from “No Measure”
Kelly Krumrie | No Measure | Calamari Archive | October 2024 | 112 Pages
Today I discover that the ruler is the length of my forearm. I’m also an instrument. My wingspan, another measure. I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this? I pull out a string and wrap myself up then pull it taut. Ankle to knee, the circumference of my hips, a circle around my wrist. I lie down and draw my length in the sand. How many of me is the row? The fence?
- - -
I’ve been trying to tell you.
This is about abstraction and reproducibility, repeatability and what it means to measure. The desire to know and to mediate knowing, what landscape desire makes.
- - -
This is my account. Where’s yours? In the control room. Shelves of samples, a dial. You touch my hip, here. I don’t write that down. From up here I can see so far.
You unfold a diagram on the table. Use your pencil to point here, and here. See? you say. I look. The diagram projects a critical point where the grasses’ reach makes a substantial impact on the particulate matter in the air. The dunes quiet, the grass like hands pressing the sand down. At this measure the air is clearer. Look, you say. You’re pleased. You point to the diagram and then out the window. The grasses yellow near the field’s edge.
- - -
I can barely estimate boundaries. The combination of light and air is like a mirror. The immensity of the valley planes my view. It holds processes at once. I coincide with my own appearance, and what appears to me, where I place my attention.
At a distance any eye is ground glass. Bodies fail to detach themselves from one another. Glass in sharp fragments, the peak of my attention, grains into mirror. The illusion consists in this: as a distance and as a mass any eye sees only one line.
- - -
If my reach catches? Topple or drought. I broadcast a new planting. The horizon recedes or moves back as I walk toward it.
At what point am I along the grass blade? The end, root, some ridge? Its emission? I mean my location, on average, is relative. My skinny arm disappears when I twist it.