Peasant Shoes

Things have been quieter than normal at the B.F.M. Two consecutive weeks of travel put me behind the eight ball. I returned to the farm on June 16th. Since then, I’ve been playing catch up on different projects—some related to the farm, some to writing. The good news is that nothing catastrophic happened while we were away. I’m hurrying to wrap up the third and final phase of a multi-year USDA project, but I’m still on schedule. The bad news is that we’ve reached the point in the growing season where the lives of plants, trees, and animals seem one or two or three steps ahead of this farmer’s ability to care for them. Factor in some travel, and one morning this farmer will come home to a riot of weeds in the garden and fruit rotting on the vine.

One of the first things I noticed when I got home was the sorry state of my boots. I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed before I left, but they’re looking particularly shabby these days. The stitching is worn away in places, and while none of the seams is coming apart yet, hundreds (truly thousands) of days trudging through pasture, gravel, and mud have abraded the slick, oily sheen the boots used to have. I’ve done my best to care for them—especially in the winter, which is the toughest season for boots—but I see new fissures and cracks spreading across the surface of the leather. Of course the boots leak, but that’s true sooner or later of any boot that steps on Bell Farm. (Better to have boots that water can get out of than boots that trap water inside, I say.) At this point in my life, I’ve been through so many pairs that I know I’m not that far away from needing something new.

I’ve grown particular about my footwear on the farm. When I first started farming, I wore my hiking boots all the time. These lasted about six months before the briars and blackberry tore the synthetic bits to shreds. Then I experimented with fancy rubber boots, which are good for sloppy conditions in the weather. But heavy treds hold a lot of mud, and in the summer rubber overheats quickly. Also, I could never get them to last longer than a season or two. Four or five years ago I settled on a simple, lace up leather boot with no tred. They’re made by Red Wing, and I can usually get them to last longer than anything else I’ve owned. The laces can be annoying, but they shed mud and water better than any boot I’ve worn before.

Seeing my boots in their sorry state reminded me of a painting by Van Gogh entitled Shoenen [Shoes]. The story goes that Van Gogh bought some old boots at a flea market and brought them back to his studio in Montmartre, where he painted them multiple times over several years. This particular painting is late—1886—and perhaps ‘post-impressionist’ is the best marker of its mode of representation. Even so, the boots in Van Gogh’s painting bear an uncanny resemblance to my own.

Vincent Van Gogh, Shoenen [1886], oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Then I was reminded of an essay by the philosopher Martin Heidegger where he discusses this painting at some length. I wanted to use this post to share some of what he says about shoes. Here is what he has to say about Van Gogh’s painting:

“The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes actually serve. It is in this process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment. As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. […] A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more.”

What Heidegger is saying something like this: shoes reveal their essence as equipment, as tools (I’m using these terms interchangeably), when the peasant uses them to walk across the field or village—and all the more so the less the peasant is even aware of them as shoes while walking. The reality of the being of shoes is hidden in their use. When shoes distract us—with pain, annoyance, or a distinctive design—they chafe against their own character as equipment. The “equipmental being” of boots resides in their usefulness, which itself resides in their reliability, a durability that lasts beyond the hour of its use. “The former [usefulness] vibrates in the latter [reliability] and would be nothing without it,” Heidegger says. Heidegger thinks that tools disclose themselves precisely in the moment of their disappearance in our work or in our living. My boots express their being best when I am oblivious to their shape or quality or the character of their physical extension in the world around me. They may have been pleasing to look at, but the pleasure arrives on the heels (so to speak) of what the boots really are—the place they have in my life and work.

But that’s not all that Van Gogh’s painting has to show us, Heidegger thinks. When we bring ourselves before this painting—when we attend to the fullness of the picture, when we allow it to question us—when we place our own being in “the vicinity of the work,” we find—

“From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.”

Again, having situated himself before the painting, the painting then discloses something essential to Heidegger about “what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth.” Van Gogh’s painting facilitates the emergence of shoes “into the unconcealedness of [their] being.” As the painting stands, it doesn’t do a very good job of providing a visual representation of what shoes or boots look like. We can’t even tell what they are resting on. It’s not a pleasant or titillating image. Rather, what happens in the work of art is “a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is.” Art, he says, is “truth setting itself to work.” Encountering Van Gogh’s painting means letting the work tell us what boots are—what in the everyday reality of our lives equipment really is. And the essence of boots is a “protected belonging” that covers over every object of use in our world.

Heidegger is using this phrase in a more general sense than I intend to, but I like the notion of protected belonging very much. I wasn’t able to save my boots from the silent call of the earth, but I was able to prolong their stay. It seems to me that the phrase describes what agriculture is about: a craft that belongs to the earth and is protected by the world of the farmer.

More soon.

Jack