My Beard (By Micheal Atavar)

I Love My Beard


I carve a line under my chin with the razor and only shave below. This demarcation between beard and not-beard is philosophical, complex, intellectual, spiritual.


The willingness on my part to shave my full head of hair to zero crop but let my beard grow – feels erotic, powerful. I control something and I also let something go.


My beard shows that I’m a man and I’m not frightened – of anyone. A gang of street thugs in Camden Town, a fight on the tube, a drunken shoplifter in Sainsbury’s supermarket. It says ‘Don’t worry, I can sort it out.’


People can be afraid of the beard and its unequivocal intentions – its reproductive, unreductive – and I really like that. I use my beard as a barrier between me and them. My beard is a shield that protects me as I walk down the road, a carpet that rolls in front of me that I can walk on effortlessly.


For those in the knows it says ‘I have sex with men’ in a way that can’t be hidden – because its all over my face.


I use my beard as a bear magnet. It magics men toward me across the room. On invisible lightning I pull them to me. And it works. Time and time again younger men are drawn towards the sensuality of the beard.


Down empty streets at 3AM in strange cities I barely know, the beard leads me into liaisons with unfamiliar men in alleyways and through closed, bolted doors.


Our beards lead us, like a trail of gingerbread in the forest, to our primitive side, the spark of ignition, our fighting nature, our deeper self. The beard puts me into an older tradition – the man of legend, the woodsman, the wizard, the man on a quest.


I make marks with sticks and carve on trees – my beard allows me to do this.


The beard separates me from a past life I no longer want to lead and with which I have little connection and provides me with a complex and chaotic future.


As I walk through the concrete corridors that are my home town, I fight off invisible assailants and monsters – even if these are only of my own psychological making. I do this with my beard. It confers esteem, invisibility, magic. ‘Pow’ and the danger’s gone.


I will never shave off my beard. It’s too integral to who I am. It’s become me. It is me.


The beard is what makes me interesting.


I write about it, talk about it, I go look at it in the mirror, I take this photograph.


I love it.


My beard.

-Michael Atavar