Put Off Thy Shoes

This summer’s collaboration between poets Melanie Challenger and John Kinsella, published on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, draws attention to the sense of touch. Mel’s fourth poem in the series refers to the “Unconquerable eye, dux of body’s province” which, with its passion for sites and sights, is “A blight at the dying rootstock of body’s / Other charms.” The series was born out of the mutual agreement between the poets that travelling by aeroplane to complete readings was indefensible. The recalibration of the hierarchy of the senses that results in touch being foregrounded is therefore a product of the attempt to refocus on the regional, to reconnect physically and mentally with immediate surroundings. The capacity of the human body to be in touch with its environment through being restricted to its own, unmediated scope is hymned by these poems.

In a recent “green book group” session organised by the novelist and environmentalist Gregory Norminton, participant Alette Willis read from The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir by Linda Hogan. Her chosen extract included an incident of barefoot walking, an episode that tied into the book’s contentions about the corrective that Native American thinking can offer to a Western culture that connects knowledge and intellect with the visual sense. Hogan’s approach to landscape is resolutely multi-sensory, but the barefoot walk is particularly resonant in that it enacts a range of emotions, states and intentions. To walk barefoot may, I think, be interpreted in the following ways:

1. An act of humility
2. A punishment or penance
3. A tribute (these first three forming parts of the pilgrimage experience)
4. A ritual, often involving suffering (e.g. firewalking)
5. An indicator of disenfranchisement via class, enslavement or other form of submission
6. Therefore, a marker of poverty
7. A sexual practice (thinking in particular of barefoot dancers)
8. A claim to freedom
9. A statement of nonconformism
10. A claim to fashionable status (e.g. hippy chic)
11. A spiritual act
12. A claim of connectedness to the earth and, therefore, the Earth
13. An act of mourning
14. An indicator of innocence (e.g. unshod children)
15. A mark of respect (removal of shoes in holy places)
16. A means of treading lightly, in order to prevent harm (as in the Jain tradition)
17. A marker of commitment to peace
18. A statement of elemental connection

There may well be more interpretations of the barefoot walk, some stemming from readings within other cultures that might contradict my own reading of the gesture. But crucially there is something about touch, and in particular about touching the land with one’s feet, that suggests both a connection to the regional, and a humble approach. Perhaps a barefoot walk is, at the metaphorical level, the way we should all choose to travel. As Exodus 3.5 has it: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”