Daisy Atterbury, The Kármán Line

 

The Kármán line is the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármán line is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altitude region of the atmosphere. When they say altitude they’re thinking in terms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line the Earth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight. (“after star death.”)

I’m struck by Santa Fe, New Mexico-based poet, essayist and scholar Daisy Atterbury’s The Kármán Line (Chicago IL/Cleveland OH/Iowa City IO: Rescue Press, 2024), a hybrid/lyric memoir around space travel, cosmology, planetary bodies and the logic of landscape, all wrapped around the impossible abstract of the Kármán line, that edge between earth and outer space. As she writes, mid-way through: “We become identified with a wound, you said, and I am like sure, let me. I persist in autobiography.” Set in the nebulous between-space of prose poem and essay/memoir, Atterbury weaves her narratives around what is difficult to precisely capture, allowing for the betweenness to capture betweenness in startling ways. Writing of asteroids in a piece titled “Binary Asteroids,” she offers: “Perhaps like people in my life, these stones can be classified as falls or finds: falls, seen falling to the Earth and then collected; finds, chance discover with no record of a fall. In 1492, a large stone meteorite fell near Ensisheim, Alsace, one of the first known recorded falls. In 1895, my grandfather’s family left Alsace-Lorraine after it was annexed from France by Germany. When my mother was forced to enlist in the German army, they fled to the United States.” Opening with a list of “places (in no particular order).” Atterbury’s The Kármán Line is constructed via a sequence of sections, most of which are composed via prose—“after star death.,” “troposphere.,” “stratosphere.,” “mesosphere.,” “thermosphere.,” “exosphere.” and “epilogue.”—as she works through the layers of this particular line, attempting to discern the threads that accumulate into that single line of thought. And, oh, what distances she travels, even as she focuses on such intricated detail. As her piece “Roads of the Dead” reads, in part:

The Severan Marble Plan of Rome is a carved marble rendering, a map of ancient Rome based on property records. Its size complicates its ongoing digital reconstruction.

The marble map is a blueprint of every architectural feature of the ancient city, from buildings to monuments to staircases. The map’s carved blocks once covered a wall inside the Templum Pacis, but all surviving pieces have been shipped to the floor of a Stanford University warehouse to be scanned and catalogued. The 1,186 surviving marble fragments make up only ten percent of the original marble plan. Using 3D modeling, the Computer Science department is digitally reconstructing the whole.

The Severan Marble Plan project is a study in method. Virtual teams of engineers, archaeologists, and researchers from the Sovraintendenza of the City of Rome solve the puzzle by using shape-matching algorithms to digitally construct the jigsaw based on matching forms. That the process is “painstaking and slow” is no deterrent.

The original plan is detailed, accurate, and consistent in scale because it was copied from precise contemporary surveys of the city of Rome, produced from cadastral records. Carving mistakes and small irregularities remain in the original map. Its reproduction is made all the more difficult because of this lingering trace of the hand.

In the 1750s, a European mapmaker cut a wooden map of the British Empire into pieces as an educational tool for the children. In the 1990s, puzzle-making attained status as an aristocratic pastime.

I’m going to Spaceport America.

What becomes interesting, also, is how her sections of pieces, set more traditionally into the shapes of poems, suggest themselves as asides to the main narrative as variations on the Greek Chorus, offering an alternate perspective on the main action, otherwise tethering together those elements of narrative.

You cant rely on
structure these folded
matchbooks I take one
greased packet of fire sauce
This makes a very large
salsa verde, ten calories

The way you discovered
money, you pissed me off
when we touched, I sort of
peeled back, a paint strip falling
from the pole. But we keep
contact. I muscle myself
into a tight shirt, press my face
against a glass pane, make notes

Towards future health
wondering if the problem is lack
of calories or ritual
lack. Dry as a bone
and full of vacancies