Contributor’s Marginalia: Leah Falk on “Before Time” by Claudia Emerson

In Claudia Emerson’s “Before Time,” measurement’s the matter. In science, music, and mathematics, to measure is to reach an agreement with others, to say: this phenomenon can be expressed in standardized units. To say, let me show you, let me translate from my experience to yours. Measurement is why we know Mars is more than a pebble above the horizon, how we know the human heart can be approximated by the size of a fist. To measure the height of a child in centimeters is to make someone an ocean away understand a little of how it feels to stand next to or embrace him. Far from being the cold, less human cousins of words, the units we share with others can communicate precision of size, weight, time and force – they’re the score for architects, orchestras, and aerospace engineers.

But of course, as every home cook or self-taught musician knows, we can also measure without those units, using the body as a scale. Such measurements may not be as easy to repeat, and so often stay close to home, transmitted only through teaching or telling. Science is such a magnetic subject for poets because poetry exists at the junction between these two types of measurement: the agreed-upon accentual-syllabic rhythmic unit and received forms bonded to the poet’s private experience and sense of rhythm and tone.

“Before Time” opens with a catch-22 most of us barely recall: that to agree on the units of distance and time that allow us to communicate with others, we often have to sacrifice something of our own individual experience of the world, the function of the body as a personal measuring tool. (Anyone who has tried to record a recipe from a grandparent knows this problem well.) In “Before time,” this is expressed as an engineer’s conundrum, where bodily or “local” measurement is a barrier to standard, or “real” understanding:

The inexactitude of early measure
Claude did try to unlearn: that space between
the mother’s last breath and what you think is
the last breath rib-fixed, then as though fated.
Or the time it takes a melon to gorge itself on its own seed…”

The first irony of the poem is that the character Claude’s resistance to “early measurement” is resistance to what appear to be his own precise observations, the raw material of science. Such immeasurable, or inexactly measured, experience and observation isn’t so easily overridden by the world’s standard, as Claude discovers: “And when you cannot unlearn it,/ you turn to something else,” the measurement, in this case, of time – the building and fixing of clocks.

As a poet who often makes use of scientific material, I’ve often bristled against poems that seem intent on demonstrating that scientific inquiry is a mask for suppressed emotion or tunnel vision (yes, Whitman, yours, too). Emerson, even as she begins “Before Time” by positioning the felt against the measured, avoids this trap. Yes, her “you” “find[s], after all, the falling weight/ learn[s] to ignore a bee in blossom,” which sets up opposition between the observed natural world and precise measurement by machines, but the machine as an antidote to the rush of nature is turned on its head by the end of the poem’s first section. Unrelenting measurement, it seems, especially of time, can overshadow its object:

And you see the town become overrun with them – time pieces
set on their night-tables, with faces the size

of looking glasses, their small bells they bring you to fix –
wake them to the nothing there is.

Reading this, I’m reminded of a poem I have on constant loop in my head, as a writer with a day job: Tomas Transtromer’s “On the Outskirts of Work.” In the borders between the segments of our days, Transtromer argues, bloom wild ecosystems, if we would only remember to look away from our schedules.

Suddenly, in the face of so much measurement it’s almost meaningless, the imprecision of “the time it takes…for a gourd to gorge on the pith/ of emptiness” seems precious. How do we go back? Having learned the language of standard measurement, having code-switched into the lingua franca of clock-measured time, how to keep that “early measurement” alive – not just for our own enlightenment, but also so that our tools can help us comprehend greater portions of the world? Or will “what lords over” us, “deeds/ and wills, deaths, weddings, births,” the punctuation of our lives, always hold sway?

Emerson asks these questions – fundamentals, really, of scientific inquiry as well as best science fiction – just as her character, fixing the gears of the big town clock, mourns his role in encouraging the public to privilege the clock over their attention to nature’s measurement: the kind of attention that must have made him a good machinist.

…You set it all
to the rights again should they ever look up
to see what they think must have been pigeons
you have made afraid by the perfected strike of noon.

Ending in the subjunctive, Emerson allows us to hold both kinds of observation together: fixed to do its job well, the clock has the potential to be a wake-up call, to urge a measurement-dependent public to remember the strength of their senses.

To its strength, the poem doesn’t end with a condemnation of either the measurement of time or the organic experience of it. Emerson reminds us that clock-time exists in the same world as time measured by pigeons and gourds, and we can’t count our own days without witnessing the confluences and contradictions of nature with the way we study it. The relationship between nature and science Emerson champions, rather than the adversarial one inherited by so many western poets, is instead a relationship between teacher and student: the clock, rather than erasing the sun and stars, learns from them, sings with them, extends their light. At the same time, like any good science fictionist, Emerson is concerned with the limits of machines, only as good as the brains that build and fix them. While our machines are busy counting, what might have escaped their measurement? Look up: a kit of pigeons may be flying above; a fat melon may be ready to separate from the vine. Somewhere, someone may be breathing his last breath, and we must not miss it.