这是Nina Maclaughlin的六部分系列在天空中的最后一部分。

Frederic Edwin Church,Niagara, 1857.

我走到高处，睡在顶部。空气薄薄。在邻近的空间睡觉的人生病了。咳嗽在夜里穿过墙壁。但墙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.

那天晚上我躺在床上 - 一个胶合板平台，我铺设了我的睡袋 - 穿着双倍的常规裤子，四层衬衫，一个下背心，羊毛帽。我把袋子的引擎盖拉到了我的头上以咳嗽。我没有担心传染，但下一个房间的疾病也意味着我的房间也是可能的。房间我的意思是我的身体。我很远，高于我曾经去过的地球。我害怕。我不想死。似乎很孤独地死于我所爱的大家。

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Nina Maclaughlin的六部分系列在天空中将每周三都在接下来的几周内运行。

Albert Aublet,Selene, 1880

我们用天空调情的对象：

Kites

喷泉。

Hammocks.

Ice skates.

气球。

天气叶片。

降落伞。

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的六部分系列在天空中将每周三都在接下来的几周内运行。

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和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.

天空。押韵high和fly和为什么。押韵eye和再见和die。Stay with me.

There’s breath in the word. Each one of its three letters makes itself known.S嘶嘶声和空气的嘶嘶声，像云一样的曲线，就像风的道路一样，在街道和人行道上转移的声音。这导致高大的茎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- 天空下沉的陨石坑。K—the kaleidoscope. The cliff and the kaleidoscope, the hard edge and all the colors spinning. AndY, eye, I. Like theS,Y继续来。它立刻持续嘴巴，冷热。为了全景天空，眼睛吸收光明，它的太阳神，它的发光，珍珠月亮。只要眼睛可以看到，眼睛会看到。而且我也是天空。我和所有人。我是你的，天空。我属于你。我在你身边。

例如is the word for sky in Hungarian. My English-speaking mind adds anotherg和the sky becomes a whole, huge, endless egg, we inside suspended, hung in the albumen (from the Latin阿尔巴斯, white), also known as theglaire(from the Latinclarus, bright or clear).

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Nina Maclaughlin的六部分系列在天空中将每周三都在接下来的几周内运行。

The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist. First appeared in Camille Flammarion’sL’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?

我最近追求了一些了解，并令人遗憾的是。一英里的脚数是一个从来没有困住过我的数字。我问一个距离计算器，将35,000英尺的经典飞机巡航高度转化为英里。当它交付答案 - 6.6287879英里 - 我想，我犯了一个错误，或者它有了。这是不可能的。六点六英里朝着天空？

如果我要乘坐35,000英尺的步行，我可以将公寓留下，或多或少到南部，在两小时内，到达富兰克林公园动物园。徒步两小时，我可以看看眼中的老虎。似乎是梦想。（现在不是一个选择：动物都被锁在了。）但是六点六英里起来？事实上，我希望我能无法知道。它扰乱了我的舒适。我是在这个困境中启动你们吗？如果我知道，这是否意味着你应该是什么意思？你可以忘记我说什么。

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的六部分系列在天空中将每周三都在接下来的几周内运行。

保罗符号，View of Saint-Tropez, 1896

天蓝色。请拍照。在你的脑海里放一口天蓝色。只是片刻。天蓝色。闭上眼睛。你看到它。现在，看着窗外，向上和向天空。我想知道，你看到了什么颜色？它是否匹配了所预测的颜色？ 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 itblue吗?我看到一个蓝色的ish-ness，灰色的闪耀，但这只是因为我已经知道天空是蓝色的吗？我们看到的是多少，因为我们认为我们已经知道了什么？如果我在一块布上看到它，我会怎么称呼这种颜色？而你 - 我看到你的方式有多少是我们所教导的彼此的话？

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的六部分系列在天空中将在未来六周内每周三跑。

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.

我很快意识到我对此一无所知。我没有听到Charles Simic的声音听到它的声音：“来吧，黑暗角落的爱好者，/天空说，/并坐在我的一个黑暗的角落里。”我开始学习一个人来学习一种新的爱情，初始启示的初始状态，窗帘拉开。告诉我：主要事件，改变创伤，热情，厌恶，恐惧。你吃什么？你有什么梦想的？你最喜欢的一年是什么？天空并没有超过它已经总是持续的，但我浪费了很多时间不关注。开始时可以很好。已经始终出现了什么比我预期的要多得多。

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.

问题来了。

Where does the sky start?

多么简单的问题。多么明显。但它不稳定了;我被我不知道的力量所追随的。

你什么时候在天上吗?有明显的时代:一架飞机;一个小时ot 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