My Pendant and the Hairs on My Chest Are at Loggerheads

On the Myth of Neutrality and the War Between Decoration and Nature I.

My pendant and the hairs on my chest are at loggerheads.

This is not a metaphor, not at first anyway. Most mornings, as I lean toward the mirror to judge whether I still resemble the person I imagined I’d become, the chain around my neck shifts. It catches on the hair below my collarbone and tugs like a creature with a grievance. The pendant is smooth, cold and insists on resting gracefully. The hairs prickly, defiant, ancestral, insists on resisting. Here lies a microcosm of something worthy of an examination; the friction between what we adorn ourselves with and what we are.

But I am a writer. Everything is a metaphor if you have suffered enough. When well-meaning friends observe the eternal struggle between my pendant and the hairs on my chest, they often suggest with kindly condescension that there must be some neutral ground; some Switzerland of the sternum where decoration and nature might coexist in peaceful harmony. I see only the most seductive of delusions. They speak as though neutrality were some pristine mountain peak we might ascend, leaving behind the messy valley where flesh meets metal, where the wild meets the wrought. This neutrality does not exist. To those of us who must daily navigate the battlefield of our own bodies, it is almost nonsensical.

The fundamental truth that these diplomatic souls refuse to grasp is that we encounter not abstractions first, but the concrete reality of stubble catching on chain links at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. The difference between the idea of fire and the actual burn is a good example. Not very often will you meet the pure concept of "body modification" floating ethereally in some academic ether. Instead, you meet the sharp tug of a pendant yanking out a chest hair as you lean over to pick up your keys. This is how we arrive at understanding, not from the sanitized theories of fashion magazines, but from the daily friction between what we choose to wear and what we cannot choose to be.

The pendant, you see, represents humanity's eternal attempt to transcend the animal. It hangs there like a small golden declaration of independence from the tyranny of the merely biological. "I am more than flesh," it proclaims with each glint in the light. "I am a being capable of adorning myself, of choosing beauty over mere function, of declaring myself worthy of precious metals and careful craftsmanship." Decoration's manifesto rings out with each glint in the light. Like your favourite politician's promises, it proves both inspiring and slightly ridiculous.

The chest hairs, on the other hand, have their own ancient wisdom. They grow without permission, and follow laws older than civilization. They obey genetic codes that predate the invention of jewelry by millennia and represent what the Stoics might have called natura naturans - nature naturing, the inexorable force of being that requires no justification because it simply is. Each hair emerges from its follicle like a small flag of biological sovereignty, declaring: "This body belongs first to itself, to its own purposes, to the democracy of cells that voted you into existence long before you had opinions about aesthetics.”

Human beings, it turns out, are not blank slates awaiting the inscription of pure objectivity but complex biological and cultural ecosystems that have been developing since before we could form opinions about anything. We do not encounter the world from some pristine vantage point outside of history, culture, and embodiment. We encounter it from within the tangle of our particular existence.

Take something as simple as observation itself. I look out my window and see a tree. Neutral enough, you might think. But the "I" that does the looking is not a disembodied eye floating in space. This eye is attached to a brain shaped by twenty plus years of education, embedded in a skull that has learned to categorize visual input according to patterns established in a particular culture at a particular time. The word "tree" itself carries with it the accumulated weight of every tree I've ever seen, every story I've been told about trees, every symbolic association my culture has attached to the idea of treeness. More fundamentally, the very fact that I distinguish "tree" from "background" reflects a way of parsing visual experience that is not universal. Some languages don't distinguish between blue and green in the way English does. Some cultures organize spatial relationships differently than others. The neutral observation turns out to be shot through with the particular chest hairs of the observer.

Once we recognize this fundamental truth about perception, we can begin to see how it operates everywhere in our culture. The journalist who reports "objectively" on a protest by giving equal time to protesters and police, without acknowledging the vast differences in institutional power between these groups, is not being neutral. She is taking the side of the status quo while wearing the pendant of balance. The academic who refuses to acknowledge how his discipline's methodologies might privilege certain kinds of knowledge over others is not transcending bias, he is hiding his biases behind the gleaming ornament of scholarly objectivity.

Even our attempts to account for bias become entangled in new biases. The effort to be "inclusive" reflects particular assumptions about what inclusion means and why it matters. The commitment to "diversity" emerges from specific historical and cultural contexts that give that commitment its meaning and urgency. There is no view from nowhere, no perspective that rises above the mesh of assumption, tradition, and embodied experience that makes human understanding possible.

So the quarrel continues, as all great wars eventually emerge, with small daily skirmishes devoid of formal declarations. My pendant, swinging innocently as I walk, catches a hair. The hair, growing innocently as hairs do, snares the chain. What will appear to outside observers as mere inconvenience is actually a profound ontological conflict - a clash between two fundamentally incompatible visions of what it means to inhabit a human body.

The moderates among my friends suggest trimming, a kind of diplomatic hair reduction that might create neutral zones where the pendant can swing freely. But this misses the point entirely. To trim the chest hair in service of the pendant is to choose sides. I have now formally declared that decoration may in fact, trump nature, and that this aesthetic choice supersedes the biological given. There is no neutrality in this trimming, only the victory of one vision over another, dressed up in the language of "compromise.” Moderation in itself, stands as a position, centrism, an ideology. They reflect particular assumptions about the value of compromise, the dangers of extremism, and the virtue of splitting differences. These assumptions grew from somewhere, were nurtured by particular experiences, and serve particular interests.

Others suggest changing pendants, perhaps something shorter, one that is less prone to entanglement. But this too is capitulation. Why should the pendant, this brave symbol of human creativity and self-expression, retreat before the advance of mindless keratin? Why should art yield to biology? This path leads not to peace but to the gradual domestication of all human aspiration, the reduction of our decorative impulses to whatever can coexist comfortably with our animal inheritance.

The truth that neither side wishes to acknowledge is that this conflict is not a bug in the system, this conflict is the system. The tension between decoration and nature, between what we choose and what chooses us, between the cultivated and the given, is nothing other than a condition to be inhabited. We are creatures suspended between the animal and the divine, and our ornaments are the physical manifestation of this suspension.

The pendant exists because we are the only species that looks in mirrors and finds ourselves insufficient. We alone among animals feel the need to add, to embellish, to declare through decoration that we are more than the sum of our biological parts. This impulse is simultaneously our greatest glory and our deepest neurosis. It is what builds cathedrals and starts wars, what creates symphonies and spawns advertising industries. The chest hairs connect us to something humbler and more enduring. They remind us that beneath all our golden proclamations of transcendence, we remain mammals. We sweat, we shed, we grow and decay according to laws we did not write and cannot repeal. The hairs are biology's response to pretension. They are the body's way of saying: "You may choose your decorations, but I choose your decorations' context.”

The pendant will continue to catch. The chest hairs will continue to grow. We must recognize that all attempts to rise above the fray will always reckon with the stubborn, particular, irreducibly human ground from which they spring.

Till next time. Sayonara.