Skygazing

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Moon

My grandparents raised me for most of my childhood. Every couple of months, they’d take the 13 hour flight from Seoul to Chicago and the three hour drive from Chicago to Indiana to look after me. I would cry and wail whenever they had to leave. I was needy and separation-anxious. My grandpa told me that whenever I missed him, I should look up and leave a message with the moon. It was the same moon that shone over Korea. Whatever I whispered to it, it would relay to him. I took solace in knowing we lived under the same sky. 

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I’ve been looking at the sky more often. We have always turned to the heavens seeking the assurance and direction of those celestial waypoints. Lately, it has clambered down from its distant resting place to violently reassert itself in our lives. In the summer of 2023, New York turned a virulent orange as smoke descended from wildfires up north. The acrid filth seeped into our apartments. We hid in insulated rooms, unsure how to live in such strange weather and stranger times. 

Skygazing in contemporary discourse is often dismissed as childish and skygazers as oblivious to the concrete and urgent concerns of this dismal condition. Serious Realists™ tell you to focus on the material realities that structure our world. As Gil Scott-Heron told us a half-century ago, “I can’t pay no doctor bill / but Whitey’s on the Moon.” Billionaire narcissists continue to propel themselves to space in gigantic phalluses while their workers can’t find a decent home to live in. For many, the sky is nothing more than colonies, profit, and a privileged escape. 

I can’t dismiss the sky as a mere extravagance. When we became bipedal, our eyes, once trained on the ground, lifted. We were free to look forward and upwards, to contemplate the sky. The aim of this contemplation remains as elusive and transient as the clouds. In Ted Chiang’s short story “Tower of Babylon,” workers build towards the sky in an attempt to pierce the heavens and better know Yaweh. One succeeds, only to reemerge from the soil a few miles away. The earth and sky are caught in a recursive loop. 

As kids, we recognize the sky is a projection surface for our thoughts. We stare at the clouds and name shapes without fear of naming wrong. Might we muster up this child’s play once more to seize the sky from the clutches of colonial fantasy? Lie back. See. 

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Air

The sky in Indiana screams in crystalline blue as it drowns out the planar landscape of the Midwest. It is the sort of never ending expanse that’ll make you believe in God. In Seoul, the skies are replete with highrises and mountaintops. In the mornings, it is the soft milky color of celadon. If you left me blindfolded in either place, I’d know where based on the taste of the air alone.

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It is a conceptual a priori, something baked into the foundations of our being. Circadian rhythms—found in even the earth’s most rudimentary creatures—tune our bodies to the daily movements of the sun. The cadence of heaven is our own. Prior to our modern atomic clocks and coordinated calendars, we relied on sundials and the regular movements of the moon around earth and earth around the sun. Before our standardized maps, we had the stars. The sky not only situates us in a particular time and space, it makes our concepts of time and space thinkable. No wonder our earliest cave paintings depicted constellations. 

Acknowledging this existential entanglement helps us resist the illusion that the sky is a distinct domain with nothing to do with us. It’s a misconception we’ve held since the Romantics, who thought of the sky (and Nature, more generally speaking) as a transcendent Other, an uncorrupted territory that supersedes our reach. This line of thought has wormed its way deep into modern discourse, shaping the positions of both reactionary oligarchs hoping to obscure the full breadth of their exploitation and liberal “realist” types urging us to keep our focus away from fluffy concepts. The truth is no such divide between culture and Nature exists. As eco-theorists like Tim Morton have persuasively argued, it is a false dichotomy that merely accelerates the destruction of the green world by causing us to see it as a boundless, extortable Eden.

No escape awaits us above. Leaving (as Musk and his ilk seem to want to do so badly) would mean nothing short of using up all our dwindling resources and ravaging the planet beyond recognition so that a privileged handful might persist. To survive in such a manner would be to live stripped of one’s humanity. Hannah Arendt thought this when she saw the launch of Sputnik as an attempt to overcome our earthliness and negate precisely that which makes us human; so did the film Wall-E, populated by its barely humanoid, post-capitalist space dwellers. Though billionaire man-children might be willing to let us rot while they live on as some creature, I am not. 

We must confront the many ways in which the sky grounds us. The journey upwards shouldn’t be seen as a pathway to escape, but to reflection. As media theorist John Durham Peters writes in The Marvelous Clouds, “theory, as all our metaphors still suggest, was at first related to the sky.” He reminds us that although the sky is often taken for mere “openness and emptiness,” it is in fact a medium dense with contested meaning. What might first appear flat and neutral is, upon closer examination, a rich cultural field, at once “a tomb or a cave as well as a map, clock, or book.” The sky, he acknowledges, was essential in shaping our understanding of the world, but in the act of apprehending the skies, we also transformed it, turned it into something new. Sky is made, not simply given, as the technics we use to make sense of it exert a force on the very thing they help make navigable. “The ship alters the sea,” he writes. Our telescopes, planes, and astrologies alter the sky. Skygazing thus requires us to consider the ways in which the sky structures us, and how we in turn structure it. It is an exercise in ontological, historical, and cultural thinking—in short, a necessarily political act.

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Star

My grandparents fled the north when they were young, displaced by what was not quite yet a civil war. They traversed mountains under the cover of darkness to avoid detection. They muffled their cries or else ended up caught and dead like so many others. I can scarcely comprehend this. I am lucky.

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In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the ascent skyward is synonymous with an ascent of knowledge. The prisoner escapes his shackles and realizes what he thought were real objects were merely shadows cast by flickering lights; then, having fled the cave and acclimated himself to daylight, he turns towards the sky. Only when he rests his gaze upon the sun does he finally see the true “origin of everything previously known,” the source of his reality. In the sky, philosophers found a counterpoint to our messy terrestrial lives, a realm populated by unchanging entities governed by harmonic order. It is for this reason that Peters calls astronomy the “epitome of an exact science.” If one knows how to read the stars, they can “project backwards and forwards in time,” reading the future and past as one. It was only natural that we would give this prophetic territory to the gods, oracles, and fates.

Then, Galileo’s telescope saw that those seemingly perfect bodies in the empyrean were pock-marked, craterous, and exploded. We traded our idealism for empiricism and the transcendent became immanent, subject to human affairs. Driven by Promethian hubris, we pierced the skies with our works, as if the blue yonder was just another thing to be conquested and exploited. Even the ever-changing clouds were placed into rigid taxonomies (cirrus, cumulus, stratus) under our techno-scientific regimes of control. All the while, our own man-made plumes proliferated. Not so long after the Hudson River Valley School painted their sublime cloudscapes, Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare showed steam rising from a train and mingling with the sky in one amorphous swirl. Less than a century later, scientist-warlords in New Mexico brought the calamitous power of starlight down to earth and disposed its foul radioactive excesses there too. 

As we entered the Anthropocene, our relationship to the skies changed. It is a telling reversal that amidst climatic catastrophe, the ancient order-driven art of astronomy has become secondary to the modern big-data-driven practice of meteorology (from which chaos theory emerges). There were no more metaphysical lessons to be learned, no more eternal beings to be pondered— only value to be extracted, lines of flight to be anticipated, chaos to be mitigated. The skies were revealed as a medium capable of bearing the monstrous offspring of war and capital. As Peter Sloterdijk notes in Terror From The Air, gas warfare converted even the atmosphere itself into a weapon, leveraging our “immersion in a breathable milieu” as a tactical advantage. Today, a clear blue sky serves as hunting grounds for unmanned predator drones dealing out death from above. 

We now live under what the science historian James Rodger Fleming calls “anti-skyscapes,” threatening skies heavy with invisible poison. The wealthy believe they can get away scot-free with enough HEPA-filtered insulation and imported bottles of fresh air; if you have the money, you can even purchase artificial lighting fixtures designed to look like natural skylights so that the canopy of your bomb shelter is always sunny and blue. Profiteers have worked tirelessly to milk the sky for everything it’s worth, and then with a shamelessness unique to their kind, turned around to sell a simulacral replacement for its desiccated corpse. In the long run, insulation will only lead to suffocation. 

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Cloud

I’ve been wondering what it might mean to truly understand these people who raised me. Not so much in the linguistic sense—though my Korean, even by Korean-American standards, is atrocious—as much as the sense of wanting to know them whole, to hold them close, in their entirety, even when I am old and they are gone. There are facts I know: they are warm, musical, tough as nails, always smiling. But then there are facts I cannot know: my Grandpa, worn down by the accumulated weight of Japanese occupation, civil war, the ensuing military dictatorship; my Grandma, resentful of a demanding marriage that stole her best years; their sadness, their fear, their loneliness. They are too human—vast and contradictory.

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Objects this size—hyperobjects, as they’re sometimes called—elude our traditional modes of cognitive apprehension. They operate at scales too large and dispersed for us to capture through our well-worn pathways of “knowing.” Nothing will come from our drive for comprehension, which stems from a futile desire to hold, passify, and retain (comprehension, after all, is first founded in prehension). We must learn to experience and feel these entities differently, leaving space for the unknown to seep through us. We must go beyond the domain of epistemology—which is too concerned with the unilateral question of how we might grasp, taxonomize, and control its subject—towards that of aesthetics, asking the bilateral question of how we might be transformed by an encounter and harmonize with entities singing in a different key.

James Benning is a filmmaker from Milwaukee. His films are an exercise in patience and sustained attention (a stereotypically Midwestern trait), often involving long takes of environmental scenes that can stretch on-and-on. In One Way Boogie Woogie—one of the films from his early career which helped establish him as an ambassador from the “cinematic flyover zone”—he depicts Milwaukee’s industrial valley in a series of 60 static, one minute long shots. The slow, plodding pace of the films gives the viewer ample time to fall into the image, to feel the cadence of this specific milieu. As they sit with these scenes of smoke-spewing steel and rusted Ozymandian decay, their gaze inevitably begins to wander beyond the foreground towards all that lies behind it—and slowly, the sky becomes pronounced, revealed as a hidden character in the drama of this region.

Benning’s interest in the sky culminates with his 2004 film Ten Skies, which is composed of ten 10-minute long takes of, yes, the sky. The skies that he shows are in turns gray, luminous, empty, cloudy, lazy, roiling, and heavenly. Each time a new one pops up on screen after 10 meditative minutes, it feels as shocking as a jump scare—a sudden rupture that belies the fact that he is simply filming the same object over-and-over again. Though no humans are shown throughout the film, it’s wrong to say these frames are devoid of human activity. Critics have noted, for example, how the skies are affected by everything from wildfire smoke to pollution from an industrial factory, while the soundscape (which involves both captured and added sounds of helicopters, gunshots, etc.) further contributes to a broader unseen world. The thread of the Anthropos is interwoven into the film at every level, and to that end the film retains a distinct political edge that commentators often latch onto.

Yet Benning’s skies cannot be reduced solely to symbol or synecdoche. Compared to similar skyworks —like Byron Kim’s Sunday Painting series, in which Kim paints the sky from wherever he is each Sunday and overlays it with a sentence or two of diaristic commentary—Benning’s film is stark and minimal. There is no voiceover, no commentary, not even the “action” of a brushstroke which might capture the artist’s internal state; there is only what is promised, ten skies. The film scholar Erika Balsom has written about the sheer difficulty of attempting to analyze a film that, even compared to the rest of his filmography, is defined by its “apparent emptiness, its flatness and refusal of representational hierarchies.” Every time we try to hold onto something firm, or subject the skies to the scalpel of analysis, it pushes back, as if insisting that sometimes a sky is just a sky, though the question of what “just a sky” is remains unanswered.

Critically, the opacity of Benning’s sky differs from the unknowability premised by the Romantics and their Nature. It doesn’t stem from a view of Nature as a distinct Other, but rather from a notion of the sky as something we are so completely wrapped up in, something so total and ever-changing, that we can never know it in full. This is visually reinforced by the limitations of film itself, restraining our perspective to one measly sliver bounded by the frame of the camera and the ten minutes Benning allots us. We are left wanting more, and yet no matter which lens you use, how many shots you get, or for how long you film, it will never be enough. 

Benning’s sky changes and becomes. Instead of affixing the sky to a particular point or perspective, the film focuses on tracing this worldmaking dance. Each shot gives us brief insight into its many shifting shades, forms, and moods while also gesturing towards yet-unrealized possibilities. The emphasis on emergence, transformation, and movement allows Benning to circumvent both the idealistic metaphysics of Plato, to whom the sky would remain static and transcendent, and the utilitarian instrumentalization of the moderns. The sky is neither an unchanging domain of truth, nor a tool to be controlled. It is a constant flux, an enacted performance. In this way, he echoes the contemporary “process” philosophers who prioritize notions of becoming and occurrence over fixed substantiality. Only through change and movement might we come to appreciate the sky for what it is.

Likewise, it is precisely through process and change that the film gestures towards how we might reestablish our attunement to the skies. Just as you can’t conquer a song, you can’t conquer the sky. Skygazing demands we give up our white-knuckled desire for power and let the forces of the sky shape us. This is what pieces like Turrell’s skyspaces—which lets you sit and stare until you get bored and walk out— get wrong. There is no such thing as engagement with the sky on “our own terms,” no walking away. Engagement requires that we situate ourselves within its elemental rhythm, melt into its vastness. Our modern techno-imperialist frameworks, so focused on rigidity, subjugation, and objectivity, get us nowhere.

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Sky

They are still with me. But they are old. I don’t know how to prepare for being without them. Writing this feels wrong, as if I’m somehow inviting catastrophe. I’ve tried penning them a letter. I’ve tried saying everything I wanted to say. Every time, words fail me. I can only hope they sense my feelings, that which are both too crushingly simple and impenetrably complex for my craft. Is my love for them as self-explanatory as it is devastating and bottomless? 

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The things most essential to us are the hardest to know. We are made up of contingent necessities and intrinsic dependencies. We cannot get far enough away to see them properly. I can’t fully grasp the sky. I’ll never know anybody the way that I want to. Being is cloudy—borders ill-defined and always shifting. My mom tells me stories about myself I can’t remember. Others hold so much of me. I hold so much of others.  

Our ethics have long proceeded from precisely a faith in rationality, whether you’re a Kantian who thinks that rules are universalizable because of a shared capacity for reason, or an analytical utilitarian fussing with hedonic calculations. We believe more analysis, more facts, more education will redeem us. But too much devastation has been carried out in the name of the “rational animal.” I gaze at the sky and marvel and do not understand a single thing. 

The idea of exploring the territories beyond reason can seem overly nostalgic, even regressive, but scholars have made a case for its radical potential. In an essay on “Marvelous Writing,” Emma Heath discusses the ways in which magical realism, surrealism, and speculative fiction helps articulate realities that we otherwise lack the conceptual frameworks for. It is no coincidence that magical realism emerges from attempts to work through the totalizing impact of colonization. The unknown, alien, and marvelous can help us expand beyond our imposed horizon—can help us feel beyond what we are able to presently see or articulate. Skygazing lets us attend to precisely this marvelous unreal, carving out the emotional space we will need to endure what lies ahead.

I am afraid of the future, uncertain of my place in the world, and guilty of not having done enough. I miss my family. I miss old friends. I miss the dying earth. Nothing lasts. But I do not meet this with anguish. I do what my grandpa said and look up. It is too easy to be a nihilist, immobilized by the sheer impossibility of living. But as we skygaze, we practice an activity without destination, outside the binary of success or failure. We might not find salvation, but there is still grace to be had. 

We climb into the clouds. We re-emerge from the dirt in a world both recognizable and not. We confront with fresh eyes the monumental horrors wrought by our capitalist warmongering, our individual sublime insignificance, the primordial state of being. It is absurd, beautiful, and awful, and, for once, this doesn’t lead to feeling quite so helpless.