Victor Nizovtsev, Reflections

I know I'm turning ugly

A turpentine tree trunk

Twisted as the shadows

Lengthen and silhouettes

Soften, someone show me

How to make anything but

A fist— I bruise, I burn, I

Hold on to everything

That wants to let me go

I am growing stunted with

The skillet slant of the sun

Playing hide-and-seek

I have lost or I am losing

And the ink in my veins

Falls in splotches insensible

In this eternal, internal rain

I have a mouth made for

Despair, I have learned to

Chew the air before my

Weary lungs can swallow

How about in 2024 we stop it with reading books with the goal in mind to finish the book so you can add it to your list of read books and start reading books slowly and intentionally with the goal to rip it into pieces with your mind and be touched by it and formed by it and changed by it

You hurt me with your fragile words;

lonely is the new day's speech

and the quiet beholds a solemn time

filled with empty promises, I hear you speak

of nothing more than darkness folding

consuming all to sit and see

a new day filled with quietly spoken

words now absent

of your cruel mind and damning speech

Having an existential crisis over whether people love me or not when it's really just poor communication skills on my part due to dyspraxia and low self-esteem gaah

Glass slippers, yes... SLIPPERS

Whenever the “verre VS vair” debate is brought up, glass shoes or fur shoes, something is pointed out. It is extremely funny that people seem unwilling to accept the “glass” part of the shoes (which in itself is not something weird, especially since as other people pointed out there is a lot of glass in fairytales, up to entire glass mountains) ; but blindly accept and never contest a much more puzzling and weirdest part of the item. “Slippers”. Glass “slippers”.

In French “pantoufle de verre”. The shoes you see in every modern Cinderella iteration are not “pantoufles”. They’re high-heeled shoes, they’re shoes to go outdoor, they are not “slippers”/”pantoufles”. And the very decision of making Cinderella wear “pantoufles” to her ball seems very strange… 

A “pantoufle”/”slipper” (for the sake of simplicity I’ll use the French pantoufle from now on) is not a ball shoe, and certainly a strange choice to go to the ball. A pantoufle is a comfortable “inside shoe”, worn usually inside the house (or sometimes even just in bedrooms), and often the pantoufle was opened up at the back, leaving the heel uncovered. That’s the kind of slipper the 1950s dad wears alongside his pajama robe when he gets out of the house with a pipe in his mouth to go searching for his journal. A quite unelegant and unusual shoewear for a formal ball organized by a prince. 

Maybe we can get some clues from looking at the history of the pantoufle? Let’s see…

The French pantoufle was originally inspired by the Arabian “babouche” (you know, the archetypal “Arabian” shoe you’ll see everyone wear in One Thousand and One Nights). Somehow the fashion of the “babouche” reached France in its Middle-Ages and became there “pantoufles”. Originally pantoufle were peasant and low-class shoes: made out of felt, they were not shoes per se but things people put on their feet when they wore clogs (what in France we call “sabots” shoes) so that it would be much more confortable (”sabots” being thick and hard wooden shoes). So basically it started out as the peasant equivalent of socks. 

But by the 15th century the “pantoufle” suddenly reached the upper-class where it became a true fashion, every gentleman had to wear some, usually made of silk or thin leather (those were costly shoes). These “pantoufles” were notably worn with a sole made of either wood or cork (”liège” as we call it in France), to avoid the pantoufle being dirtied by the muddy ground. 

In the 16th century, a new change to the “pantoufle” was made (which notably became confused and conflicted with another type of slipper known as “mule”). The “pantoufle” became feminized, to the point that it became at one point an exclusively “feminine” fashion, the “pantoufle” becoming womanswear.

Though it had exceptions: notably under the rule of Louis 14 (who was the king under which lived Perrault and whom he served), the servants of the royal palace had to wear “pantoufles” with felt soles for two reasons. 1) So that the sound of their constant travellings throughout the palace wouldn’t disturb the upper-class. 2) So that their shoes wouldn’t damage the floor. 

It was at the end of the 17th century (which is also the time Perrault wrote and published his fairytales) that women started to use “pantoufle” as proper shoes, not just glorified socks. They noted how light and practical and easy to slip on and wear those things were, and so they wore them all on their own - but only inside their house or in their private chambers, due to how fragile they were. As I said, “inside shoes”. 

So in conclusion, we know that in Perrault’s time the “pantoufle” were feminine footwear, traditional footwear of the royal court (but for servants), and fashionable enough to be worn on their own… But at the same time it was still an “inside shoe” of comfort and rest, and still stays a very unusual item to go to a royal ball with. They certainly were not easy shoes to dance with (not even counting how they were made of glass!). 

It is probably just another one of those details that Perrault liked to add to his fairytales just for the sake of having a form of humor in there. But it is fascinating to see how the “pantoufle”/”slipper” concept was rejected through time - in fact, even when people in the 19th century debated the “verre or vair” topic, they often called the shoes “soulier” (which is a type of outdoor shoe much closer to the ones popularized by modern adaptations than the indoor “slippers”, bedroom “pantoufles”).

All in all I can’t give you an answer, but it is an interesting detail that not many people took care of looking at (from my knowledge) ; or if they did, it was themselves to only point out how somehow nobody seemed bothered by the fact the shoes were slippers.

It’s quite nice to spend a while dancing through time

suspended in its ticking hours and days 

forever a breath away from endless moments

There is nothing more hopeful than the delicate touch of rain amongst a thunderstorm of clouds.

When there are gaps in knowledge, the vacuum can be filled with myth, especially in reference to a woman, and an unusual woman at that.

Patricia Pierce, Jurassic Mary

I'm getting in my own way again...

Call out to me so my footsteps halter

Burnish my skin of these lasting marks

Made by tears of my own making

With every footstep that I falter

In fog formed by clouds I mistook in my own ecstacy

when I say “everyone’s on their own timeline”, I mean it.

there’s no right age to learn something by. there’s no right age to be settled down, to move out of home, or to start your own family. there’s no right age to start working, if you work at all. there’s no right age to graduate.

life isn’t a series of boxes you need to tick. do things at your own pace. slow down if you need to. it’s okay.