27 August 2017
I’d never heard of the Babinski response before, but apparently, I have it. When I’m hanging out with no shoes on, both of my big toes flex back a little toward the tops of my feet and point skyward. It isn’t noticeable to anyone but me, but it made me curious. My favourite chiro explained it. Apparently, the big toes of newborns and infants do it, but eventually, conforming to shoes and learning to walk, the toes stop doing that and learn to play along with the rest of the foot.
This reminded me of a poem by Pablo Neruda. In English it goes like this:
To the Foot From Its Child
A child’s foot doesn’t know it’s a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can’t fly,
that it can’t be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child’s foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to life in a shoe.
Little by little without light
it got acquainted with the world in its own way
without knowing the other imprisoned foot
exploring life like a blind man.
Those smooth toe nails
of quartz in a bunch,
got harder, they changed into
an opaque substance, into hard horn
and the child’s little petals
were crushed, lost their balance,
took the form of a reptile without eyes,
with triangular heads like a worm’s.
And they had callused over,
they were covered
with tiny lava fields of death,
a hardening unasked for.
But this blind thing kept going
without surrender, without stopping
hour after hour.
One foot after another,
now as a man,
or a woman,
above,
below,
through the fields, the mines,
the stores, the government bureaus,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot worked with its shoes,
it hardly had time
to be naked in love or in sleep
one foot walked, both feet walked
until the whole man stopped.
And then it went down
into the earth and didn’t know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn’t know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.
Maybe Shug and Lefty have regressed and forgotten that they are feet. Maybe they are waiting to see what they become next. I like that idea. I like that we all have the potential to forget who we’ve become and can re-imagine ourselves maybe not as an apple or a butterfly, but as something beautiful and new.
I’m taking a page out of the book of Shug and Lefty (and Neruda), and I’m working on forgetting what I was and thinking about what I’ll become.