On the Origin of Measures - James Tadd Adcox
In the time of the ancients, Father Kircher writes, the size of things was determined by the body of the sovereign. The sovereign’s arm, from here to here, measured one ell; from here to here, on the sovereign’s hand, was a palmus minor, from here to here a palmus major. The full length of his thumb, starting from the wrist, was the cun, or lichas; the ald was the distance between his outstretched arms; the misó agóri the distance from his elbow to his knee; the barba-ictu was the length that his beard grew during the time it took for an observer to blink. Certain names were assigned to the length the sovereign could travel in a day, a half-day, a quarter, or a sixteenth. For the sake of practicality it was found expedient to record the sovereign’s measurements in lengths of string or iron rods, and to distribute these across his domain, to those areas beyond where the sovereign himself might have cause to visit; but these were understood to be copies, or copies of copies, always (however minutely) errant. Only the presence of the sovereign body itself could insure the true length. And so it was observed, Kircher writes, that the further one traveled from the capitol, the less trustworthy became the length of things; joints did not line up, bricks refused to lay flat. Of greater concern, however, was the changeable nature of the sovereign body itself. When the sovereign gained weight, or lost weight due to illness, subtle flaws appeared in the capital; cracks wended between stones; beams that once kissed now shrugged. Whole buildings seemed to exhale and inhale. As he aged and shrank, the capitol came to resemble and then surpass the outskirts in its flaws, until a day would come when the monarch died, and his palaces and beautiful mansions, and the palaces and mansions of the court, must be rebuilt, with new measurements from the new sovereign, themselves subject to the incertitudes of time and the body. This apocalypse was survived in only certain of the farthest provinces, whose lines had been drawn from a memory of a memory of a king who might never have existed.
Originally published by Mosh Lit, May 2019
James Tadd Adcox's work has appeared in Granta, 3:AM, and X-R-A-Y, among other places. He is a founding editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing. He is the author, most recently, of Denmark: Variations, a collection of sixty sets of instructions for variations on the play Hamlet.
