Chet'la Sebree's "Oceans could separate us, but no"
Thoughts on touch and constellations.
"Oceans could separate us, but no"
Oceans could separate us, but no matter where we stand in them, we're touching. Can the same be said of the night sky? ★ ★ ★ I've always sought the pole furthest from the one I know. ★ ★ ★ In Australia, I was lost under the Southern Cross. ★ ★ ★ But the reality is that I've never lived more than a few hours from home. from Field Study (FSG Originals, 2021)
I first encountered this poem in The FSG Poetry Anthology, a massive tome full of many of the poems by many of the poets FSG has published over the years, from Frank Bidart to Joseph Brodsky to Mahmoud Darwish to francine j. harris to Bill Knott and so many more.
To say that this is its own poem would be a lie, as the book that it is from — Sebree’s Field Study — is comprised of a single, long poem. A cento of sorts, filled as it is with quotes from Cathy Park Hong and Mikki Kendall and others. But in The FSG Poetry Anthology, this excerpt sits alone.
It’s funny, thinking of that, and thinking, too, of how this poem begins:
Oceans could separate us, but no matter where we stand in them, we're touching.
Yes — a poem about, of so many things, connectedness, pulled from a long poem, and put in a book to stand alone. In some ways, the very nature of this context helps enact the idea the poem wonders itself towards. As in: what does it mean to be touching? As in: how can we still be lost even when we are connected? As in: even when we are lost, are we really that far away from home? As in: when we are pulled away from something or someone, are we still close in some sort of way — and, if so, how close?
Sebree’s Field Study is a remarkable book that thinks towards questions of identity and desire and so much more. Not long after — in fact, immediately after — the excerpt that comprises today’s poem, Sebree writes:
I worry that being nobody's happily ever after makes me nobody. To be nobody is to be no body is to be weightless. I could use more levity. I worry that not being anyone's happily ever after makes me no one, which could also mean I'm never alone.
I love that line: I could use more levity. I think first of levity as humor, and then of levity as lightness, as weightlessness. I think of how that works in this moment — how such a desire is both to make fun of one’s situation and also to float away from it. And I think of how that very idea of doubleness is at the heart of today’s poem, too. Not necessarily the doubleness of humor and seriousness, or of weight and weightlessness, but rather of loneliness and connectedness, of lostness and rootedness — of feeling both such things at once. Or of wanting one and feeling the other. Of wanting touch but finding touch’s absence. Of wanting solitude but finding only company.
In an interview with McSweeney’s, Sebree writes:
All my speakers are taking up space to be messy, and in that messiness they’re fully human.
And, a little later in Field Study, Sebree writes:
You have to be twice, my mother said.
What a remarkable way to put it, I think now. That to be human is to be messy. That you have to be twice, nearly at all times. That you have to be so much, nearly always. Perhaps that is part of the condition of being human — to be so much at once. Even when so much feels irreconcilable. Even when so much feels as if it doesn’t intersect. Or even when, if something does intersect — a cross of stars, perhaps, in the sky above — you still feel lost. You have to be twice. You have to be twice and then some.
I think one reason I found myself so drawn to this poem when I saw it The FSG Poetry Anthology was because, not long before, I had been asked to briefly cover my high school’s AP Calculus class and, in that moment, had given my yearly half-joking, half-serious lecture on asymptotes. Asymptotes as metaphor, obviously. Calculus as the stuff of literature, which is the stuff of life.
An asymptote, if you don’t know already, is a mathematical term, one that illustrates a line that forever-attempts to intersect a curve, but never does. It is, in other words, a kind of illustration of Zeno’s Paradox — this notion that you could walk halfway to someone for literally forever. I love asymptotes. I assume I have written about them before. I love them because — and this is what I told those students (who I also teach, as I teach all the seniors at my high school) on that random day — they illustrate, for me, the complexity of the human experience.
An asymptote, in other words, illustrates our desire to know one another despite our knowledge — which we hold at the very same time as our desire — that we will never fully know one another. An asymptote illustrates what love can feel like: a daily commitment to move closer to someone despite knowing, as you move closer, that you will never fully become that someone, that you will never intersect. An asymptote illustrates the act of waking into each day, the act of taking a single step, the act of moving at all in this life that promises nothing but the failure of complete intersection, that promises only our finitude, our uncertainty, and our limitation. Yes, in the space between an asymptote and the line it is trying to intersect is our hope, our love, our faith, our belief. In that tiny, forever-getting-smaller and yet ever present space, is what makes us, I believe, human.
I love asymptotes. I love what they express about our finitude and our limitation. But I wonder, too, as I read this poem today, if I am wrong about the idea that we never fully touch. I think again of these lines:
Oceans could separate us, but no matter where we stand in them, we're touching. Can the same be said of the night sky?
And I think, too, of the idea of a cento — of a poem that is comprised of a series of voices, a poem made up of other people’s words. Like a quilt, of sorts. Something to remind you of home. I think of Sebree’s epigraph to Field Study, from Tressie McMillan Cottom, which reads:
Black women do not have all the answers. We are not superheroes, and ours is not the definite worldview. But we are trustworthy subjects, of our own experiences and of ways of knowing.
I found myself so struck by the final sentence of that epigraph, of phrases like trustworthy subjects and ways of knowing. Such a moment makes me wonder if one goal of life is not to know each other so well that we become or intersect completely with one another, but rather to understand each other as fully trustworthy subjects, inhabiters of unique and powerful experience and knowledge. To respect the space between us, and still to reach across it. To make connection out of a distance that will forever exist. Maybe that is the kind of touching that Sebree’s poem illustrates.
It feels less, then, about the intersection that an asymptote makes impossible and more about the constellation that comes when you draw the points that are still on the graph. Sometimes, intersection feels like ownership. It feels possessive, overbearing. In this current moment, there is a sense in which being known feels like an invasion. All throughout the day, scrolling or buying or scanning, we become algorithmically calculated, our various actions becoming known and then used as fodder to predict our future actions. This kind of intersection — between each of our individual selves and a predictive, seemingly all-knowing force — feels both too easy and too much. It feels like a reduction of who we are while also being, at the same time, an invasion of who we are.
It is strange, then, in this moment, how easily we are made visible — to one another, to corporations, to massive internet servers looming in massive rooms — and yet how distant we seem to feel. My likeness, my face, my purchases, my searches — the strange stuff that makes up part of me — are spread more widely across this world than I probably could ever imagine. Perhaps I am more known than ever before was possible. And yet, if this is intersection, I don’t know if I want it.
I think of the opening line of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, spoken by one of her leads, Eddie, alone, all by himself. It’s one of the great opening lines, opening sentences, opening anythings. Here it is:
The shit that happens is not meant to be understood.
And I think, too, of the form of the cento — this desire for constellation rather than intersection. I think of how grateful that is, how graceful, how humble. I think of how a poem like today’s, or an entire book like Field Study, is, by its very form, an exercise in humility and limitation — an invitation to participate in this world with others because of the mystery and because of the variety of truth. It is the searching that makes up who we are, I think, maybe less so than the knowing.
I think, also, of this cento by Cameron Awkward-Rich, which contains lines from so many poets: Justin Phillip Reed, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, sam sax, Ari Banias, C. Bain, Oliver Bendorf, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall. It begins:
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to & now I have a choice repair a world or build a new one inside my body
And it continues, later on:
when I call out all my friends are there everyone we love is still alive gathered at the lakeside like constellations
There’s that word: constellations. A sense of connection without possession. A kind of humanness — to make the effort to reach across space, from one star to another (these things that we are made of), and make out of empty space a kind of shape that means love, or continuing, or living, or anything and more.
To be human must mean to retain a sense of mystery, to forever maintain a gap between ourselves, a gap that we fill with the actions that make up our humanness — our desire and our love and our belief and so much more. Instead of wondering about when we will ever intersect completely, I wonder: what can we constellate from our experiences that will forever be entirely our own, and, as such, will never be fully known or understood? What shapes and understandings can we draw from these further away places than intersection presupposes? In other words: if we can never fully know one another, what can we learn from the space that forever remains in between? And how can we center love there? And compassion? And touch, even if touch is just the forever-reaching to hold a hand?
Some notes:
I had an essay published in Longreads two weeks ago. You can read it here. Thank you for reading it, if you have the time. It is about a year of learning (when I sent in the essay, it was just titled “Learning”) and what such learning has taught me — which is to say, more about about how to cope with the uncertainty of life than anything else. What is the word for that, I write in this essay (and still wonder), for the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?
Here is a list of urgent fundraisers for Gaza, if you have the means.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.
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Asymptotes!