The Impossibility Of Being A Sea Cucumber

The Impossibility Of Being A Sea Cucumber: Szymborska’s Broken Whisper And What It Means For Us

By Jenica Amalita

We are not sea cucumbers. Despite our intelligence, technical prowess, flexibility, talents, and ability to morph into anything we wish to be, we cannot be sea cucumbers. And Wisława Szymborska tells us why in her poem “Autotomy:”

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees. 

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be. 

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores. 

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair. 

If there are scales, the pans don’t move.
If there is justice, this is it. 

To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.

Jennifer Clarvoe in Non Omnis Moriar: Reading Szymborska in Translation writes that it’s quite easy to mistake “autotomy” for “autonomy” as you read about a sea cucumber that’s able to take control of fate by cutting off whatever holds it back, by separating itself from that part that causes suffering. Clarvoe talks about a moment of realization: autotomy isn’t freedom of choice, but a reflex. It’s an involuntary act that entails leaving a part of yourself behind without wondering why you need to do so. It’s thoughtless, and that’s what makes it violent.

But freedom of choice, an inability to separate oneself from whatever could harm us, and an inherent desire to prevent violence in all its forms are not all that keep us from ever turning into a sea cucumber. In Szymborska’s eyes, the biggest difference is that a sea cucumber can enact justice, can somehow understand that a predator seeking to devour it isn’t doing so for maniacal pleasure but for survival. And so, it tears itself in half, dooming half of itself to death. But it doesn’t allow either itself to die or its attacker to succumb to death. Maybe it doesn’t recognize that its being attacked is because the predator is being killed from within, or maybe it does. Either way, it doesn’t allow for justice to tip her scale in favor of anyone. 

The sea cucumber doesn’t question what justice is, but it knows how to establish it. The sea cucumber doesn’t need to be blindfolded, afraid she will choose wrong. The sea cucumber knows that leaving behind a part of itself can be a form of salvation for both itself and the cause of its danger.

Bogdana Carpenter, in Wisława Szymborska and the Importance of the Unimportant writes about how Szymborska hesitates from an overt implication of what is good and what is evil. She sticks to a neutral stance because she understands that life is lived in uncertainty. This uncertainty is what leads to openness. It leads to our questioning the world around us, which enables us to occupy the world with more courage, more resilience, more hope. In order to do this, Mimi Thompson, in The Joy of Listening: Three Voices in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborska, writes that her poems involve a deep skepticism which allows for deviations from the established and the accepted. 

Szymborska’s holothurian, while seeming to somewhat disagree with this norm, doesn’t. The sea cucumber itself might not agree with our definition of goodness, safety, and justice, but Szymborska points to another way it disagrees with us. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, abyss means “a very deep hole that seems to have no bottom” and “a difficult situation that brings trouble or destruction.” “An abyss appears in the middle of its body”, is, by far, the most interesting line in the poem. Our definition of abyss tells us to stay away from it or, as we are instructed by Nietzsche, disallow it from perverting us. But here, in an act of righteous glory, Szymborska shows us a creature that creates an abyss for itself, that turns potential destruction into justice and salvation. In “In Praise of Self-Deprecation,” Szymborska writes:

“The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations. 

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it. 

The killer-whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light. 

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.”

The sea cucumber is not an anomaly. It is not saintly or self-sacrificing. It simply is. And so are buzzards and panthers and piranhas and snakes. They simply exist; they are simply themselves. In this way, by juxtaposing life vis-à-vis how we see life, Szymborska can finally show us why we can never be sea cucumbers: we think too much, we worry too much, we let life get in the way of living. Carpenter writes about how Szymborska’s poetry stands apart from the norm because she refuses to reflect in abstractions, only in ambiguities. Her oeuvre is composed entirely of a variety of concrete, forgettable, or unforgettable moments that make up history. We can see this playing out in “Autotomy” too. Szymborska here has captured a seemingly inconsequential moment—that of a sea cucumber escaping a predator’s attack—and showed the human something about the human condition. 

Our collective truth is simply that we cannot not be human. That our aspirations to perfection only result in despair, as perfection is not something we can contain within ourselves. The rest of “Autotomy” reads:

“We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry. 

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out. 

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar—
just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers. 

The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.”

Szymborska, as already stated, wishes to breathe hope into our world. The way she goes about doing this is by acknowledging brokenness and injustice. The line “We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true,” when read all on its own, points to the truth—that we live our lives in conflict, that we are broken into multitudes of opposing sides without even knowing why. Unlike the sea cucumber that divides itself to live, we divide ourselves to die. At the end of this line lies despair. But Szymborska completely turns the narrative around, changes the emotion associated with this unnecessary division, and exchanges one form of truth for another with the simple inclusion of the word but.

By transforming historical truth into poetic truth—our division is not that of race or nationality or religion or gender or caste—she transforms what we make of ourselves. Our division is now a division of “flesh and poetry,” of transience and eternity. Ironically, poetry is introduced as a broken whisper. Because “broken whisper” precedes poetry, and since humans are trained to live in binaries, the assumption that immediately follows is that our broken whispers are our souls. Szymborska lets us think whatever we want to think. And once we are done thinking, she corrects us. 

She breaks the binaries we look through, and says that our souls are more than the opposite of our flesh, that what truly opposes our flesh is poetry. “Flesh,” as used in the poem, now urges the reader to contemplate what it really and truly means. Szymborska’s oeuvre contains many poems that deal with Christian themes, and this poem silently stands at the end of the line. “Flesh” is malice, rage, deceit, selfishness, greed, hatred, jealousy, pride. Flesh is what divides us, not the abyss. Flesh, an internal force, turns us into the predator that kills itself unless a sea cucumber exists that allows us to live on, live on in beauty and in pain.

It is ironic then that the part of us that gets broken off is only a whisper, only a quickly dying out laughter. It is ironic that the part of us that allows for incomplete death is transient in and of itself; that poetry, in being wrested almost forcefully away from our bodies to be consumed by others, is what allows us to keep living. Unlike the sea cucumber that tries to escape from the ‘other,’ the human condition seems pitiful in that we need to escape or save ourselves from ‘one another.’ But it is also this irony that promises “non omnis moriar,” I will not fully die. And we are promised this because “The abyss doesn’t divide us. / The abyss surrounds us.” The threat of endless despair, of unwanted destruction, hovers over us and around us, but it cannot penetrate us. It cannot tear us apart or doom us to death. And this isn’t simply because we aren’t sea cucumbers. It’s because we were never meant to wield destruction in our favor; we were meant to thrive despite its existence.

References:

Cambridge Dictionary. “Abyss.” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/abyss Accessed 17 April, 2025.

Carpenter, Bogdana. “Wisława Szymborska and the Importance of the Unimportant.” World Literature Today Vol 71 Iss 1, Winter 1997, pp 8-12. https://doi.org/10.2307/40152553

Clarvoe, Jennifer, “Non Omnis Moriar”: Reading Szymborska in Translation.” New Ohio Review. 19 January, 2009. https://newohioreview.org/2009/01/19/non-omnis-moriar-reading-szymborska-in-translation/.

“In Praise of Self-Deprecation.” Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wisława Szymborska (Trans. Magnus J Krynski & Robert A Maguire). West Sussex, Princeton University Press, 1981.

Thompson, Mimi. “The Joy of Listening: Three Voices in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborska.” CMC Senior Theses. 2732. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2732

Szymborska, Wisława. “Autotomy.” MAP: Collected and Last Poems (Trans. Clare Cavangh & Stanisław Barańczak). Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.