"Pairs"

These things on my feet. It wouldn't be correct to call them shoes. Nor boots nor moccasins nor loafers nor slippers nor anything else in the social vocabulary we have to define the materials that robe our feet. Neither sock nor stocking nor hose will do either, though certainly closer to the lightness those items imply.

The problem, I believe, is that this is the first garment I own that can most accurately be defined not by the materials it is made of, the brand or designer, the size, the country of origin, the length of the laces, the proper use of, or the history of the concept of the shoe itself. These devices on my feet, which to you may seem vague in description, can only be described in adjectives and not nouns.

For simplicity, for your vocabulary, since you have never worn such a thing, I will call them “shoes.” But this soft wiry mesh is softer than the clunky thing that you are probably scrounging up in your imagination. So instead, picture: lightness. Air. Softness. The voice of your favorite female jazz vocal singer shrouding your feet in clouds. Imagine the feeling of stepping into one of Monet's lily ponds, or bathing downstream from a waterfall in a bubbly ravine. This is not just how these shoes feel, but how they look.

Imagine, now, in your head, one shoe. What is the first thing you notice? Yes, correct. Where is the other shoe? Like so much in our lives, shoes are defined by absence. They require another, a compliment, a fox they can mate with for life. One shoe, is meaningless. One of anything is meaningless. I look at my bookshelf and zone in one one book. NW by Zadie Smith. One single book. But this is not one book. Because this book does not exist on my book shelf without me thinking of White Teeth. Nor does it exist without me thinking of the New Yorker article in which Smith pays tribute to Joni Mitchell. Nor of the short story about disaster striking London. I think of when I bought a used copy of On Beauty in Chiang Mai. I think of how the publisher sent my two copies of NW to review on accident. So this one book, as you can see, is never alone. It can be paired with many things.

In fact, it is this multiple pairedness that helps define, sharpen, and illuminate the meaning of this book and author. Because a single pair, like a single shoe, is meaningless. Every single pair needs a compliment, a fox it can mate with for life. A right pair without a left pair is like a right shoe without a left shoe. And yet, these two pairs, when combined, grow together to make just one pair, without compliment or fox.

I realize that many may despair over the seemingly futile struggle of matching shoes into infinity but it is just these connections that resist the inherent futility of single shoes.

The magnetics of infinity require that each pair find its 'ment, its 'mate, its fox. For every shoe is an equal and opposite shoe; for every pair is an equal and opposite pair in which they share the wisdom that is derived from their own pairedness.

This is why it is not correct to call these things on my feet shoes, or boots, or moccasins. They are more than that and less than that too. Because more is always paired with less. Every pairing is the completion and negation of the existence of each individual component.

Therein lies the lightness, the air, the clouds that robe my feet. My pair of feet, my two legs, my left and right brain, my two eyes, my one body and the inevitable completion and negation of this body.

My body is a right shoe, crawling through a desert of Pairs, in search of its left shoe.