Your immediate past and your present are probably as familiar as your favorite running shoes. Those and your other shoes are your unconscious biographers. And if you had never thrown away your old shoes, you might have lined them up chronologically to reveal your personal history. “I wore these when I graduated. These I wore when I was dirt poor; they were my only shoes at the time, and I wore them till they ripped. And these are the shoes I wore on my first day of work; they still retain their shine.”
But if you are like me, you don’t have all those old shoes. They aren’t available as biographical indicators. I suppose we could say the same for ancestors we never knew, and maybe also for older relatives, now gone and about whom we really remember little or knew little. They knew us as we developed consciousness and identity, but took that knowledge to their graves. I know, for example, that my paternal grandfather’s family had established themselves in my hometown in the early part of the twentieth century, but aside from a great uncle, I really knew nothing of their lives; my paternal grandfather died while my father was still a child. You might differ in this, but in my youth, I was never driven to ask any detailed questions about that generation. As with most youth, I lived in an Eternal Present. Nevertheless, whatever those ancestral relatives two generations removed from me did and, of course, who they were lay in my background like forgotten old shoes in the closet of my personal history. I might not have walked in their footsteps, but they made the trail that led to me and the paths of my early life.
In an age when shoe repair shops are almost as rare as Tasmanian devils in Australia, many people choose to buy new shoes to replace their old and worn pairs. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe most people in an affluent society discard old shoes or place them in some out-of-the-way storage space, where they might lie unworn for years. The modern practice of acquiring new shoes to replace old shoes rather than repairing them might be the result of shoe shop scarcity, but it could also be the result of vanity. Shoes, after all, have long been expressions of the times, and since medieval times have indicated both social or economic status.
But even if there were a repair shop on every corner, many running and casual shoes don’t lend themselves to repair. How, for example, can one resole a pair of Nike Air Max once the air pocket collapses? No, discarding the old and buying the new is the common practice of those with sufficient funds to do so. And for “dress shoe” repair, too few shoemakers have shops.
I mention shoe repair shops because it was in one where I connected with my ancestral family two generations removed. That great uncle, Uncle Jack, whose given name was Cirro, was a shoemaker. On my way home from elementary school with my friends, I stopped in almost daily to say hello, and he always had a friendly smile and greeting for me. I remember that pleasant part of my early school years fondly, and I also remember the smells of the glues he used to repair shoes. Uncle Jack was part of my childhood’s Eternal Present.
In those days before Nike, Adidas, Asics, and Brooks and other modern shoe companies inundated the market with ever more “advanced” footwear, people wore leather shoes with leather soles and heels that daily did battle with the friction of a concrete world. Shoes wore out, and people contemporary to my youth chose to repair rather than replace. Uncle Jack took their old shoes and made them new again. He turned the worn past into the useful present; he made it possible for people to walk toward their future.
His shoe shop was lined with shelves of old and worn shoes awaiting repair.* In retrospect, I understand how those shoes connected to the lives of those who took their footwear to Uncle Jack. Scuffs and scrapes, unevenly worn heels, and holes in soles, the shoes told tales of the wearers’ pasts and character. Uneven heel? Uneven wear on the sole? Did those shoes reveal a slightly turned ankle fixed by muscle weakness or a flattened arch? Did the uneven wear reveal supination from joint immobility or bad posture indicative of inherited body structure or bad habit? And those holes in the soles? Walking on concrete in the city, obviously. The friction of the modern world revealing itself in wear during less affluent times when people had fewer pairs of shoes and walked more frequently than they rode.
Both Uncle Jack and his repair shop are now long gone. Times are different. In looking back at that Eternal Present of my youth, I see deeper into time, into other generations’ Eternal Presents, all marked by wear on shoes both kept and discarded. I think of Van Gogh’s famous painting, “A Pair of Shoes,” that inspired Martin Heidegger to tie the painting to his phenomenological interpretation of the world. Heidegger writes, “From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and the earth’s unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” The farmer’s worn shoes reveal that during his life he could produce a crop through his efforts, but, ultimately, he encountered the hard soil of a wintry field. Try as he could in his own Eternal Present, he could not guarantee a future or a final control over Earth.
We are always in a state of becoming, and that might be what makes us think we live in an Eternal Present. But we didn’t just arrive in the present. It really isn’t eternal. It’s derived. And its derivation can be shown in those many shoes all worn and many discarded, yet all somehow part of the present—descriptors of personal past and present.
Were you surprised when a team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists announced their discovery of 120,000 year-old human footprints in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia?** I have to say I both was and wasn’t. Years of debate about when humans left Africa to people the rest of the world hinge on the most recent discoveries of fossils, both tangible and trace. The latter fossils can be telling. Long before there were shoemakers like Uncle Jack and even before there were shoes for farmers like those Van Gogh painted in 1886, in fact, long before the first farmer sowed a seed, people walked barefoot. They left no worn shoes, but they did, on occasion, leave their tracks, and those footprints became bas relief sculptures in the ground, an artwork not consciously made ala van Gogh, but made simply in the act of living, in the act of what they might have perceived as “eternally” becoming in what was for the footprint makers their Eternal Present.
Maybe during the first exodus from Africa, the migrants turned on occasion to see the marks they left on their way into the Levant. But maybe they thought little of how they got to be where they presently were. It is possible that the past meant little to them since they had no record-keeping. We have no way of knowing. Without such written records and old shoes, we have only fossil footprints to suggest their ties to the nature of their predecessors’ lives or to their own lives. Just footprints, the usually ephemeral markings in the soil preserved only by chance. Those ancient ancestors of everyone whose heritage lies outside Africa left no purposeful record, no famous painting, no shoes lined up in a shoe repair shop, telling the tale of human character. But then, I guess we could say that our own worn and discarded shoes.
Though indicators of our lives like the farmer’s shoes of van Gogh’s painting, our old shoes are not the conscious products of personal history. We put on shoes and walk. Once on, the shoes wear down in the act of the wearer’s daily living, slowly recording something about the wearer by the wear. And in a world of concrete, asphalt, and durable flooring, few of us leave much of a life-trace in our footsteps.
Strange, isn’t it? Unless you are totally African in your heritage—we are all originally Africans in part—your personal history goes back to those footprints in the Nefud Desert. Those shoeless footprint-makers left the hominin homeland to explore the yielding and unyielding Earth. Their descendants 100+ millennia in their future and 10 or so millennia in our past became the first farmers, eventually leading to the shoe-wearing farmers like the one whose shoes van Gogh painted and to us whose shoe affluence would boggle the minds of those ancients crossing the Nefud.
I suppose I recapture my past’s Eternal Present in my memory of Uncle Jack and that shoe repair shop. But I have no practical memory of all those pairs of shoes I have worn and their relationships to my personal history. Too many shoes over too many years, and none of those that Uncle Jack repaired remain, all of them outgrown, out of fashion, or discarded. And when I turn around to look, I can’t find a trace of my steps except in the people I know that I might have influenced or in these and other scribblings that will, in time and only by chance survive as a record of my own walk through an Eternal Present.
*The joke I told elsewhere, but sorry to say I cannot attribute to a particular source: Two people were cleaning out their attic when they came upon an old claim ticket from the shoe repairman. “Honey, did we never pick up these shoes?” “No, look at the receipt. We left them there five years ago.” So, they went to the shoemaker and presented the claim ticket. He went into a back room and emerged, saying, “They’ll be ready next Tuesday.”
** http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/alathar-footprints-08869.html The article has photos of the footprints.
Mathew Stewart et al. 2020. Human footprints provide snapshot of last interglacial ecology in the Arabian interior. Science Advances 6 (38): eaba8940; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba8940
But if you are like me, you don’t have all those old shoes. They aren’t available as biographical indicators. I suppose we could say the same for ancestors we never knew, and maybe also for older relatives, now gone and about whom we really remember little or knew little. They knew us as we developed consciousness and identity, but took that knowledge to their graves. I know, for example, that my paternal grandfather’s family had established themselves in my hometown in the early part of the twentieth century, but aside from a great uncle, I really knew nothing of their lives; my paternal grandfather died while my father was still a child. You might differ in this, but in my youth, I was never driven to ask any detailed questions about that generation. As with most youth, I lived in an Eternal Present. Nevertheless, whatever those ancestral relatives two generations removed from me did and, of course, who they were lay in my background like forgotten old shoes in the closet of my personal history. I might not have walked in their footsteps, but they made the trail that led to me and the paths of my early life.
In an age when shoe repair shops are almost as rare as Tasmanian devils in Australia, many people choose to buy new shoes to replace their old and worn pairs. Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe most people in an affluent society discard old shoes or place them in some out-of-the-way storage space, where they might lie unworn for years. The modern practice of acquiring new shoes to replace old shoes rather than repairing them might be the result of shoe shop scarcity, but it could also be the result of vanity. Shoes, after all, have long been expressions of the times, and since medieval times have indicated both social or economic status.
But even if there were a repair shop on every corner, many running and casual shoes don’t lend themselves to repair. How, for example, can one resole a pair of Nike Air Max once the air pocket collapses? No, discarding the old and buying the new is the common practice of those with sufficient funds to do so. And for “dress shoe” repair, too few shoemakers have shops.
I mention shoe repair shops because it was in one where I connected with my ancestral family two generations removed. That great uncle, Uncle Jack, whose given name was Cirro, was a shoemaker. On my way home from elementary school with my friends, I stopped in almost daily to say hello, and he always had a friendly smile and greeting for me. I remember that pleasant part of my early school years fondly, and I also remember the smells of the glues he used to repair shoes. Uncle Jack was part of my childhood’s Eternal Present.
In those days before Nike, Adidas, Asics, and Brooks and other modern shoe companies inundated the market with ever more “advanced” footwear, people wore leather shoes with leather soles and heels that daily did battle with the friction of a concrete world. Shoes wore out, and people contemporary to my youth chose to repair rather than replace. Uncle Jack took their old shoes and made them new again. He turned the worn past into the useful present; he made it possible for people to walk toward their future.
His shoe shop was lined with shelves of old and worn shoes awaiting repair.* In retrospect, I understand how those shoes connected to the lives of those who took their footwear to Uncle Jack. Scuffs and scrapes, unevenly worn heels, and holes in soles, the shoes told tales of the wearers’ pasts and character. Uneven heel? Uneven wear on the sole? Did those shoes reveal a slightly turned ankle fixed by muscle weakness or a flattened arch? Did the uneven wear reveal supination from joint immobility or bad posture indicative of inherited body structure or bad habit? And those holes in the soles? Walking on concrete in the city, obviously. The friction of the modern world revealing itself in wear during less affluent times when people had fewer pairs of shoes and walked more frequently than they rode.
Both Uncle Jack and his repair shop are now long gone. Times are different. In looking back at that Eternal Present of my youth, I see deeper into time, into other generations’ Eternal Presents, all marked by wear on shoes both kept and discarded. I think of Van Gogh’s famous painting, “A Pair of Shoes,” that inspired Martin Heidegger to tie the painting to his phenomenological interpretation of the world. Heidegger writes, “From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth… The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and the earth’s unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.” The farmer’s worn shoes reveal that during his life he could produce a crop through his efforts, but, ultimately, he encountered the hard soil of a wintry field. Try as he could in his own Eternal Present, he could not guarantee a future or a final control over Earth.
We are always in a state of becoming, and that might be what makes us think we live in an Eternal Present. But we didn’t just arrive in the present. It really isn’t eternal. It’s derived. And its derivation can be shown in those many shoes all worn and many discarded, yet all somehow part of the present—descriptors of personal past and present.
Were you surprised when a team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists announced their discovery of 120,000 year-old human footprints in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia?** I have to say I both was and wasn’t. Years of debate about when humans left Africa to people the rest of the world hinge on the most recent discoveries of fossils, both tangible and trace. The latter fossils can be telling. Long before there were shoemakers like Uncle Jack and even before there were shoes for farmers like those Van Gogh painted in 1886, in fact, long before the first farmer sowed a seed, people walked barefoot. They left no worn shoes, but they did, on occasion, leave their tracks, and those footprints became bas relief sculptures in the ground, an artwork not consciously made ala van Gogh, but made simply in the act of living, in the act of what they might have perceived as “eternally” becoming in what was for the footprint makers their Eternal Present.
Maybe during the first exodus from Africa, the migrants turned on occasion to see the marks they left on their way into the Levant. But maybe they thought little of how they got to be where they presently were. It is possible that the past meant little to them since they had no record-keeping. We have no way of knowing. Without such written records and old shoes, we have only fossil footprints to suggest their ties to the nature of their predecessors’ lives or to their own lives. Just footprints, the usually ephemeral markings in the soil preserved only by chance. Those ancient ancestors of everyone whose heritage lies outside Africa left no purposeful record, no famous painting, no shoes lined up in a shoe repair shop, telling the tale of human character. But then, I guess we could say that our own worn and discarded shoes.
Though indicators of our lives like the farmer’s shoes of van Gogh’s painting, our old shoes are not the conscious products of personal history. We put on shoes and walk. Once on, the shoes wear down in the act of the wearer’s daily living, slowly recording something about the wearer by the wear. And in a world of concrete, asphalt, and durable flooring, few of us leave much of a life-trace in our footsteps.
Strange, isn’t it? Unless you are totally African in your heritage—we are all originally Africans in part—your personal history goes back to those footprints in the Nefud Desert. Those shoeless footprint-makers left the hominin homeland to explore the yielding and unyielding Earth. Their descendants 100+ millennia in their future and 10 or so millennia in our past became the first farmers, eventually leading to the shoe-wearing farmers like the one whose shoes van Gogh painted and to us whose shoe affluence would boggle the minds of those ancients crossing the Nefud.
I suppose I recapture my past’s Eternal Present in my memory of Uncle Jack and that shoe repair shop. But I have no practical memory of all those pairs of shoes I have worn and their relationships to my personal history. Too many shoes over too many years, and none of those that Uncle Jack repaired remain, all of them outgrown, out of fashion, or discarded. And when I turn around to look, I can’t find a trace of my steps except in the people I know that I might have influenced or in these and other scribblings that will, in time and only by chance survive as a record of my own walk through an Eternal Present.
*The joke I told elsewhere, but sorry to say I cannot attribute to a particular source: Two people were cleaning out their attic when they came upon an old claim ticket from the shoe repairman. “Honey, did we never pick up these shoes?” “No, look at the receipt. We left them there five years ago.” So, they went to the shoemaker and presented the claim ticket. He went into a back room and emerged, saying, “They’ll be ready next Tuesday.”
** http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/alathar-footprints-08869.html The article has photos of the footprints.
Mathew Stewart et al. 2020. Human footprints provide snapshot of last interglacial ecology in the Arabian interior. Science Advances 6 (38): eaba8940; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba8940
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