Navigating the New Year (Revised: 2/15/2025)

Red Shoes - cellphone photo - 2024, DS.

 (Text added & revised February 9 - 15, 2025)

About the photo: It looks like it might be a reject from a fashion-photo shoot; in reality' it was anything but. Nor was it any sort of "selfie," or so I thought when I shot it.

Actually, when I first noticed the way the shadows were falling on the motel balcony that night, my first thoughts were on all the geometry that lay beneath my feet. I had to use it. Shot in just the right way, the shadows, the balcony, the railing, my feet...

well, to make a long story shorter, I think it worked. Basically, I just kept my eye on that corner in the foreground and kept shooting.

"I began to see the possibilities offered by the regular division of the plane. For the first time I dared to create compositions based on the problem of expressing endlessness within a limited plane."

I've posted the (single) money shot (above). Poised in the red shoes, I seem to be standing on a spiraling, impossible plane designed by M.C. Escher, (quoted directly above). Success! A birthday gift!

But, then, there was the matter of the red shoes. Because, apart from the pop of color the shoes provided, intuition informed me that the red shoes had more significance; perhaps, a personal one. It also occurred to me that, although I had heard references to red shoes in the past, I had never read the original fairy tale... 

(Continued below the jump.)

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"... Booker T. & the M.G.'s played a handful of instrumental R&B tunes, wearing brilliant lime green suits, then they were joined by an identically attired Otis Redding who electrified the audience with his sexually charged singing style.He sang his 1965 song "Respect" which was topping the charts because of a popular new interpretation by Aretha Franklin. Redding finished with a riveting "Try a Little Tenderness". The crowd responded by standing and screaming for more. Redding had been included on the bill through the efforts of promoter Jerry Wexler, who saw the festival as an opportunity to advance Redding's career. Until that point, Redding had performed mainly for black audiences, besides a few successful shows at the Whisky a Go Go..."

The festival would be one of his last major performances: Redding died only six months later, in a plane crash, at the age of 26."

- A quote sourced from the Wiki entry for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival which rock purists recognize as more relevant to rock music history than Woodstock, the larger and more famous festival which followed in 1969.

I found the video (above) of Otis Redding on Christmas day. It was my first gift of the holidays. In spite of his tragically short career, Redding was considered the King of Soul and it's confirmed by this stellar Monterey Pop performance. There's a few moments in the video when he extends a note in such a way it pierces your heart. Can't touch that.

Note: Redding died at age 26; a tad too soon to gain entrance into the 27 Club. Interestingly, however, also performing at Monterey were Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin... while Brian Jones wandered through the crowd. And they, like Morrison and, later, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, are members of that incorporeal group of rock dignitaries who died at the tender age of 27.

Otis beat them to it.

In Memory of Otis Redding and His Revolution

Happy New Year!

(More below the jump...)

 

The Red Shoes

"And when she danced toward the open doors of the church, she saw it guarded by an angel with long white robes and wings that reached from his shoulders down to the ground. His face was grave and stern, and in his hand he held a broad, shining sword.

'Dance you shall!' he told her. 'Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton.'"

- Excerpt from Hans Christian Anderson's cautionary "fairy" tale The Red Shoes. Written in 1845, it has been continuously adapted and reinterpreted well into the 21st century.

In my "red shoe" investigation I read the full story for the first time... and was appalled. It is a harrowing chronicle of a series of  misfortunes that befall a poor orphan girl - or, as we are to believe, a "vain" little heretic - who dares to wear red shoes to church... and dance a few steps. In the excerpt above an "angel of god" curses her to dance continuously till she dies. Or, perhaps he just curses the shoes but the result is the same. Apparently, the girl, unable to stop dancing with the shoes preternaturally attached to her feet, eventually has her feet amputated by the local executioner:

"The shoes danced away with her little feet, over the fields into the deep forest. But he made wooden feet and a pair of crutches for her. He taught her a hymn that prisoners sing when they are sorry for what they have done. She kissed his hand that held the ax, and went back across the wasteland."

But, it wasn't until the time of her death - the last paragraph of the story - that her "sin" is forgiven and the curse lifted. It is a strange and beautifully crafted passage:

"Then the sun shone bright, and the white-robed angel stood before her. He was the same angel she had seen that night, at the door of the church. But he no longer held a sharp sword. In his hand was a green branch, covered with roses. He touched the ceiling with it. There was a golden star where it touched, and the ceiling rose high. He touched the walls and they opened wide."

The symbolism almost sounds hermetic. As a cautionary tale for modern children, however, we might want to pass on this one.

For another reading of the story try this Surlalune page.

"I tie on the red shoes.

They are not mine.

They are my mother’s.

Her mother’s before.

Handed down like an heirloom

but hidden like shameful letters.

The house and the street where they belong

are hidden and all the women, too,

are hidden."

- From the haunting poem, The Red Shoes, by Anne Sexton, published in The Book of Folly (1974). Sexton also wrote a book of poetry reimagining Grimm's fairy tales entitled Transformations. 

 

"The Red Shoes is a powerful exploration of the inherited burdens and societal pressures that shape and, often, destroy women's lives. Anne Sexton uses the fairy tale as a framework to examine the darker aspects of female experience, particularly the ways in which women are conditioned to endure suffering and sacrifice. The poem’s vivid imagery and surreal transformations underscore the themes of entrapment and disintegration, leaving the reader with a haunting sense of the inevitable tragedy that unfolds when one is bound by forces beyond their control. Through this work, Sexton offers a stark critique of the societal expectations that continue to haunt and hinder women across generations."

-  From an excellent analysis of  Anne Sexton's poem (and Anderson's story) found here.

"As Estes says, 'The psychological truth in The Red Shoes is that a woman's meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed, or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth. The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take onto ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul."

- From Goddesses in the Dust: The Red Shoes regarding a version of the story told to Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Interestingly, the blogger features photographs of herself as a child wearing red shoes... Reminding me of my first pair of dress-up shoes. Yes, they were red leather. And I wore them to church.

As it stands, girls never did fare too well in the early fairy tales, and neither did females of any description. This was the conclusion reached from a study of Grimm's and Anderson's fairy tales.

"Overall, there was a noticeable disparity between male and female deaths in fairy tales. Of the twenty eight deaths, one was of a character of an ambiguous gender, seven were of males, and twenty were of females. When it comes down to it, death in fairy tales is, for the most part, a form of punishment, and female characters seem to be punished far more frequently than their male counterparts.

The deaths of women tended to be more violent overall, with six causes of death unique to women being torture, murder, burning, exposure to the elements, self-sacrifice, and being devoured by animals."

- Via Women as Villains and Victims: Case Studies in Death and Gender in Fairy Tales.

Also see: The Disturbing Origins of Fairy Tales

First she thought she would not go to the wedding; but then she felt she should have no peace until she went and saw the bride. And when she saw her she knew her for Snow-white, and could not stir from the place for anger and terror. For they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.

- The last paragraph of Grimm's Snow White. So, we begin our dance wearing accursed red shoes then finish it in red-hot, cast-iron shoes.

Happily, most of us were raised on Disney adaptions. Which is not to say that any degree of censorship is a good thing, nor that girls in particular, are thereby spared from all the debilitating sexist garbage in existence. Hardly. Perhaps, sexist literature should merely come with a warning label.

On the topic of actual censorship of literature in America these days see: PEN America, The Freedom to Write.