On Hair as Memento Mori
Hair, to me, represents death.
I found one on my ear this morning. Not in the ear, not nestled in the canal where it might at least serve some vestigial purpose, catching dust or performing some other arcane evolutionary duty—but on the ear, sprouting from the fossa triangularis like a single black antenna, coarse and curly like the hair on my balls, and at least a centimeter long, which means it had been growing for weeks while I walked around thinking I was a person who had his shit together, talking to colleagues, kissing my girlfriend, presenting myself to the world as a human being worthy of civilization, all while this thing was just…there.
So I plucked it. What else could I do? Tweezers, bathroom mirror, pop!, a moment of pain. And of course you know it changes nothing, you know it’s coming back in a fortnight, you know Hair always comes back in the places where you least want it, you know, and you do it anyway because the alternative is surrender, and you’re not ready for surrender, not yet, not on a Tuesday.
Hair is time you can see. Stubble by noon, gray by forty. Hair grows with crushing regularity, so we build rituals around it. Its emergence or disappearance marks the days and seasons and years and decades. Wrinkles are slow, like glaciers. Hair is fast enough to taunt you. Hair is waging a permanent, multi-front insurrection against your dignity, and its victory is already guaranteed.
Hair is already dead, so it has nothing better to do than count down the clock until we join it. A few hundred haircuts, a few thousand shaves, and that’ll be it.
Hair makes you build an arsenal. Mirrors. Steel. Electricity. Gels, sprays, clays, creams from Korea, chemicals in matte-black bottles with minimalist fonts and a story about the spruce forests of Scändinävia. We wax, laser, epilate, thread, bleach, dye, sugar, crimp, braid, cut, trim, shape, buzz, layer, curl, and straighten it. We shave it into religious submission, crop it into military discipline, raise it in rebellion, or powder it into aristocratic arrogance.
Hair is painfully zero-sum. Hair will grow where it is least welcome and vanish where it is most desired. Your body is a socialist republic of follicular redistribution, taking away at the temples and giving out in the nostrils, the ears, the back, even the fucking knuckles. Especially the moles and warts, just to draw a little extra attention to them and make you worry about melanoma.
Hair haunts us, because it is both us and not us: produced by us, branded by our genes, yet once it leaves the follicle it becomes trash. It is both personal and indifferent. And the leaving is not elegant. Hair doesn’t retire with dignity; it abandons ship when you most need it. And the hair that abandons you first is the crown jewel, the hair on your head, the billboard you erect to say this is me, this is the version of me I recognize, the version I’d like you to recognize too. Each generation comes in thinner, shorter, paler than the last, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
So Hair is vanity, yes, but Hair, also, is survival, in the sense that the person I recognize in the mirror requires that hairline to be recognizable, and the alternative is meeting a stranger in the glass every morning. I’ll get used to it one day, I know. I’m just not quite ready yet. Not on a Tuesday. I don’t even feel shame anymore when I ask the barber for a cut that will strategically hide the retreat (less convincingly with each passing month). It’s like talking about anal warts with your proctologist. He is a consummate professional. I feel safe in his hands. He has seen this tragedy a thousand times.
We enlist drugs to help us decrease the hormones that destroy it. I read the list of side-effects on the side of a bottle of finasteride: chills, cold sweats, confusion, dizziness, and, hilariously, gynaecomastia. Of course. Of course! Of course the bargain for keeping your hair is growing a pair of flappy, disgusting man-tits. Biology is a bitch. But I have weighed my endocrine integrity against my hairline and the hairline was heavier.
The pill doesn’t cure anything. It holds the line. It buys time. And you know (the way you know that the sun will eventually expand and consume the Earth, distantly, theoretically, in a way that does not yet disturb your breakfast) that this is all temporary, and that one day it will all be gone.
Just yesterday, I was a virile young man who had never even thought of the hair in his nose. And today I had to insert a small electric rotary trimmer into each nostril, screeching with its high dental whine. Tiny black clippings fall onto my upper lip like the world’s worst confetti, and I blow my nose afterward and more come out for hours, and this is just Tuesday, this is just maintenance, this is the baseline cost of existence and participation in polite society.
Hair subjects us to absurd indignities. A lifetime of laser treatments that fire scorching light into your skin, heat traveling down the shaft to cauterize the stem cells at their source. There’s a faint singed scent in the air. The smell of Progress. But some Hair always survives the extermination campaign. The next day you find yourself bent over on crinkling paper under the glare of fluorescent lights, ass in the air, spreading your cheeks for the nice lady in latex gloves while she tries to keep the conversation buoyant to distract you from what’s going on. She presses the hot strip. Waits a moment. And rrrrrip! like velcro.
Hair is disgust. Hair in your mouth. Hair in your soup. Hair stuck to lip gloss. Hair caught in teeth like a wire. Hair growing sideways in a pocket of painful pus. Hair braided into the vacuum roller holding on to all the world’s dirt. Wet clumps of Hair in the drain. Hair on a fat old bastard in the locker room, a thick damp pelt stretching across his back and shoulders, releasing its sweaty miasma into the air. Hair is a breeding ground for pullulating microbes and mites and lice and all the uninvited tenants of flesh.
Her shaved armpit is in front of my face. I extend my tongue towards it and give it a good lick. Two animals in a room, grateful for the temporary smoothness, grateful for the illusion that we can edit ourselves into something cleaner than nature intended. We make love and we smell the products and the soap and the faint metallic tang of effort, and for a moment it feels like we’ve pulled one over on the universe. Then, the stubble returns. The little bristles rise up, mindless and stubborn reminders. You can shave the armpit, you can lick the armpit, you can write sonnets to the beauty of the armpit, but biology will always show up.
Hair is intimacy. Hair is the divine scent of coconut when you bury your nose in her long curls. Hair is pleasure, when you pull it back in your fist and hear her moan. Hair is heaven, when she drags it along your back, making you shudder with delight. Hair is hell, when you find one of her strands inexplicably still stuck to the pillow two months after she said “let’s stay in touch”.
Hair is brutal. Hair is tiresome. Hair is repetitive. You groom, you shed, you clean, and the enemy just keeps building more reinforcements inside your skin, more of this evidence that you are a thing made of rotting meat.
You impose your will on your biology, but it only lasts for a few hours. The oil returns. The wind gets to work. Gravity performs its quiet sabotage. Fingers run through and undo it. Sweat dampens it. A hat crushes it. Time advances its troops. You will go gray. Your body will shrivel up. Your ears will sprout forests and your nose will require the trimmer you keep in the second drawer, next to the dental floss and the expired ibuprofen. The hair on your temples will fade while the hair on your shoulders will thicken, and none of this is negotiable. In the end Hair wins in the only way that matters: you will die and Hair will not care.
But sometimes. Sometimes you step back from the mirror after that ludicrous ceremony of shit, shower, shave, trim, pluck, pill, comb, condition, spray, the little wipe of the sink—and you look at what you’ve managed to impose on this nasty animal. And for a moment it’s not so bad. A brief stay of execution. Absurd, yes, but also necessary, because that’s what it means to be alive: small losses, small restorations, a stubborn refusal to let the organism slide into decay just yet. And despite knowing the war is already lost, the feeling is one of—triumph. So pick up the hair. Wash. Comb. Cut. Shave. Style. Go out into the world and wear your dead filaments like a crown. And tomorrow you’ll do it again, wielding your arsenal of steel and chemicals and hope and once more unto the breach, dear friend. You will walk out the door as a person: groomed, beautiful, victorious, if only for an infinitesimal sliver of cosmic time. And it will feel like something—the only kind of meaning available to a creature made of meat that knows it’s going to die.
The antenna will return. But this Tuesday morning, in the mirror, with that single coarse black hair between my tweezers and the satisfying little pop of its root giving way, I won the moment. And for a creature like me, that’s close enough to Glory.