Practice Heads at the Hair School

a sideways reflection on the writing process

Lately, I’ve been noticing how apt the term “charged” is to describe an emotionally intense topic. A charged topic is one that acquires a magnetic pull all its own, drawing distant events and words to itself like loose metal filings. Suddenly, every little thing seems to be about that thing.

This magnetism occurs with any idea that’s been camped out in my mental living room for a month, year, or quarter century. So, improbably—who knew?—a haircut turns out to be about writing.

Like most people, I stopped getting trims when the pandemic started. Even after the state lifted restrictions and I’d been vaccinated, it didn’t seem worth the risk. We’d crossed into new territory where irreconcilable political differences with one’s hair stylist actually mattered. I didn’t want to be in a small, enclosed room with someone who thought a deadly virus was a hoax.

Eventually, unable to stand my split ends, I walked into a nearby beauty school in my mask and asked for a cut. And then I did the same thing again two months later. It works for me. Not only is my student trim $10, but I get to wander in off the street and people-watch for a random free hour.

It’s a few days before a trip, and I sit in one of the sleek black-and-chrome swivel chairs while a young woman snips gingerly at my head. Her teacher swoops in twice to fluff at my hair (I am incidental there below it) and to give an instructional snip.

“What you want to do is lift the hair at a 90-degree angle,” he says while pulling a section of my hair taut, “and then notch-cut with your hand at an angle like this…”

Hair cutting, it turns out, is a complex process involving math.

“Totally!” the instructor confirms cheerfully. “That’s why I love it—I get to geek out on geometry and nobody thinks I’m weird.”

My student stylist is a wryly funny country girl married to a soldier. We talk about the American landscapes we’ve visited—desert, oceanside, mountains—and which we like best. For her, the Appalachian mountains are forever home. She chatters about this and that with long, focused pauses as she cuts one small section at a time, working around the loops of my mask.

“I test myself for COVID a lot because my momma has lung cancer,” she says. “I try to get her to wear a mask when she goes out, but she won’t listen to me.”

“Why do you think she won’t?”

The stylist shrugs. “‘Cause she’s a stubborn ol’ hillbilly.”

The layout of this large, open, brightly lit space is disorienting: row upon row of mirrored stations with gaps between them. My eyes keep tricking me: for a split second I can’t tell if I’m seeing what’s behind me in the mirror or in front of me through the gap to the next row. Maybe a firmer grasp of geometry would help.

Through the gap I see two young women huddling over a disembodied head, painting streaks of color in its synthetic hair. Now I realize why my stylist is half-jokingly possessive of me, her living-doll client: she’s lucky to get real hair to play with.

A wiry, pierced hipster in a thin black t-shirt settles in near us with another severed head. He focuses intently on his experiment in progress. Like my stylist’s, each of his snips is tentative, careful, intentional. What if he messes up? I wonder if more hair can be tugged out of the plastic head like the retractable mane of the creepy Chrissy doll I had as a child.

When I shudder at the mannequin heads, my stylist says, “They’re scary, aren’t they? My dog barks at them. One of these days I’m gonna get in trouble with the police. The other day I opened the hatch of my car and a couple of heads rolled out.”

This place is hilarious. But it’s also a temple to beginner’s mind.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. ― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Beginner’s mind is a fresh, exciting, risky state. Here nothing is simple; nothing is mindless; nothing is preordained. Art might happen, or heads might roll.

Everything I think I know is just static on the radio
—Jim White, “Static on the Radio”

God knows I don’t want a novice in epidemiology to decide policy during a pandemic, but here at the well-ventilated hair school, I can relax back into my chair and hand my head over for practice. Geometry guy is always close by to measure the angles.

As a writer, I’m practiced enough to style words unsupervised, day after day, alone here at my computer. The monitor is like a mirror, reflecting my work back to me. Snip, snip, I deftly shape sentences and paragraphs into meaning. I notch-cut the edges for more natural transitions. Occasionally, I peer through the gap to see what other writers are doing.

But to create something new, I always have to start at the beginning. I have to make a mess. Beginner’s mind in writing is the place where we give birth to fresh ideas and surprising connections. Later, we may have to murder our darlings; that’s how this process goes. Cruel as it may seem, the idea that we thought was the point is often the head that has to roll.

From Henry James, as quoted by Annie Dillard in The Writing Life:

Which is the work in which he hasn’t surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done, doesn’t he ask himself what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed to that extremity? —Henry James, preface to “The Spoils of Poynton”

The beauty of beginner’s mind is that the point is the practice, not the outcome. The mystery is that this messy freedom is an essential first step toward a final, polished work. I save some of my orphaned snippets in files like doll parts stashed in a trunk. Though I hate to sever them from the work they inspired, I know nothing is ever really lost.

I walk out of the hair school with a lighter head, leaving my split ends on the floor to be swept away.