Once upon a time, the sky was everything above the earth, which lay at the centre of human experience. The sky was the place of deities. Storms were demonstrations of their powers, and birds their airborne messengers. To attempt to fly, Icarus-like, too high, was a sign of hubris. Vast as it was, the sky remained in some sense “closed”, forbidden to us, unknown and probably unknowable.
The language that had been used before the space age to describe the relationship of humankind and the sky was, to put it in simple terms, pre-Copernican. The English word “sky” originates from the Old Norse “ský”, meaning “cloud”. The cloud populates, as it were, or provides relief within the space of the air or atmosphere. Individual clouds may appear to extend horizontally or vertically when seen from the earth, but when seen from outer space, they form a shifting, almost unfathomably complex system orbiting and encasing the earth.
The advent of popular air travel did not alter this perception so much as standardise it around the globe. Aeroplanes could go only so high and could stay in the air for only so long. Additionally, aeroplanes travelled along fixed routes. By 1919, these routes had been coined “skyways”. They were, and to some extent, remain, extensions of the land, spoken of in the same way as shipping routes. Indeed, much of the literature also describes space as a “frontier” to be crossed, tamed and ultimately conquered in the way that the land and the seas had once been.
For reasons that are not exactly clear, the thinking around this concept of sky shifted at midcentury. The culprit most often cited is the proliferation of unmanned satellites. Filling the sky with all those orbiting gadgets, therefore, has not only turned the earth upon its axis multiple times and surrounded it with multiple smaller spheres, but has also broken it down into almost innumerably detectable quadrants. We now know in precise visual terms that the small blue dot on which we live exists in a vast universe, and some of us continue to refine a particular consciousness of the earth — and human civilisation — as existing on an interconnected, interdependent and fragile sphere.
Sixty-three years ago — on July 21, 1955 — the then president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, had announced an initiative he called “open skies”. It called for a reciprocal agreement between the US and the Soviet Union to observe freely each other’s military arsenals. This included the sharing of information about the locations of installations, which by then were possible to observe and photograph from above.
The idea behind this was simple and is what today called a “confidence-building measure”. It was a statement of political and philosophical intent, nominally sincere but possibly cynical in practice. Using the transparency of the skies, in other words, was meant to shed light, to build mutual trust and perhaps even transpose what was once mysterious into something more knowable.
“Open skies” has come down to posterity as a partly psychological (and perhaps propagandistic) attempt to alter collective behaviour — a sort of Big Brother effect, as it were. But it also marked a different psychological — or perhaps spiritual — shift, having less to do with the quality of the sky itself than with the relationship between the sky and the territory below.
That it took until 1992 for an open-skies treaty to be signed between the former Cold War rivals suggests that some people like to keep their secrets hidden. Back when Eisenhower introduced the idea, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev protested, it was said, by insisting that Americans wanted to look into his bedroom. When Soviet forces shot down an American U-2 spy plane a few years later and caught Eisenhower in a lie, Khrushchev relished the I-told-you-so moment.
By that time, aerial photography had multiplied the possibility of its range; satellite imaging was included in its arsenal; the once novel image of the “Blue Marble” planet taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972 was now normalised and absorbed into the cultural imagination. In 2004, Google would buy Keyhole Inc.’s EarthViewer software, transforming a tool of modern warfare into a convenience for the typical computer user.
However, there was more to the coincidence of this shift in territorial meaning. Yes, there was a familiar, generational shift away from one form of linearity in favour of another, from an absolute to a relative sense of both time and space. But something else had happened. The sky had opened and shifted to another axis — not of the earth itself but to bridge the connection, spatial as well as spiritual, between the land and the air, between the planet and space. As human beings were able to look down upon the earth, rather than exclusively upward towards the sky, the relationship between the two — each in the presence of the other — became less predominantly horizontal than vertical.
This vertical orientation did not, however, restrict the human imagination by imposing a hierarchy from the earth to the sky. Rather, it liberated the relationship by substituting a bidirectional gaze for a unidirectional one. Americans and others quickly became habituated to looking down on the earth from the sky, and the view taken from the sky soon accompanied the views of the sky from the earth for those, artists, cartographers and astrophysicists alike who were in a search of clarity of perspective.
Eisenhower’s open skies — our airy source of clarity — became momentarily possible. The views from an aeroplane in the comparatively unpolluted skies of California in the early 1960s allowed Thom Gunn to write of the intoxicating “richness” of an aerially mappable space — a vision of “places I have not been to” — which, on cloudless days, is the ideal of scientific clarity: “A cold, hard light without break/that reveals merely what it is — no more/and no less.”
Yet, as human beings were able to look down upon the earth, rather than exclusively upward towards the sky, the relationship between the two became again less vertical, and more contrived. The sky filled with all those orbiting gadgets therefore has not only turned the earth upon its axis multiple times and surrounded it with multiple smaller spheres, but also broken it down into a familiar patchwork of seas, plains, ghettos, “street views” and possibilities of filtered vision that Google Earth presents us so readily with.
We have begun again to bring the sky closer to us; by populating, polluting and managing it increasingly with earthly objects, we are moving the open sky, the nongravitational nothing of space, or the space of the deities, farther away. We have not only furthered a schizophrenic notion of sky, but have also reinscribed a deeper sense of aimlessness.
The filling of the sky just above the earth with the flotsam and jetsam of the space age leads us to ask whether or not this represents some sort of ironical condition of foreclosure in the early-21st-century imagination, foreshadowed by Louis MacNeice in 1937: “The sky was good for flying/Defying the church bells/And every evil iron/Siren and what it tells:/The earth compels ...”
Meanwhile, many more countries now watch from the sky what each of us is doing in microscopic detail. And so we may be right to ask if another conceptual breakthrough may soon occur in the spatial imagination. And we would be right to fear that the sky may fully close before that happens.
— New York Times News Service
Kenneth Weisbrode is a historian and the author of several books, including The Year of Indecision, 1946. Heather H. Yeung is a critic and poet and the author of Spatial Engagement With Poetry.
