Things Getting Hairy: Sunday Scribblings

This week's Sunday Scribblings topic is Hair. For more writings on this topic, go here.

The source of what I've learned about hair in relation to wild can be found here.

Hairy has long been a way to describe someone or something undesirable. The idea is this: as human beings have evolved, they have lost more and more body hair. To retain this hair is seen as wild or evolutionarily backward, less advanced.

I suppose it's why a scary roller coaster is called "wild and woolly". I suppose it's why, when I wore my hair well below my shoulders until about ten years ago, I was referred to as "that wild English teacher."

You might remember the hairy relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, Al Hrabosky. Hair flying, sporting a huge Fu Manchu mustache, he stomped angrily around the pitcher's mound, intimidating batters. He was nicknamed "The Mad Hungarian."

Facing Hrabosky was hairy. It was dangerous, frightening.

The flight of the Apollo 13 was a hairy situation when an explosion occurred on the space craft.

It's an odd presumption embedded in our language about hair.

And, yet, what is more sensuous than stroking the hair of an intimate? Or having one's hair stroked?

While thick, lush hair has been marketed as the most desirable hair for a woman, once the palms of love and the fingers of passion play wildly with the hair of a lover, the hair can be lush, thin, permed, straight, wavy, curly, dyed, cropped, tangled, kinky, or in dreads: it doesn't matter.

One lover touches the other's hair, and things can get hairy. Things can become uncontrolled, spontaneous, fun, tender, unruly....

I hesitate to narrate my own specific experiences with wildness and hair. I won't.

But I can say that when things have become hairy between me and a lover, when we have fired our passions playing with one another's hair, it was wild, but, to me, it wasn't backward or uncivilized.

It was supremely human. Things getting hairy in the intimate moments of love heightened my sense of being wildly human.

It never felt like I was less evolved. It felt like I was pushing evolution forward, beyond the measure or awareness of time.