I was thinking about talking about sand and my book No Measure, but I think as a way to talk about both, I’m going to tell you about an experiment I conducted in October of 2023—almost exactly one year before the publication of the book and two years after I finished writing it—where I read all of Gertrude Stein’s one hundred ninety-three page poem Stanzas in Meditation out loud to myself. So I’ll tell you about what happened, and what I thought about afterward, and that will take us back to sand, and vibration—vibration through a plate—cymatics—makes the vibration visible, puts the sand into an arrangement though the grains remain uncountable—and No Measure, and I’ll end with reading a little bit from it.

Download essay here 

Audio recording of the last nine stanzas of Part 5, 8 Oct. 2023