Transcontinental Bliss---An Essay in Idleness With Pictures Soon to Follow
“Has your discerning mind just served to drive you mad?" ---Kamo no Chōmei
Last week I received some long-awaited boots. I had no idea when they would arrive. My records show the pre-order was made in September 2021. That’s sixteen months ago. As Petty once put it, “The Waiting in the hardest part…”
Truth is I’d neither forgotten them nor was I eagerly awaiting their arrival. Kenko in his Essays in Idleness reminds us, “If man were never to fade away... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” I might emend to add a tincture of “scrupulous ambivalence” even as I await the next pre-order.
The boots in question here are the collaboration from The Black Sign x Clinch via The Brass Boot Co. of Tokyo, to wit, the utterly unmistakable Transcontinentals.
In case you missed them, this make up is currently for sale from Standard & Strange. (*Link with the footnotes.) When you gander at them, the mysterium tremendum et fascinas will not be far behind. I guarantee you it won’t just be the handsome price that likely gives you pause. These boots are not whispering in sober and understated dulcet tones. Not even a little.
Allow me to put aside requisite review banalities. The clicking, construction, and execution of these is as we have come to expect from Clinch, impeccable. The amount of work that must have gone into this construction boggles the mind, not just the pocket book. Best then to cite the Standard & Strange description to confirm verbally your inevitable visual overload:
Standing at an average of 16" tall (the height will change slightly relative to the size of the shoe), these pack an impressive 6 eyelets, 9 speed hooks, another 5 eyelets, and two custom brass buckles to keep them securely on your legs. Brown O'Sullivan cork outsoles and heels provide fantastic grip and comfort, while still cutting a clean, low profile.
The leather is black waxed Gustave cowhide, from the Degermann tannery in France. Degermann is France's oldest leather tannery, with a history going back over 300 years. The hides are combination tanned - combination tanned leathers are finished with both natural vegetable tannins and mineral ones, resulting in a leather with the durability of a veg tan and the softness of a chrome tan. After tanning, the leather is coated with a natural wax, which is heat pressed into the hides, giving additional durability and water-resistance.
Now why in heaven’s name would anyone need these boots?
I submit the word “need” might apply if we suspend all implication of commonsensical, practicable, handy, sound, functional, or utilitarian. “Need” refers here to something more Marlowian, a matter of the “will in us” that has been “overruled by fate.” For these boots answer the amaranthine query, “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” But perhaps little else.
Need I remind us that the great Marlowe was born to a shoemaker? That makes him living proof that the dictum ‘sutor, ne ultra crepidam’ has at least one important exception.
Marlowe was also accused of “blasphemous libel,” nowadays no longer a crime but in the far reaches of Christendom but perhaps something these boots will revive. The outrage, the ravishing mischief coupled with the ruinous enormity of their sheer presence would be enough to revive a reconsideration of The Stephen Code. Whiles Stephens was also famous as an opponent of Mill, he loses the argument wholly to his disputant. Mill once wrote,
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
Though on the matter of happiness, especially with regard to boots, we should demur with Stephens from the worthy Mill:
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
Umm, nah. If we cannot pursue happiness with genius and frivolity what’s the point of living at all? Of course we can’t buy happiness but in boots you can certainly buy a healthy dose of exhilaration. And what did that ever cost ya’ but another expensive mistake?
Prudence in boots is like happiness itself: wildly overrated. So let us return to the noble Chomei for more counsel (n.b., shoe pun wholly intentional).
If you conform to the world it will bind you hand and foot. If you do not, then it will think you mad. And so the question, where should we live? And how? Where to find a place to rest a while? And how to bring even short-lived peace to our hearts?
I would not expect these boots to bring even short-lived peace to my heart but there’s something to be said for a redolent freedom that makes no nuisance of one’s self to another. These boots are a personal rebellion against accountability that answers to no other than myself, be that sober or drunk as Davy’s sow.
I am usually disinclined to impulse though I wholly indulge Marlowe’s injunction that love itself is best immediately revealed and slowly unveiled. I make it a point to fall in love with something or another every day, be that a song, a poem, or a pair of boots. These private obsessions are rarely shared and even more infrequently acted upon. As swift as I am to fall in love, I make it a point not to violate the After 8 Rule: no purchases after 8pm especially if that involves more than one two three beers.
But when I saw the Clinch Transcontinentals I discarded all heedful deliberation. I had no idea when, where, or if ever I would wear them. Having to have them was all that mattered.
This is surely my exception, not my rule. As a matter of habit I think long and hard well, maybe twenty minutes about bringing something into the wardrobe, not only because my tastes are (finally) well-honed (at this very late date) but because I try to incorporate purchases into the styles I actually do fancy most---traditional Ivy, workwear Amekaji, and the occasional foray into fine Savile-esque and what we might call “eccentric tailoring.”
The Black Sign touches at least two of these categories but they are the current princes of eccentric tailoring. Since much of their eclecticism is channeled through nods to ‘20s and ‘30s workwear it bends and swerves with provenance but never recklessly abandons coherence---as if that man of blue collars on weekdays would have had the leisure to ride his moto from city to countryside or even weekend fest in a suit.
There’s nothing particularly fashion-forward about The Black Sign. Their genius lies in taking us back and forward at the same time. Last summer when I needed a suit for our daughter’s wedding The Black Sign provided just the right mix of elegant and eccentric. That choice had nothing to do with these Transcontinental boots, which truth be told, I had no occasion much less plan to use. As for the role Clinch plays in this story, suffice it to say, it is with inimitable carriage. Clinch is often (umm, too often) copied but rarely equaled. What is it like to have only peers in a world in which better but never finished is the goal? That appears to be the point.
When the notice that the boots had arrived with Standard & Strange and were soon to roost on my doorstep, I realized the proverbial chickens were coming home. Would they be like those Robert Southey wrote about in The Curse of Kehama (1809):
“Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.”
He did go on to embrace the paradox by admonishing and encouraging the madness,
But let your hearts be strong,
And bear ye bravely on,
For Providence is good, and virtue is secure.
I’m not so sure about Providence but these boots are really good. Virtue never being all that secure is not really at issue here.
Back to the problem: not why own these exemplars of unrestraint but how to wear them at all.
Of course The Black Sign shows them with Sheriff’s breeches and other moto-inspired gear on Café racers fit for sepia-toned early 20th century coolness. If only. Those 20s and 30s were my father’s time. Am I doomed as all sons to ever converse with his ghost? For my part, I don’t think I can conjure any inner Eric Estrada doing signature CHiPs freeway pileups. “Ponch” Poncherello I ain’t. The conclusion: I’m not going with the breeks. Yet.
And then it dawned on me that the solution had already be had. You see, I also own the fabled Clinch Hi-Liner, a boot oft celebrated and never surpassed by our very own YouTube idol The Vintage Future. He is a fine fellow, I tell you. Let us follow his lead here.
While it may indeed be blasphemous libel my preference will be to wear the Transcontinentals in a fashion to my Hi-Liners, to wit, slipped beneath by my usual wide leg trousers as yet another matinee showing of My Own Private Idaho. Can I pretend I’m Keanu? Just for extra fun? Despite the girth of buckles and their prodigious height, the Transcontinentals will fit quite nicely in this personal space.
So kitted beneath my wideboy jeans the Transcontinental become a secret beknownst only to me when in public. This is not an infrequent sartorial strategy I employ to invoke misrepresentations of the tonseisha. Kenko our archetype reminds us, “There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you.” Including your boots.
Tonseisha were of course the medieval Japanese reclusive aesthetes fabled for their insouciant disregard of the rigors of Buddhist monasticism but keen to live hidden in plain sight in pursuit an inner joy, albeit fleeting and evanescent. Their aim was to love life, but secretly. Ain’t nobody’s bidddness butt’cer own.
If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in this world, how things would lose their power to move us! (Kenko, cf., Keene, Donald (1998). Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. New York: Columbia University Press)
Disinterested in renunciation but supremely aware all is indeed mujo, impermanent, the tonseisha---Chomei and Kenko, our historical archetypes---revel in their asociabilities, private contemplations of artistry, and the sublimity of nature. They owe as much to sake as they do Zen but don’t we all? They might also secretly attend a Noh play in the city while in disguise or drink too much sake and play music through the night alone. They did not care much for what the world thought of them but thought a great deal about how culture, art, and spontaneous imperfection makes incompleteness an end unto itself. So why not boots, I say? Especially boots so brilliantly crafted, dangerously conspicuous, and difficult to conceal as Transcontinentals.
My own style has long committed to masking my intentions and personal viewpoints. It is in fact an important feature of my job that college students have no idea of my opinions even as I attempt to help them imagine lives they have not led and will never lead. In matters of style I want not to be noticed and, at the same time, I mean to enrage the unconscious, particularly my own.
It is the artistry of the boots themselves that is the provocateur and cause of the tonseisha-moment.
But in candor let us consider yet another bit of artlessness on my part. Could it be that the Transcontinentals are just too cool for me? That I am actually too embarrassed to wear them outside for all the world to see?
The boots themselves come perilously close to costume and I’m too damn old for cosplay. To avoid the undignified may be an old man’s affectation, a mere aureate, but that doesn’t make the feeling less genuine. I maintain the Undiscovered Territory from which no traveler returns a matter designed to puzzle the will and rather make us bear those ills we all share.
Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But with a crafty madness, keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
(Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)
I am after something very personal, and sometimes boots help do that trick. Now to further confess I could get away with wearing breeks and the Transcons even in my workplace. Tenure has few but still some privileges. But that would place attention on me when they are supposed to be thinking about feeling.
My wife and I travel less frequently now but she’s been encouraging me to moto through my Scots ancestor’s Highlands, so why not break out my breeks and let my Transcon freak flag fly? Frankly, I don’t think this will happen anytime soon. To wear these out requires context to avoid cosplay. And right now I’m pretty short on context. It would be like putting on a six-piece (go ahead name them all…) tweed kit anywhere but on one of those shooting estates where driving grouse from the moors is a lord’s weekend. Or something.
One last shot?
I could imagine the Transcontinentals in a kilt and that is something I do like to do. Maybe not at work but to a wedding or a re-past, a purvy tea, or into battle. May the occasion arise.
For now the transcendental Transcontinentals will remain my own harvest of leisure, a clandestine choice beneath high-waisted denim, uncloseted but very much a neach prìobhaideach. Wait. What? That's Scots Gaelic for a “private individual,” the Highland version of a tonseisha choice, something you do for yourself when everyone might be looking and you care enough not to want to be noticed. If you notice and see me wearing these matchless boots, do me a favor? Please don’t say a thing. Unless. Maybe. “Those are some braw boots, lad.”
Notes:
Whoever Loved That Loved Not at First Sight?
By Christopher Marlowe (c.1564-1593)
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should love, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
RE: The Stephen Code, cf., and Sir James FitzJames Stephen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fitzjames_Stephen
“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
“There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
“In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
“If man were never to fade away... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
― Kenko Yoshida
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