On Shoelaces

By Francesca Gardner

How is an essay like a shoelace? Robert Herrick’s 1648 ‘Delight in Disorder’ concludes: 

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility—

Do more bewitch me than when art

Is too precise in every part.

This is a poem which sees beauty in an ‘erring lace’, a ‘cuff neglectful’, a ‘tempestuous petticoat’ — the adjectives signal sprezzatura, a term used in both literary and sartorial contexts. The essay throws on tailored words and concepts with the same kind of nonchalance. Adorno defines it negatively in ‘The Essay as Form’: ‘[t]he ideals of purity and cleanliness bear the marks of a repressive order; these ideals are shared by the bustle of authentic philosophy aiming at eternal values, a sealed and flawlessly organized science, and by a conceptless, intuitive art’.

Though the OED traces the English noun back to 1647, and they were first patented by Harvey Kennedy in 1790, shoelaces themselves are far older. In 1991 two German tourists discovered Ötzi, a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC on the east ridge of the Fineilspitze, on the Austrian-Italian border; his shoes have been the topic of much discussion. They had laces. In 2016 Scientific Reports published analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of Ötzi’s clothing — the material of the laces ‘clustered to hapologroup T3 taurine lineage of cattle’, the ‘predominant mitochondrial haplotype in European domestic cattle […] observed in high frequency throughout the neolithic of Europe’.

While there have always been laceless shoes, in 1968 Puma SE became the first major company to introduce trainers with Velcro snaps instead of laces; Lock Laces (no-tie laces) followed from college track athlete Eric Jackson in 1997. In the 1661 Hewson reduc'd — John Hewson was a shoemaker from London who signed the death warrant for the execution of Charles I — Shoostring, Boot’s Page, is useful to Shoe, though expendable to Slipper:

Shooe. String, Come tye my Shoe.

Pum. What little go by the ground is that?

Slip. A Hang-by of Mr. Shooe; they call him Shooe-tye, a fellow that I am not beholding to: But Pump, farewel a while.

(Exit Slip.)

P. Slipper farewel. Pump will have a fling at you anon. Shooe, Sirrah, How doth my Cosin Stocking?

Str. Faith, Sir, He was lately a dying, but now they say, he is on the mending hand.

Sh. Why, what's the matter?

Str. They say he took a grief, because he stretcht himself for Mr. Leg, and so brake.

Shoelaces speak. The London Skinhead scene of the 1970s and the punk scene of the 1980s saw the rise of a Dr Martens lace code: red and white laces for neo-nazi or white supremacist views, yellow for anti-racism, purple for gay pride, green for neutrality, blue for cop-killing.

In C S Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace converses with ‘star at rest’ Ramandu. ‘In our world’, he says, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. Ramandu replies, ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’. The OED defines ‘shoelace’ (synonyms: ‘shoestring’, ‘bootlace’) as ‘[a] long, thin fabric cord or leather strip’. Is that what a shoelace is?

Small subjects

Montaigne said of his essay subjects, ‘[t]out argument m'est egallement fertile. Je les prens sur une mouche’ — ‘[e]very argument is equally fruitful to me. I take them on a fly’ (i.e., on nothing). The shoestring is a little subject, perhaps the little subject par excellence; ‘on a shoestring’ is an economic idiom describing the slimmest of margins. The shoe-tie is one of the many items comprising Autolycus’ ‘trumpery’ (Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘something of no value, trifles’) for sale in The Winter’s Tale. It is also called upon to remind others that they are not fit to approach even the meanest article of a given figure’s clothing. Louis Maimbourg and Bernard Lamy’s history of Socinianism, translated into English by William Webster in 1735, documents that when Professor of Bremen Martinius asks ‘by what right GOD can require Faith, which is the work of an infinite Being, from man, whose faculties are limited’, Professor of Groningen Gomarus retorts that such talk ‘is not worthy to untie the shoestrings of Calvin’. In Smollett’s 1755 translation of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, speaking against Dulcinea and in favour of Quixote’s marriage to the beautiful Dorothea, argues that ‘she is not half so beautiful […] not worthy to tie her majesty’s shoe-strings’ — this diverges from Cervantes’ original, which says instead that ‘no llega a su zapato de la que está delante’, ‘she doesn’t reach the shoe of she who is before them’.

Shoelaces are a small subject, but multum in parvo is the essay’s motto. Shoelaces emerge in texts concerned with establishing, promising, or exploring intimacy (c.f. another Herrick poem, ‘The Shoe Tying’). This is often as a symbol of devotion to the last detail: ‘[a] pilgrim to the shrine’, states Samuel Rogers’ 1819 Human Life, ‘for a relic would a world resign. | A glove, a shoe tye, or a flower let fall — | What through the least, love consecrates them all’. In Samuel Butler’s 1663 satirical poem Hudibras the eponymous character similarly promises the Lady ‘as is my Duty | [to] Honour the Shadow of your Shoe-tye’. Duty and shoe-tye are also related not via rhyme but via the paronomastic Italian noun lacci in Domenico’s Starnone’s 2014 novel of the same name. Meaning both ‘laces’ and ‘ties’, the title is the key symbol in this domestic drama about romantic affairs, definitions of sexual liberation, and filial attitudes and stances, concerned with what ties us to and unties us from the people we love. We discover in a flashback in which the absent Aldo meets up with his young children that his son Sandro had learned to tie his shoelaces by copying his father — but Aldo never directly taught him (unlike J. D. Salinger, whose son had fond memories of this rite of passage).

Lacci’s cover image, which English translator Jhumpa Lahiri points out was chosen by Starnone himself, depicts a man wearing a ‘pair of shoes whose laces are tied together. It is a knot that will surely trip him up, that will get him nowhere’. She notes how many words there are for disorder in the novel, threatening to engulf the one word for order (ordine). Any delight in this disorder is ambivalent at best. ‘In this house there’s visible order’, says daughter Anna, ‘but a disorder that’s real’. Accordingly, the denouement of the central ‘whodunnit’ mystery — the aged parents Aldo and Vanda return from holiday to find their house ransacked — is that it was their children, not destroying but revealing. Bukowski similarly detects a danger in the little things:

no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies

that send a man to the

madhouse…

not the death of his love

but a shoelace that snaps

with no time left…

In ‘the shoelace’ (1972), it's the little things that trip you up: ‘so’, the speaker concludes with accordingly cautious enjambment, ‘be careful | when you | bend over’.

The shoelaces of those who are perceived to be a threat to themselves or others are closely monitored: prisoners and patients in psychiatric hospitals are asked to remove their shoelaces because they can be used as a weapon, or under ‘suicide watch’. As reported in a 2022 article for the Washington Examiner entitled ‘No Strings Attached’, people stopped while crossing the US border in Yuma, Arizona are immediately ordered by Border Patrol officers to remove their laces in case they put them to use while in custody. Zim Live reported in October 2024 that in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, armed robbers stole $32,500 and ZAR 300 in cash from a company after tying up two security guards and twelve employees with shoelaces.

Digression

Following the logic of magical thinking, neglect of order can have direct and disastrous consequences: for some sportspeople, the ordering of left-right, or right-left, shoelace tying foretells a game’s victory or loss. According to a Scottish superstition, not tying your shoelaces properly brings bad luck.

The best way to tie a shoelace so as not to undo them or wear them down has long been the subject of debate. On Ian’s Shoelace Site, you can rate knots according to a one-to-five-star system: the lowest is the ‘Loop the Loop Knot’ (2.8), the highest ‘Ian’s Secure knot’ (4.7). In 2017, Proceedings of the Royal Society A published an article entitled ‘The roles of impact and inertia in the failure of a shoelace knot’, including the testing of cyclic impact by mounting the knot to a ~20cm pendulum arm released from rest at a prescribed an angle of inclination (~43°).

There is in fact something essayistic about this ‘sealed and flawlessly organized science’, perhaps because the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ have a tragicomic relationship to the ‘why’. Shoelace tying preoccupies the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s 1988 novel The Mezzanine, the story of Howie, a man going from the bottom of an escalator to the top during his lunch break. As his shoelaces have broken on successive days, he has been to buy some new ones. He considers at length how it could be that they did not snap at the same time, records a colleague joking about the material and quality of his own shoelaces, and documents his search for the new pair at the CVS Pharmacy. At the close of the novel, when Howie is digressing from comments on a sentence in Aurelius’ Meditations, he mentions the ‘luxurious incidentalism’ of the footnotes of A History of European Morals, proceeding to embark upon a meandering tour of literature and the footnote beginning, in its own footnote:

In one footnote, for instance, Lecky quotes a French biographer of Spinoza to the effect that the philosopher liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders' webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that he occasionally burst out laughing. […] As Boswell said, "[…] Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, […] told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles." ([…] Think of it: John Milton wore shoelaces!)

Later, Howie remarks that by the time of his death he will probably have thought more about shoelaces than Marcus Aurelius (in the past month shoelaces had come up 325 times, Aurelius 90 — but, like his shoelaces, he has now ‘worn both of the thoughts out’). That the footnote brings us back to shoelaces, the foundation of one of the few and far between plot points of the novel, makes this not only a footnote on footnotes but also a foot note.

This is a formal summation of The Mezzanine: ‘[d]igression’, the footnote continues, is ‘a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument — and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters’. Gradus means step as well as position, rung, or degree. A flowing, ranging, ambulatory style Baker’s is not — its shoelaces continually trip up and wear out. Relying on an overarching through-line, telos, or path (the escalator-as-plot), Baker spatialises the text according to the novel’s setting; ‘the muscles of the eye […] want vertical itineraries’, says Howie. The setting is a building with a ground floor and a mezzanine, where Howie’s office is located, connected via the building’s escalator. With its footnotes frequently splitting the pages in half, so, too, does the book have an upper and lower floor. Howie’s movement, and our own, through the text is ostensibly one of smooth upward and forward transition — a step on the average elevator travels three times the distance from London to New York each year, says one caption from Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-sections’ ‘Subway Station’ — but it is also downwards, fraught, complex, stumbling, bathetic, and jerky.

To take note of your feet need not be an action prompted by embarrassment, lassitude, or disinterest, but instead the result of an active, deliberate, and curious gaze. ‘[T[he MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes’, recalls Howie. ‘Were they nuts?’ Baker’s footnotes are indeed essay-like. When discussing ice skates and record grooves, Howie clarifies that ‘[a]s in the later case of the frayed shoelace, what I wanted here was tribology: detailed knowledge of the interaction between the surfaces inflicting the wear and the surfaces receiving it’; in this (typically lengthy) footnote, questions about blades and needles proliferate. The friction of vertical itineraries is a wearing down which revitalises, producing movement and music.

FRANCESCA GARDNER is an English PhD student at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, working on pastoral poetry in the long eighteenth century. She makes puppets.

Art by David Ring for Europeana Fashion, reused under Creative Commons