My Autobiography of Sky
Whispers of an idea of a thought of sketch of a draft of the first chapter of my first book!
Image is Georgia O’Keefe’s “Sky Above Clouds IV” (1965). It was part of a series inspired by airplane travel and Georgia calls the thing “ridiculous” because it kept her working long hours at the age of 77. Read more about it here.
I first learned about the book Autobiography of Red from the pilot episode of the original “The L Word.” The show didn’t stay with me, but the reference did. I thought “Autobiography of Red” was literally going to be a history of the color red, and that “autobiography” was meant to signal a specific form this historical storytelling would take.
The very idea knocked me out (even though I was very, very wrong about what the book is actually about.) Hearing this title was the first time I ever thought about genres as split-off from their books, or about genres as having a kind of productive agency. The idea that genres could be their own thing or do their own work was a revelation! Genre as its own object of study? I think since hearing Carson’s title I’ve been chasing an opportunity to write a mutant biography of something.
That was many years ago. This year, I’m writing the manuscript for my first book. The book is a culminating extension of the project I began in my doctorate about making images of the sky across art and computing. That all begain in 2014. 2012, if you count my master’s research on digital art and environments (my MA thesis, which primarily looks at the Landscapes Without Memory series by Joan Fontcuberta, is here). It’s a long time to think about one, hyper-specific project, and, frankly, I’m ready to move on. I don’t think I’ve ever quite nailed the answers (or the questions) I was seeking, but doing so also seems to be an impossible task (I appreciate Cal Newport’s admission that you always leave one book unsatisfied and resolve to do better in the next). Still, I just sort of dread the topic as of late.
And then, the other night I had my first dream about my book. In the dream, I was thinking about the book’s layout, and dream-me had it in a setup that wasn’t half bad. I took it as a sign. Maybe I’m not bored or unsatisfied with my project. Maybe I just need to dig in more radically into what drew me to this subject in the first place. Maybe I was getting too caught in the formalities of A BOOK and was losing touch with its heart?
I let myself1 throw the idea of the book I had been working on away. I began to imagine my book if it wasn’t a book for tenure review, if I didn’t need it legible to an academic field, if I didn’t need to use it as a tool of professional self-crafting. That’s when I came up with the idea for a chapter that–for the first time in a while–resonated. Biography of Sky is the first chapter to my book There Is No Sky (that’s the current working title, but I’ve got some other ideas cooking). To be completely honest, Biography of Sky is not a huge departure from what I originally had. And I have no idea how it will pan out, or whether if its successful how that will affect the rest of the argument I’m making in the book. But for now, here’s the idea.
This first chapter serves two purposes.
It provides a history of the sky. (Here, I’ll have to be rigorous with myself about how much a definition of “sky” can be disentangled from work on clouds, because, in that case, I suppose a history of clouds starts with Aristotle? But even then Aristotle’s work isn’t really just a history of clouds–or is it?–but the history of meteorology.)
“Biography” functions to highlight how the sky is an invention of humans and a profound, symbolic space in human consciousness. To tell the history of the sky is inevitably to tell the history of how humans think about the sky, what it means to them, and how it functions in their imagining.
For these reasons, the chapter marries the philosophy of emotion with genre studies on biography to understand how narrative and techniques of narrativization produce meaning.
The reorganization of the chapter is raising some methodological questions, challenges, and high points. First, the challenges.
Savvy readers will already suspect that the ASA panel on Radical Biography that I attended might be at play in my new interest in writing a “biography” of sky. They would be right; the idea of the radical biography as trying to tell the life of a person who lived their life in a way that runs counter to the practice of biographical writing is a point of convergence. I find myself thinking through the panel questions/comments on source material and applying them to this project. For example:
A key practice of writing biography is that you build your story off primary sources. What are the primary sources of the sky?
Does an archive of the sky already exist? As with the practice of radical biographers, how might one build an archive of the “very human life” of the sky?
What is the balance of science/non-science stuff that is appropriate to use here? (Or ever, lol.) If I use the best science to describe the sky, that is just scientific reporting. If I mix in the “bad” science about the sky, that is very human… but where is the limit? When does the bad science become not informative enough; not a human accounting of sky but parody?2
Now, some of the high points from research thus far.
One quirk of being an interdisciplinary scholar is that you often come to interesting ideas very late in their canonical formation. This was the case for me when I learned that “biography of objects” is well-trodden ground in archaeology. In a similar way to how literary canons have productive capacities for knowledge, applying these ideas to objects can also de/emphasize the process of making knowledge. This makes sense, since knowledge is often produced in the stories we tell about events, objects, and relations. So far, what I’ve found is:
Traditional archaeology seems to have relied a lot on the method of creating a “typology” of an object–classifying something according to its uses (e.x. this is for digging) and in relation to other, similar use-categories (e.x. this thing to dig is smaller than that thing to dig).
The criticism of the typology method that emerged was that objects often change meaning and use over time; typology assumes that things are static. (Just think about all the anachronistic icons on your smartphones and desktops, like file folders).
Biography of objects, on the other hand, starts from the premise that all individual objects have unique lives that change over time and put them into changing relations with other objects, too. Things that dig don’t just stay things that dig but might also become things that scratch a back or help make pizzas! (IDK, I’m not an archaeologist.)
And still! Archaeologists are pressing for even more complex and dynamic forms of telling stories about objects.3 So even the biography of objects is missing some tricks.
Applying this back to my research, there’s a whole lot of typology of clouds, but could/should there be a typology of the sky? The sky is sort of a fixed thing…it’s always just this visible area above the Earth. Or should I be joining the archaeologists in trying to find some more complex structure for producing knowledge about the sky?
These debates around objects and how we learn with them become slightly more interesting in the study of ancient artifacts and cultures, when literary genres existed but in far less cohesive ways than we engage them now (or, at least this is how it seems).
For example (and, to my classicists out there, please chime in), it seems that poetry/poetics played a big and fundamental role in written knowledge. Biography was something that emerged later than poetics or historical writing, and so the earliest days of biography (IIRC I think something around 1400s BC?) are difficult to parse for their evidence and non-evidence. Could it be interesting or significant, even, for me to pull an archive of the sky solely from poems written about it? From biblical imaginings of it? Or to make the case for paintings alone as non-textual poetics of sky?
IDK man I have no answers for these questions right now, and sometimes (oftentimes) I feel real cringemaster 5000 levels of “stoned first-year grad student” writing them out. But, hey, that’s just where I’m at! 🫡 Your friendly, neighborhood cringemaster 5000 academic, at your service.4 But listen, research and writing is a process that’s mostly ugly and embarrassing until it’s not.5 We all must claim that truth even as we vow to never look it in the eye or address it. Ok? Ok.
The awake version of me.
This article was a really helpful primer to the debate! Also: bracers! I never knew that they existed, and now I do! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/from-typology-and-biography-to-multiplicity-bracers-as-process-objects/F292847D5A4DF3A9F0FE37AC6FBB14E8
Did I mention I was the first one to arrive at the Icebox Project Space/Vox Populi New Year’s Eve party this year? 2023 set out to humble me, and she did–right to the bitter end.
My last read of 2023 was Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and if this rich, white woman chopping wood and keeping the blinds closed with a hand-drawn image of what exists beyond the blinds taped over them isn’t embarrassing writer behavior then IDK what is.