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43 Hair

hexagram-43-hair‘A BAD HAIR day is a day that only starts with uncontrollable hair. The truth is,
the mirror gods will often relent by lunchtime.’

Who would have guessed the Cleopatra fringe would be so short-lived?
Many suspect foul play: an actress, it’s thought, bought by a rival studio,
may have slipped an asp into the Hollywood harem. Revivals turn heads.
But this is no forgiving cut: sharp angles sit ill with strong cheekbones,
nose or jaw. The ideal face for such a frame is oval, round or heart-shaped.

1st – The Hair in Its Proper Place
That spin pin does the job of twenty kirby pins without snagging or
faltering. In the hands of a maestro you’re marble with the attributes of
never-mentioned flesh – pliable as wax, cleaving to the skilful hand. The
frisson between stylist and styled gives all good hair its élan.

2nd – The Hair Bulletin
There’s bubbly in the newsrooms for a syndicated scoop – a smirk-and-tell
spectacular. Driving a golfball into the rough of a celebrity photo mag;
grey-sheeted at the Maltese barber’s: the first bearded TV newsreader.
Surprisingly, he speaks from the voice box, in a timbre slightly feminine.

3rd – The Hair Reflected
The deuxième toilette, for a gentleman caller who loves her in a six-way
mirror: hexagonal joy, met with politeness. Exquisite downcombing parts
tangled filaments of the golden waterfall. Disdained by servants, he’s back
now in the cold grey street, a priceless treasure bundled in his heart.

4th – Hairless in Gaza
Most days a reassuring morning mist blankets the furrows, soft-focus idyll
of fieldwork – rough-and-ready life skills. Today, intimacy is the paradox
of a scripted surprise on which the ploughshare thuds, as the all-knowing
priestess lays herself out for adoration, amidst a clattering of jackdaws.

5th – The Bad Hair Day
Tented from the chin down, he smiles in the mirror at his executioner.
Neapolitan scissors, with twirls like moustaches, groom him for an
interview. Then a crisis, worse than an earthquake at the dentist’s.
A conflagration in one ear! Protestations. The other tuft pointlessly saved.

6th – The Hair Trade
Prison and temple supply the global need – wardens shear captives like
sheep, while acolytes give freely, in gratitude for answered prayers. In the
desert town where two rivers almost meet, extension agents scout and
trade. Camels are laden, plying the keratin road through a veil of sand.

All six – The Hair in a Polish Plait
Cut it off and the malady will take its revenge: even kings have been
enslaved to this appendage of filthy knots which courtiers might copy to
show solidarity. What are the nightmare symptoms, other than the plait
itself? Rheumatic aches; cravings, sometimes for costly imported wine.


Introduction to Six-Way Mirror | The Index of Hexagrams and Cantos

 

 

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