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The physical world was troubling me. In those early days of
writing what would become Beyond Measure,
my bangs never sat right and I was usually cold, except when I was sweatingly
hot. My teeth constantly threatened to revert to their pre-braces positions,
and the chair I wrote in was being bleached by the sun—though if I lowered the
blinds I’d have to raise them, and then I’d have to contend with how they never
fell exactly parallel to the floor.
Finally, I started listening to the critiques. Eventually, I
would be able to describe the light around me as a way to represent hope; I would
be able to describe a plastic bag in the wind as a way to describe my declining
mood.
That was the point of the collection, in a way: to
understand how we are applying our expectations of the physical world—that it
is measurable, namely—to the virtual and emotional. But when I first started
writing the book, though I knew I needed more of the physical world, I didn’t
know how to create it on the page (and still often don’t know how). So I turned
to other essayists to show me. I read pieces of Heidi Julavits’ The Folded Clock again and again, I read
Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness too. But
most often, I read Zadie Smith’s “Find Your
Beach.” I’d find myself thinking of the essay suddenly, as if someone had
said aloud to me, either whispering in my ear or shouting from across the room,
“Find your beach!”
I’d first read that essay before I knew I’d be writing about
measurement. Later, I found myself turning to it often while in the throes of
the book. I’d pull it up on my iPad, place the screen next to me on the
bleached chair’s armrest, and swipe slowly with my left hand while I wrote
feverishly with my right. If Smith could make a Corona billboard about
productivity and work and writing, then I too could find my beach and make it about what I was thinking and feeling
(uncertainty and the body and anxiety).
I kept it simple: I assigned myself a physical space to
write about (Bed
Bath and Beyond) and an object (an electric toothbrush). As I wrote, I
studied the way Smith moved from the billboard itself to what it represented,
the way her imagined personality for the woman across the way from her held her
concerns about motherhood and happiness. In description she found uncertainty,
and in uncertainty she found meaning. The piece existed because it was about
something in three-dimensional space—the piece existed specifically as an essay
because its three-dimensional space held people and those people felt feelings
and thought thoughts there.
I am still unable to not be aware of my trouble with the
real. It takes essays like Smith’s to remind me. To look inward, especially
while writing my book, I had to look outward—and no matter how cliched that is,
it’s true. I was, after all, writing about measurement, and even if that
measurement is applied to my enigmatic body—I wrote about working out and sweating
and sleeping—it is an external
description of what’s happening unseen, a description dependent on context.
It’s impossible to measure anything—to even consider measuring anything—without
having something to compare those numbers to. Measurement can be metaphorical,
but the metaphor has to point to something real, just as subjectivity must be
relative to something else. It implies difference, and difference requires
reference points.
Smith’s essay, then, didn’t just show me how to write about
the world around me—it taught me why I should want to, and that, in turn,
taught me something about what I was trying to figure out by writing the book
in the first place: why, when faced with all the sights and sounds of the
outside world, I still don’t trust myself to measure it accurately.
Rachel Z. Arndt is the author of Beyond Measure (Sarabande, 2018). She received MFAs in nonfiction and
poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was nonfiction editor of the Iowa
Review. She’s written for Popular Mechanics, Pank, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.
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