Black Cat Moments

And, you may say, we asked you to write a pastiche about women and shoes—what has that got to do with a room of my own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to write about women and shoes, I sat on the bottom second step of my fire escape and began reflecting on what shoes meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Emily Dickinson; a few more about Sylvia Plath; a tribute to Taryn Rose; some witticisms, if possible, about Mrs. Virginia Woolf; and a respectful allusion to Imelda Marcos.

But at second sight, I began to study my open closet door…those stacked shoes peacefully hanging from off my 24-pocket over-the-door shoe organizer. I soon realized, shoes didn’t seem so simple. The concept of women and shoes might mean, and you may have meant it to be, women and shoes and how they fit together. Or it might mean women and shoes and how they walk together. Or it might mean women and shoes and reasons why women own multiple pairs in multiple styles. Or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together, and you want me to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed most interesting.

Soon I saw that it had one fatal drawback: I should never be able to bare my feet and walk in other women’s shoes. But I understand, the first duty of a poet is to hand you sanitized stanzas filled with rhyme. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one major point—a woman must be barefoot and have a room of her own if she is to write poetry; and that, as you will see, stirs the great trouble of the true nature of poetry.

But then one would have to decide what is style—a question which—but there I was actually at the church entrance door that led me inside to sit and observe from the pews—the place in which all creatures are admitted. Where do they all belong? I looked at their shoes and saw their life. Some women either wore stacked heels, wedge heels, or pointed heels. But most women wore flats. Whether they wore gender-neutral sneakers, puffy-comfy boots, or ballerina style heels; nevertheless, they were flats they had worn.

Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only here I listened with both ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the shuffling of shoes and some soft murmurings. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at Mass such as this, women would have worn precisely the same shoes, but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of colorful, quick clicking showers such as the ones cicadas made, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could I set those clicking showers to words? And here I found Dior and Monroe were dancing:

The real proof of an elegant woman is what is on her feet.

Was that what made men click their shoes at Mass before the war? And the women?

Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.

Was that what made women click their shoes at Mass before the war? But why–I continued, listening to the priest’s sermon–have women stopped clicking their shoes during Mass? Why has Dior ceased to dance?

…is what is on her feet.

Why has Monroe ceased to respond?

…she can conquer the world.

Shall I lay the blame on the war? When the steel on target landed on March 8, 1965, did the faces of men and women at church Mass show so plain in each other’s eyes. Romance was killed, too. Certainly, it was shell-shock (to women in particular with their illusions about marriage and children) …those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, having sat on the steps of my fire escape for a long while, I suddenly sensed a cold draft.

Poetry must stick to truth, and the plainer the truth, the better the poetry—so I am being told. I pondered why it was Mrs. Virginia Woolf who, at the time, had been perceived as a major female writer on feminist literature, kept complaining about lack of women’s rights during her time. She was wrong. The truth was that it had been 16th century English writer Miss Isabella Whitney to have been the first feminist and poet during her time. On the contrary, Virginia had been traditionally married to a man. Marriage meant dependency. “Why, Mrs. Woolf, I’m pot—Miss Pot, and I’m calling your kettle really black. A real feminist is unmarried. That would mean you were a married feminist. Well, isn’t that rich.”

A married feminist is like an enslaved colonialist—it just does not happen. Colonialists pride themselves in exercising domination over other people foreign to their own. Don’t you lose your domination, or perhaps, relinquish half of it to your husband once you are married? At that rate, Dickinson would have taken out one of her stiletto heels stashed away, somewhere in her closet, and crushed the skull off that creepy cockroach. A rush of that cold draft coming through my fire escape continued to chill my feet.

It is a curious fact, though, that poets have a way of making you believe that a church Mass is invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the poet’s convention not to mention Holy bread and wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to express the truth about the poet. The poet must be naked entirely from her head down to her feet. How else can a purple starling’s feathers shine if she doesn’t face her song directly into the sun?

But to that one poet, who found favor in sticking her truth inside a bell jar, it was no wonder bringing your dead father’s spirit to the beach in wearing your patent leather shoes would eventually choke you to death underneath the sun. Hence, the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

How would Dr. Taryn Rose have handled modern poetry? She and her family would escape from the fires that would later burn down Saigon into the ground, land as refugees at Fort Pendleton, and grow up to become a United States orthopedic surgeon, who would eventually become a multi-millionaire capitalist selling both men and women’s luxury shoes internationally. As I side eyed again at those stacked shoes peacefully hanging from off my 24-pocket over-the-door shoe organizer, my shoeless feet had grown numb from sitting outside for so long on the icy fire escape in the dead of winter.

I pondered lastly over why it was that Mrs. Imelda Marcos owned 3,000 pairs of shoes and for that was nicknamed “Steel Butterfly”; and what effect wealth had on my mind; and I soon thought, shoes were meant to be broken. Chafed underneath, peeled-off at the sides, scratched deep should women’s shoes be worn until torn and useless. Only then can we women recreate our lives to be re-lived…a sort of reincarnation of poetry in motion. During her marriage to that dictator and after his death, I thought, just look at all of the fiction she walked.