Hair

Now, it may be because I grew up in the 70s, but I think a head of >ahem< long, beautiful hair is essential to a woman's beauty. I've already mentioned my mom's friend, Laura, and how she helped develop my sense of beauty in a woman. She was a small woman, and, in addition to the big sunglasses and floppy hats of the day, she had really long hair. In my memory, it's the color of a nice pilsner, and it flows like one: cool in the sun as it fills the curve of the glass.

So I've always loved long hair, the way its tendrils trace the shapes of women's bodies, frame their faces, and become mischievous arrows that point here, to cleavage, here to the hollow of the throat, here to the ass. Here's a bit from the Rubaiyat that I think captures the intoxication of hair:




Perplexed no more with human or divine
Tomorrow's tangle to the winds resign
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The cypress-slender minister of wine.

Most of my girlfriends have had long hair, and mostly blonde or red-headed, from coppery and fiery to pale straw-colored. I've only dated one brunette, but, paradoxically, she's the one I married. Go figure.

But there's other hair to talk about. Let's look at some literature, such as Eliot's contribution to the subject:
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?

Oh, presume, presume, my good man. I've always thought this a nice little bit about the paralyzing enticements of desire. And I love the hair, so soft visually, implying the touch, but never reaching it.

And this bit from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North:


Mrs. Robinson was a buxom woman and with a bronze complexion that harmonized with Cairo as if she were a picture tastefully chosen to go with the color of the walls in a room. I would look at the hair of her armpits and have a sensation of panic.

Okay, so as Americans, hairy armpits are not exactly a turn-on. I remember being shocked by the pictures outside a Greek porno theater where the women had completely natural armpits. I just have a hard time dealing with that. But Salih captures something here, with his "sensation of panic" (although the words are a translator's), an effective euphemistic truth akin to Updike's "it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron." Stomach, indeed. He's making the connection between a woman's armpit and her pudenda, a really logical connection that was also used effectively in Cronenberg's Rabid. Making that connection, it makes sense that Americans would move from shaven pits to shaven nethers, though it really is a shame, since, as I said, I'm a fan of hair. I recently came up with a new theory on why, which I'll share in another post, since this one is getting long.





I'll close with another quote from Salih on hair:





This last idea converged in my mind on the tiny hairs on her right arm near to the wrist, and I noticed that the hairs on her arm were thicker than with most women, and this led my thoughts to other hair. It would certainly be as soft and abundant as cypress-grass on the banks of a stream.





Or a sacred river.