Redshifting & Blueshifting in the Worlds of Poetry

1.

I was standing in a volcanic park and looking at the sky. Any picture I attempted to take came out as a blurry wash. So I stood in the numbing air––later, cold enough to form ice crystals on the outside of our tent while we slept––stepping through the patches of fallen moss on the dirt and watching the silvered points of glass in the air. Something crackled in the underbrush; the air smelled tasteful sans taste.

Lassen Volcanic Park, six hours’ worth of a car ride northbound from my home in Northern California, is famous for its night sky, unveiling a dome of brilliant white stars without the cloudy fog of light pollution. The stars blinked. Some of them smeared and smudged in my short-sighted vision, others as clear and hard as crystal bullets riddling fabric, I thought about how the Doppler effect––a phenomenon I had recently discovered in my astronomy class––wasn’t too far off from words.

The Doppler effect (n.): when wavelengths are shortened or lengthened depending on if the source of those wavelengths is moving towards the viewer or away from the viewer. For sounds, you might notice that a siren sounds high-pitched as it comes towards you and fades to a lower pitch as it moves away, or a bee’s buzz similarly growing high, and then low. Those are the wavelengths compressing and then elongating. Through reading poetry, we similarly manipulate, shorten, and magnify the stories around us, perception paralleling the movement of particles in physics.  

The Doppler effect also applies to light in the form of photons, which are discrete particles of light; they also double as ‘pockets’ of energy that can be absorbed or released by electrons as they jump up and down energy levels. When massive objects radiating great amounts of photons and moving at incredibly high velocities––in the case of astronomy, stars and other celestial bodies––move towards or away from us, the viewers on Earth, their photons are redshifted or blueshifted.

Blueshift is the compression of photons’ wavelengths as they turn more blue to the human eye on the visible light spectrum. Redshift is the elongation of photons’ wavelengths as they turn more red to the human eye on the visible light spectrum. 

I was several weeks into my gap year before college, and I spent much of my time alone, reflecting on what the people around me meant to me. My grandmother passed away, and my relatives struggled with COVID-19’s shutdowns in China. All of this I struggled to process without seeing it eye-to-eye. Because I was spending so much time reading, learning about my relationships to people by comparing them to fictional parallels, I was becoming myopic. By understanding the emotional reactions of grief, solitude, and love in the vacuum of text, I was losing sight––while simultaneously gaining so much detail it became overwhelming––of reality. As we navigate the ecosystems of poetry, the words themselves redshift and blueshift our view of reality.

p. 1/4