Outta My Hair 4 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

Three words jump out at me this morning. DREAM IMAGINE CREATE.

Placed as they are in all caps and the imperative tense, these words command, order, invite. They seem like good words to start the work week. Today D starts his classes at university; today I’m back at the keyboard after a weekend on retreat. At sunset tonight, the ten days of repentance begin with Rosh Hashanah, and at sunrise I was on my ninth hour of consecutive sleep. When I woke, in the eleventh hour (I had no idea of the rest I needed until I was able to take it), I recalled my idea, during Sunday’s eucharist, to begin each day with the praying of a psalm. So I made my coffee, read silently, and—finding the sound both comforting and a bit odd, my voice alone in the room—chanted the verses.

DREAM IMAGINE CREATE. From the abstract and the intuitive comes the idea, the exploration, the making concrete. From a young boy besotted with the idea of living in a country that still has a queen to an eighteen year-old boarding a jet for his freshman year in Scotland, from my craving greater closeness with God to my chanting aloud “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,” from a candidate’s desperation to shake up his campaign to the re-energized sales of ratting combs and hairspray (how else does she keep it in that pouf?) —

I found the words DREAM IMAGINE CREATE—or they found me—in the same place they’ve been every morning for months. Who knows why I noticed them this morning? Who knows why, when I opened the bathroom cupboard door, my eyes went to the paper tag at the top of the package of fabric-coated ponytail-holders, and stopped there? The brand name is Scünci, the merchandise Made in China, so perhaps we have nothing more than a translation issue. And yet, being in a suggestible mood, I lend myself to what is given. And this morning, I’ve been given a package of hair holders.

At first, the connection strikes me as silly and off-putting, a sign of all that’s reductionist and dumbed-down in our culture, as though by pulling my hair back I’m reaching for (if never attaining) some deep personal potential. And then there’s the small trademark sign after the word CREATE, as though Scünci holds the patent on the action.

But perhaps the juxtaposition is not so strange, given our skill at melding the philosophical and the mercantile, the commercial and the koan-istic. Just do it. Think different. And what better product to so mix the two than something that holds and shapes hair, that mass (and mess) of dead protein sprouting from our follicles that inspires (aha!) so much longing, jealousy, despair, fear, and accusation.

Think not just of Sarah Palin’s trademark bangs-and-barretted-bump but Britney Spears’ mishap with the electric razor, Dorothy Hamill’s royalties from Clairol, the Sex Pistols’ influence on the sales of Dippity-Do.

Punk rockers, cheerleaders, Marines; dreadlocked suburban white kids and womyn and Hasidic housewives—who among us has not changed (or covered, or shaved) our hair as a taking on of identity, an instantly recognizable tribal stamp? Isn’t a haircut (or color, or extensions, or wig) a step on the route to DREAM IMAGINE CREATE, whether culturally, politically, sexually, socially, or just to piss off Mom? But even the butchest of crew cuts, the dreadiest of unwashed dreads, imposes an ideal that someone somewhere thinks is cool. Even nonconformity, somewhere, conforms.

In my life, I have only to think of the many times my friend L and I have sat, legs crossed and feet bare, a photo album open in our laps and glasses of wine at our side, as we analyze and extrapolate the past decades of our lives in terms of hair. Happiness in love; success in work; harmony in family: Is there a correlation (page boy; shag; bob)? When we break up with someone (and here I’m speaking universally), what do we do? No one ever wrote a song called “I’m Going to File That Man Right Offa My Nails.”

No. Hair has its own shelf—its aisles and aisles and aisles, in our psychic general store as well as at any Target or Walgreens or Whole Foods—of self-improvement and idealism. Am I the only one who’s every wondered just what imp is at work when our hair looks its best after five days of camping, say, when we’ve washed only in a creek with Dr Bronner’s and come no closer to a mirror than to hot water? Perhaps hair, as my mother used to say about a potted geranium out in the sun, likes to suffer.

Or perhaps, for those five days, I’ve been busy and content enough not to fuss. Perhaps sleeping under the stars and zipping my sleeping bag to that of my sweetie and cooking on an open stove and drinking camp coffee has given me other, more lasting and thorough ways to dream, imagine, create.

See? I haven’t even pulled my hair back, and already I’m on my way.