors in New York in July.

Finally, as I’ve already confessed, I’m a vulgar man with low appetites. My only hope for salvation is the redeeming power of fine art. Surely folks will be patient as I grope my way toward the light.

Rosina P. writes from New Zealand: “I had a pet lamb when I was about 10....one day I couldn’t find it when I came home from school.... Dad said ‘Oh, I put it in with that lot that went to the works.....’”

In the 40’s my parents made the mistake of giving me a green-dyed chick for Easter. I named it Greenie and played with it till it outgrew local zoning, at which point my parents offered it to my Uncle Sammy, who kept chickens. He ate it. This may help explain why I haven&’t been on speaking terms with that side of my family for the last thirty-two years. Or with the other side, come to think of it.