Responsible viewing: Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1998 by Morris, Daniel

My Shoes

Shoes, secret face of my inner life:

Two gaping toothless mouths,

Two partly decomposed animal skins

Smelling of mice nests.

My brother and sister who died at birth

Continuing their existence in you,

Guiding my life

Toward their incomprehensible innocence.

What use are books to me

When in you it is possible to read

The Gospel of my life on earth

And still beyond, of things to come?

I want to proclaim the religion

I have designed for your perfect humility

And the strange church I am building

With you as the altar.

Ascetic and maternal, you endure:

Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,

With your mute patience, forming

The only true likeness of myself. (Selected Poems 38)

Perceiving the shoes with an unusual degree of attention and empathetic identification, the speaker represents them as "the only true likeness of myself." In the poem, the shoes embody a personal spirit and a sense of religious mystery. In fact, the speaker claims that from his apostrophe to an abjected part of his everyday surroundings he can build a cosmic structure, divined in the "strange church" of the poem with the image of old shoes as the "altar."5 As in Cornell, who combined the renaissance portrait of a Medici princeling with images that appear to belong to a pinball machine, Simic juxtaposes sacred and profane objects, the world of spirit and of body, of libido and of a transcendence of ego, of what Simic refers to as a "good-tasting homemade stew of angel and beast" ( Unemployed Fortune-Teller 103) .6

In "Street-Corner Theology," Simic describes Cornell as "a religious artist" (70). "He makes only icons. He proves that one needs to believe in angels and demons even in a modern world in order to make sense of it" (70). Even if Simic and Cornell express religious impulses in their art, both ground their figures of transcendence in the impurity of the body and the risk of urban life. In "Vaudeville de Luxe," from Dime-Store Alchemy, Simic describes Cornell's art as a space where conversionary experiences occur. The boxes are "like witch doctors' concoctions" that contain objects possessing magical properties (40). They are "a little voodoo temple with an altar" (40) . In Christian churches the altar is the table, or, in Latin, the "high place." Traditionally, the altar is used for sacred acts such as the Eucharistic performance. In "My Shoes" and in Simic's reading of Cornell, however, the altar is not a high place in a church, but a discarded or broken object with which the poet or artist performs an act of visual transformation. Each man revises the significance of objects in an unorthodox structure such as the short lyric poem or the sixteen-inch wooden box filled with debris. In "My Shoes," Simic repairs aspects of his personal, cultural, and familial past. In Cornell's case, art enhances the sensation of New York City as a humane environment where private associations and meanings, once hidden from view, become available to others for speculation and enjoyment. As in his reading of Cornell, Simic in "My Shoes" employs cultural leftovers to produce unauthorized ("strange") versions of a ceremony figured as "magic" or "witchcraft." By reading Cornell's boxes as profane vehicles that enable him to access a sacred environment associated with metamorphosis, Simic visualizes his own poetics and suggests an unorthodox religious sensibility.