Clouds

Adriano Farinella

"More often I looked upwards at the great cathedral piles of clouds that passed along the winter sky, extravagant and erring shapes radiantly rimmed or quite ensilvered by the sun. Once, a broad shaft of light, let out from the clouds, beamed down upon the distant land. It lit up the ground on which it fell and slowly moved from field to field, from hedge to hedge, as if looking for something - like a great searchlight reversed. Then it went out suddenly, as if switched off. The clouds above increased in splendour.

...Clouds are water, and they have weight - we know that much. Then why do they not sink to the ground? They should be continually falling at our feet. Yet they stay up there, though they are not supported from below nor held from above...Another question. How is it that clouds are so complete, so sharp in their outline? We look up into the sky and see these chiselled leviathans swimming through the ocean of air at the bottom of which we walk, these drastic shapes each margined against the blue with a termination as clean as the Cliffs of Moher; but they are not solids, and the last thing we should expect is this firm binding of the unboundaried moisture in the airy wastes.

P. A. Nisbet, Colossus

I turn again to Ruskin, and again he does not know the answer.'What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web?' he asks. 'Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You can't have, in the open air, angles and wedges, and coils, and cliffs of cold. Yet the vapour stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapour pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled as the potter's clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?'

...Certainly there is nothing more mysterious in Nature than clouds. And nothing stirs the imagination more than those creatures that are not alive; those buildings not made of brick; those domed and daring palaces in which there reigns no king; those vast foundries flaming without fire; those mountain ranges upon which no feet may ever walk; those radiant prospects of a far country belonging to the paradise lost regions of the heart."


John Stewart Collis, "The Worm Forgives the Plough"


What are clouds? I'm sure we could get many answers, but their mystery remains. Just above our heads, all this! Sometimes like gigantic creatures of myth, other times like escapades in architecture, or the scene of ferocious battles, the triumphs and defeats of unknown empires. Heaven and hell acted out before our eyes.

And in this blue river above us these cloud-bergs flow continuously by. They seem so solid! Yet they dissolve as we approach. They weigh thousands if not millions of tons, and yet float as if feather-light. 

I can't help but think of Joni Mitchell's song - she's right, there are so many illusions to clouds. We see them so many different ways. There's Billy Collins too, with his Biography of a Cloud,in which he follows the life-story of one "anonymous mass". How a cloud is born?  How does it die? 


And did you know that there's a Cloud Appreciation Society? It's fantastic. You will be amazed. I would join, but it isn't free, so I have my own little society, take my own photos...

Neb

 I could go on about clouds.