I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
TS Eliot
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
Measuring flooded fields with knotted rope
I love measurement: using ancient words that use the body––feet, cubits, fathoms, paces, hands–– to measure the physical world. Egyptians used knotted ropes to remeasure fields after the annual flooding of the Nile. My father showed me how to use my hand to measure the height of a horse. My own forearm is an almost exact cubit.
Over the years, I’ve assembled a collection of instruments and objects to measure time and space. Given that I love the old measures, it’s fitting that many of these objects are bent or broken or rusty. ‘Runcible’, my father would have called them. Hammers from his battered toolbox, or the vast array of handmade tools that used to hang in his shed inspire me to write poetry.
https://charlotteclutterbuck.com/depth-charges/
I also like to measure with objects that are not standard tools of measurement: spoons, hammers, corks, chopsticks.
The poet’s tools: metaphor, symbol, and open questions
When I use these objects as a stimulus with a writing group, I am surprised, gratified, amazed, sometimes, to observe how this exercise frees people to explore new poetic tools. Grammatical structures loosen up; they adventure into metaphor and symbol.
Today we worked beside the estuary, and the location interacted with the tools in drawing out new ideas and approaches. The cork became a symbol of an unsettled soul as one imagined it bobbing up and down, drifting out on the tide. For J, the egg-timer and compass generated a meditation on the fluidity of time and direction:
The canoeist paddling down the sparkling waters of Cockle Creek … how far can he go before the light fades – without losing direction?…
The old fisherman on the wharf, waiting patiently with his line in the water … waiting, waiting … no egg timer can tell him how long he must wait.
The beautiful measurement of A4 paper
And while researching, I discovered this gem:
| The A series of paper sizes was first standardised in Germany in 1922 as DIN 476. However, the concept dates back even further to 1786, when German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg first proposed the idea of a paper size with a 1:√2 aspect ratio. This ratio is key to understanding what makes A4 special. Each size in the A series is exactly half the area of the previous size, while maintaining the same proportions. So A4 (210 x 297mm) is half of A3, which is half of A2, and so on, up to A0, which has an area of exactly one square meter. |
This is the exercise as I handed it out on the day
| Coffee spoons: the resonance of measuring
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons TS Eliot Implements: coffee spoon; chopstick; key; cup; hat; handkerchief; tape-measure; pocket sundial; steel ruler; spirit level Coloured pencils; A3 graph paper. Measuring can be a deeply physical activity. Before the metric system, our words for measurement were ancient, growing organically from the human body and its work: foot; inch (etymologically it was one twelfth of a foot, but my first thumb joint is approximately one inch); hand (for measuring the height of a horse); cubit (middle fingertip-elbow); fathom (the span of outstretched arms); acre (the area a team of eight oxen could plough in a day); a mile comes from Latin mille passus, a thousand paces. ‘fathomless eyes;’ ‘go the extra mile;’ ‘inching away from danger’; ‘buckets of love’ This is a reflective, creative, meditative exercise which you can take in whatever direction it wants to take you.
30 Minutes (outdoors) Measuring You may like to work in pairs. Measure a variety of things or people or animals––whatever is available. Using a mixture of the implements provided or your own body in ways you would not usually do. Be adventurous. 30 Minutes (indoors) Writing With any luck the first part will have generated a flow of ideas. Take them in any direction you wish. Write or draw quickly, without worrying whether your ideas make sense or not. It might be a story or a drawing or a poem, or a sculptural arrangement of objects. 30 Minutes (indoors) Discussion
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