Toes

 

    I suspect my toes may be nursing a grievance.  A remote and neglected part of the body, they are perhaps aware that I rarely take any note of them at all.  Lurking down low to the ground, encased often in both socks and shoes, they seem to pursue an independent existence.  Yet I suspect they are uneasy.  They may feel they have reason to fear evolutionary obsolescence after such a long period of being ignored.  One can imagine future homo sapiens with a smooth shoe-fitting flipper metamorphosed from the unused digits like a horse’s hoof.  Tiny fragments of vestigial toenails would have retreated to the interior of such futuristic feet.  Already some people, I am told, lack the middle joint of the smallest toe.

   The experts say that toes (the halluces or great toes in particular) are important for our species’ bipedal propulsion, but that is not subjectively obvious, nor is it essential.  People lacking toes can yet walk, and in fact those who have lost a thumb may have it surgically replaced by a big toe, which, like the thumb, has two phalanges, and such people will continue to walk and run, though their gait may be modified.  The role of toes in human locomotion is based on our walking on the soles of our feet, a trait described as plantigrade we share with, for instance, bears.  (Cats walk on their toes, a motion labeled digitigrade, while unguligrade mammals, like deer and horses, walk on hooves, the hardened tips of their feet in which toes are no longer distinguishable.)

     In spite of the fact that feet give their owners an impression of only marginal function, nature implies otherwise.  Feet are densely covered with more sweat glands and nerve endings than any other part of the body, in part explaining the phenomena of stinky feet and ticklishness.  Physicians say we may lose a cup of water through our feet in a single day.  A lessening of this flow may be an early sign of neuropathy which could, if undetected, lead to amputation.  The fact that feet are as sensitive to touch as hands was surely useful when our remote ancestors made homes in the branches of trees.  Toes are subject to a frightening array of pathologies, in the main impairing ordinary walking, including turf toe, claw toe, club foot, bunions, hammertoe, and mallet toe.  Feet are sufficiently a field apart that the sufferer likely to be treated by a specialist physician, not an M. D. but a podiatrist or D. P. M., a profession that, like medical, osteopathic, dental, veterinary, and pharmacy schools requires four years of graduate study.   

     We no longer have (as apes do) opposable big tors, though a hominin ancestor found in Ethiopia and dated to three and a half million years ago retained this characteristic.  Its loss rendered the feet less capable of many tasks.  Yet today’s humans may with training recover some of our remote ancestors’ agility.  People without hands have long compensated by learning to accomplish many tasks with their feet.  Dressing, cooking, eating, and most activities of daily life may be managed with feet alone.  A considerable number of people have developed sufficient dexterity in their toes that they can play the piano with their feet.  Though lacking arms, a Chinese man named Liu Wei has become not only a foot piano virtuoso but also a champion toe typist and swimmer.  (Which skill, one wonders, might he have thought most difficult to acquire?)

     Akshat Saxena from Uttar Pradesh is a sort of toe champion, having been born in 2010 with ten toes on each foot.  He is an extreme case of polydactyly, a condition which affects about three of every two thousand babies.  For reasons not yet understood, polydactyly occurs about a thousand per cent more commonly in people of African descent as opposed to those with a European ancestry.  Sometimes a single toe will grow unusually large, a condition with unknown cause called macrodactyly. The longest toe yet measured was that of Xi Shun, verified by Guinness World Records in 2005 at over eight centimeters or three and a third inches) and belongs to Xi Shun (China).  Louise Hollis became known in 1991 as the grower of the longest toenails known having achieved a total combined length of eighty-seven inches.  (Though she grew her fingernails as well, she was never able to attain a record for them.)

     Habitually avoiding the spotlight, toes have played little role in magic and mythology.   The belief is, however, widespread, that a second toe longer than the first is an auspicious sign of royal descent or long life or good luck in general.  Though the link between toe size and destiny is a fanciful one, it is clear that to the ancient Greeks such an extended toe was considered aesthetically pleasing and most of their statues display the characteristic, though it appears in a minority (only twenty percent) of people.  For this reason it is sometimes called a Greek toe.  Michelangelo’s David and the Statue of Liberty display such toes in neo-Classical form.  Called “Morton’s toe” by the medical profession, it can sometimes interfere with balance and walking. 

     During the heyday of physical-anthropological speculation in the nineteenth century, researchers produced a taxonomy of foot profiles.  (In some listings, the Roman is inconsistently called the Peasant.)

 

 

     While none of these identifications reliably identifies a pattern common in a certain area, national variations do exist.  Three quarters of Japanese, for instance, have the Egyptian foot with a steady slope from toe to toe. 

     According the National Shoe Retailers Association the average American foot is two sizes bigger than a generation ago, a change for which increased size in general is primarily accountable.  In my own childhood a visit to by shoes frequently involved the opportunity to see one’s own bones in a fluoroscope using a special machine patented in America in 1927 as the Foot-O-Scope.  By the nineteen-fifties over ten thousand such devices were installed in American shoe stores.  Originally unregulated, such unnecessary examinations delivered a dangerous dose of radiation.  By the nineteen fifties, though, medical experts were warning about the hazards of this apparently modern, scientific technology and in 1957 Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the machines and, by a few years later, they had vanished from most U. S. retailers, though they lingered in Canada and the U. K.

     Toes are associated with infantile innocence as we all know the game “This little piggy” which first appeared in print in the eighteenth century, yet they are as well the focus of prurient interest for foot fetishists (or podophiles), among whom toe-sucking may be a game of dominance and submission.  The lowly status of feet which underlies this sort of power game inspires Georges Bataille to make of toes a grand symbol of the horror of being human.  He maintains in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 that “The big toe is the most human part of the human body.”  Accompanying his text with monstrous closeups of big toes, Bataille regards toes as a symbol not only of humanity but of mortality as well.

 

Corns on the feet differ from headaches and toothaches by their baseness, and they are only laughable because of an ignominy explicable by the mud in which feet are found. Since by its physical attitude the human race distances itself as much as it can from terrestrial mud -- whereas a spasmodic laugh carries joy to its summit each time its purest flight lands man's own arrogance spread-eagle in the mud -- one can imagine that a toe, always more or less damaged and humiliating, is psychologically analogous to the brutal fall of a man -- in other words, to death. The hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and proud appearance of the big toe corresponds to this derision and gives a very shrill expression to the disorder of the human body, that production of the violent discord of the organs.

 

     What in an infant seems tiny and cute and quite perfect later evolves into a terrifying reminder, almost medieval in  its disgust with life, of how dirty and disappointing one’s days can be and of their inevitable end.  Bataille goes on. 

 

Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse--a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.