Kate Colby's 'The Bind' at Chicago Review

Leading into her new essay at Chicago Review, Colby writes, "Gertrude Stein said, 'And then there is using everything.' I have long held to this aspirational strategy, taking completion as a basic measure of the world as I would have it, and wanting to depict it at total scale. I long to pull all that is, was, and might one day be into concentric shapes around me." Picking up from there: 

Recently, in the course of doing research on the poet Charles Olson, about whom I’m supposed to be writing per a fellowship proposal, I decided to write about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, whose intra-referential proportions are meant to extend to everything—perfect man as basic measure of the universe. I thought I might also write about Vesuvian man—the heat-blasted, ash-buried bodies left at Pompeii—mostly for the wordplay. But I do have a knack for making things mean, and there’s something concentric about a spread-eagled man representing the proportionality of the universe and the bodies curled up under a deadly blanket of ash, although I’m not sure which shape contains the other. Everything might already be here, in some form or another, but you can’t have it all—per the uncertainty principle, say, you can know a moving object’s speed or position but not both at once. I mean to toggle between.

Olson tried to include everything in his poems (with the exception of women). But on this livid March morning—raw cough, wet snow patches on ugly asphalt roofs—I am thinking about excision as another way toward completion. Not Wite-Out, but Vantablack, the blackest black material, which absorbs 99.965% of light. If you shine a flashlight on it, the beam disappears. It betrays no contours or third dimension of whatever it’s applied to. If I wore a dress of it, for instance, my head and hands would appear to jut from a 2-D, dress-shaped void. I would find this garment more useful than an invisibility cloak, I think—to look down at my blacked-out torso and lap, and know a more palpable absence.

Lumped into my preoccupation with scale is equivalence: I just learned that the kilogram is a physical object stored under two bell jars and whose mass has been changing over time. Thus, since the late eighteenth century, a good deal of the human world’s physical reality has rested on a basic unit of measurement that’s unstable. A team of scientists has just created a stable version made of a silicon isotope and the new definition of a kilogram might soon be the number of atoms contained in its reflective, nearly perfect sphere.[1] If the softball-sized object were scaled up to the size of the earth, its greatest deviation from sea level would be five meters, making it the roundest man-made object. Sea level is a measure of roundness.

Continue reading at Chicago Review.