A Hair Short | by Christopher W. Clark

I am not a very masculine man. My physique resembles Olive Oyl more than Popeye, and my soft-spoken voice is often mistaken for a young girl’s on the phone. I cry during certain movies, and I regularly write love poetry as though I were an 18th century Keatsian consumptive. I listen to Enya (when nobody is around, of course), and would rather read a pastoral romance novel than chop wood or spit.  It has never really bothered me much, this lack of machismo, but for one thing: I want more than anything, to be able grow a proper beard. A thick, full-bodied monster of a thing, that glistens with frost in the winter and could shelter in its hairy recesses an orphan bear cub. A Grizzly Adams, if you please, or at least a Kris Kristofferson.  A Viggo Mortensen, before he did Hidalgo.  Something I can wear like a coat-of-arms wherever I go, proudly disclaiming my unimpeachable virility.

Growing a beard is a rite of passage.  It signals the arrival of manhood in a way that is more acceptable to our modern sensibilities than, say, wrestling a boar to death or wandering peyote-addled through a desert on a vision quest.  A beard radiates a certain aura that is inarguably manly.  In my experience (which has been informed as much by an overactive imagination as actual observation), men with beards are simply more capable.  Bearded men can lift heavier stones than the beardless; they can drink more spirits; they have a larger repertory of bawdy drinking songs; they can bed greater numbers of women.  They are ten times more likely to be a lumberjack or a carpenter or a merchant seaman.  Just consider the rich legacy of beards History has bequeathed us:  Marx and Whitman.  All the Old Testament patriarchs.  Zeus.  Santa Claus.  Rasputin.  Great men, all.  Some terrible, some mythic, but all loved, feared or respected.   

A beard denotes power, control, strength, and a ravenous libido.  It is as essential (even in the over-hygienic times we live in) a part of the constitution of a man as a broad chest, a deep voice, and hands callused with work.  Wordsworth once called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of emotion.”  Well, beards (which are like poetry, but hairier) can be defined as “the spontaneous overflow of Primal Man-ness.”   And lest we forget, Jesus himself had what is perhaps the most famous beard in history:  well-proportioned, long but not overflowing, with a holy effulgence which seemed to permeate each strand like a dew-dropped cobweb struck to brilliance by the morning sun.  Or, as I heard it said once en passant:  “If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

A beard, in its way, is both as simple and as complex as a peacock’s feathers, the colored spokes of an iris, a morning mist.  It is part of the landscape of ourselves, and it is as worthy of a poet’s (or essayist’s) attention as a waterfall, an eagle, or a field of lilies.  It shapes a face, bounds it, limns it and gives it character.  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then a man’s beard is like an ivy which wreathes around the front door, casting strange shadows, tethering the whole edifice to homely earth.

It is true that men will never know the wonders of childbirth and pregnancy.  But a properly-grown beard is a kind of pregnancy, a slow—sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful—parturition yielding a new kind of life.  A beard, as much as a human child, has its own individuality and identity.  Its own religion, sometimes.  It can be light or dark; straight or curly; Hasidic or Rastafarian or Muslim; ugly or beautiful; luminous or dull.  A beard can whisper across the fingertips like fine silk, or grate like a frayed Brillo pad.  It can frame perfectly a smile, or conceal it.  It can keep you warm on windy ways, or miserable in the heat of summer.  It can be as light and permeable as a veil of lace, or as unyielding as Kevlar.  It can stir memories; it can distract.  Cats can bathe it, and small children smile at it.  Women can fall in love with it.  Other men may look at it and cower in fear.

What makes a great beard?  There is no single ideal.  Part of its attraction is the many costumes it may wear and still retain its essential beard-iness.  That being said, certain characteristics are pretty dominant in the greatest beards.  Dark tints are always better, simply because they are more visible.  Beards that are too light, especially blond ones, look like a strange skin condition from any distance.   The space between hairs—what I will term the interfollicular distance-- should be small, giving the effect of a pointillist painting.  Too far apart, too sparse, and the overall composition acquires the feel of macaroni art.  It should resemble in shape the head of a spear, tapering, narrowing to a point that seems to cut the air with each turn of the head.  Avoid the octopus-beard, the one that looks like a mass of wriggling tentacles spreading outward from the face.  

Some people seem to be able to grow a beard the way the great painters paint.  There is an artlessness to it that is imminently artistic.  I am not one of them.  If I were to chart my beard-growth, it would go something like this.  Week 1: A light, dimly perceptible budding of hairs which can be seen only in certain lights.  Week 2:  Not much different from week one, but more visible.  I finally get my five o’clock shadow--it’s only taken two weeks.  Week 3: I begin to resemble what I imagine a small cactus would look like if it could be self-conscious.  I have not yet reached a respectable length or shade.  Hair still refuses, and will continue to refuse, to grow in the hollows of my cheeks.  This makes either side of my face look like a twin Tunguska Event.  Week 4:  About as good as it will get, the tepid acme of the entire  process.  It is an almost-beard, an Ur-beard which might fool someone with cataracts or at a great distance.  Week 5, onward:  It grows, swells beyond its capacity to self-govern, teeters on the brink of anarchy.  My face resembles an irregular planetoid surrounded by a mist of copper-brown, curled-hair debris which seems to float in an uneasy orbit around it.  About week eight, my beard (such as it is) becomes unmanageable.  Too curly, more evidently spotty, meshy like a tangle of rose-briar.  Food gets caught in it.  It becomes a growing, living thing outside my control, only liminally connected to me.  It verges on sentience, and the inevitable overthrow of its parent organism (me) is not far behind.  The day after week eight:  Shave, frown at my smooth prepubescent pink face in the mirror, repeat the cycle.

Everyone has a favorite movie, a well-loved book that they return to again and again.  My favorite beard, the ne plus ultra of beards, is the one worn by John Huston in his later years.  I saw it once while perusing the biography section of the library, and was enchanted.  I won’t even try to describe it:  any image I conjure will be wan and lifeless compared to its white, living majesty.  Some faces are able to wear beards in such a way that they enrich and inform each other, like separate but parallel stories in some Scheherezadean tapestry.  Huston’s is such a beard.  His aged face, furrowed and canalled with wrinkles, is a face that beams with a sense of manly authority.  It is like a wind-beaten cliff, ancient, detached, enduring, mysterious.  A beard, in certain contexts, becomes more than a physical thing; it becomes a vision of fortitude.  There is something ineffably comforting about a beard, the way it seems to shelter and hallow certain faces.  Like the right word, used in just the right way, it casts a spell that can’t be shaken.  In Huston’s case, I am strangely moved by his beard.  It is a silly thing, maybe, but it stirs me, fills me with a sense of having known something forgotten, beyond my capacity to remember.  It is a feeling like pining for home and a warm nook to shelter me from a vast windy wilderness.  

Maybe it is true that we are all imperfect shadows of what we will be in the next life.  If so, then what beard shall I wear in the hereafter? I see it clearly when I close my eyes:  It is the length of three football fields, and it writhes and wreathes itself in a myriad of rainbow hues.  A single strand is stronger than a bridge-cable; the whole thing constantly moving, rippling with light.  I drape it over my shoulder and drag it like a long cape.  I can use it to rescue people in quicksand, to climb tall towers, to keep sickly children warm in winter.   I can disappear for days inside of it.  I can tow stranded ships ashore with it.  It is a beard so rich, so varied in hue, so conducive to deep spiritual introspection that I can dwell on its glittering, undulating swell for days without tiring of it.  I will write odes to it.  I will bandage wounds with it.  I will listen to it sing like a harp in the wind.

Like most things, if you follow them back far enough, this all has to do with my father.  He formed my ideas about what a man should be.  And, much later, he would become the yardstick by which I measured own disappointments and failures.  My father had a good beard.  It was like something ripped from Tolkien or one of the Icelandic sagas—a thick, golden beard, the hairs close-set and overlapping in a myriad of interweaving layers: pliant, responsive, but impenetrable as a suit of chain-mail.  And it glowed, did I mention that?  Not catching the light the way beards do in fitful glitters, but actually producing its own light through some obscure art of follicular radiation.   It was the Platonic essence of a fatherly—a masculine—beard.

I do not have a single memory of my father that does not bring his beard to mind.  It is like a silent companion always present in the background of our interaction.  When I was little, I remember tugging on it, wondering where it came from, and where I might get one.  It was as warm and comfortable to lie next to as a hearth-fire.  I remember the texture of it when I hugged him, the way it needled my face with a cloying sharpness before bending silkily against the pressure of my small cheek.  It was a source of mystery, of awe.  I did not see much of my father growing up, but I remember his beard the way some people will remember a birthmark on an estranged lover, or a person’s eyes.  It had personality. Like Samson’s hair, it was a source of inscrutable power.

I cannot tell you about my father without describing his beard.  It is inextricably bound up with my six-year-old vision of him.  More than just a beard, it was a symbol.  A symbol as it is felt in childhood, immediate, living and vital with an inarticulate wonder; not the tame and broken things we talk about in classrooms, but a thing of energy, deeply and wordlessly communicative.  My father was the beard he wore, braided thickly with my own half-formed assumptions and associations about manhood and wisdom and fatherliness. It was not just the beard of my father—it was the same one worn by Iron Hans in the Grimm story, by Merlin, by all wise, questing, indomitable men.  

He shaved only once that I can clearly remember.  It was a strange and unsettling thing, to be confronted after school by a man that was not my father.  It was more than the absence of hair.  It had completely reconfigured the landscape of his face—and I encountered it with the same horror and spiritual dread as if I were seeing a tract of tree-stumps where a forest once belonged.  It took at least five years off his age, but the five most important years—all the formative crises, turns of fate, heartaches, joys, and longings which chisel in careful lapidary the lineaments of a man’s face.  Where was once a visage bristling with authority and hard-earned, hirsute wisdom I now saw a bare-faced boy, his skin a hostile shade of pink.  Like a kind of reverse lycanthropy with the Wolf-man suddenly changing to harmless, befuddled Lon Chaney, Jr.  

But even the most unassailable of heroes suffer moments of bathos, I suppose, when we see their inmost weakness come to the surface.  Lancelot will always be swayed from virtue by his Guinevere; Merlin forever imprisoned in stone by his Vivian.  My dad’s story, too, involves a woman and a betrayal, but it is an old story, and you’ve heard it before.

I saw my father recently.  His beard was not as golden as I remember it being, not as perfect and heroic-seeming.  It was sadly changed, in a fundamental way that the mere passage of years could not account for.  It was like a garden at an abandoned estate, overgrown, weedy, and clothed in an obscure gloom.  His beard no longer a rich teleology, but a creation dismantled by entropy.  Not a vision of virile fatherliness and wisdom, but a visible echo of his alcoholism-- knotted, tattered, and unwoven by years of loneliness and souring disappointment.  The golden chain-mail punctured in battle, rusted with age.  It was like being confronted all over again by the pink-faced stranger.  Only the stranger, I realize with sickening conviction, is someone I’ve known in some sense my entire life.  He is not the storybook father I’d created, but as sad and fallible as his son.

It is strange, seeing things for the first time.  Not as my six year-old eyes saw them, embroidering so naturally—so convincingly—the world around me with marvels and wonders, but as I see them through the lens of adult experience.  I want to have that vision again, that view of Eden before the sudden eviction.  I want my father back. Not the alcoholic divorcee, but St. George.  I have learned, unwillingly, to be disappointed.  And I have become, like the beard I cannot grow, a disappointment.  I have come up short in almost everything—as a husband, a student, a writer, a son.  My sense of incompleteness, my sense of failure haunts me like the ghost of what I imagine my father was, once.   I have been reckoned, and found wanting.

I cannot grow a proper beard, try as I might.  I cannot swear properly. I do not know the names of trees, or birds, or flowers.  I could not point to Switzerland on a map.  I have never seen the ocean, except in movies.  I can only speak a few broken phrases in French.  I have never read Milton.  I am a terrible swimmer.  I cannot fix a car, or change the oil, or change a tire.  I do not know how to play baseball, or build a fire.  I seem to break whatever I lay my hands on.  I do not give good gifts.  I do not tell good stories.  I apologize too often, sometimes without reason.  I do not exercise.   I feel guilty for things I’ve never done.  I have biceps that are smaller than most teenage girls’.  I do not know how to make choices.  I am oblivious.  I blanch at the sight of my own blood.  I am not as smart as people think I am.  I do not know the name of that piece of music I listened to and loved.  I cannot throw a horseshoe.  I’ve forgotten all the names of constellations I once knew by heart.  I am too often sad, when I should not be.  

All my shortcomings—the real ones, the ones I only imagine (which are every bit as real when they come a-haunting)--hem me close, and make it hard to breathe.  I am terrified of being abandoned, of being suddenly and unutterably alone.  I remember once, when I was young, my mother driving away, stranding me at an auto repair shop.  I was terrified.  I cried, but I did not tell anyone what had happened, did not call for help.  I waited, patient and frightened on the curbside, until she came back, weeping and apologetic.  Years later, she left again, as unexpectedly as the first time, and did not come back.  Some rare nights when I cannot sleep, or I wake from a bad dream, I must check to see if my wife is still there beside me.  I touch her, just to know that I am not alone, to provide some anchor for an anxiety which threatens to drown me.  To know that I have not been left, marooned like Crusoe.  I am comforted for a moment, before I realize the scope of the fears which beset me, which have shaped me as much as they have broken me-- and my inability to confront them.  To face them as I grew up to believe a man should face his fears.  I am too weak, and my beard does not grow thick enough to hide a worried, anxious face.

I want to be a bulwark, a fortress, an unscaleable wall. I want to be fearless.  Confident.  And, yes, I want to grow a beard like the beard my father had.  To be my father, not as he is, but as I saw him once.  The way I see him still, when I close my eyes.  The man I saw recently was not the father of that six year-old who idolized him.  He was not even the stranger with the pink shaven face I briefly knew.  But to be fair, he never was. I cannot hold him responsible for my idea of him, and I will not.  This is not the first time a person has been disillusioned by his father.  It is a familiar, far-traveled refrain.  I will always have two fathers, one a memory, one flesh-and-blood.  I love them both.  He is Merlin, even now, but Merlin imprisoned, his voice muted by stone, buried and broken.  And I have my ear to the stone, trying desperately to hear what is said, for some meaning to take hold.  

But we are built to be disappointed.  Limitations define us.  There is a Cabbalist belief that God divided himself in order to see and know himself.  Which is to say an imperfection can sometimes be the shortest road to perfection, a fragment the best way of viewing a Whole.  I used to spend hours when I was younger daydreaming about the life I would one day have.  While I have fallen short of my fancies, I won’t pretend that I’ve led an unworthy or unhappy life.  Yes, it’s sad to say, I am a failure.  But I am a mostly happy failure, and that is something.  I have a houseful of cats, a not-inconsiderable library, and the threefold solace of nature, imagination, and memory to sustain me. I will never be a manly man, not John Huston manly, or Ernest Hemingway manly.  I’ll be lucky to qualify for the same level of manliness as Richard Simmons.  But I can be strong.  I can cradle those moments of happiness, of wholeness, which blossom suddenly to light for a moment or two some dark or obscure passage in my unfolding story.  I can be patient.  If not a good man, I can be a better man.  I will wait as long as I must, my ear pressed firmly against stone, knowing that words must come, words to break the spell that binds me.  That binds him.  

  But my face is beginning to chafe a little, and I think it’s time for a clean shave.