This article was just brought to my attention, “because it’s about shoes.”
“Bringing a Daughter Back from the Brink with Poems”
Is it always about shoes? Are shoes one of our primary apparently-casual-examples? Even if we aren’t talking about shoes, does it inevitably insist on being sorted? The shoe always goes on in the end… Until then you are suspended. Because not wearing shoes is either resistance or self-abuse or both? And is it precisely poetry, then, that will shoe you in the end? How else to grow up? Find your words, lose your feet.
Funny, because someone also just pointed me to Vilém Flusser’s essay, “The Gesture of Making,” all about hands, in which we find this future for them:
The discovery of a calling is the result of the hands’ struggle against the idiosyncrasies of the object—any object. It is simply the discovery that each pair of hands is different from any other and that some hands are more capable of fabricating shoes, others of fabricating poetry, that fabricating shoes is as noble a profession as fabricating poetry.
Shoes or poetry. Any object, but shoes or poetry. It is as if we must choose without realizing why, so that our resistances and explorations are read in advance. Apparently casual examples, working in tandem to bring things to a close. Of course you can do anything, as long as you do one of these.
Above all the hand must choose. Because either way shoes are as noble as poetry, and poetry gets your shoes laced.