The new passport arrived last week, the third edition of my little blue book of international memories and futures. My old passport returned this week in a separate envelope. Curious, two mailings, but pretty darn quick service, I dare say. Government works, at least the State Department.
I contemplate three faces over thirty years, a moustache on each. The first sports a light isosceles smudge, somewhat asymmetrical, on a face in search of symmetry, with a cheesy fringe of beard adding to its youth, presumption and cluelessness. Note: I did, briefly, have hair. At forty, I wore mid-face a solid wedge of masculinity, but without ostensible national political association. Under the auspices of this particular look, I made my first trip to Poland. Two later trips I traveled essentially shorn. My current face brandishes its Polish moustache(s)—plural in the Polish—brushes now dense enough to thatch a Kashubian roof. It will serve as my visa.
I read this month of an organization in the United States calling itself the American Mustache Institute and promoting a “million mustache march” in April, as well as legislation, including tax breaks, in support of hairier faces. We are a silly people sometimes, extolling the economic benefits of mustache cultivation with hardly a word about the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic benefits. The Poles wrote poetry on the subject: Franciszek Dionizy Kniaznin. (See “Twirling moustaches and equestrian statuary: Polish semiotics in Conrad’s ‘Nostromo,” Jean Szczypien, Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 28, 1995) Now to find Kniaznin’s texts.
