Control

Control

The general look of hair temples varies from place to place, but in this they remain the same: the mirrors. Every hair temple around the world possesses floor to ceiling mirrors before which the priestesses force you to sit, staring at your sad, overgrown, split-ended mop. Sometimes they leave you there, staring, until you are overcome with repentence at waiting this long to return to the Scissors.

The principle of dentists and hair priestesses is the same: they have the right, once you are seated helplessly in their thrones, glasses off, to do whatever they like to your head. The first operates in the name of health, the second of style, but their methods are roughly the same, involving sharp, shiny tools, too much water, and noxious chemicals.

Back in my home city, I rarely changed hair temples, and when I did it was due to a subtle falling-out between my hair priestess and I, usually over the matter of cost, although sometimes over the matter of style.

My first steady hair priestess was a middle-aged woman named Lucy with hair that was sea-changed every time I visited--it flowed from black to brown to blonde to short to long, from straight to curly.

Lucy and I developed a friendly relationship, although my fear of her powers, exacerbated by my then-timid nature, never quite diminished. As she sawed off chunks of brown hair Lucy always made conversation, asking me questions about my life plans, and I, nervously watching the silver scissors flash fuzzily in the mirror, asked her questions about Texas, and avoided my own haunted reflection.

When I finally, after a number of years, left Lucy without explanation (when is reckless abandonment of one's hair temple ever okay?), I scouted out prices and made a single visit to a rather cheaper hair temple. There, I found Mary, and found Mary to be prone to avoiding the mess of washing her customers' hair before a cut, using a little spray bottle instead to fix the hair to the head in a flat paste, making it easier for her to lop it off in a straight line. Mary shaped my hair into a memorable middle-aged mullet with a delicate fringe at both ends.

Next I visited Theresa's swivel chair, but by then I'd adopted a deliberately modified attitude: one of purposefulness, confidence. After all, one must learn to take charge of one's own haircut, musn't one? Mullets are never okay.

But in Theresa's domain it was even harder to take control. She would march me directly across the floor when I arrived at the hair temple, thrusting my head under the chemical wash before even glancing at the state of my locks. After returning me to the swivel chair, she'd look with a mixture of irritation and confusion at my wet head, ask a cursory question or two, and then aggressively finish my hair off in a quick, messy altercation.

As Theresa lopped off my fuzzed ends she never tried to make conversation, a fact I was glad of. But the problem still remained of what expression to wear while in the chair: how can one look confident and pleased at the same time, while totally unable, what with extreme myopia, to see one's face in the mirror, and equally unable to hide one's occasionally dramatic alarm? The haircuts at Theresa's were never the same twice, but Theresa once said of my hair: "it's great hair." I believe, in retrospect, that this means my hair is easy to cut. Lucky me.

I left Theresa to come to England, where I put off getting a hair cut as long as seemed justifiable, and trimmed my fringe myself. But the back grew out, as all hair inevitably does, until I was in danger of creating my own mullet. Hence: Carla.

Carla sat me down to wait for ten minutes before the floor-to-ceiling mirror, freshly drenched by a morning downpour on my way to the hair temple, and I was forced to stare bleakely at my rain-frizzled head in the glittering wall of humility. Upon her return Carla was bearing a grim-looking checklist on a clipboard, and an expression of pitying judgment.

"Now I'm just gona go through a few things wi' ye then? As' you some questions? Wha' state is your hair in today?" She looked at me, concern filling her eyes, asking me silently to be honest.

"Um it needs a cut... it's long..." said I.

"Okay. I'm just gona cu' i' shor'er in the back then, and leave it a bit longer by the face?" She put her hands out to pull at my hair.

"Well okay, I was hoping you could cut it short all over though," I said, taking control.

Carla's face registered both patience and concern. "Okay, bu' it really should be shor'er up in the back here, you see? And a bi' longer by the face, okay?" She pulled at my hair again.

"Alright, but I was hoping you could cut it into a sort of pixie?" I fought to remain calm. Take control.

"Well the pixie isn't qui' righ' then, it should be a bi' shor'er in the back, yah, and I'll take off somutha weight, bu' a pixie is too shor', it will be too short, you see? Is tha' all righ' then?" She continued talking, her voice descending into the labyrinth of the local dialect, and I mentally conceded defeat.

"Do whatever you want," I said.

Every hair temple around the world operates on the same assumptions: that the customer requires its expert aid, that penitence about one's neglected locks is the only productive attitude, and that great good can be done, provided the customers cooperate fully. In the shiny little temples packed with colours, smells, mirrors, slim, black-clad hair priestesses or ninjas belted with throngs of glittering weapons, and always the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, you are better off not to ask questions, to simply submit.

You are not in control.

"The destiny of art in our time

"The destiny of art in our time

...is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in their being united together, and to set up, in place of the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God--that is, of love--which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life."


Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? 1898(trans.) Oxford University Press, 1994.

Game night

Game night

Inside is the small and careful, the tedious and disciplined, the conscientious and dutiful, the dull. Inside is thoughts and books and work and trying to work and failing to work. Tonight, inside is oppressive silence.

After class, we escape. We leave the house and wander to China Town in search of roast duck (for her) and chicken and cashews (for me), seeing visions, in the cold, of endless cups of hot green tea. It must be a game night: the cars are parked end-to-end on every sidewalk within a mile of the stadium, leaving little room to walk. The closer we get to the stadium, the more alive the streets seem.

On game nights, the city takes on an added vigour--even if you aren't personally attending the match, everyone in the city perforce is listening to it, surrounded by it, every minute until it is over, and even afterward. We battle through crowds of jersey-clad people streaming through the streets toward the stadium, shouting as they march. But when we escape into the restaurant, we find a seat by the window. A little distance away, the lights of the stadium burn the sky white, and arrest my attention, pull it from the meal. What is happening? Who is winning?

When we emerge it is to empty streets, but the air is talking about the game, buzzing with electrons and leaping with energy every time the entire stadium gives a collective yell. I can feel my body twisting toward the sound. What is happening? Who is winning? Suddenly the question is important, very important.

Passing pubs lining the darkened street, we startle to notice that every face in each pub seems to be staring straight at us--but no, the TVs are sometimes situated over the windows. They look, to my bemused eye, like people under a spell: their faces are nearly motionless, or moving all at once. They yell at the same time, and sometimes they punch the air. I wish, as we walk on, that I were inside with them-- What is happening? Who is winning?

Away from the stadium the streets grow quiet again. We find our door and unlock it and step inside, say goodnight. But my four pale-green walls are suddenly energetic, friendly, encouraging, and I leap across the room to my computer to find the results--

We didn't lose. But we couldn't have lost: not with that much energy alive in the air, busting up preconceived notions of the "quiet of the evening," changing the character of the streets, which would have themselves picked up out of the soil and streamed to the match, if the laws of gravity had been reversed, just for one night.

Pablo Neruda:

Pablo Neruda:

Never an illness, nor the absence
of grandeur, no,
nothing is able to kill the best in us,
that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with:
beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct,
and every door opens on the beautiful truth
and never hides treacherous whispers.

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.


--Untitled, from The Sea and the Bells, trans. William O'Daly, Copper Canyon, 2002.

On living in England

On living in England

It is and it isn't that different. The cars are suddenly and quixotically unpredictable, when one has been used to them behaving the same way all one's life; people walk in and push through crowds rather than loitering along by themselves; the air smells different; the prices are only deceptively low, never as low as they seem. But people speak the same language. Litter looks the same on the ground. Pavement is the same colour, and so is the sky. Everyone rejoices on Friday and goes out in celebration. Everyone returns to work on Monday with grim faces.

Worse than the recognition of cultural or environmental differences is the inevitable realization that you are absolutely an outsider, when you've been a relative insider in your home country your whole life. When you are walking down the street you imagine that you appear slightly off to the people passing you, like a new smudge or flaw, or simply a difference, in a painting that's been hung on the dining-room wall as long as any of them can remember.

At first, when I arrived, the buildings looked as though God had reached down and mashed them together with his oversized hands, to create more room for more buildings, leaving them all looking tall and thin and uncomfortable, like a row of unadjusted teeth crowded together in an old person's face. (Old, old, old, everything here is old--even the new buildings appear either slightly weathered around the edges, or tawdrily newfangled, sure to be shortlived and replaced). But now the houses seem quite comfortable. I'm getting used to them. The glimmers of individuality in each building's windows distinguish it properly from the rest. Even the long rows of houses in blue-collar districts, where each is like a carbon copy of its neighbour and as a consequence the dreary whole appears almost surreal, and surreally ugly, there is room for difference after all. Look closely: the curtains in the windows are not the same, from house to house; the laundry on the line is different as you move along; the houses emit different smoke, different smells, different feels, like houses everywhere. "Crowded" is a relative concept.

If travel changes you over time, I wonder how great the change can be? You carry the same work habits, the same interests, the same flaws with you wherever you go. Wherever you go you lug the same intertwined body-and-soul mess with you. If you travel to escape yourself, I'm sorry to say it will never work: you'll always be dragging your old self along, like tin cans tied to the tail of a running cat.

What might happen instead is that you meet new aspects of yourself around corners (to borrow imagery from a friend), new ways of seeing, and new friends who make the world a little more enlightened.

Colette Bryce: (The Hopes)

Colette Bryce: (The Hopes)

They extend above the houses
like mechanical giraffes.

Dignified,
they are there for a reason.

Cables hang
from their heads like harnesses.

Behind them, the sky is unusually
blue and clear

for a month so late
in the year. Don't give up.




from Self-Portrait in the Dark, Picador, 2008.