When I first saw shoes dangling from telephone lines, I thought them rather whimsical, an ad hoc celebration of ugly, as if a festive ornament could be anything, so long as it swayed in the breeze. The tableau was given a darker spin when I was told the shoes marked places for street drug dealing. Considering how randomly placed such shoes seem to be, the connection is likely a folk etiology, that is, somebody made the connection in their head — and it was an explanation that immediately made sense. Of course, there’s a nefarious reason for the shoes! Who knows, maybe that was the purpose at one time, but with shoes swinging here, there, and everywhere any connection must quickly have lost its usefulness. I’ve come back around to the notion that shoes dangle on overhead lines because it’s just fun to throw them up there, and it feels like a lasting accomplishment to see them swinging away every time you go by. How else are you going to get any satisfaction from throwing away worn out old shoes?
In his book on Mexico City Juan Villoro looks up from the ground level gridlock, the careless drivers, and the gaping holes in sidewalks to those seemingly footloose shoes:
Shoes hung on electric lines offer another parable of transit. Since the streets are dead ends, the final steps must be made aloft. The dead shoes reach that desired beyond, the paradise where the pedestrian strolls the sky.
source:
Horizontal Vertigo: a city called Mexico
by Juan Villoro, translated by Alfred MacAdam
2021. Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House, NY
No comments:
Post a Comment