Measure - How do we measure up?

Measure - How do we measure up?ES

#lyricalessay, #memory, #growing, #mybody

In the kitchen of the house where we grew up there is a white wall, dividing the dining room from the stove, sink, and microwave. This wall, like all the walls, is painted glossy white, with thick emulsion paint; protected from oil splatters, spraying from greasy pans. Nothing was ever hung on any of our walls. No paintings. No photographs. No memories. We were always ready to move. Onto the next place, and into the next country. We would never have to repaint. But this white wall became our mural. A thin strip of unchanged space, somehow stuck in time, slowly greying, covered in small pencil lines and numbers. Dates. 11/02/2003. 20/04/2007. 30/05/2012. The last date; the year I stopped growing.

We’d stand with our heels touching the base of this wall, barefoot and cold as our feet stroked the wooden floor panels. We’d straighten our backs, correct our postures, and wait patiently for the heavy recipe book to be placed upon our heads.

I’d look up and ask my mother; ‘how do I measure up this year?’. ‘Just one centimetre taller than the last’, she’d reply.

This kitchen became the home of measure. Our yearly ritual to track our progress, and our time spent growing. Now when I gaze upon the surface of that wall, and it’s smudged numbers, I wonder, did it hurt as my body stretched itself, bones elongating and muscles strengthening, in time with others my age. In time with myself. These measurements, the lengths between the pencil lines, became the stand-ins for our physical development, snapshots of a growing process neither our minds, nor bodies will ever remember.

Leonardo Da Vinci once explained upon creating the Vitruvian Man:

‘If you open your legs far enough to reduce your height by one fourteenth and at the same time ‘spread and raise your arms until your middle fingers touch the level of the top of your head,’ your navel will be at the centre of your outspread limbs and the space between your legs will describe an equilateral triangle.’ (King 165) This followed Vitruvius’ claim that the distance measured from the toes to the top of the head equals that from fingertip to fingertip if arms are outstretched. (King 165)

This is our measure of the body, of our proportions. A method of measure in art I use daily to construct my paintings, and to build subjects. We are measured by what we are constructed of. Supposedly, in my body there are seven heads, just as in my head there are two palms, and in my palm there are four fingers. By creating one circle of measure, my body apparently fits into each other part of itself, with each limb constantly compared to another, through measure.

With ‘The Tanner Scale’ I am measured to develop breasts and grow pubic hair at 11 years, to have my first menstrual bleeding at 12.5 years, and to reach my adult height at 15 years of age. Is this the age I stopped measuring myself?

Measuring systems became what allegedly made the world ‘thinkable’, ‘knowable’, and ‘livable’ (Garcia 27).

We deem to have ‘understood’ our bodies and their growth. But measure excludes and measure is toxic. With measure comes a constant need to compare. To ‘measure up’. We are not all the same, yet we measure ourselves against one another. I did not develop breasts at 11. I did not reach adult height at 15. Our bodies are not all made up of seven heads. We measure up our progress, our achievements, and our performance, against each other. We are keeping track of records, and keeping time of minute differences in performances, once invisible to our own eyes. We are endlessly comparing, and in this are ever losing ourselves.

I notice myself ‘measuring up’ to those around me. How do I measure up? I am losing sense of my self-actualisation and so I must stop measuring. But it is difficult. It is impossible. Now, I do no longer measure myself, for I no longer grow. I have reached my ‘maximum’. I am left only to measure the distance to the kitchen in the house where I grew up, and the months left until I can return there, to gaze upon the fading measurements. The measured lines of my ‘progress’.