Polyamorous Love Song by Jacob Wren

Author:Jacob Wren [Wren, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771660372
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2014-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

6. The Frightening Thing Is Everyone Has Their Reasons

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

—Fernando Pessoa

I went to get my hair cut in Berlin. The moment I sat down in the chair I could already sense that the hairdresser didn’t much like me. “Fucking American tourists,” I could almost hear him thinking to himself as he brought the scissors closer to my head. “Trendy capitalist shit pigs.”

And he had barely begun to cut my hair but already I could feel it was going to be one of the worst haircuts I’d had in a long time. And I wondered if he was doing it on purpose while at the same time imagining someone else: another German hairdresser, vaguely aware of the Dadaists and having experienced expressionism and the neo-pathetic cabaret just before he left for New York in the forties or fifties, who more than anything hated the fucking stupid Americans that came to get their hair cut from him day in and day out.

And since he was convinced the Americans were completely stupid, he began to experiment, see what he could get away with, cutting away big clumpy bald patches into the sides of people’s heads and, when they complained, telling them that it was the new style back in Germany. Most never came back and yet he started getting a new kind of client: young artists and bohemians in search of styles that ran contrary to the conservative, bourgeois values of the previous generation.

The title of this chapter is stolen from a line of dialogue – or more precisely from a subtitle (since I do not speak or understand French) – that is to be found in the classic Renoir film La Règle du jeu. The film, which I’ve seen only once (something like twenty years ago) made barely the slightest of impressions upon me (even at the time) and yet this single line of dialogue nonetheless continues to strike me anew, incessantly and in the most singularly piercing fashion. Somehow it summarizes everything. The frightening thing is that everyone has their reasons, and somehow whatever anyone does, whatever anyone does to you or for you, they are more often than not able to justify it to themselves in a rather precise and frequently exemplary fashion.

I thought of this sentence many times as I was getting my hair cut in Berlin. And as I continued to distract myself from my ever worsening visage in the mirror in front of me with stories of that other German hairdresser, his business now modestly flourishing within the vibrant subcultures of forties or fifties New York, cutting polka dots into women’s heads and shaving off only half of men’s beards, I thought that perhaps all of my stories, my writings, my so-called works of literature, were exactly like this one: little tales to distract myself from something I actually didn’t want to look at too closely within the strictures of the present moment. Often through conjuring up something far more confusing or worse.

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