Puts on her shoes. She’s late for work but work doesn’t occur to her. Dad called and said I’ll not be home, not the now. Dad called and said, I’m reading all of it. Dad said I’m done. I’m done with this.
Stoned Julia stops by the salon and asks for a casual shag.
We’re out of razors, the girl says.
Do whatever you want, says Julia. The world is moving very slowly and she will have the hair for it, pronto.
The salon has a fine selection of scissors and combs. Julia is texting very slowly the underwater pleas of a failing employee. She’s supposed to be at work but she can work from her phone. She has words for every pore in a body.
What do you do, when you’re not looking this cute? The hairdresser says, snipping Julia’s fringe into triangles.
I make content.
Content.
It’s kind of boring.
What kind of content?
I pretend I’m famous and sometimes reply to pitiable men who want me. As in me, the celebrity. I am good at being not who I am.
Is the pay good? She spritzes with expert nips the front half of Julia’s hair.
It pays.
Huh.
Put it this way, I don’t ever wanna serve tables again. But then, you put up with some shit in the content farm, let me tell you.
The hairdresser squints with a dash of suspicion.
Want dye?
Is there a colour? I mean, it’ll cost more.
What?
What do you think of me, naturally?
You’re a mousy blonde.
I guess.
I mean, do you like it?
I blend in. Nobody knows that I’m the voice of a famous —
Can I make you strawberry blonde? It won’t take long if I super bleach.
Can I just have a moment to vape outside? I wanna finish this monologue. Then I’ll make a decision.
You can just vape in the toilet. But you’ll have to take the cloak off.
Okay.
Outside is overrated. They say the pollution —
Girl, I haven’t got all day, Stoned Julia slurs.
Okay, well, lift up your arms.
I have strawberry ice vape, lychee vape, goes Julia, parma violets. I smell like chemistry.
What do you mean?
Just chemistry. Something I remember.
The salon girl hums.
How long is this going to take?
She’s putting a ton of foils in Julia’s hair, heavy thick silver foils that fold endless origami smelling of chemicals.
The foils need twenty minutes then I’ll do an orange wash, with a splash of pink maybe.
Another hour in total.
Julia, nodding off, relishes the incoming wrath of her boss.
More foils. A machine that goes over her head is so sci-fi.
Do your parents know what you do?
Julia mumbles like… her parents are dead, or she doesn’t know.
What are they doing? What are they doing right now?
She tries to picture them watching television but only sees static.
Things are a bit fuzzy. Her hair is so, so wet. Dripping.
Honey you’re gonna look gold when I’m done.
Strawberry gold.
Pretty much edible.
What you writing now?
Wouldn’t you like to know what the famous love.
I feel like it must be amazing to be anyone in the world.
Sometimes. Sometimes it stings.
Do they say anything weird?
Like you couldn’t imagine. I once sent them a packet of my toenails for a hundred dollars, claiming they belonged to ___________.
Could you not get sued for that?
People don’t copyright their toenails honey. The whole industry runs on body parts and scams.
How did they know they were buying the real deal?
I painted them violet.
The hairdresser takes ten minutes to blow dry Julia’s hair, using a diffuser the size of the moon. Everything afterwards is huge and bouffant.
Wow, I love it. What would my dad say? Girl you’re a CAKE!
I guess ___________ would have violet toenails, I mean I can see it. She pauses, holds a mirror up so Julia can see the back of her head.
Do you like it? She brushes some flyaways into place with a small comb.
Yeah I look delicious. You’re really good. I can see this working.
A woman in the opposite seat is talking about the scandal involving a local politician.
Yo that guy went to high school with me, the wash girl chimes, rinsing silver from the octogenarians — two of them at once. He used to go out with my sister. He seemed kind of rich.
A phone rings.
You need to delete more with the razor. Hone in on it. I’m looking for an edge.
I wonder if anyone still has his number, Julia thinks. Julia sees his baby face in a newspaper and knows the big policy. What he’ll do to the city. What he’d do to her.
Hmmmmmmm…..hmmmmmmmm…..hmmmmmm…. goes the razor.
Brush little sweat from someone’s brow.
So are you happy girl? You look great, go get ’em.
Cutely, Julia is tousling her blonde curls, newly bright, a shade too tangerine. The credit card taps sweet and completes a big transfer. It’s a big day. Fragrant.
I felt the only thing to do was to write a Book of Rain. I was reading all these San Francisco poets. Sure, you can get detailed climate data on more or less whatever you like, but it meant nothing on its own to me. I looked at the annual hours of sunshine, average precipitation. How many days of rain. I mean you could say Glasgow was like 329 or something. How many days in a year again. I have never been to San Francisco, let alone lost my mind there. Or maybe I have, the latter I mean. I googled what’s a box of rain and it started relaying info on radio access networks, because I’d left out the ‘i’ in rain. Access all radio until the signals run streams in your mind forever. We ran out of the box and into the street. I had a dream someone was coming for me in the bathroom of a restaurant and I had to escape but the floor was ridden with rats. They were beautiful rats made of iridescent glass, and I was nervous about shattering them. Beautiful soundless rats all around. You could drop a box and break them all. The waitress was crying outside because the boss had discovered her glass menagerie. “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” I was murmuring to her, quoting Williams in some echo of what I had wrote in some essay, forever ago. Not for Emma. She was like, “But what is that it of which you speak?” She had a thick Polish accent and the tone of her breath was like full-fat butter, melting inside me, running down the side of the walls of the box. Animal ashes. I tried to give her a key, a single silver key to my office. I was like, you can hide in here and bring all the plants. The plants were also made of glass. There were avocado glasses, lemon glasses, aloe glasses, spider glasses. I’m not saying it was “unrealistic”. She carried them with such tenderness I remembered the names of many friends I’d abandoned to youth. Everything we said in the street outside was set to music. These kind of Vivaldi swoons of violin, with pizzicato flutes from the boys by the roadside, doing parkour. I felt stupid and reached for my cello. She was like, “do you not have a viola d’amore” and I had to demure I did not know. “It’s okay,” she said, “summer is in G minor.” I took off my dress and walked down the street, shrinking. I was waiting for a bracket to scoop me up. Something of her molten voice had shattered the glass heart trembling inside me. But where, but where! Where would I go. Summer is so stressful, those bloody erratic strings. I needed something that felt more like the rain. Soft rain pouring a chord inside me. What they say of the viola d’amore: with sympathetic strings. Whose love are we even soft for. The extra resonance of the rain lent weight to the future. The future auxiliary is. What did he die for. At the end of the rain, the air is composed of cinders. I missed Edinburgh before the Fringe. I was in a bathtub drained of water, lighting cigarette after cigarette and letting the ash pop the bubbles of thought. When I ask the internet of cinders, People also ask: ‘How did Derrida die?’, ‘How many languages did Derrida speak?’. I want the resilient self-presentation of all this nothing. My mother goes out in relentless rain. I composed a sonnet of the city, it went like All devices lying down and already I’d fucked up the iambs. So I googled it properly, what’s a box of rain. Any morning, any evening, any day. The box of rain is what this is not. I put pressure on the ash to summon a dormitory, the many-bedded archives of sleep. The world is a box of rain. The world is as fugitive as the bubbles of a sad geometry. Whose idea to play. They blew of our world a glass with walls and lid and corners. The rainbowed edges of slender aporia. Container for rain. You could prise open the box, its sticky lid, as though inside you’d find the most opulent yoghurt in the world. Imagine a yoghurt that would fill your belly with billions of tiny, glassy eels. I made of my guts the Hudson River. A lyrical gesture of elements came to count. I can’t listen to the song that makes me so happy I am instantly sad, like being stuck in a dream of a dream where all you can touch is reflection. I had all these stupid lines about gemstones, trying to hold that feeling. Cleavage. It’s existence, you idiot. ‘The reflection / itself’ (Cedar Sigo). They were all swimming inside me and I had a dream about swimming and chlorine depression and all the red sucked clean from my hair. The water would leave me a mousy self to crawl into her former corner. I would let the glass mice eat me like sugar. In the aquarium a sea mouse is pushed quite cruelly towards the water filter by a petulant scampi. Nobody puts baby in the corner but scampi. He was cute though, bug-eyed and orange-pink. Crustaceous slice of sunset, all feelers and limbs. They sometimes add colour to salmon, there’s a whole gradient of petrochemical pellet effects. A dark wild salmon is best. Dark a wildness, swimming. Pure aesthetic pigments. In the café, she spoke of how octopuses feel with colour and then I remembered everything. Everything I loved of your ruddy shade. Politics talking. Glass rats and pint glasses brimming with gold. A clip of the soft, panicky salt of the dark. Then morning relief. I sensed the light through my skin which was also glass, shaved glass reformed into something more convincingly epidermal. I was camouflaged, cold-blooded, cuttled into daily life. I cradled a corner. The eels propelled to the surface and left tiny blots like shingles. I’ve let them swum. I felt sick with all that had happened. In the salon, I read Plath’s Letters Home with my hair in shiny, sci-fi foils. ‘I plan to build up into the lovely creature I really am during the next two weeks’. First blush of ‘“champagne ambrosia”’. The herbal tea in Largs was better. Everyone crusted with salt & waves & exhaustion. Little roses among the leaves, expenses. The silver quality of island light fell on a speech. Someone recited the seasons in tiny, seed-like stanzas. I was handed a hazelnut shaken from the roadside fresh, cracked at the back of my mouth a green sort of sweetness. Yes, Sylvia, it all ‘bear[s] a whirl’. August is almost over. The sympathy of your cephalo-strings. A low kind of aching tremolo, plows through the intertidal zone, the reef, the abyssal depths of later. Paradise froze on a brooch. I had opened the blinds to nothing like light. Your diamonds are studded on tentacles, prodding their way through the window. They were sticky with yesterday’s circadian tears. When I dream, I wake up wanting to see the person. Palm oil on toast. My cutlery grief. People are having sex in swimming pools at Christmas. Tinsel of lindens lining the parks where cats enjoy their kill. A river runs into the sea. I am touched by a terrible language, the jellyfish trying to erase me. There was this wasp, we were trying to eat lunch. My fingers were black with tapenade and wine. You cannot swat this call away. I was a lover in the telephonic sonnet. I need a scholarship to write my Book of Rain. The kind of money that weeps from a nourishing prairie, melts like chocolate. I needed a whole milk scholarship. How to prove I was worth it. There was a green banana, a frazzled conscience, island jealousy. False green money, emoji, insomnia. There was all this ink on my sheets, like an oil spill. I was nobody’s refinery in the dead of the night where life was a story poured out on my shoulder. Oh you are lovely. We have our boxes of rain now, so many. I had not thought the rain would undo so many. Rain overflows its glass. Once again, sand again. It is a crisp apple rain. Held in the ampersand between days. I drew one on my wrist to mark that night where the colours were heavy inside me. I singed the fledgling arrivals of chorus, red-skinned greens. After ‘The Gilded Cunt’, I never looked at a bin-man the same. They are doing the rubbish in the garden in sync. I flung syrup from the window to tint the rain, and all the black bags would glow with gold. We had too much, it was sodden. Woke up at 8:am to find my laptop was streaming a video on pyramids. I watched Lana Del Rey step out of the screen and shake up the car where the cheats make out. Everything became an off-peak day return to the sea. Sunday of twenty-seven degrees. Triangulate clouds to a future point. In my Book of Rain, it’s stopped raining. ‘It’s stopped raining. My fingers graze the yellow flowers beneath my window as I turn back to my desk and write. These past two years have been difficult. I keep thinking of the time I’ve wasted. I was the undergrowth—always underneath taller trees, always wanting’ (Rae Armantrout). I was wearing white and not crying. If you could see my bones underneath. The order mattered not like an emptiness. A sculpted classic of ashes. The rat let out in singular, rain afresh. On your mother’s instruction I hiked in the wild farmland around your dreamhouse to find the Marsh Library, the Library of Marshes. The air smelled of opium incense and late summer pollen and I sat with my brushes, painting false dreams inside the dreams of the movies, and then the dream that held me melted. Directive. Natalie says, I felt cheated. I missed the marshes, required an Air. The broken hyperlink became a book by Nicholas Royle about the plaza of bootleg pdfs and I opened the book which was a sandwich, leaking sweet potato mush onto brown lunch paper. That was so disappointing. I would feed it to the rats; the rain had melted the words into gluten. End of the box of the endless rain. How do we say an object is ‘teeming’. I would bite the brittle stars of September.
~
Angel Olsen — All Mirrors
Björk — Virus
Tropic of Cancer — I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over
As I was a permanent client of stars, awaiting that moment before contract to fold back, edge of the page that was prior to birth. The sky is that page where everything saucy happens. If I feel ‘switched on’ it’s in fear of the light, scraping cutlery together to start fires with little intention of correct extinguishing. This is just an indulgent way of saying ‘fuck you’ to the spinney where I dropped a whole packet of sour cherry sweets that day after school with the song in my head. ‘Fuck you’ to the trees, like they own me forever. As I was defined by the willow I cried by, circa 2009. You only say ‘fuck you’, truly, to these sorts of vicarious parents, dragging their entrails along the water. They come in plurals; they have to eat each other just to exist. Something Eileen Myles says of a person, they can’t fully flourish till the mother tree falls. What was the one I saw by the golf course, Maybole, spear of the monument? Granite is war is radiation.
Someone replaced their tongue with a leaf of mint. They spoke in sprigs.
Things written in lieu of a nature poem:
A letter to washing machines all over the world
The lyrics to ‘Florida Kilos’
A list of snoring faces
Imitations of archived Twitter
Requiem for a useless wedding
Things I once wanted from the Argos catalogue
An inventory of much-despised artificial flavours
Amnesia’s archive of MySpace bulletins
Plagiarised ‘Daffodils’
Impressions of Shoreditch
An amateur walkthrough to ‘Star Light Zone: Act 3’
Homage to retro screensavers
Flyers for drugs
Hieroglyphs of ring-collecting sound effects
Many novelisable addictions
Screeds of abrasive html
Reasons why X should get paid more
Moderate to good assortment of sexual confessions
___The night in the casino felt like gold was butter, gold bars of the house we were chipping apart from the ingot. We hadn’t spoken in a very long time, so it seemed, galaxies of the year had passed already. In a land where I only reserve soft lyrics, hoard Milky Ways, know nothing of your suffering in that time except what you showed.
Taxidermic language, wrapping up the undead for the accidental. Reels of my body, scented magnolia layers beneath. ‘As for love’, Clarice says, ‘they weren’t in love, of course’. This is ‘The Message’.
Off the train the air was clear, smelled manicured. Click of the tape deck. He scorns me at the checkout, 2:am, buying my lightbulb. I could not live through the night without light. Haggard in Tesco blue he called me a moth and bared his teeth; I smiled and stepped into temperate February. Just flick the switch before you leave, that’s all. I’ll be a while, it’s no use waiting. My 1:09 Transpennine got stuck at Bellshill for hours and hours. I drank with a woman who did not know my name, as I lacked hers; we laughed at the pensioner commentaries, ordered drinks. We learned so much about trains in that time. I arrived back in the grey and longed for LED, Cornish horizons, the shape of his jaw like the edge of a country I might not visit.
It seemed impossible that I would ever fall asleep again. Veers of the wrist[?]
My sick heart is a small blue swollen ball.
In the novel I read there were always these nocturnal women, pacing around in foreign cities. They stayed in hotel rooms but could not last the night, they would slip softly into Parisian spring and trail the streets. It was often Paris, which rose in the back of my mind like something unfinished. It needed rendering. All I remembered was the razoring cold, the leers of buildings, needing to piss for hours and hours. The taste of cow’s milk, morning ache. Sometimes fancying the accordion song, impossible to exorcise.
[ The wreck contained mustard and scarlet, teal and rose. We wriggled a little. Missed a bit. ]
John Hall: ‘Can’t you see why I couldn’t be doing anything else?’
Tracing such palimpsests of light, we ask of the week a question. Will you stay this mild forever? Little interlude, it’s okay to feel nice for a while. That’s what he said, this is nice. The daffodils are out. Kneading the dough of a belly, I over-sleep each day until the hollows of my eyes smooth into cream. Life is a cheeky rose. Perhaps no one is in love as James on his album. Picture him at the window, clipping the extraneous stems from various houseplants, watching the syrup drip onto the leaves. Think of this synthwise. Maybe that is a loneliness, so absolute in your feeling. Imagine him paring his Joycean fingernails, the man at the window whose name was Blake with a kytten for history. There was nothing so bright as that. You could not say, hailing it, kytten, kytten! It was extra literary. It was sooo much of everything before even alive, hey.
__The kytten was made of milk. It was bound to leak out someday.
We’ve not had a chance at everything yet. We’ve burned it all! At dawn we drank algorithms and the well-bronzed man still kissing away on the fire escape. As if all of this happened, expensive drams and learning the words for variable clouds. We enter the storage facility. Your da, your da, your da sells—That bit where Don Draper gets all misty-eyed over Hershey’s. At the end I’m crumbling a little white cookie, Karen is wailing the way she feels, the inward razoring, and it’s all I can do to remember the bees.
[…]
Dyeing my hair with fresh cherries, yayo yayo, yeah they say it’s excess to do this again. She runs the punnet under a cold tap, rubs them clean with her fingers then scrunches them, crushes them luxuriously over my scalp till it all runs down and I’m shining again. There’s a baby at the back of my eye that screams and screams, maybe I pretend I don’t know her. The cherry girl in the bar was trapped in a basket. Lana says nobody dies in Miami! I remember the harsh sunsets of your Playstation 2, smashing ourselves into several pixelated seas. Rank best to worst our beliefs, this night that got away again. We looked up the cheats and looked into the future, pressed x’s and triangles together. I mixed up my consoles, remembering it. A hook, a hook.
It took me six months to write and then I scrunched that mess back into a planet!
Notes from my diary:
Today I’m heading south to learn about trees I could easily sit in a spoons and weep.
Goddamn stars what am I supposed to owe you! Held sequins in palm to insufflate, insitu. There was so much oil in my salad it looked unethical. Walking through the park at night, say this is balmy, so warm for the season but I don’t want to say unseasonable, and so feel like the narrator of another bored and beautiful New York novel. Don’t like the tonic in gin. Pay without debit; display songs in nested form. There are so many themes up my sleeve! Leave your key at front desk, darling I’m trying to reach it; white lines on the road wherever the silkworms—
This month first bloomed in the green-gold fairgrounds of sleepless nights, twinned in a week of pre-delirium. We stood in a packed sports bar and watched three screens simultaneously, everyone’s face a spectacle of something other that was going on beyond offsides and angles and penalties. Indulgent love of epi-bro culture. Finding that tiny jubilance inside you. Running round with the lights off, spouting catch phrases that kill and kill. I say the same name again and again, without meaning to. Am I winning.
Closing time and proximate whisky. What swills and feels wavy, later, at the top of the street. I hold ice in my gums for the numbing.
Imagine a toothache so rich in pain it was like cradling some other entity within yourself.
So the paths seemed windier than usual and trailing my way into whatever would happen and the ascent and the lights that seemed stranger. Cradle your toothache into some kind of coda, a pause that leads to return. The portholes of naproxen, dihydrocodeine, paracetamol, ibuprofen. Appetite collapses and the mouth is a metallic pool of pain. Send one thing away to endure. Circle around, forget about yourself. Forget your body. Learn to make of my carpet a turquoise pool, our belligerent drift which quickens to pulse. I lay very still and bit my lip. Learn not to cry when people are kind, learn to accept gesture in itself. Walk in the back roads of Finnieston on some green afternoon, everything lush and wilted with rain.
So it warms again.
Salt rinses make me sad for the sea.
These train rides between cities and the way the light looks at eight of an evening in late July. The soft yellow gold of fields to be harvested, trails of meadow lines read as braille. We talk intermittently. I close my eyes to a faint remainder of presence. It is difficult to remember what’s happened, bundling into a part song of falling. Walk back along the Clyde, swallow a letdown that ricochets through all buried traits, read as you walk. Walk as you read. Chance encounters that mean things.
To be sent home early, to feel over-brimming with all this salty, incorrigible water. Cancer season comes to an end.
I say whatever weird thing pops into my head. This is the way we are now. It is light at six in the morning, we sit at the table among fag paraphernalia and sketch each other’s souls. So ever to read glitches between us in negative space. I walk home alone and the daylight tastes so beautiful and I am so dizzy from twice cheating the diurnal within the same week. When we message, we use only the choicest emojis. Wouldn’t you like a vial of mercury?
I told him I was seeing. I was seeing.
My head in my throat, forehead to forehead. Is it the sweat, the seemingly interminable beats? The club is like the cabin of a ship, sloshing with heat and bodies. I spill out in cold night. I write this looking at the rain outside, which is utterly vertical and soft, drooping the branches of trees I can’t name. The sky is a greyish egg white, clearer towards centre. It matches my mood quite perfectly. I fear it will melt.
The colours in the takeaway were ravishing, erratic. I could not take my eyes off the shreds of meat. The singular tomato.
The rain was welcome. It gushed bright cold to my skin as I peddled, the canal adjacent to my trail. Catching my breath on the hot chest feeling, which later would become a pang, a harp string pulled too taut. A minor chord that needed to settle. It takes awhile to settle into your own body, to learn its game. The rain was good, the rain was silver and dazzled the leaves. I cycled to Lock 31 and back again twice in a week. I wanted to compare each experience. The fact was a shift in my flesh, a chorus of moving blood and water.
My sweaty hair smelled of the sea. I like that the seagulls leave when it rains.
Maggie Nelson writes: ‘How many ways are there / to get saturated in another’s mind?’ & I wonder. She is writing about a canal too, but really she is writing about desire. Canals don’t flow though; canals are relatively static. Something of undercurrent draws them along?
The pale sweet scent of coconut oil and misplaced nostalgia.
The Forth & Clyde Canal is so unlike the Clyde, this great wide luminously masculine river. When the song came on and I thought of the boy who drowned. I like to look at the lights on the Clyde at night, feel quite dark in myself and proximate to history. Feel everything dimming. Feel muscular for merely being there.
But then once I saw the Clyde in the afternoon, it was buttermilk.
Maryhill becomes a sort of fairyland, the unseen space around the canal, the outcrops of houses blending into Anniesland. I stick to the line, the gravel, the pace. Trust in my breath. Clusters of teenage girls pass by on their mobiles.
Sometimes I hallucinate the phone ring of my childhood home.
Keep sleeping in and savouring escape. The trick is to get to bed before five. To keep yourself stable.
The weeks slip away like vulnerable sand flats.
I drink things that are orange and icy and strong. I try to recall that hullabaloo of pain. A wedge of it bright and red.
Drawing is a warm sweet vortex where I drag myself deep into greens and blues.
Layering long stints of techno over the same routes. It gets heavier. I walk into the headlights of cars without meaning to. They keep playing Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ in Byres Road Tesco, the inchoate vertigo of a broken decade. Later I dream the stores were empty as they were in the snow days. Water everywhere, sloshing the hours and ankles, not a drop to drink. Remember when everything caught glitches, sounded through the tinniness of a Motorola phone, those metallic wee speakers, resounded twice over on the plexiglass of a bus stop?
Everyone’s cold suburbia closes. You just shut the skylight, ignore the rain.
When you are away I sort of half live in the other place, but then already between myself.
Is it the circles below my eyes, below ugly tungsten light? The intimate work of a visceral distraction? Too many bowls of soft cereal?
Craving the expanse of the sea, releasing my cuts, wanna lose all time + memory.
Salt rinse, salt rinse; salt and cloves.
Find a note on someone’s jotter at work: get cunt fae spar. It will take a while to parse this. Fae spar get cunt, cunt spar get fae. Ye olde spar will get yae. Forget the star.
There is a fight and a fire and over and over I write things like, gratitude, gratitude. Plug sockets sparking.
Resist the tinny in the fridge. Do magick. I think maybe I am tired and scared of the present. The piano sounded lovely. With my window open, I could hear someone warming the keys. Notes for a genuine summer, notes for a situation. Then breathe. Bryan Ferry is sound-checking from the bandstand, you can hear the distant, phasing groan. It is almost August.
*
Death Grips – Black Paint
03 Greedo – Jealous
Cold Cave – You & Me & Infinity
Fred Thomas – Good Times Are Gone Again
The Twilight Sad – I/m Not Here [Missing Face]
Hand Habits – Book on How to Change
Pavement – Harness Your Hopes
Mush – Luxury Animals
Black Marble – A Great Design
Sun June – Discotecque
Emily Isherwood – Calibrate
Hana Vu – Crying on the Subway
Laurel Halo – Sunlight on the Faded
RF Shannon – Jaguar Palace
Amen Dunes – Lonely Richard
Lucretia Dalt – Edge
Ride – Chrome Waves
Oneohtrix Point Never – Monody
Gang Gang Dance – Lotus
Beach House – Black Car
Womensaid – Magick!
Wooden Shjips – Eclipse
Phoebe Bridges – The Gold (Manchester Orchestra cover)
A long time ago, far out in the constellations of mythology, Rapunzel let down her hair. And what lovely hair it was, a waterfall of gold, spilling from the window of her tower. Answering the call of her keeper or lover, she unravelled her braids to form a rope. Rapunzel’s hair, then, provided the connecting threshold, the thread that stitched together her turreted psyche and the world outside. It was also her downfall, allowing her to have illicitly a lover. Her keeper, Dame Gothel, became jealous and cut her hair, and left her to live a withered existence out in the desert. The tale takes us from the lush beauty of a ‘splendid garden’ to the arid desert, where eventually Rapunzel and her lover reunite and find happiness. It’s a peculiar tale of desire, entrapment, revenge, femininity; a tale which sets the scene for wider cultural mythologising of long hair. It’s a mythology that we’re still fascinated with, as the popularity of the Disney adaptation of Rapunzal’s tale, Tangled (2010), attests.
History and myth are glutted with references to the power of lengthy tresses. Take Samson, the Israelite leader who lost the source of his strength when his lover Delilah betrayed him and cut off his long hair. Or the Sif, the wife of Thor, whose wheat-coloured locks were cut off and stolen in her sleep by the malevolent god Loki. After Sif’s husband entered a threatening rage about the hair theft, Loki ordered dwarves to weave Sif a new mane of hair out of threads of gold, more long and beautiful than before. There’s also, of course, Medusa; the monstrous Greek guardian whose hair famously consisted of venomous snakes, and whose eyes turned their onlookers to stone. In his essay, ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922), Freud suggests that her snaky mane is linked to the castration complex, the (male) fear of having one’s genitals effectively guillotined. Freud’s typically eyebrow-raising essay links Medusa’s head to the female genitals, and the supposed threat of castration a boy experiences if he catches sight of these genitals. Well, apparently, Medusa’s snakes also alleviate the terror of castration, since they provide supplementary figures for the penis, thus filling in the implied absence of castration. And of course, Freud throws in a cheeky sexual pun, as Medusa’s head makes her ‘spectator stiff with terror’, and thus not only turns him to stone but also arouses him: ‘[f]or becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact’. Yes, quite.
Medusa.
Well, it’s undeniable that literature has tended to represent a woman’s long hair with desire, sexuality and beauty. Take this passage from Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Medusa was astonishingly fair;
She was desired and contended for–
So many jealous suitors hoped to win her.
Her form was graced by many splendors, yet
There was no other beauty she possessed
That could surpass the splendor of her hair–
Yet while her hair made her an object of desire, a thing to be ‘contended for’, the ‘splendor’ of her snake hair also symbolises her multiplicity. As the snakes are full of a life of their own, Medusa cannot be pinned down, her personality is multiple, endless. Her hair is its own being, extending in legend and through history. It is slippery, but also a symbol of her power. Indeed, Hélène Cixous reclaimed Freud’s psychoanalytic pinning of Medusa to advance her feminist call-to-arms for women to rethink their sexuality in relation to language. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) Cixous critiques the way Freud’s castration complex reinforces the mythologising of Woman as hysterical, as the Unknowable, ’dark continent’. As weak, passive, mysterious. Through writing (extending the lines of multiplicity that we find in Medusa’s hair), women may reclaim themselves, reach out and produce their desires and being through writing. Just as Cixous herself reclaims the mythical figure of Medusa from Freud’s cigar-stained fingers: ‘she’s not deadly’, Cixous argues, ‘she’s beautiful and she’s laughing’.
There is something joyful and exuberant about long hair. Think of the connotations: a young girl skipping through a field of wheat, streaming behind her a cherry red ribbon. An Austen heroine waiting to be the belle of the ball, or the flame of The Little Mermaid’s rippling tresses. It is a distinctly youthful trait, too; a symbol of childish innocence. In Victorian society, only children tended to let their hair down in public; if a girl wished to be seen as a woman or ‘lady’, she must pin up her locks, dress them in ornaments and braids. Letting one’s hair loose as a woman was seen as a sign of wantonness. Thus, the artistic portrayal of woman with their tresses flowing free represented a kind of back-to-nature aesthetic, a fetishising of the body, the long locks relishing a kind of originary femininity and sensuality. Perhaps also a wildness, a breaking forth from repressive societal values – the kind of constructed femininity that kept women as the domestic ‘angels of the house’. Think of the young Cathy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), her hair streaming behind her as she gallantly trails the ‘savage’ Heathcliff over the hillsides, or the iconography of the ‘fallen woman’ as depicted in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Women who did not look in the mirror and reflect back the pale perfection of the chaste Victorian angel, but positively glowed with their own matter – their glorious hair – their sensuality. There is something in that: the glorious feeling of standing on a cliff edge, letting the wind whip your hair across your face and fill it with billowing energy. Just don’t try it when you’re trying to eat ice cream.
Today, like everything else long hair has been sucked into the commercial imperative. Perhaps that is why long hair has been associated with anti-capitalist and consumerist movements: the lengthy tresses of 1960s hippies, Marx with his wild white beard and mane, the fluffy mop of Che Guevara. Long hair (especially the unkempt dreads of the hippies) was never really a friend of the drone-like demands of the job market. A short sharp haircut symbolises ‘cool’, edginess, the new freedoms enabled by consumption (think of the bobbed Flappers of the 1920s). Advertising impels us to buy products, perfect your femininity, express yourself through a new style; a new cut, spray, or shampoo. ‘The latest hair trends’, the V05 website proclaims, ‘help you express yourself’. Every day is a decision about how one will adorn oneself, about one’s performance; hair becomes a web of possible signifiers, waiting to be decoded by an image-consuming public, or at least by that stranger across the street. Femininity is a performance, but the secrets of self lie in the hair. There is Kim Kardashian, that postmodern queen of the feminine, a patchwork of skin and plastic flesh, of shiny dye and hair extensions. Websites will spend considerable time and space unpicking the details of Kim’s hairstyles, as she shifts chameleon-like from blonde to black to ombre. It seems that still we read a women through the strands of her hair, as if they were lines of text.
authentic flappers!
In Greek mythology, the long-haired Sirens were alluring femme fatales who seduced sailors with their bewitching singing, leading them to perish and shipwreck on their islands. The beauty of these long-haired beings is thus inherently linked to danger, a threat to the freedom and power of masculinity. We might make a connection to the emasculating anxiety of becoming trapped in feminised domestic space. We might also make a connection to the contemporary use of the word siren in relation to (often long-haired) actresses: she’s a real screen siren, we say. Again, these sirens are beguiling, but often perilous in luring their spectators into the isolated islands of their cinematic fantasies.
Yet in addition to these chains of mythology, hair at its most basic component is protein: an element of our body which symbolises nurturance and life. Like our hair, we are always changing, growing. If we look after our bodies with sleep, good food and exercise, it shows in the glow of our hair. A quick flick through a photo album will reveal a history of hairstyles, which reflect not only on the (dodgy or not) cultural trends of the period, but also on ourselves. Who we are and were.
My own hair history is a fairly interesting one. I’ve always loved long hair, ever since (perhaps even before) I watched a rented VHS copy of Splash (1984) and decided I wanted to be a mermaid. Refusing my mother’s futile attempts to brush my hair, I went to school with a witchy mane which was only sometimes contained in double, Heidi-like braids. There’s a picture of me at my seventh birthday party, with it all crimped as I grin at the camera, wearing 90s-style Baby-Spice white leggings. It would’ve looked almost cute, if I didn’t have a full-fringe which took over half of my skull. Safe to say I’m not such a fan of primary school photos…
fierce crimping. source: pinterest
At least I earned the comparisons I (still) get to Hermione from Harry Potter (and not just through the geekery department). Kids at school would ask me if I ever bothered to straighten my hair (or at least brush it, one girl sighed) – this was back when everyone had to wear their hair poker-straight and smooth as if it had been recently ironed, Bridget Jones style. All that static flattened out; everyone a clone. You could almost smell the whiff of burnt heat spray as the other girls glided past. I wanted GHD straighteners for so long, that by the time I got them (a joint present for me and my brother, who was then going through his wee 12-year-old emo phase), I quite liked my hair a bit wavy or curly. I still have and use that same pair of trusty straighteners, incidentally.
Hair was always a contentious issue in my schooldays. The P.E. teacher would warn us every week that if we didn’t have it tied up in class, we’d be forced to wear rubber bands to pull it back. I’d always imagine the excruciating sensation of pulling a rubber band out a ponytail (along with half of my hair), every nerve searing with dread. By the time I was thirteen my hair was pretty long and for Halloween I bought some of that wonderful Stargazer semi-permanent dye and made a half-successful job of my hair. I think I got that sort of ethereal/faerie/cyborg look, as I dyed the top half pink and the bottom half blue, and my bad dyeing skills meant I actually got quite a cool ombre effect as the shades blended into each other. I wasn’t so good at clearing up the spattered mess of the bathroom, which resembled a mediocre Jackson Pollock painting by the time I was finished.
Me with pink hair for the Halloween Disco…and a Carrick Academy tie.
Oh, and with said blue dye I also did my brother’s hair once. My friend and I bought him some cheap permanent blonde stuff from Semi-Chem, thinking that because his hair was so naturally dark it would need a bleached out base. I didn’t think the blonde would do much at all, maybe only lighten the brown a bit. Somehow, however, it worked a treat and he had the most, um, skunk-like streaks of yellow in his hair. Diligently, we applied the blue dye, forbidding him to look in the mirror until it was finished. With everything all rinsed out, I suppose he looked more like Sonic the Hedgehog than the Billie Joe Armstrong look he was probably going for. It also didn’t help much that I also let my friend cut his hair in the Debenham’s family toilets (while I sipped warm wine mixed with whisky from a plastic sports bottle – classay!), leaving chunks of it over the floor like it was the detritus of some old, innocent self. After a few week’s of swimming lessons, the chlorine made the blue bleed out into a measly green, and he’ll probably never forgive me for that.
The best hair I ever had was platinum blonde. I loved it so much. I guess it was my failed scene-kid phase, when I wanted hair that was long and spiky and backcombed like a rat’s nest, a white canvas to set off my black liner and neon eyeshadow. The bleach process took over three hours for the hairdresser to do, and probably cost all my birthday money and a month or so’s worth of EMA, but it was worth it. I was born a bonnie wee blonde, but cursed with the family trait of having this fade. Having bright blonde hair makes you literally dazzle. Anita Loos was the first to say that ‘gentleman prefer blondes’, and it’s become an adage that blondes have more fun. I don’t know about all that, but you do feel like you’ve become some diamond in a sea of dull, radiating a new light. It fades though. The roots cut in like black leeches and the strands dry out like straw. You get bored. I let the blonde grow out and kept the tips as a kind of proto-ombre (I swear I got there before Alexa Chung et al), which remained as a kind of limp homage to my teen years pretty much until about a year ago, when I went the whole way with the brunette thing.
blonde tips!
blonde tips again!
on holiday in Italy…
me all blonde and melancholy
And now I just wished I was ginger, or at least half ginger. That’s my plan now: gradually get more ginger. There’s something special about ginger hair; the way people try to hide it with lovely euphemisms – strawberry blonde – the way it’s linked to a fresh freckled face, or strange stereotypes (ginger people don’t have souls, I’ve been told). Its Celtic connotations. I want the amber and russet tones of Pre-Raphaelite tresses, that look gorgeous in autumn. It’s a sort of long term life plan, but probably achievable, although it’s one of the hardest colours to get right. You could end up with some cat-vomit orange, or a lustreless red, if you’re not precise with your dye. Yeah, I’ll do it gradually. It took me a while to get my hair as long and strong as it is now, so in spite of that saying ‘it’s hair: it’ll grow back’, I’m not risking my mane anytime soon.
Lily Cole in all her gorgeousness for Vogue Italia (source: pinterest)
The best hair colour and freckles ever. source: pinterest
Sure, I love the idea of hair makeovers. Get several inches lopped off and highlights put in and maybe an undercut. It looks cool on loads of people. But I’m definitely one of those strange souls who finds their hair a total comfort blanket, a scarf in the winter, something to chew on idly when I’m staring at a computer screen. I like being able to hide my face in awkward situations, or conceal the fact that I’ve made no effort with my makeup. It becomes a kind of signature, and people remember you by your hair. It would be hard to lose that, like shedding a self.
However, I’m not denying that long hair, rich with sensuous mythology though it is, isn’t a proper pain in the arse. The brushing, painful detangling, the half-hour plus hair-washing, the problem of it getting stuck in the door when you’re trying to clean the microwave. How to wear it for work; nobody wants a spaghetti strand of hair in their £18 steak. You do come up with a good routine though and it becomes manageable. I promise, it’s worth it.
Desire, jealousy, strength – all things long hair represents in myth. Sure, everyone has bad hair days, but maybe a bad hair day with long hair is more a ‘I just came out of the ocean’ look rather than ‘I just woke up’. Long live the mermaids.
meee 2014
Long hair-care tips:
Wash as little as possible. I wash about once a week with a teaspoon of shampoo and a heap of conditioner.
Good diet! Eat all your greens: kale, spinach, celery, avocado and broccoli are best.
Coconut oil: heat some up and slather your hair in it and leave overnight for a nourishing hot oil treatment.
Buy a tangle-teezer and make your life 50 x easier.
Try to sleep with it in a braid.
Wash it in the coldest water you can stand, and only start to blow dry it when it’s about 80% dry, so it’s getting less heat damage.
Soft scrunchies are better than harsh bands!
Give yourself or get someone else to give you regular almond oil scalp massages. A splash of peppermint oil mixed in also stimulates growth.
Regular trims will not make it grow longer (myth myth myth!) but obviously keep your ends in good shape.
Try using colour-depositing shampoos and conditioners as a less damaging colour upkeep as opposed to layering up permanent dye. Henna can also be good, although it doesn’t ever wash out, so be careful and do a strand test.
mariaology 
