Redshifting & Blueshifting in the Worlds of Poetry

3.

How do we redshift the worlds moving away from us? 

When I was six, my father left overseas to work in China. In spite of periodic visits where he came home for weeks at a time, I rarely saw him. I was alone for the majority of the time  outside of school hours in elementary school. My mother worked a full-time job, I didn’t have many neighbors or friends in our idyllic suburban, but hostilely silent, neighborhood, where English and AYSO soccer were the lingua franca and I still stumbled through any vowels that weren’t Mandarin, and I became familiar with my elementary school libraries in a way I never would have expected. 

The ‘ideal family’ that I saw on the sidelines of my soccer team drifted away from me. The more I read, the more I noticed the disparities between my home life, where my immigrant mother and I ate fruits silently, and I lacked the words to express my loneliness. Until last year, I didn’t even fully comprehend the word ‘repression’ and how it applied to my life. 

Before I moved to America, I lived in a small town in China for several years. You can walk through the streets and hear people chuckling, crowded around half-eaten rinds, smoking cigarettes, and fixing a stranger’s motorcycle still leaking smog into the amber streetlight. Or you can stop at a roadside shop where blue plastic stools teeter against the wall and ask the owner––who went to school with your aunt and owes your uncle a meal for something or other––for a piece of peeled sugarcane, and you can suck the cold juice from that on your way across the pond, dipping your feet in the spill of green water. The community was much more tangible and intimate than the one I found myself lacking in America.

After moving to the United States, suddenly, my life became sitting in my room at night and studying. I was extremely fortunate to have the luxury of having nothing to worry about except for my studies and loneliness. Still, my young self felt lost. Sitting in the libraries during my lunches, stories about young people with strange or non-traditional families, stories about young heroes overcoming great odds to save their families—through redshifting, I broadened and oversimplified my view of my father, and created parallel worlds of a world in which I had my full, Chinese family with me in America. When I stepped into a piece of text, I was always hazily conscious of my own life beyond its borders, and that reality grew distorted and glorified based on what I saw in the literature. 

We elongate, broaden, oversimplify, and caricature the life and people moving away from us. This is, in part, to ease the pain of loss. We can no longer rely on the stable presence of this family member, friend, classmate, or fixture in our lives, so we make up stories. We were never meant to be friends. Sometimes the opposite occurs: to sweeten the melancholia of loss into an alcohol, we turn that sadness into longing. 

Instead of understanding the internal workings of this concept, you latch onto the details still visible to you and fabricate with ease. Take the world of the dream, in which you are driving through the bridge. You hear the sounds of eagles receding into the fog above. You have a preconceived notion of a bird––although you cannot see the eagle. Immediately, you imagine its stiff feathers and disc-like eyes whirling above you. Despite having no knowledge of the inner workings of the animal, despite being unable to see the eagle at all, the image comes to your eyes in a flash. 

As people and phenomena pass out of our reach––like an absentee parent, or the dream of an idealistic and utopian world in which racial injustice is completely nonexistent––their image, in our mind’s eye, shrinks to a mere blip. In order to fill that space left behind by its shrinking, we strengthen its color and shape by adding on emotional narratives, crystallizing details that do not exist. 

In “Introduction to Quantum Theory” by Franny Choi, Choi creates a parallel universe in which brutal aspects of our world are heightened into a pacifist utopia. Her alternative universe looms in the distance as a small fantasy, moving steadily away from us with each new installment in the slow-motion wreck of the 21st century. 

There are only so many parallel universes

that concern us.     In one, he isn’t dead.

In another, you drink light with your hands

all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying

emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe

in which our mothers haven’t learned to wrap

their bones in each small grief they’ve found.

Progressing through new and heightened events of police brutality and the systematic take-down of journalists’ credibility through labeling unfavorable news as ‘false,’ a peaceful and harmonious world that Choi imagines marches away from us by the day. Still, seeing that spark on the horizon, by nature we extrapolate the idea of a world of total peace into one with its own characteristics and ticks: where we “drink light with [our] hands all winter,” “oceans pull the moon,” and “no one’s child washes / blue, ashore.” The creation of this redshifted universe becomes a source of comfort and stability. We revel in the longing and in the understanding that these receding ideas, in their movement away from us, are changing colors. 

Similarly, in “summer, somewhere” by Danez Smith, Smith similarly imagines an alternative universe in which Black boys are reborn in heaven. 

… sometimes a boy is born

right out the sky, dropped from

a bridge between starshine & clay.

one boy showed up pulled behind

a truck, a parade for himself

& his wet red gown. years ago

we plucked brothers from branches

unpeeled their naps from bark.

Our yearning latches onto these photons rippling ashore and elongates them. “sometimes a boy is born / right out of the sky, dropped from / a bridge between starshine & clay,” writes Smith. Immediately, the entry of the boy into this world is juxtaposed with the grotesque ways in which the boys died, parading in in “wet red gowns,” “clutching wicked metals,” and “wad[ing] here through their own blood.” As Smith shows the parable-like origins of these boys emerging from the sky, we see them from a distance, simplified enough to be holy; as he brings the poetic viewer’s panoramic view into a more tight camera angle, we see that Smith has drawn out the specificity of each horrible way in which the boys gained entry into this sanctum. 

Finally, Smith turns the view onto the reader. “grab a boy, spin him around. / if he asks for a kiss, kiss him. / if he asks where he is, say gone.” Moving away, relative to the viewer, the boys––a general group––then dissolve.

When I read this poem, I feel chills. The budding of imagined universes from discrete bits of reality is so aching and tender, like I am watching a forest grow in reverse. 

By reading the ‘redshifting’ of poems, I can understand how we superimpose our own narratives onto reality in order to allow ourselves the stability and indulgence of our emotions themselves, considering the fact that the source of our sensations is the chaotic and uncontrollable world. 

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