On the Secret Power of Shoe Polish

“The Infinite Shoeblack” is not an everyday concept. But I came across it in an eccentric philosophical novel called “Sartor Resartus” (“The Tailor Retailered”) by Thomas Carlyle. Now, philosophy books often hide curious thoughts in them, but this one, well, it exceeded all my previous encounters of weirdness in books. The album Giant Normal Dwarf is, of course, a very kooky thing in itself. It could be described as a surrealist philosophy of all things in general and of all sorts of transformative, – physical and chemical – processes occurring in nature and in the human mind. The song “The Infinite Shoeblack” opens in a rather dark and ominous world of factories, smoke and machines, where all imagination seems to have disappeared. The opening lines evoke a sterile place of unhappiness where fantasy is locked up behind closed doors and imaginative worlds, as created in drawings and dreams, seem to have been banned for ever. The whole album feels like an attempt to return to a kind of dreamlike, imaginary world, trying to reclaim a fairytale innocence where objects are like forms and colours to play with and elements of the universe are mysterious personae in an animated world, where the moon has a friendly face and the strings of a pair of shoes can whisper a sweet sound in your ears. A struggle against the harsh “Wipe out the blackboard drawing, fool”, where the rationality of the machine prevails and creative imagination equals foolishness.

The odd book I mentioned above centres around a fictitious German idealist philosopher called Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo who wrote a philosophy of clothes, yes you read that right, clothes. The more he thinks about the world of mankind, the more he gets convinced of the fact that the whole of society is “founded upon Cloth”. He claims that all man’s earthly interests are hooked and buttoned together and held up by clothes. Throughout the centuries there has been an abundance of philosophies written about all sorts of subjects that tickle man’s curiosity, about everything that goes on in the tiniest fibre of his body and soul, but the “Grand Tissue of all Tissues”, – his clothes -, has been overlooked by all these philosophers. Well, Nits of course in their thing-like universe made many an allusion to clothes and buttons and the likes; losing a button of his shirt even leads Henk into a childhood rêverie of the past. And the title track, ”Giant Normal Dwarf” softly unfolds with the words every girl likes to hear: “What a beautiful dress you’re wearing tonight – What beautiful shoes you have on your feet”. So for Nits, I guess, this philosophy of clothes must appear quite a natural exploration to undertake . Furthermore Nits know all about weaving tissues, they are used to working with the most delicate of fibres in their creative processes. And, as Nits know so well, the soft materials in which we wrap our bodies and souls day and night, are so close to the essence of the naturally sophisticated beings that we like to be. Look at Henk in his Magritte-like appearance with the bowler hat and a neatly tailored suit in his cutely surrealist “Vogelman” films. A very demure elegance characterises both his music and his outfits. Our clothes are the closest thing to our skin; the fibres of their materials, could they be turned into sound? Piece of cake, for Nits. Over the years Nits have proven to be nothing less than tailors of haptic, textured music; have you seen the delicate way in which they touch their instruments, the skin of the drums, the strings of the guitar, the keys of the piano? In their lovingly spun sounds, Wool famously became a fabric of the soul. Their latest, Knot, was often compared to tweed, and not only for the look of its cover. Oh and lest we forget, one of the most beautiful philosophies of clothes written in music and words, is certainly their lyrical “Under a Canoe”, with at its core the glorious musical phrase “a shirt is waving in the meadow”, one of the most memorable and mystical moments in the Nits repertoire. It signifies the intimate unity between man and nature (or the surrounding world) via a simple piece of clothing moving with the wind. Doctor Teufelsdröckh would have been impressed…! So this mystifying philosophy of clothes sort of fits the Nits world like a glove… Now all we still need… is shoes, right…?

Enters the Infinite Shoeblack (a man who shines shoes for a living). He appears as a character that the philosopher Teufelsdröckh uses to elucidate his theory about man’s unhappiness. He claims that man’s unhappiness stems from his greatness: there’s a sense of the infinite in man that he never manages to bury under all the finite futileness of his many earthly occupations and aspirations. Nothing can make the shoeblack happy for more than an hour or two, because the shoeblack is not just a stomach that can be filled time upon time as hunger arises, no, he is a soul primarily which always hungers for more, for the infinity of it all which he can of course never attain… But for Nits, this rather bleak vision of mankind makes no sense. We are all too familiar with the melancholic sunshine that gave rise to the peculiar beauty of the Nits universe. The song pictures a girl – probably wearing a dress with yellow flowers, underneath a Dries Van Noten overcoat – and a boy – in a blue jacket of C&A and sporting yellow socks – on a journey to unleash the power of imagination, back into a black, monochrome, monotone world. They want to re-awaken the dreamlike energy hidden in all material things. When the girl and the boy look at the world full of material things, they feel summoned by it to make it even more beautiful, to create new versions of it through their imagination. Polishing the blackness of the world until the light shines through, until the black gives way to an infinite, glimmering glow. The shoes, the black shoes, the shoeblack, they need to be shined and turned back into the wide, infinite mirrors of the imagination. So the world is opened up again, to light and lightness of being, to smiles and colours, accompanied by enchantingly sweet fairytale sounds of a keyboard manipulated by elves and fairies: Mmmmmmmm… For Nits imagination knows no boundaries. And infinity can indeed be captured by the light of an eternal world reflecting through the darkness…

And with this other, very special type of shoes on our feet, (do you hear the cautious tread of the normal boy and girl, the heavy footsteps of the giant, the light-footedness of the fairy and the jumping steps of a whole army of strange, imaginary creatures on their way to the clear, transparent bell-glass of wonders, in the music?) – called Radio Shoes -, we can “all disappear in the Infinite Shoeblack”, like Alice did, through a rabbit hole, into an unbridled world of fantasy, where things don’t quite match up with the familiar shapes of reality…

(last gig of the 2004-tour in Paradiso, Amsterdam on March 20th, 2004. “The Infinite Shoeblack” is from the album: Giant, Normal Dwarf (1990))

Joke Roelandt, February 2020