whit/ness i: the haptics of hair in ancient greek poetry
Dear Whitney,
First of all, my apologies for the delay in getting this letter out to you. I told you months ago that I was writing it, and am only now getting around to publishing them for you. I feel like I owe younger you an apology for all the times I’d tease you about taking so long getting ready, always going through several outfits before you were satisfied. I’m mature enough to understand now that dressing up is an artform for you–partly because I’m exactly the same when it comes to my artform of writing; I try so many different styles before I finally settle on one.
I’m writing to you to talk about hair in ancient Greek poetry. During my whole second masters, it felt weird that I was trying to talk about hair to all these folks in my field who don’t really think about hair all that much, and not discussing it with the person who taught me about my own hair in the first place. Growing up, you always tried to teach me that my textured hair was something that needed to be constantly maintained, but that there could be great pleasure in doing so, in figuring out the different styles and methods of managing my hair. The practices of combing, sectioning, identifying different curl patterns, which oils and moisturizers worked best, different styles of braiding and twisting, how to use heat to either straighten my hair or reshape its curls, and how to add extra hair to increase volume in the form of extensions and weaves.
My response was usually fear and anxiety–I’ve always been called tenderheaded by our community, the term for those of us who are more sensitive to touch around our heads, which can lead to a lot of tears and anguish when we’re getting our hair done. I was always so embarrassed about how much it would hurt when I’d get my hair combed, but it grew so fast and thick that I didn’t think I’d ever keep up with it. The first hair practice that I did on my own was one that you never instructed me in: cutting off all my hair with a pocket knife when I was thirteen after dad wouldn’t let me cut it when I was on swim team. I then took to dyeing it different colors in undergrad as well, trying to get it to thin out a bit.
The first time I felt truly anxious about my hair as an adult was during my time at Columbia, when it started falling out. I think it was a combination of reasons–dyeing it one too many times, the aftermath of my first breakup, malnutrition/not getting enough vitamins on a Manhattan diet, stress over trying to get my Greek up to the standard of my Latin so that I could be taken seriously in my field, and the fact that I started combing it the most aggressively I ever had, ripping out whole chunks of my hair at a time. During this time, I was also reading a whole lot of Greek poetry and trying to improve my vocabulary, and I realized that not only did the ancient poets mention hair quite a few times, but they frequently mentioned textured hair in contexts that I was intimately familiar with–braiding hair as an expression of desire, tearing out hair in anguish and lamentation, but most importantly a deep anxiety, particularly from female characters and choruses in tragedy, of being dragged off by ones hair, a singular fear of another expressing agency over one’s own hair.
After my failed PhD pitch to Columbia to study this subject, I hopped on a plane and stayed with you for a month–at the end of which I launched this journal, “Corona Borealis: just a kinky hand-braided crown”. I wanted to make a space to think about all my feelings about hair and how much hair was connected to emotion in poetry, and after four years I think I’m finally ready to share what I’ve learned. I spent my time in Vermont creating a giant catalog of networks of hair-related terms in ancient Greek poetry, reading through everything from the 8th-4th century BCE–epic, hymn, lyric, and drama. And now that I’m done, I need to go through all the data and separate it into sheets, and I figured that this would be a good time to share what I’ve learned with you as I’m combing through all the material (pun intended).
I never told you this, but I always felt a type of way that I didn’t have more perspective to offer you while you were playing Medea and designing your hairstyle for the role. I watched you research ancient hair and bring your own cosmetic materials to the table to create the look, and I felt like something of a fraud because I couldn’t think of anything useful to help you as an artist, when it was my main interests. I was still too in the early stages of my research to produce anything that I thought you’d be able to work from.
It was a big reason I decided to do a second masters in the first place–I wanted institutional access to get a handle on all of the strange discourse around hair in ancient Greek poetry. It wasn’t the only reason I went, but a central one amid other deciding factors: wanting to hang out with the Vermont cousins, eager to be back teaching and in public school again, the chance to have a proper ending with some of my east coast friends, a cute boy in Harlem, the opportunity to do more ancient drama, etc. And now that my homecoming has been delayed until after my birthday, I figured that there’s no time like the present to get into it.
There’s quite a bit to discuss, so I’ve decided to break this up into seven letters–this first one to overview the rest, then three that are divided by poetic genre, and a final three to discuss different categories of hair terms. A key point that I want to highlight right away is that all of these poetic genres are religious and musical–so in the other letters I’ll also be explaining and detailing aspects of ancient Greek religion and musical history as well.
In the first letter, The Tropes of Tresses in Ancient Greek Epic, I’m going to begin with the earliest poetic genre–epic. Epic is monometrical in form–it is always in dactylic hexameter, six feet to a line made up of either dactyls or spondees. In terms of surviving completed works, this includes Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, as well as hymns to various gods written in dactylic hexameter that were associated with Homer’s style. There are also several fragmentary works from the genre that I will detail as they come up.
I’ll spend the most time on the Iliad, the earliest surviving poetic composition that we have. Despite the subject matter being centered around the infamous Trojan War, there is actually quite a bit of hair in that epic, and not just in terms of describing different characters or groups. Homer uses hair in terms of scenes of seduction, violence, and lamentation in really interesting ways, which was what first got me interested in studying how hair becomes used in specific tropes across poetic genres.
The first surviving instance of a figure braiding their hair in all of ancient Greek poetry is the queen goddess Hera in Book 14–in the famed Zeus Apatos (Zeus Deception) scene where she needs to distract her husband’s attention for the benefit of the Greeks in battle, and so she gets all gussied up to go seduce him. Her entire process of getting ready is detailed, starting with rubbing sweet-smelling ambrosia all over her skin, scenting and delighting the entire palace, before turning towards her hair:
τῷ ῥ᾿ ἥ γε χρόα καλὸν ἀλειψαμένη ἰδὲ χαίτας
πεξαμένη χερσὶ πλοκάμους ἔπλεξε φαεινοὺς
καλοὺς ἀμβροσίους ἐκ κράατος ἀθανάτοιο.With this [ambrosia] she anointed her lovely flesh and hair
combing it with her hands braided shining braids
beautiful, ambrosial, from her immortal head. (14.175–7)
She calls upon Aphrodite and Hypnos for help in her endeavor–the former so she can get some sexy lingerie to finish Zeus off, the latter to ensure that Zeus doesn’t wake up for a while after their lovemaking. Aphrodite is like “say less girl, finally something worthwhile for me to focus on”, but Hypnos is very wary at the last time that Hera tried to deceive Zeus, around the birth of Herakles, one of his children from a mortal affair, when she enlisted the help of Ate, goddess of blind-folly and deception.
Hera assures Hypnos that this staged deception won’t end like the episode with Ate, and even throws him one of the Graces to marry in order to sweeten the deal. Her plan goes off without a hitch and she’s successful in tricking Zeus through seduction, causing the earth to burst into bloom from their lovemaking.
The fate of Ate is revealed later in Book 19, after Patroclus has been killed and Achilles has decided to return to battle, the leader of the Greek side, Agamemnon, rallies the army together after they’ve been so divided across purposes since the beginning of the poem (when Agamemnon disrespected Achilles by demanding his enslaved concubine). In a rowsing speech to the army, Agamemnon reflects that even Zeus, king of the gods, has been led to blind folly by the goddess who embodied the concept, Ate, which lead to her expulsion from Olympus to the mortal realm, where she now spends her time blinding mortals to their follies instead of influencing the Olympian gods.
After he realizes that he’s been tricked by Ate, Zeus feels mental anguish from which he then grabs Ate by her braids and hurls her from the heavens:
ὣς φάτο, τὸν δ᾿ ἄχος ὀξὺ κατὰ φρένα τύψε βαθεῖαν·
αὐτίκα δ᾿ εἷλ᾿ Ἄτην κεφαλῆς λιπαροπλοκάμοιο
χωόμενος φρεσὶν ᾗσι, καὶ ὤμοσε καρτερὸν ὅρκον
μή ποτ᾿ ἐς Οὔλυμπόν τε καὶ οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα
αὖτις ἐλεύσεσθαι Ἄτην, ἣ πάντας ἀᾶται.
ὣς εἰπὼν ἔρριψεν ἀπ᾿ οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος
χειρὶ περιστρέψας, τάχα δ᾿ ἵκετο ἔργ᾿ ἀνθρώπων.So she spoke, and sharp pain struck him deep in his mind–
immediately he seized Ate’s head by her gleaming braids,
angered in his mind, and swore a mighty oath that
never again to Olympus and the starry heaven
would Ate come, she who blinds all.
So said he, and flung her from the starry heaven,
twirling her about with his hand, quickly she came to the realm of humans.(19.125–31)
I return to this passage quite a bit as it links the relationship between internal mentalities and external hairstyles–Ate makes Zeus feel anguish internally in his head and he responds by making her feel anguish externally on her head.
Having one’s hair and/or headwear become yanked out of order doesn’t always happen with external agents, but can also be self-inflicted, particularly around grief and lamentation. Agamemnon reunites the factions of the Greek army and Achilles returns to battle and slaughters Hector. While he’s lynching his corpse around the walls of Troy, a shock wave of grief and lamentation ripples through the city, until it finally reaches Hector’s wife, Andromache. When she sees the far-off figure of Achilles dragging her husband’s corpse around, she falls back and tears off her various hairpieces in lamentation:
τὴν δὲ κατ᾿ ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν,
ἤριπε δ᾿ ἐξοπίσω, ἀπὸ δὲ ψυχὴν ἐκάπυσσε.
τῆλε δ᾿ ἀπὸ κρατὸς βάλε δέσματα σιγαλόεντα,
ἄμπυκα κεκρύφαλόν τε ἰδὲ πλεκτὴν ἀναδέσμην
κρήδεμνόν θ᾿, ὅ ῥά οἱ δῶκε χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη
ἤματι τῷ ὅτε μιν κορυθαίολος ἠλάγεθ᾿ Ἕκτωρ
ἐκ δόμου Ἠετίωνος, ἐπεὶ πόρε μυρία ἕδνα.Down over her eyes the darkness of night covered,
and she fell backward and gasped out her spirit.
Far from her head she tossed her bright headwear,
the front-clip and hairnet and braided headband,
and the veil that golden Aphrodite had given her
on the day when Hector of the flashing helmet led her
from the house of Eëtion, after he had brought plenty of betrothal gifts. (22.466–72)
This section is one of the greatest concentrations of hairwear terms in the whole epic genre, and the specificity of their removal helps to emphasize Andromache’s role transitioning from wife to widow.
These three scenes are key to understanding the different emotional scenes that hair becomes a trope around, also in how they highlight agency over hair–the difference between when one does practices to their own hair, vs when another impacts one’s hair.
In the second letter, The Coiling Crowns in Ancient Greek Lyric, we’re going to dive into the fractured world of Greek lyric. Lyric is marked by its polymetry–it takes on a whole host of different meters and rhythms to soundtrack different emotional landscapes: love, heartache, anger, betrayal, grief, delight, derision, delusion, and otherwise whimsies. Due to its variable and divergent nature, the gods tend to show up in interesting and surprising ways associated with different types of musical genres. Apollo is associated with the lyre, and so he shows up quite a bit through the entire genre, as well as associated divinities around him like his sister Artemis and the Muses. Aphrodite shows up quite a bit with her entourage of Eros(es) and the Graces as erotic lyric poets become popular–most notably Alcman, Alcaeus, and Sappho.
While a good deal of archaic lyric is fragmentary, it still manages to develop different trends around hair, particularly in emphasizing the vegetal/flower crown as a symbol of religious devotion, particularly to the gods of the arts.
For instance, Sappho warns one of her companions around the irreverence of being without a flower crown:
σὺ δὲ στεφάνοις, ὦ Δίκα, πέρθεσθ᾿ ἐράτοις φόβαισιν
ὄρπακας ἀνήτω συν<α>έρραισ᾿ ἀπάλαισι χέρσιν·
εὐάνθεα †γὰρ πέλεται† καὶ Χάριτες μάκαιραι
μᾶλλον προτόρην, ἀστεφανώτοισι δ᾿ ἀπυστρέφονται.You–Dika–bind your erotic locks in crowns
tying together stems of anise with your hands
for the blessed Graces prefer the beautifully flowered
to gaze upon–the uncrowned they turn away from. (fr. 81)
Lyric also shows the advent of a new instrument–the aulos, or double-pipes, which later becomes the main instrument of tragedy. A popular song-genre that emerged from it was the dithyramb, a style of repetitive singing that became associated with the god Dionysus and his entourage (and was later thought to be one of the musical origins for tragedy’s choral odes).
A feature I adore about archaic lyric, which also carries over into dramatic lyric, is that it frequently blends different aesthetic networks together. Two words for hair–kome and phobe–are also used for plant leaves in Greek poetry, and so you can see language flowing from hairstyling into natural landscape which blends into different styles of poetic performance. Like in one of Pindar’s fragmentary dithyramb honoring Dionysian revelry, he offers forth in his lyrics both floral crowns and singing styles:
ἰοδέτων λάχετε στεφάνων τᾶν τ᾿ ἐαριδρόπων ἀοιδᾶν
receive violet-bound crowns and spring-plucked singing (Dith.75.6)
As he describes the advent of the spring and the chorus gathering to come and worship around Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysus, he blends language of hair and landscape to move from nature to the choral celebration, using hair as an intermediary:
τότε βάλλεται, τότ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἀμβρόταν χθόν᾿ ἐραταί
ἴων φόβαι, ῥόδα τε κόμαισι μείγνυται,
ἀχεῖ τ᾿ ὀμφαὶ μελέων σὺν αὐλοῖς,
οἰχνεῖ τε Σεμέλαν ἑλικάμπυκα χοροί.Then it is scattered, then over the divine earth the erotic
tresses of violets, the rose becomes acquainted with hair,
it echoes: voices of melodies with the aulos as
the chorus comes to Semele’s circling-headband (75.16–9)
Most importantly, I’ll start highlighting the new types of hair-terms that emerge from lyric, because the genre is deeply influential on drama, and tragedy in particular is when hair terms start to become far more prevalent and occasionally take on new meanings.
In the third letter, The Metatheatrical Manes in Ancient Greek Drama, we will spend quite a bit of time with drama, as hair also gets a bit more meta in terms of its performance with stage costuming. Across tragedy, comedy, and our extant satyr play(s) hair takes on a new element: horror and exploitation as we dive into a genre of entangled dark emotions needing to be unraveled for catharsis.
We’ll start with Aeschylus who seems to popularize a trope of placing his female choruses under threat of being dragged away by their hair as a euphemism for sexual violence.
In the Seven Against Thebes, the young women of Thebes become anxious at the attacking Argive army at their gates and express to the king, Eteocles, their fears of all the Theban women being dragged away by their hair “like horses”:
τὰς δὲ κεχειρωμένας ἄγεσθαι,
ἒ ἔ, νέας τε καὶ παλαιάς
ἱππηδὸν πλοκάμων, περιρ-
ρηγνυμένων φαρέων· βοᾷ δ᾿
ἐκκενουμένα πόλις
λαΐδος οὐλομένας μειξοθρόου.while the women are taken captive and led away —
ah, ah! — young and old together,
by their hair like horses, rent
from their clothes/veils, it cries
the emptied out city
those perished of plunder, of mixed-shrieking. (326–31)
In his Suppliants, the daughters of Danaus are fleeing forced marriage from their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, and are seeking asylum in Greece from North Africa. When their cousins catch up with them, they use the same threat of dragging them off by their hair:
ἕλξειν ἔοιχ᾿ ὑμᾶς ἐπισπάσας κόμης,
ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἀκούετ᾿ ὀξὺ τῶν ἐμῶν λόγων.It looks as though I’ll be dragging you off by your hair,
since you aren’t hearing my words sharply. (909–10)
The play where he does the most with hair is his Libation-bearers, so we’ll end up talking a bit about that play.
Sophocles seems the least interested in hair of the three tragedians, but I would argue he’s the most deliberate when he does use it–not really innovating with hair like Aeschylus and Euripides, yet still very responsive to their trends, especially around using hair as part of the aesthetics of violence.
Like in the messenger’s speech of the Women of Trachis, when Herakles murders [a guy] by hurling him onto the rocks
μάρψας ποδός νιν, ἄρθρον ᾗ λυγίζεται,
ῥίπτει πρὸς ἀμφίκλυστον ἐκ πόντου πέτραν·
κόμης δὲ λευκὸν μυελὸν ἐκραίνει, μέσου
κρατὸς διασπαρέντος αἵματός θ᾿ ὁμοῦ.He grabbed him by the foot, where the ankle-socket joins,
and hurled him around onto a rock of the sea
From his hair poured out white brain, the middle
of his head splattered with his blood. (779–82)
But it’s not just the gruesome horror that he uses hair for, but also the more aesthetic horror as well. There’s also a tradition of serpents being described as braided or twisted that Aeschylus utilizes in his Libation-bearers to describe the Furies (1049). Sophocles uses this to describe the oak and snake crown of Hecate, titan goddess of crossroads and witchcraft, in a play called the Root-cutters that seemed to center around Medea in some way (there aren’t enough fragments to reconstruct the plot):
Ἥλιε δέσποτα καὶ πῦρ ἱερόν,
τῆς εἰνοδίας Ἑκάτης ἔγχος,
τὸ δι᾿ Οὐλύμπου <προ>πολοῦσα φέρει
καὶ γῆς ναίουσ᾿ ἱερὰς τριόδους,
στεφανωσαμένη δρυὶ καὶ πλεκταῖς
ὠμῶν σπείραισι δρακόντωνHelios, lord, and sacred fire,
the spear of Hecate of the roads,
which she carries as she attends her Olympian mistress
and inhabits the earth’s sacred crossroads,
bearing crowns of oak and braided
coils of savage snakes (fr. 535)
Similar to Aeschylus, we’ll spend a lot of time on his Electra play, which deals with the same events of Aeschylus’ Libation-bearers, which also carries the record for the most hair of all his plays.
And then we get to Euripides which is where the real fun is. He accounts for nearly 80% of all the hair uses in tragedy and does some wildly interesting things with it. Unlike the others, his Electra play is actually where he takes off in adding more hair terms to his plays and he steadily increases with only a few dips until the spectacular finale of his posthumous play Bacchae, which accounts for 10% of all the hair terms in tragedy.
I do finally have plenty to say about hair in the Medea now, but I’ll especially be looking at how much his female choruses are concerned with their hair in all manners–not just in anxiety and fear, but also in delight, reverence, and whimsy. Euripides is chock full of females choruses singing about each other’s hair.
Like the chorus of enslaved Greek women in his Iphigenia among the Taurians, who imagine themselves changing into birds and flying off elsewhere, returning to a time when they were in competition with one another for fine husbands and all the cosmetic conventions that went along with it:
χοροῖς δ᾽ ἑσταίην, ὅθι καὶ
παρθένος, εὐδοκίμων γάμων,
παρὰ πόδ᾽ εἱλίσσουσα φίλας
ματρὸς ἡλίκων θιάσους,
χαρίτων εἰς ἁμίλλας,
χαίτας ἁβρόπλουτον ἔριν,
ὀρνυμένα πολυποίκιλα φάρεα
καὶ πλοκάμους περιβαλλομένα
γένυσιν ἐσκίαζον.May I stand in the chorus, as I did
as a virgin, for glorious marriages,
twirling away from the side of my dear
mother to the revelry of my agemates
into the competition of charm,
hair’s luxury-rich strife,
moving my multi-varicolored veil
and scattering my braids around
to shade my cheeks. (1143–52)
Or the titular chorus of the Phoenician Women, who get trapped at Thebes due to the attack of the Seven when they’re on their way from Carthage to Delphi in order to be promised to the god Apollo. In their entrance song, they are more concerned with their future religious service than the current civil war, as they imagine the famed spring that will dedicate their hair to Apollo through baptism:
ἔτι δὲ Κασταλίας ὕδωρ
περιμένει με κόμας ἐμᾶς
δεῦσαι παρθένιον χλιδὰν
Φοιβείαισι λατρείαις.For the Castalian waters
await me so my hair
can be drenched in its virginal luxury
as an attendant for Phoebus. (222–5)
Or in my favorite of all Euripides’ plays–the wild Orestes–when Orestes, Electra, and Pylades decide to flip the script on myth convention and stage a killing of Helen. Electra and the chorus agree to stand guard while Orestes and Pylades go inside to do the deed, and Electra directs the chorus to keep watch through the curls of their hair:
ἑλίσσετέ νυν βλέφαρον,
κόρας διάδοτε πάντᾳ διὰ βοστρύχων.now whirl about your eyes
cast your pupils every which way through your ringlets (1266–8)
Yet he also continues trends set and developed by Aeschylus and Sophocles, particularly the trope of women being dragged off by their hair in several of his plays. In the Iphigenia in Aulis the chorus of Chalcian newlyweds wonder about the future sexual violence that the Trojan women will face as the Greeks wait to sail to Troy. At one point, they imagine the words that the Trojan women will say to each other as they leave their weaving in anticipation of being abducted:
Τίς ἄρα μ᾿ εὐπλοκάμου κόμας
ῥῦμα δακρυόεν τανύσας
πατρίδος ὀλλυμένας ἀπολωτιεῖ;Who will drag me–stretching the hairs
of my fine braid, dripping tears,
wretched–away from my fatherland? (790–2)
Like I said–there’s a lot to go over when it comes to drama, and especially Euripides (we’ll talk about the comedy boys too, particularly Aristophanes, but their hair networks seem to be pretty dependent/responsive to tragedy, so that’s what we’ll spend the bulk of the time on).
After I’ve established all the ancient poetic genres from the 8th to the 4th century BCE, we will then turn to talking about the different ways I’ve been categorizing hair across all of them. These ones will come with spreadsheets, so I’ll keep these intros brief as I don’t want to spoil too much ahead of time.
First, for Textured Hair Terms in Ancient Greek Poetry we will discuss the fact that the Greeks dealt quite a bit with textured hair, particularly with the diversity of terms for different types of curls, including some that are innovated by poets themselves. We will go over the different terms and lexicon of texture and entanglement across ancient Greek poetry.
I’ll overview all of the words for different types of curls and textured hair that are distinct from the other general hair terms–but the main thing I would like to discuss is the difference between braiding and weaving. There is an incredible overlap in vocabulary–most of the weaving happening in Greek poetry is wool, another form of textured hair that needs to be maintained–however, I actually think there’s been an oversight when it comes to a single root word that’s actually more specific to hair than to weaving.
The plok-/plek-roots in ancient Greek refer to anything entangled or enmeshed with itself. From its use across all those poetic genres, I’ve never once seen it refer to loom-weaving, and yet it is frequently translated as “woven”. I have a spreadsheet of everytime that it shows up, and I’m eager for your opinion on it, because I think that, if we’re supposed to be precise with our Greek translations, that it should actually be translated as “braided” or “twisted” or “entangled” or, in some cases, “textured”.
Then in Hairstyle & Headwear Terms in Ancient Greek Poetry we will overview the terms concerned with the styling of the head–the different ways of wearing ones hair and its different accessories from headbands to veils to hairclips to crowns made up of all kinds of materials. We will also look at how gender and age play into the styling of one’s head.
The Greeks were quite specific with the ways they’d style their heads, as the earlier examples of Andromache’s mourning in the Iliad and chorus longing to be in marital competition from Iphigenia among the Taurians show. Some of the greatest specificity that they seemed to show was in their vegetal/floral crowns, which where used to both signify different types of relationships to the gods (like in the Sappho example), but also later becomes a metaphor for poetic composition.
My second spreadsheet that I’ll share with you are all the instances of steph-roots across the poetic genres, which is the most common word for crown. I’ll show how this word links together hair and poetry and brings the two into constant connection and how that has different meanings across the various genres.
Finally, with Cosmetic Net-works in Ancient Greek Poetry I will discuss the broader network of adjectives used to describe hair–from color to texture to sheen to length to aesthetic–in order to understand how hair is conceived of aesthetically across these genres. I’ll talk a bit about my current translation project, Euripides’ Trojan Women, which has some fascinating hair terms that show up for the first time in poetry in that play. In this final section, I want to talk about how all these different terms come together to make up identity. And perhaps, for the Greeks, their identity was just as bound up in their hair as it is in our contemporary.
This might seem pretty obvious to you, but you wouldn’t believe how much pushback I receive from my straighthaired colleagues about this. They don’t understand why having texture in my hair is the main part of it that I focus on, particularly in discussing identity. Whenever they get to irritating about it, I just point out that for folks with straight hair, what they focus on is color–there are decades (centuries for some) of stereotypes around blondes, brunettes, and redheads, and we watched girls divy themselves up and change their whole personalities around this from middle school onwards. Not to mention how much alternative hair colors and cuts are pretty much shorthand for the queer community nowadays.
And so, for the final catalog, I’m going to go over every kosm-root to show how it interacts with hair, but also helps set hair in a much larger context around identity. The Greek word kosmos means the make-up or style of anything–from a person’s cosmetic, to a cosmopolitan city, to the broader cosmos of the universe. It’s a word that flits in and around hair networks and occasionally works to recontextualize other hair terms for different purposes.
(It’s also just the first solo-root catalog that I’ve ever made, and I’ve been wanting to share it with you for a while.)
And that’s it–I keep wondering if I’ll add one last letter, but I feel like that won’t become apparent to me until I’m closer to the end. Much like the rest of life, hair deals with a process, and I think I finally figured out how to deal with not only my own, but also the subject in ancient Greek poetry.
Now that we’re both in our 30s, I think that we should actually come together and collaborate artistically in a serious sense. Not like when we were growing up and you were our chorus leader, but a new type of relationship. Because I’ve realized after all this time that’s it’s not about finding the people with the skills–I actually already know all the people who fit the bill. I was the one who was hiding from making a decision, but now I finally have. I think that I need to return to the theater in a serious way, and if I’m going ot be conducting from the orchestra pit then there’s only one actress that I’m interested in looking up at on center stage.
I figure one letter a week might be the best way to space it out? Six more iterations of #WhitneyWednesday? After that, I’ll be back west, and we can finally start to scheme.
Love you, hunnah.
Always,
Vanessa
