My face this week observes six full months of proto-Polish moustache. While not its fullest growth, it has, it seems, reached a fundamental maturity, at which its character can be judged and its future indicated.
Other than snipping the most twisted and unruly of outliers, I have yet to clip this creature, and its most ambitious and well-bred members recline inches long above my lips, almost long enough to style. A vicuna collar, a mink lapel. The proximal process, from philtrum to nostril flare, dips routinely into my tea, the foam of a Guinness, and, of course, my vodka. As so often observed in Sienkiewicz’s trilogy, grain spirits dribble down and drip off the gathered tips like melt off a ridge of icicles, like seepage off stalactic kielce. An admittedly sloppy business. Napkins, kerchiefs seem suddenly relevant and a very mainstay of civilization. A walrusy brush (though I’m the slightest of walri), this sector protrudes with the effrontery of Pilsudski. The medial process flows down and rolls around the corner of my mouth with a graceful turn, like the wings of Sobieski’s hussarial victory over the Turks. The distal process, with some care and coaxing, curls down, like the rebel Cossack Bohun’s, but it twists as well, perversely, at its limit into the orthodox tendril of a Jewish boy. It is, thus, triply, perhaps, quadruply, Polish. (Admittedly, one sees Wild Bill Hickock, Yosemite Sam, and any number of Confederate generals—until recently, Nathan Bedford Forrest—in this cockade, but Polishness has affinities with the insane liberty and the cavalier pride of the American Wild West and ante-bellum south, respectively.)
In these weeks, my moustache has become a thing unto itself, an independent entity. Its beingness insists upon regard. I, myself, am not a particularly insistent fellow and crave nonentity, but my companion elicits comment from family, friend, and cultural authority; I must respond on its behalf, sometimes in my own defense. My son, moj drogi syn, laughed the laugh of the incredulously curious and twitted me with little remorse. Advisees and colleagues require explanation. I have, more or less unconsciously, acceded to its demands. The gestures of moustache care—the index knuckle bump, the thumb brush, the snidely tip pinch and twist (down, in my case)—which at one time seemed so affected, are, in truth, the most natural of hand-to-mouth interactions, a dance, mostly private. One pets, one grooms, pinches, crimps, one autonomously (and, yes, affectionately) attends to it, like a sort of superior companion animal—one that you don’t have to feed or clean up after. It is surprisingly soft and sleek. While not quite silk, neither does it bristle like quill; it comprises rather the textures of shaving brush, cashmere, and feather, and drapes in concrete gray with highlights of chrome and the odd filament of copper. I have dispensed with the chin whiskrage, snow white, or ice white, an ivory cube between tongs; it aged me unduly, and I’m not that hip, not a jazz musician or a beat. The soul patch proved culturally superfluous (and I'm doubtful of the existence of my own and would prefer not to advertise falsely). While many Poles definitely wore beards, moustache holds significant pride of place.
I have had the honor these past couple of weeks of hosting an imminently distinguished Polish academic from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, a doctor of sociology and cultural studies, specializing in immigration, who has sympathetically assessed my Polish ethnic progress. While my language skills require constant correction, and she has on at least one occasion reproved an interpretive error of mine with a complete dismissal, "You know nothing about Polish culture," she generally approves my appearance: “You have such a Polish moustache!” Otherwise an encouraging pronouncement, yet in the same breath and with a sigh, she indicates that the Polish moustache signals not merely an old school charm, but actual social and pop-cultural obsolescence. Since the extinction of the szlachta, its replacement by a Soviet-influenced preference for clean-shaven Communism, as well as the decadence of the post-modern succession to an overly Westernized, digitized, that is to say, hairless aesthetic, masculinity in contemporary Poland is expressed with less and less reference to the grooming practices of bygone ages. So that I may now sport a vestige, an affectation, perhaps even a parody of Polishness—kitsch.
