CYCLE ONE: ATTITUDES TO HAIR

1. Peoples differ collectively no less than people individually in their evaluation of hair. Some peoples, for instance, regard hair as a kind of fiery backdrop to the head and/or face, whilst others perceive it as having an airy connotation that stretches way beyond the head. To them, on the contrary, hair grows out of the head like air out of vegetation, and is therefore something less symbolic of emotionality, the fiery parallel, than of spirituality, the airy one.

2. I, myself, like to regard hair as having an airy connotation, since my own hair is soft and fine rather than hard or coarse, and that is arguably closer, overall, to air than to fire. However, even if my hair were not particularly airy, it would demonstrably differ from the sort of hair which immediately suggests a fiery parallel, since, quite apart from its soft texture, it is dark rather than bright, and thus seemingly closer to essence than to appearance. Compared to someone with wavy or frizzy red hair, my soft brown hair would indeed seem tame and airy rather than wild and fiery.

3. However, whatever the texture or tone of hair, the point I was making at the beginning about some peoples regarding hair one way and other peoples holding a different, if not contrary, view of it can be borne out, I believe, by the different attitudes to hair-length that prevail amongst different peoples. Those with a fiery sense of hair tend, as a rule, to prefer short hair, while those whose concept of hair is airy have greater tolerance, it seems to me, for long hair, particularly on men. For whilst it will be thought desirable for women to have longer hair than men wherever the fiery view of hair prevails, men will tend to grow their hair as long as, if not longer than, women in those countries or societies where hair is identified with spirituality, since it is a logically demonstrable fact that while women are generally more emotional than men, men, by contrast, tend to be more spiritual than women.

4. This distinction revolves around the fact, basically, that fire is a female element and air a male one, since the one is noumenally objective and the other no-less noumenally subjective, and the genders differ precisely in their relationship to the elements not only of fire and air, the noumenal elements par excellence, but of water and vegetation (earth) in the lower realms of phenomenal objectivity/subjectivity.

5. Now because fire and water hang together on the female side of the gender divide in their relationship to objectivity, peoples with a female disposition for the objective will prefer hair to be longer on women than on men, particularly if they are more civilized than barbarous, and thus disposed to the hegemony, to all intents and purposes, of water over fire. Women, for them, are entitled to longer hair than men, but the emphasis, overall, will be on shortness, on a reduction of fieriness to the advantage, it may be, of wateriness. On the other hand, those peoples with a male disposition towards subjectivity, to vegetation and air, will be more disposed to long hair than to short hair, and because men are thought spiritually superior to women, they will be expected, if not encouraged, to grow their hair longer, and probably with reference to a ponytail and/or pigtail, in confirmation of a subjective bias.

6. For style is another thing in the estimation of hair vis-à-vis either fire or air, water or vegetation, and we need not doubt that where the objective options are concerned, hair will be hanging loosely in centrifugal and falling fashion, whereas the norm for those peoples and/or societies centred in subjectivity will be a swept-back or centripetal style of hair such that confirms a male disposition to rise. Hence the almost inevitable recourse to ponytails of one type or another with long hair in the case of those societies which affirm, culturally and religiously, a subjective bias.

7. Between the noumenal and the phenomenal planes, however, there is all the difference between absolutism and relativity, between unparted hair and parted hair, and we may well believe, in consequence, that hair will be unparted, in due absolutist and upper-class terms, whenever either fiery or airy parallels are at stake, but that a parting relativity will creep into hair which reflects either a watery or a vegetative parallel, after the manner of that which, being phenomenal, is lower class, and more given, in consequence, to mass and/or volume than to time and/or space.

8. Hair, to me, is an airy thing, and even the word 'hair' is 'h' plus 'air'. Doubtless denigratory usage of the word 'fairy' derives, in no small measure, from the combination of 'f' with 'airy', as though to say 'faggot' with 'air' or, in stylistic practice, 'bum' with a ponytail. Such reactionary abuse is only to be expected from people whose societal basis is more barbarous and/or civilized than natural and/or cultural, but it is instructive, all the same, of the opposition which does exist, in some societies, to long hair on men, particularly when that hair is demonstrably fine and arranged in accordance with subjective procedures. Their sense of what is decent or relevant is offended precisely because long hair 'flies in the face' of their own respect for short hair in relation to a fiery backdrop which, while still acknowledged and even respected, requires modification of a watery order, in conformity with civilized criteria. Yet peoples are rarely homogenous but a mixture, often enough, of different ethnic and racial groupings, some of which will think one way and some of which another.

9. On the subject of ponytails, I like to distinguish between the plaited ponytail as feminine, the loose ponytail as masculine, and the pigtail as supermasculine, on the basis of watery, vegetative, and airy parallels in relation to transcendentalism, and hence the context overall of air, the spiritual element par excellence. Hence people whose cultural entitlement would be to the top tier of the triadic Beyond to which I, as a self-proclaimed Social Transcendentalist, subscribe, should ideally be of the ponytail/pigtail confraternity, since that alone is commensurate with spirituality, and it should be reflected in terms of the watery (feminine), vegetative (masculine), and airy (supermasculine) subsections of the tier in question ... come the dawn of 'Kingdom Come' in relation to the Centrist options of the triadic Beyond, as already discussed in various earlier texts.