eu·di·om·e·ter

 

I’m so pleased to be starting our nonfiction november with an essay by Mika Taylor.  Enjoy!

 

eu·di·om·e·ter  (yü-dē-ˈä-mə-tər) n.  [Gr.  eudios, clear, fair (eu-, good + dios, genit. of Zeus, god of the sky) + meier].  1.  originally, an instrument for measuring the amount of oxygen in the air.  2.  an instrument for measuring and analyzing gases.

 

I pictured a machine – some complex contraption with tubes and knobs and glass spirals. It measures the air. Air is everywhere. It measures the everywhere.

 

In reality, it isn’t much – a simple apparatus – an upside-down test tube with numbers on the side, its mouth end submerged in water, a pipe leading from another closed tube in which something (anything) combusts. Arrows point the gas up and out the pipe, under the water and into this numbered tube, pop, pop, pop, floating to the top, and displacing what it can. Once the material is burned, the gasses released, there is a number, an exact measurement that those far better with numbers and chemicals and processes than I, will use somehow.

 

I don’t know how much gas there is in in a penny or a pound cake. I don’t know how much gas there is this room right now or on the planet or in myself. If I did know, that knowledge wouldn’t matter. I cannot change the number. I don’t think it would change me. These things exist. They are measured. Is there comfort in knowing that they can be quantified, and that others are doing that job? Perhaps.

 

There are so many things I would measure if only I could construct the right network of tubes and beakers and Bunsen burners. But I do not have the expertise. I measure and order and quantify what I can with words, not numbers – parsing language to better explain all I see and feel. But life is not exact. Life is complicated and long. There is beauty and pain. There is beauty in pain. I try to find order, but with words there is so much slippage. What I mean, and what I say, and what you read, and what you understand, are all different, all variable.

 

Even for this simple apparatus, the word is layered, its meanings multiple. The root, eudios, means clear and fair and good, and of the sky. This device was invented to measure the “goodness of the air”. It now just measures quantities of gasses. “Goodness” must have been too soft a term for modern thinkers. The inventors though, the namers of this particular tool called on Zeus, god of the sky, as if they were looking to measure something more in those tiny bubbles, something profound, and eternal, and real.

 

It’s time for someone to invent a machine to measure me. Centrifuge my cells. Boil my blood. Quantify and qualify. Be precise. Tell me my weight, my height, my bone density. Tell me how much is water and muscle and fat. What gasses are in my system? In what amounts? Tell me my IQ and income level and the number of descendants I will leave behind. What is my life expectancy? What can I expect from life? Numbers of years and days are not enough. Time changes. It opens up in front of me and disappears as I pass through it. Years go by and time is always now.

 

Tell me how much I have lived – how much more there is. Give me a precise calculation of everything I have gone through so far. I want an exact measurement of what is to come. How much more love do I get? How many more ideas can I have? How often will I laugh and cry and change my mind? How deeply will I feel each particular loss that sits unknown in front of me? How hard will it be from now on?

 

 

 

Mika Taylor lives in Willimantic, Connecticut (aka Romantic Willimantic, aka Heroin Town USA, aka Thread City, aka Vulture Town) with her writer husband, PR Griffis and Petunia, their crime-solving dog. Her work has appeared in (or is forthcoming from) The Southern Review, Guernica, Hobart, The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Diagram.