Redshifting & Blueshifting in the Worlds of Poetry

2.

How do we blueshift the worlds closest to us? 

I was watching my mother one day, in August, the day after I submitted my gap year request. A year stretched before me: a yellow-brick road leading to… no emerald palaces, no fields, but an end-point point in a line I had yet to draw. A year at home was not what I had been expecting when I initially began planning out my gap year. While I was explaining to her what I hoped to do, I turned. She was standing by the window, over the cutting board, slicing pieces of lotus. I heard the knife cutting, landing bluntly on the wood; I saw the thin, translucent slices, wet and shiny, fall in a domino-like succession. 

The window was open. She was wearing a fraying navy coat with several buttons undone and she was wearing a bunched brown hairband and there was a spray of moles beneath the pale downy slope of her forehead and I could not see myself in her, for a moment, at all. She was criticizing my plan for my gap year and giving suggestions. She was preparing dinner. A scene I had all seen before.

Realizing I would be spending an entire year, passing through this exact same position, seeing my mother in the exact same pose, every day, she seemed so strange, so strange. Like if I could peer with a telescope inside her there would be a tangled mass of blue paint, an abstract painting in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The detail blew towards me. It was dizzying: not with active speed, but with total and commanding force. Because, in a way, I knew the surface of this person so well, I broke her down into a series of images, disintegrated the meaning attached to each of them.

We compact and densify the wavelengths of the life and people we see directly around us. What was once an intoxicating story of growth and endurance of your close friend or mother occupies a high-energy gamma-ray burst of light in your mind, a brief and luminous knife of marvel that cuts through the fog in your mind. It lapses into nothingness.

Imagine yourself in a dream-world, driving through a bridge. Below you is water. Above you is fog. You know what an eagle is meant to sound, look, and fly like. One flutters past you, its wingtip brushing the top of your car and leaving a white gash. You meet its eyes, and all you see is the protrusion of the wishbone, and you think, How barbaric––what it does to live, what it uses to continue flying on. You can see the individual molecules respiring mechanically and wonder about the sweat and blood it digests, the entrails it tears into its beak. 

In poetry that blueshifts, we are so up close to an object hurtling towards us that we willfully blind ourselves to all facets except for one or several, taking what we want from a situation. We compress and densify until the multiple pieces shatter. 

Because this object is not only close to us, but actively moving towards us, we take comfort in the knowledge that it will eventually reach our side, maybe even be incorporated into ourselves. This familiarity drives us into oversimplicity. We are glutted on the detail that we so crave with redshifting, and the joy of understanding starts to wear off. We already have solved the mystery. And so we pull backwards, simplifying the surface into parts that we can easily devour. In the process, we lose our grasp on an understanding of the entire idea.

In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” the narrator, a reclusive, working-class man in love with a well-endowed socialite woman, murders her and treats her corpse as a doll, describing her by the movement of her body parts alone. We can read this as an example of how the blueshifting allows the viewer to systematically dissect what is in front of them. 

Because the narrator is of a lower class living in a remote cottage, while his lover’s parents and societal standards will not allow them to marry, he first waits for her to enter. It seems that the act was not premeditated, as in the beginning, he remains silent while she woos him. 

She put my arm about her waist,

    And made her smooth white shoulder bare,

And all her yellow hair displaced,

    And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,

    And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair...

During a storm, Porphyria enters the cottage, slipping off her gloves and soiled clothing and then coming to sit with the narrator. He idolizes her yellow hair and smooth white shoulder, listening to her say how she has “come through wind and rain” from the “gay feast” from her life in order to reach him tonight. With his ego thus boosted, the narrator shows himself in a jovial tone to be more psychotic than his initial narration suggested.

… That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

    Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

    In one long yellow string I wound

    Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she;

    I am quite sure she felt no pain.

As a shut bud that holds a bee,

    I warily oped her lids: again

    Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.

And I untightened next the tress

    About her neck; her cheek once more

Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:

    I propped her head up as before,

    Only, this time my shoulder bore

Her head, which droops upon it still:

    The smiling rosy little head,

So glad it has its utmost will,

    That all it scorned at once is fled… 

Every body part is dissected and given its own free will. The blue eyes are “laughing… without a stain,” while her cheek “blushed bright beneath my burning kiss.” The smiling head is detached from the body, and has “its utmost will.” By pulling apart Porphyria into the simplified surface-level parts, the narrator refuses to try to see ‘inside’ of her and humanize her thoughts. 

This is a violent example, a dark poem that results in the total destruction of a person by a reclusive man aiming to control a woman. When I read this for my class in senior year, I thought about how you can do that in your mind: seize reality and piece it apart, turn your eyes into a microscopic lens that magnifies the pieces of somebody until they become less than human. 

In so many poems, I feel language rushing up at me like this. “Grief,” by Matthew Dickman––I feel myself leaning into the rubbery grip of the purple gorilla, zooming in onto the ticks of the clock on the wall. Poetry feels synaptic, disconnected, and when I read, the most powerful pieces that remain in my mind are those that can manipulate those negative spaces between words and allow the words to connect in one continuous stream, as if they were wavelengths densified in their movement towards me. I know my mother. I know grief. In my gap year, sitting with my books under the moonlight of the park I’m in, wondering about what I’ll feel like when I’m a mother, wondering about how long it will take me to lose the memories of my grandmother who has passed away, I feel like my vision has turned into crumbs that form a spiral of kaleidoscopic pieces. 

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