“But why exactly were these shoes so important to Vincent? Why had he carried them with him for so long, beaten and worn as they were?” – Ken Wilber, from the essay A Pair of Worn Shoes 

The story and intent behind my poem, Ode to the Good Black Boots that Served My Soul So Well, is not extremely different from the story and likely intent behind Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, A Pair of Shoes (see image above). In philosopher Ken Wilber’s book, The Eye of the Spirit - An Integral Vision of a World Gone Slightly Mad, the author retells a story first shared by the painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) about a pair of “enormous worn out misshapen shoes” painted by his friend Vincent.

The now-iconic Van Gogh (1853–1890) created the image after serving as a caregiver for 40 days and nights to a miner who had been so badly burned that doctors gave him up for dead. Vincent Van Gogh could not accept that prognosis. He had not gone to the mines to paint but had traveled there in well-made boots as a young pastor intent on ministering to whoever might have need of him. 

After laboring with love to nurse the man back to some degree of health, the scars that remained on the miner’s brow and face looked to Van Gogh like scars from a crown made of thorns. He tells Gauguin: "I had, in the presence of this man who bore on his brow a series of scars, a vision of the crown of thorns, a vision of the resurrected Christ." 

About the experience, Wilber believes this: “…Whatever other interpretation we wish to give to Vincent's vision, the overall evidence clearly suggests that it was very probably a true vision of the radical potential in all of us.”  

Van Gogh painted his shoes to commemorate both the miracle of care expressed through him and which saved the miner’s life, as well as to celebrate his vision. The shoes had done their part by bearing the weight of whatever agonies sat upon his own shoulders while tending to another. 

I do not make such a powerful claim where my simple poem is concerned.  In fact, the poem at its beginning was partly inspired by an online conversation with fellow author Ian Irvine (Hobson) regarding the aesthetics discussed in his Anti-Manifesto for a Transpersonal Relational Poetics.  Like Van Gogh, I hoped to commemorate a useful service to humanity and to honor those basic elements which are so often overlooked but which are often crucial to any possibilities associated with service, sacrifice, and victory – or spiritual maturation. 

But rather than continue as a commentator on and deconstructionist of my own work, I invite you to read it where it has just been published for the very first time by Poetry Life and Times, edited by the astonishingly brilliant and restlessly “recluse” Robin Ouzman Hislop.        

Aberjhani
© Oct 28, 2014