The question of origins is a tricky one, metaphysically speaking. In his book Why Does the World Exist?, New Yorker writer Jim Holt helps clarify the issue as he digs into the nitty-gritty details about the fundamental mystery surrounding the creation of the universe. The first problem: If there were a creator (for example, God), the idea of how that creator itself came to be leads us into the realm of tautology. “Being omnipotent, He might have bootstrapped Himself into existence,” Holt writes, explaining one case made in favor of God. “He was, to use the Latin phrase, causa sui.” The second problem: If there’s some sort of scientific explanation for the universe (we know the Big Bang happened, but we still don’t know why the Big Bang happened), the issue isn’t simply that we don’t have enough information. As Holt describes: “A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause. But any physical cause is by definition part of the universe to be explained. Thus any purely scientific explanation of the existence of the universe is doomed to be circular . . . It can’t account for the origin of the primal physical state out of nothing.”
There’s a paradox inherent in creation itself: something can’t come from nothing, but it also must come from nothing.
That dizzying idea is the foundation for Chet’la Sebree’s new collection of poems, Blue Opening. Sebree is the author of two previous books, Mistress and Field Study, and her latest poems take the ideas of origins, beginnings, and creation and inspect them under various lenses: the body, procreation, religion, science, art. By exploring chronic illness, the biology of pregnancy, biblical exegesis, interstellar cosmology, and ars poetica, Sebree deftly connects each to that paradox of creation—how bodies, people, poems, even universes all simultaneously come from something and from nothing. In her poems, we see how what may seem like an impossible academic problem for philosophers and physicists is actually one that we encounter and engage with—and maybe even resolve—in our everyday lives.
In the poem “Unknown Origin,” the speaker recalls her childhood, seeing pictures of her family from before she was born and being confused as to why she’s not there:
But where was I, I’d ask—sticky, sugared palm pressed against wax sheen of photo.
Even at three years old, I was existential. Understood I wasn’t yet there
but not where I was before I had fingers, toes, and crusty, boogered nose.
I still don’t.
Sebree contrasts that “crusty, boogered nose”—a visceral image for anyone who’s ever had, or been, a child—with the heady question of where we are before we’re born. We don’t know if there’s any sort of pre-existence to human consciousness, but the physicality Sebree conjures—particularly of a gunky little kid—cannot be denied.
While the questions that fuel Sebree’s poems are abstract, the poems themselves are anything but. She deploys a variety of forms, including list poems, erasures, and even a crown of sonnets (arranged as prose poems) to investigate everything from autoimmune illness to the formation of stars. In her rigorous examination of the idea of beginnings, Sebree creates a book whose poems each fulfill their own artistic ambitions while striving toward an answer that is out of reach but rewarding to reach for all the same.
One of the reasons Blue Opening is so successful, both on the individual level of the poems and as a collection, is that Sebree never strays too far into the abstract. Every contemplation is counterbalanced by the corporeal—by bodies capable of feeling and being felt. For example, “Begin Again” opens wondering how different academic fields contradict each other:
All the -ologies in which I have interest conflict.
In archeology, dinosaurs didn’t coexist with Eve,
but in theology all intelligent design lived in Eden.
But the poem doesn’t dwell on the friction between the archeological and theological; it quickly pivots back to the biological:
The beginning makes as much sense as
how spermed egg begets infant: ab ovo, or
from the beginning, or from the egg, but
what about atom and Adam?
And no matter the field—scientific, spiritual, artistic—the poem concludes, every beginning is a mystery:
All the words for where we’re from
used to be none other than guttural grunts.
All of unknown origin.
Perhaps, the poem is pointing us toward that idea that the only way to know an origin is to understand that it can’t be known. The words we have—tangled up in relation to each other—will never get us to a beginning. And maybe, there isn’t even a beginning we can get to.
Blue Opening doesn’t ultimately resolve the fundamental paradox of creation, of how something comes from nothing. (If it did, I’d imagine Sebree would win the Nobel Prizes for Physics, Literature, and maybe even Peace simultaneously.) It instead shows us that the question isn’t one we need to solve. Perhaps the mystery isn’t an obstacle to knowledge, but a path to understanding. In the collection’s final poem, “An End,” the speaker reconsiders a past conversation:
I once told a love they only loved
the beginnings of things, and I wonder
now, years after our end, if this was
a reflection, projection, for I love
the slip and grip of an unfamiliar
pen in my hand, the crisp white or
pale beige of a new notebook page,
the first key flip in an apartment
ready to be smudged . . .
The new pen, the fresh sheet of paper, the key—they’re all images of beginning, but they’re also physical objects in the world. The beginnings that the speaker loves are concrete things she can touch and hold in her hand. And uncovering an answer isn’t the same as living a life:
for there’s knowledge I don’t want
so I scramble search my way
back to the water, the garden, the egg.
The book ends on those three primal images of life’s beginning: the water that fuels it, the biblical garden that nurtured it, and the egg from which it grows.
The gift of this book is that by investigating origins, we can also fix our attention. Whether it’s the image of the crusty-nosed child looking at a photo album, the key turning in the lock of a new apartment, or a loved one’s hands dusted in Old Bay seasoning after a meal, they are all reminders of the world we live in every day. To begin is the first step to being. And wondering how something became is also the practice of appreciating what is.
