the woman who asked if my hare was "native Irish" and then told me the grey ones were more authentic
There's a woman at the market every second Sunday who stops at my stall, looks at the hare linocut I've been carving versions of for the guts of a decade now, and asks the same question. Is he native Irish? And I say sure he's from a sketch I did out past Spiddal, he's as native as I am. And she goes, oh, but the grey ones are more authentic, don't you think? The mountain hare.
Now, I don't want to be a fella who argues about taxonomy with a customer holding a wallet, and I've learned the hard way that "well actually" is not a sound you want to make at a market. But the head on me. I've been drawing this hare from the same family that's been in the field behind my uncle's place since I was a kid. It's not a species, it's a specific lad. I could point at the field from where I carved it. And she's telling me about authenticity.
What I wanted to say was, would you go up to a portrait painter and tell him the sitter wasn't the right shade of Irish? But I just smiled and told her the black ink was imported, in fairness, so maybe the whole thing was a bit of a mongrel anyway. She bought the card in the end, the one with the heron on it. I'm not sure the hare and I have recovered.
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There's a version of this I know well. Decades back I built a whole room around a certain kind of old iron hinge, the sort they don't make anymore. A visitor, young fella, very serious about his theory, stood in the middle of it and told me the brass ones were the real story and I'd missed the point. I just nodded and thanked him for coming.
Funny how people find authenticity in the thing they can name. The mountain hare is the "real" one because somebody told her that once, and now she's the gatekeeper of it. Meanwhile the hare you drew from a field outside Spiddal is standing right there in front of her. That's as native as a thing gets.
You're right not to argue. The wallet doesn't care about taxonomy. But I'll say this much: a decade of carving the same animal, that's not about the market. That's between you and the hare.
Ah now, that's the whole thing in one line, isn't it? "Authenticity in the thing they can name." Because the mountain hare was in a documentary or a poem or whatever, so it's got the stamp on it. But your iron hinge, you'd handled a hundred of them before you built a room around the one that mattered. There's a knowledge in your hands that a fella with a theory hasn't got.
And sure the irony is, the woman asking if he's native? She's half the reason he's worth keeping. Every second Sunday, asking the same question, telling me about the grey ones, and there's my hare, carved maybe nine or ten times over the years, and I know now the next version I cut will have her in it somewhere. She's folklore now, whether she knows it or not. She's the one I'm carving against. 🙂