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God and Shoes
I could always rely on Mrs. Lee shoes. They sat outside her door, greeting me as I came and went. They told a story of who was inside and what noises were to follow. Early on in our years there, I gathered that shoes were not welcome in her apartment. I assumed it was a Chinese custom, a bad luck thing,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], sooner than a cleanliness issue, that left them banished to the hallway. Like the twilight zone episode I once saw where the mannequins in the department store came alive at night, the shoes outside Mrs. Lee door seemed to have a secret life all their own.
Mrs. Lee pink vinyl slippers aligned themselves outside her second floor door, next to the mat. They looked as if she might have bought them at the emptying Woolworth that hadn yet closed in Coolidge Corner. I could have imagined her shopping there, not because she was poor, but because a shoe was a shoe, in a utilitarian way, sitting on the shelf, waiting. I imagine that a 4 block outing yielding a plastic bag of needless items would as closely resemble a trip to the marketplace in China as any shopping experience in America could.
I don remember in the 3 years I lived there that my landlord ever spoke to us in English. Nor do I believe I ever saw her get into a car. My image is frozen of Mrs. Lee perpetually sweeping the front sidewalk, while her 3 grandchildren ran about at her feet. I don remember Mrs. Lee ever not being home. This was illustrated by the ever changing still life of shoes outside her door and the smell of fried food wafting through the vestibule.
Sometimes you had to walk around them,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which was a mild inconvenience but a fair price to pay for the voyeurism they provided. At times, I would look on with a shudder as the pint size sneakers and mary-janes came into view. This meant her 2, 5 and 7 year old grandchildren were visiting for an afternoon of thumping and frolicking,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], sounds which never ceased to defy gravity by vibrating upwards to our child free world on the third floor.
Like looking into a kaleidoscope, each scene was an ever changing collection of crystallized moments. In the chaotic dance of the discarded, there was pathos in every pattern that emerged. Like an insect leaving behind its shell, you saw the very instant the shoes were thrown down by adult and child, and nothing beyond the closed door,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], that moment in time preserved until the shoes were once again reclaimed by their inhabitants.
On Mrs. Lee landing Time would stop and be left on display. Although strewn across the hallway in public view, it seemed as if you shouldn be looking. As if in peering too closely, you might stumble across something you shouldn necessarily see. Occasionally, I would stop and stare. I was not gazing at the protrusion of a bunion, or a worn heel, nor was I focusing at the creases of stretched leather that had memorized the bending of toes on the frumpy shoes of Mrs. Lee daughter, the bank teller. Observations like these slid across my consciousness, sat for a moment and dissolved in embarrassment at having looked too closely at what was not mine.
Still, though uninvited, I looked on as I passed, day after day, at the ever changing snapshot of Mrs. Lee household. For each time the still life was different, and I wonder now as I must have wondered then, how many different permutations and combinations four to six pairs of shoes could display at any time. Ironically, my favorite of the scenes starred the shoes of the noisy little culprits, theirs often captured in a mid moment of fury,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], upside down, on their side,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a heel in the air, a toe on the ground like a sliding pond,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], juxtaposed or maybe even lying on top of Mrs. Lee pink slippers,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], always neatly aligned and never disrupted, perched obediently next to her mat.
I was an art student then,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a college graduate turned waitress, floundering in the poetry and romance of my twenties. As I ascended and descended the stairwell, I wished for a magic camera to capture the ever changing shoe landscape. But I was not a photographer, only paralyzed in some yearning to photograph. What the shoes illustrated that moved me so, I not quite sure. At the time, I was given a chunk of clay by my professor with the assignment: a metamorphosis I had never worked with clay before. Sitting on the floor in the alcove next to my living room, I built eight clay shoes entitled, of a Mary Jane. The series began as a baby slipper, paused as a little girl shoe and then grew up into the promise of love as a sexy high heeled pump. Gradually,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the metamorphosis declined with age, ending as an old woman shoe, which represented memories of my Grandma Jane, her feet bulging and tired from the weight of a hard life. Not knowing you could use water to smooth clay, the shoes had a chunky raw look, where my finger marks were imprinted in the body of each sculpture. It was one of the best pieces of art I done.
What demise befell my beloved clay shoes I will never know. I left them too long on the kiln shelves at the Massachusetts College of Art,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and they were either stolen or discarded. (Now as a potter, I understand the studio faux pas of leaving behind your work on community shelves). This blueprint for loss began as far back as the fourth grade, when the teacher misplaced my extraordinary Ponce de Leon essay as she removed it to show to a colleague. At eight, I wrote in the first person as if I were the explorer himself, seeing the glorious land of Florida for the first time. And so I was initiated: My best work destined to vanish into some black hole of elusive greatness. At 44, I accepted this as my fate. Is this my penance? To have things I treasure taken from me? But Jews don believe in penance, or in hungry jealous gods that take sacrifices. And I am undeniably a Jew. There is no one to blame for my silly losses. It is mere tragic coincidence.
It is twenty years from the days of 95 Fuller Street. Although the apartment is only a few blocks from my in-laws and I drive by on visits,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], I have not been back to visit Mrs. Lee or her shoes. Yet I still remember how they moved me so. But what was it about them that made me stop and stare? I still have the habit of waiting for a pattern to emerge from the most mundane of things. As an artist I am addicted to beauty. As a philosopher, I make ridiculous comments after a few glasses of wine at my dinner parties. I will look at my sterling Repousse flatware and remark, I were a fork, I be this fork Like the accidental finger marks in my clay shoes, the imprint of humanity seems to resound on everything we touch. But is it really God we are looking at?
I have this recurring conversation of a heated nature with my personal trainer, Loic. It is marginally to distract him from working me too hard, but largely because something gets to me about this young Frenchman, this new family man before me, trying to make something of his life, insisting that there is nothing he believes except that which can be proven by science. In between push ups, ridiculous images pop into my head. I visualize him as the Altar Boy he never was,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], or standing on France on his own private globe as the Little Prince did alone in his world. But mostly, I have flashbacks of reading Albert Camus at Brandeis, brown leaves blowing at my feet as I walked though the campus,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], warding off the impending alienation of existentialist thought. I revisit that pang of loneliness and isolation when he insists that the world has no larger meaning.
How could the world exist only by accident? I argue. Then why would there be beauty, why would there be kindness, why would there be love? Are all these anthropologically useful to the survival of our species? What about perception? Why would we perceive anything extra other than what we need to survive? Why would there be patterns that reflect other patterns? These are some of the arguments I used against Loic and more recently at Shabbat dinner with our Israeli friends, Aviad, a physicist on sabbatical at Yale, and his religious wife, Margalit.
As we dined, Aviad explained that according to science, nothing exists that you can see or touch. My arguments are too metaphysical, he criticizes,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and my premise presumes the conclusion as the proof. I became confused over lemon meringue pie as our fingers toyed with the elegant glass beads sprinkled over the table. I wanted to point outside to the tree and reflect on the poetic parallels between seasons and life. But it was dark. I wanted to point to their 15 year old son,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Shachar, as he sat across from me,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], participating in the debate with an electric intelligence. He looked like Aviad and Margalit shaken in a cocktail shaker. How could these things exist, but to reflect the unimaginable intelligence of God? But I do not say it,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], because Aviad cuts me off and he says, you are no longer speaking the language of science. And besides that, if God could be proven, all people would believe. It is simply a matter of faith.
you see it? It as plain as day, I remark to Loic, the following Monday morning. Then to deflect hallucinatory suspicions, I disclaim, is not that I am so religious. exists in everything, Gveret Rubenstein used to bellow across the classroom. Gveret Rubenstein,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], with her tall black hairdo and large bosom, was my teacher in 3rd Grade at Shaarei Zedek Hebrew School. My mind expanded about her words as I squinted across my desk, the sun setting golden over the grey parking lot. (Here, once again, my final project, a burlap wall hanging of Isaiah turning swords into plowshares fell victim to that parallel dimension I will never see). Thirty years later Geveret Rubenstein words continue to persevere. Those moments of epiphany look back at me, a hall of mirrors reflecting that once innocent child trying on grown up concepts for the first time.
I came to Loic one morning after reading the introduction to a book my daughter received from our Rabbi for her Bat-mitzvah. exist on all levels, I proclaimed anything? He challenged. things. I said, anchoring myself on Gveret Rubenstein, standing tall in my mind. Unphased, Loic pointed to an athlete sneaker and dared me,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], that so, then prove to me that God exists in that shoe. Projecting like crazy my inner self on all things. Is it just as Freud believed that our need for God only reflects our pathological insecurities? Am I afraid that if God doesn exist, I am as meaningless as another lonely item on a shelf in that Woolworths, belonging to no one?
OK, I concede, my argument lacks scientific proof. In fact, it is barely an argument at all. To rely on metaphysical perception is contentious from a scientist point of view. Yet all the world is based upon our perceptions. That which we can touch and see - is what we hold in common in the most elementary form. And where we intersect, we call reality. We call science.
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