This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky.

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857.

I walked to a high place and slept at the top. The air there was thin. Someone sleeping in the space adjacent was ill. Coughs punched through the wall in the night. But wall is not the accurate word for the thin sheets of particle board that divided the space. A quilt hung by clothespins would’ve caught the sound better, baseball into mitt as opposed to baseball through wax paper. “Altitude sickness” had been whispered in the courtyard in the evening as the sun did a better and better job hiding itself behind the mountains, sending megaphones of cold light toward whispers of clouds. In bed, I worried as the sounds of the sickness graveled and percussed their way to my ears. Tunnel of throat, dark cavity of lung. Breath yolky and frothed. Go down, I urged the person in my mind. Go down. Get lower where your lungs and blood can feed on the oxygen they need. I wanted them to stop coughing and I did not want them to stop coughing because I feared that a stopped cough meant dead.

I lay in bed that night—a plywood platform on which I spread my sleeping bag—wearing double the regular amount of pants, four layers of shirts, a down vest, a wool hat. I pulled the hood of the bag over my head to muffle the coughs. I did not fear contagion, but the sickness in the next room meant the sickness was possible in my room, too. And by room I mean my body. I was far away, higher than I’d ever been on earth. I was afraid. I did not want to die. And it seemed so lonely to die so far away from everyone I loved.

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Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

Albert Aublet, Selene, 1880

Objects we use to flirt with the sky:

Kites

Fountains.

Hammocks.

Ice skates.

Balloons.

Weather vanes.

Parachutes.

In November, the last time I was on an airplane, it was a rainy day in the Northeast. As the plane picked up speed along the runway, we were pressed against the seats in a sensation I always associate with sex. I inhaled and held my good-luck rock. The moment when the whole heft of the airplane leaves the surface of the earth is a moment of enormous erotic charge. The rise and press and all-at-once feeling of elsewhere, a temporary reprieve from the regular pull. In liftoff, in the erotic moment, we are freed of something.

What are we freed of? Gravity’s tug, time’s nonstop forward surge. Time surrounds us, spreading forever in all directions. And gravity still applies, but we are entered into a changed awareness of weight. There is more and less of it at once. We are both relieved of it (I’m flying! I’m dissolving!) and under a stronger spell of its power (shoulders pressed against a cushioned place; gut in hips).

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Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

Antonio Correggio, Jupiter and Io (digitally altered), 1540

How many languages does the rain speak? Is anyone fluent in all of them? Are all of us fluent in all of them?

Have you also suffered not being able to balance language with non-language? When we’re not with each other in the usual ways, not in person, so much of what we communicate—with a tick of the shoulder, the slight bow of the head, the hand through the hair, the cross of a leg, blood rising to the neck, the hand upon another’s knee, or chest against chest in embrace—is unavailable, muted. We have words, which we toss back and forth to each other, through screens, through phones, now and then through letters in the mail. For so long I thought of words as distancers, approximations. So much gets expressed when we sit together in the same room, vibrating at each other. Peter Matthiessen writes of the meaninglessness of trying to express the inexpressible in words:

The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

The time has come for a new language. We can vibrate with the tulip petals, the sunset, the morning light in the asparagus fern on the windowsill. We can share that ring. Between us, though, for now, words are what we have.

Sky. Rhymes with high and fly and why. Rhymes with eye and bye and die. Stay with me.

There’s breath in the word. Each one of its three letters makes itself known. S hisses with space and air, curves like clouds, like the paths of the wind, the sound of shifting leaves against streets and sidewalks. Which leads to the tall stalk of K, like the edge of a cliff falling into the sky. K—every edge that the sky comes up against. Skyscrapers, peaks, the bark on all the trunks, each rock. K—the craters where the sky sinks in. K—the kaleidoscope. The cliff and the kaleidoscope, the hard edge and all the colors spinning. And Y, eye, I. Like the S, the Y keeps coming. It lasts out the mouth, cold and hot at once. Eye for all-seeing sky, eye that absorbs its light, its sun god, its glowing, pearly moon. Eye that strains to see as far as the eye can see. And also I. I and sky. I and all. I am yours, Sky. I belong to you. I am in you.

Ég is the word for sky in Hungarian. My English-speaking mind adds another g and the sky becomes a whole, huge, endless egg, we inside suspended, hung in the albumen (from the Latin albus, white), also known as the glaire (from the Latin clarus, bright or clear).

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Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist. First appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888)

Rare right now, the airplanes. Before, the planes taking off from Logan tracked a path I saw from my pillow in bed, high lights wing-blinking in the night sky in ascent from Boston. Not anymore. Not for now. Before February of this year, the planes blurred into the texture of the everyday, cigarette wisps of contrails, sky-height roar, as regular as the honking geese, which sometimes I notice and sometimes disappear into the familiar static of any afternoon, by the river. Now, I see an airplane and think: Who’s going anywhere? And why? Then I remind myself it could be cargo, small packages, love letters. To see an airplane now is to be aware of both presence and lack: Oh, look, there one is; oh, gosh, I notice because they’ve been mostly gone. And then comes the press of knowing, the weight across the chest, the reminder why.

The gravity of knowing. “The more you know the more you think,” Anne Carson said recently. And the more you think the more you question. What are we supposed to know? What’s better sensed than understood? What happens when the gravity of knowing threatens to tear apart and turn upside down the way the world has existed for you? Do you run away?

I pursued some knowing recently, and regretted it. The amount of feet in a mile is a number that’s never stuck with me. I asked a distance calculator to convert 35,000 feet—classic airplane cruising altitude—into miles. When it delivered the answer—6.6287879 miles—I thought, I’ve made a mistake, or it has. This cannot be. Six point six miles up into the sky?

If I were to take a 35,000 foot walk, I could leave my apartment, head more or less due south, and in a little over two hours, reach the Franklin Park Zoo. Two hours on foot and I could look a tiger in the eye. Seems like dreaming. (It’s not an option now: the animals are all locked in.) But six point six miles up? It is a fact I wish I could un-know. It disrupts my comfort. Am I initiating some of you into this distress? If I suffer in knowing, does it mean you ought to as well? You can forget I said anything.

When you dream of flying, do you have wings? To take flight in dreams is an experience of uplift, of thrust, an unburdening of weight and an entering into the voluptuousness, as Gaston Bachelard calls it, of the soar. We’re bathed in the pleasure of defying the pinning laws and drinking in new views. Freedom! Lift! A human impulse, a shared experience in our dream life, to move as seagulls, petals on wind, superheroes, gods. “Dreamtime,” writes poet Nathaniel Mackey, “is a way of enduring reality… It is also a way of challenging reality, a sense in which to dream is not to dream but to replace waking with realization, an ongoing process of testing or contesting reality, subjecting it to change or a demand for change.” How high can we go? How free can we get?

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Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks. 

Paul Signac, View of Saint-Tropez, 1896

Sky blue. Please picture it. Put a swath of sky blue in your mind. Just for a moment. Sky blue. Close your eyes. You see it. Now, look out the window, up and out to your sky. I wonder, what color do you see? Does it match the color your mind projected? In the room where I sit now, in my apartment on the first floor, in the small Northeastern city where I live, a little after eight in the morning, sun slants across the dusk-orange couch and the brown blanket slung on the back of it. The windowpanes repeat themselves in shadow, elongated squares over the dark red rug. From behind the roofline horizon, dish towel light seeps through a tangled net of branches. What little sky I can see is not so much color as light. Looking at it, I wonder, if I didn’t know what color the sky typically was, would I call it blue? I see a blue-ish-ness, a graywhiteblue glow, but is that only because I already know the sky is blue? How much of what we see is because we think we already know what’s there? What would I call this color if I saw it on a piece of cloth? And you—how much is the way I see you limited by the words we have been taught for each other?

What color is the sky?

Robin’s egg. Peach. Opal. Purple. Baby-hair blond as my brother’s was. Garnet. Lavender. Turmeric. Charcoal. Periwinkle. Dirt road. Yarrow. Powder. Bruise. Rice. Absinthe. Piss. Shadow. Mussel shell. Ash. Blood clot. Clementine. Pistachio. Mauve. Faun. Inner thigh. Midnight. Cantaloupe. Underblanket. Honey. Olive. Orgasm. Peppermint. Raisin. Sapphire like the wedding ring my mother wore, a thin band of tiny flat sapphires so dark it looked black, but off her finger, where always it is now, marriage done, held up in the light, deep dark blue. Heather. Smoke. Yolk. Bone. Baseball. Candle. Creamsicle. Lichen. Lilac. Bile. Black silk. Hawk eye. Camouflage. Amaranth. Lamb. Is vacancy a color? Is absence a color? If you try to think of nothing, does it have a color?

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Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next six weeks. 

Claude Monet, Coucher de soleil, c. 1868

I have been alone and because of my aloneness I have started a relationship with the sky.

The sky said: “I am open.” And I knew: this was a place to aim my attention. Such is how relationships begin. It was no different with the sky.

I realized quickly I didn’t know anything about it. I did not hear its voice the way Charles Simic heard its voice: “Come, lovers of dark corners, / The sky says, / And sit in one of my dark corners.” I began to learn the way one comes to learn a new love, that initial state of revelation, of curtains pulling open. Show me: the major events, the altering traumas, the enthusiasms, the aversions, the fears. What do you eat? What do you dream? What is your favorite month of the year? The sky wasn’t showing me any more than it already always was, but I had wasted a lot of time not paying attention. It can be good to start at the beginning. What already always was turned out to be much more than I had anticipated.

The sky is a clock. The sky is an atmosphere, a mood, a temperature, a density. The sky is home to our home. The sky is each moment’s shifting fingerprint. I devoted myself.

The questions came.

Where does the sky start?

What a simple question. How obvious. But it unsteadied me; I was walloped by the force of how much I did not know.

When are you in the sky? There are the obvious times: in an airplane; a hot air balloon; a rocket; the moment of peak height after being launched from a diving board. But if you are in a room on the second floor and lean out the window and trees outside your window are taller than the roof, are you in the sky? If you are on a mountain and you are higher than the trees but there are peaks higher than you, are you in the sky? What distance must one travel up to meet it? Is there a scientific measure with numbers and variables and exponents riding the shoulders of the regular-size numbers? Does an equation exist? Sky = 11.19 squared over weather to the third times Time times light times height of person measuring minus birds? Does an invisible band like the Tropic of Capricorn trace a line above, an invisible eggshell of guarantee that delineates: this is sky, this is not sky? Read More