No Measure – Kelly Krumrie

[Calamari Archive; 2024]

The story spawned from a fact and a paradox: the fact of thermochromic glass, an inter layer that lets a window, say, adjust its transparency of its own accord as the sunlight blooms and wanes. And the sorites paradox, in which one grain at a time is removed from a heap of sand and we are asked to determine when it ceases to be a heap and becomes something else. Kelly Krumrie mentions these inspirations in the acknowledgements of No Measure, which we might call prose poetry if we wanted to capture it in a single genre. When I read about the seeds that became this story, I felt as if the story had existed somewhere in the world all along and was just waiting to be uncovered, to have its facts spun into something emotional, woven tight with the right language. Maybe that’s just the effect this story has on the reader: No Measure makes you wonder what narratives you have misread as simple facts. Facts are useless here.

“Here” is the desert. Two people, “I”—the narrator—and “you” are attempting to somehow quantify this expanse of sand. They might be researchers, scientists, mathematicians, but Krumrie won’t describe them as such; here, they are pronouns without job titles. “You” is in charge of their project, watching from a control tower made of thermochromic glass. They give instructions to “I,” which “I” tries to follow. “I” counts stalks of grass, measures their lengths, and, most importantly, keeps records: “You called me to come here to write things down—a documentation to contain a valley, what’s remediated and how.” Their attempts quickly prove futile. Their subject cannot be pinned down; “weather expands the desert, sand blows into the city.” The tools and instruments they have brought to capture the desert, to tack it to a page with calculations, might as well be broken.

“To measure is to align, to measure against,” Krumrie writes. There is little “against” in this book. The desert may well extend forever. It lacks the clear boundaries the characters yearn for. The characters themselves exist with the natural world and each other as their only means of contextualizing themselves. In this comparative void, the narrator’s identity wavers, and they begin to understand themself among their insufficient tools: “The string is slack against the grass. The string does nothing. I do.” They begin measuring blades of grass not with a measuring stick but with their own forearm, trying to quantify the desert in relation to themself. Even then, the desert resists measurement. The horizon recedes when “I” moves toward it, expanding the desert further, making its boundaries not just vast but unstable.

Krumrie’s prose reflects the narrator’s crumbling certainty. Declarative sentences end in question marks. Krumrie writes of the “mutability of extraction,” a pair of words you must stop and parse. In anthropology, extraction is a now strongly discouraged method that involves taking things recklessly from their contexts in order to study them. Krumrie implies that this method can render the extracted thing meaningless, muted. When the characters take samples of sand from the desert, they come no closer to understanding its whole. The narrator’s understanding of the desert begins to fray: in trying to understand blades of grass from every angle—color, width, “their mean growth, their mean intake, their mean grip on the sand, their mean hold on my eyes their total mass their variable release their explicit form their inching their width ceasing their trace on my knees.” Each page of the book is its own poetic fragment, and at the end of this one, the narrator has once again returned to understanding the grass by association with themself. They realize what the question marks hinted at: They cannot know what the world—what grass and sand and glass and desert—“are” because “to know the world is to be wrong.”

No Measure may be especially meaningful to students of ecology or geology, to those who have already learned, likely in a more academic context, that even the oldest rocks are not as immutable as our brief human lives lead us to believe. “Scale is central to ecology,” writes Krumrie. If we look at it on too small a scale, as we are apt to do, we will miss the living nature of the land, rock, and sand. In Deborah Stratman’s 2023 film Last Things, rocks become the main characters, and we see both the structures they form on a microscopic level and the unfolding of history from their perspective. When I first saw this film alone in a theater in Utah, its impact was diminished by days of trudging miles through snow and a widening hole of sleep debt. Several months later, when I worked as a teacher’s assistant for an ecology writing course in college, I was fascinated to relearn that even mountain ranges expand and collapse and prop themselves back up over thousands of years. Their tops weather away and their bases gather more rock and dirt, ever sprouting like quasi-immortal plants.

As the narrator of No Measure identifies increasingly with their tools, the desert feels more and more like a living being, breathing sand outside its original bounds, germinating and folding blades of grass, unwilling to be captive to these humans. In Krumrie’s account, math not only applies to but is often derived from nature. But she challenges the idea that the natural world is governed by order, by mathematics and systems, that it is unchanging and controllable, something to which we, as humans, are superior. This way we tend to understand the world, the contained way we wish to continue understanding it, gives us little more than the illusion of control. In Krumrie’s desert, the illusion is quickly broken. Instead, the researchers find a place where order coexists with life, inherently fluid, undulatory. At its heart, Krumrie’s book is about what it means to measure things, and what the value of this measurement could be. What should we measure things against? Our tools? Ourselves as tools? Is the goal to extract knowledge from nature or to understand nature and understand ourselves within it?

The narrator wonders, “What measure is in the grass before I define it? Or before you tell me what to look for?” Krumrie pushes us to observe rather than define, to witness change happening because we observe, and to find meaning in change rather than regularity. Geologists—notably Marcia Bjornerud (a narrator in Last Things) in her book Timefulness—have written in factual ways about how, counter to our common understanding, geology is in motion. Krumrie comes at it from a more emotional angle. She takes this fact about geological history and tries to help us figure out what to do with it, how to understand ourselves against it. She turns it into poetry and thereby into something with an emotional undercurrent. Interactions between systems and beings (if there is truly a distinction between the two) can animate the desert rather than tangle it up with insufficient quantifications. The narrator seems prepared to merge with the desert at times—with “silicate in my mouth,” the two come together.

And yet, the narrator still lacks something. They are “never whole here, quarried.” If you read carefully, themes repeat. Over and over, “I” claims to “leave no trace.” This may be the golden rule in natural areas and national parks, but here, the sentiment sours for both narrator and reader. The narrator intends to leave no trace, and yet they want to matter. I could feel the narrator’s isolation; I know what it feels like for your roots to twist above ground, searching. To leave no trace is to not ruin something, to keep beautiful things beautiful, to not interfere, but at some point I started to wonder when a lack of interference implies a lack of interaction. In their loneliness and loss of understanding, the two humans turn momentarily away from the desert and to each other. By the book’s third section, a romance has seemingly begun. When they are together, the narrator asks, “Show me the desert all at once this instant,” equating their romance to seeing something more, seeing everything they have failed to see, this more advanced, impossible clarity that might not be possible by way of calculations and instruments but perhaps by way of emotional connection.

“Finally an invariant shape—ours.” I read this sentence with an unexpected satisfaction. For much of the book, “You” feels controlling of “I,” dictating what they must do for the sake of research. The characters’ romance is a dramatic swerve off of the methodical, fact-focused path the characters were walking. That path had become grim and isolating and hopeless, so the swerve was welcome. And, in a stew of new ways of thinking about the natural world, floating past broken bits of our previous understandings, a romance is something exciting and familiar, something we as readers can use, much like the characters, to reorient ourselves.  

No Measure is its own sandbox, something you can dig into as far as you want, mining for more bits of meaning as you go. The narrator wishes to see not the window of the control tower but what is beyond that window, some greater context that will make more sense. Their ability to do so is in the hands of the window itself, whose thermochromic glass darkens in the desert sun, then briefly, when the sun allows, reveals the tower’s interior and the narrator’s companion, their single anchor.

Within nature are fractals, structures both carefully ordered and infinite, and this book has a fractal quality to it, as well. You can read easily, letting the sound of the words please you and seeing which ideas resonate in your brain. But if you dig into it, more meanings grow from its original spiral. And if you extrapolate from those, looking at the sand pile as a model of the tipping points our climate is approaching, the book comments on greater themes about climate change and ecology. In place of a “rights reserved” clause, Krumrie declares the “rites reversed.” She gives anyone permission to repurpose the book and its information, as long as it remains non-copyrighted and not used for commercial gain. This gesture of authorial generosity is yet another spiral of the book’s fractal. No Measure is an invitation for creativity. It is also a warning, or a plea, to re-understand the world. It is a web of question marks. It is scientific failure. It is two people trying to do the impossible and falling in love.

Erin Evans is a writer from Michigan, now living in New York. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as an arts writer and editor for The Michigan Daily. Her essays and criticism have appeared there and in Vestoj.