Five Different Responses To Clouds

All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds. Richard Brautigan

I remember when I first learned about clouds in grade school. We drew pictures of feathery clouds, flat and gloomy clouds, fat Confucius clouds, and giant, dark, menacing genies ready to pounce. After class I’d go out to the playground and fly my kite high to catch a cloud. I’d lie on my back and chew sour grass. My kite danced in the sky but never quite high enough. If you can’t reach the clouds you can watch them. And I did. For hours.

Clouds are celestial sages. They tickle the observer, pique the imagination, float along dressed in flimsy nightgowns that obscure the view. Minute water droplets, ice crystals, or a mixture, suspended in time, condensed around dust or smoke says science. Or, a reason to daydream.

“Are you
or aren’t you
going to eat
your soup,
you bloody old
cloud merchant?”
Jeanne Duval
shouted,
hitting Baudelaire
on the back
as he sat
daydreaming
out the window.
Baudelaire was
startled.

-Richard Brautigan’s The Galilee Hitch Hiker (in The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster)

We don’t see clearly, an idea older than Plato, dates from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. St. Paul repackaged it in 1 Corinthians, through a glass darkly. Camus raged against it in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Richard Feynman says “I was interested in all these things in terms of some kind of use. And by use I meant application, understanding nature–DO something with it.” Such a practical man! Richard Brautigan, he sits and watches the clouds and calls that participation. Like Baudelaire: I love clouds … the clouds which pass by … over yonder … over yonder … the marvelous clouds! in Flowers of Evil, Spleen of Paris, The Stranger.

Human perception is partial. Reality exceeds us. We live with clouds. Five different responses. Plato, “climb out of illusion. Human ignorance is temporary and correctable. Truth is reachable through reason.” St. Paul, “await clarity. Human knowledge is partial and provisional. Truth exists but belongs to God. Have faith, trust, and wait.” Camus, “confront silence.There is no guaranteed ultimate meaning, no cosmic explanation coming. Live without resolution and create meaning anyway.” Feynman, “probe mystery. We are entangled with the universe. Certainty is fundamentally limited. Mystery is not failure, it’s discovery.” Brautigan and Baudelaire, “just watch. Meaning is whimsical, unstable, improvised, aesthetic rather than metaphysical. There is no need to escape the cave, decorate it.”

Five people watch the fog roll over the Mendocino coast. Plato says “there is a clear landscape beyond this. Climb higher.” St. Paul says “We will see it clearly one day.” Camus says “There may be nothing beyond the fog, walk anyway.” Feynman says “Let’s measure particle scattering inside the fog.” Brautigan says:

“A fog was building up over the ocean. It was not building up like a shack but like a Grand Hotel. Soon… everything would be lost in flocks of vaporous bellboys” from A Confederate General From Big Sur

“Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias” from Sand Castles in Revenge Of The Lawn.

There is much to know about clouds. We’ve sketched a few responses about how to live with them. Here is one more from the author John Fowles:

Reality, human existence, is infinitely baffling.  One gets one explanation – the Christian, the psychological, the scientific … but always it gets burnt off like summer mist and a new landscape-explanation appears.  The one valid reality or principle for us lies in eleutheria – freedom.  Accept that man has the possibility of a limited freedom, and if this is so, he must be responsible for his actions.  To be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans.

Soon it will be kite flying weather. Get out there. Fly your kite. Lie on your back. Watch the clouds.