Three Ways of Looking at the Sky
I’m just back from the North American Victorians Studies Association (NAVSA) conference in Bloomington, Indiana where I gave a paper comparing (ever so briefly) two historical events that strained the language and conceptual frames available to describe them (the 1854 cholera outbreak in London and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005). I wanted to put both events into conversation with current efforts to represent climate change in the context of calls for reparations. But my middle example, the hinge between the two on which I focused, dropped out due to time constraints. That hinge was Ruskin’s 1884 well-known two-part lecture “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” Upon arriving home I happened, by chance, upon two other references to skies that made me think of Ruskin again and the challenges of finding the words to describe events that exceed them.
1. The middle section of my paper used Ruskin’s efforts to understand the new cloud formations over England as a segue between the cholera outbreak and the hurricane. This section was very much indebted to Jessie Oak Taylor’s excellent essay, “Storm-Clouds on the Horizon: John Ruskin and the Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change.” Taylor notes that at the heart of Ruskin’s lectures is “a very literary challenge: how do you describe something that has no name, and for which there is no language?” (15). When Ruskin “looked up,” so to speak, he saw something new and alarming and he wanted his audience to see what he saw. But he struggled with the language and conceptual frames available to him. I loved Taylor’s essay not only for its intimacy with Ruskin’s idiom and world but also for its insights that, again and again, made me look up from my page to think.
2. On returning from the conference I had to reread Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay, “On Being Ill,” for a reading group. Like Ruskin’s essay (but different), it’s about what exceeds description. In English, Woolf writes, there is no language for illness: “let a sufferer try to describe a headache to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words for himself, and taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other . . . so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.” I’d forgotten, however, the section about the sky. While a “public sky-gazer” might be strange and alarming, confined to one’s bed, the ill person can “look up” and watch the sky. Woolf catalogues the sky’s striking beauty but also its disregard for the observer; it puts on a brilliant and dramatic display—the passing clouds, the changing colours, the glancing light—only for itself; and that can make one—the person who looks up—feel small and inconsequential.
3. And a few hours later I stumbled upon another lecture, Anne Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Sky-Writing.” Sky-writing immediately made me think of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and, sure enough, Woolf comes up in the lecture early on. The lecture is also about war and drones and it recalled Nathan Hensley’s provocative and stirring essay, “Drone Form.” Carson’s lecture is also about translation: treatments of sky as forms of sky-writing—or sky-warning—and sky performance. And, of course, the way that writing fades. The sky that is most on my mind right now, that is most “written,” is the sky over Gaza filled not with clouds but the black smoke of bombs and the contrails of unmanned fighter jets. Woolf is helpful here but so too is Ruskin: they help one to see what we usually see through or past, the smokescreen that is right in front of one’s eyes.
The image is a Still from Richard Mosse’s immersive video installation “Incoming” (2017). A detail of it is also the cover image for my book.