Poets, authors and painters love me. I don’t always agree with their work but all attention is good attention as some politician said. Take Sandburg. “The fog comes in on little cat feet.” I don’t like cats but the sentence is charming. People like it and it softens my image.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
T.S. Eliot is another matter. He turns me into a timid, passive, yellow coward like that Prufrock fellow he hides behind.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
I’m not a wimp. I’m a cloud that touches the ground. Every water droplet of my body is a micro habitat. I clean the air. I quench the thirst of giant redwoods. Piss me off and you’ll be sorry. My cousins surround Venus with an acid fog.
Dickens gets it right in Bleak House. He gives me the respect I deserve:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Miguel de Unamuno wrote one of the few accurate novels about me. I am the condition of beings who are neither fully real nor fully unreal, entities that exist in a middle state, where outlines dissolve, where you cannot tell where one thing ends and another begins. This is exactly the ontological status Unamuno assigns to his protagonist Augusto, and boldly to all human beings. They are not solid. They are nothing. They are niebla.
In Unamuno’s novel Fog, the principal character, Augusto, who is contemplating suicide confronts the author (Unamuno) near the end of the story.
“The truth is, my dear Augusto”, I spoke to him in the softest of tones, “you can’t kill yourself because you are not alive; and you are not alive—or dead either—because you do not exist.”
“I don’t exist! What do you mean by that?”
“No, you do not exist except as a fictitious entity, a character of fiction. My poor Augusto, you are only a product of my imagination and of the imagination of those of my readers who read this story which I have written of your fictitious adventures and misfortunes. You are nothing more than a personage in a novel, or a novice, or whatever you choose to call it. Now, then, you know your secret.”
For Augusto, love “both dissolves and condenses the fog of existence. Amo, ergo sum!”
Using me as a metaphor allows Unamuno to hold together what would otherwise be contradictory claims. Augusto is vividly present on the page, funny, melancholy, philosophically acute but simultaneously he is shown to be a being without stable ground. I have that dual quality: you can see into me, things are visible within me, but nothing has edges.
Now, that is an author that really knows me, inside and out. I’m not just some atmospheric backdrop, I’m a stand in for the human condition. Identity, freedom, love, reality, and death are all filtered through me.
Claude Monet knew this when he painted me in London at the turn of the nineteenth century. “I so love London!” He wrote, “but I only love London in the winter … without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”
I have long captured the human imagination, weaving myself into myths and legends across cultures. I’ve been linked to other worlds, from the ghostly beings of Celtic stories to the scary monsters of Norse legends. I became a source of inspiration for artists and writers, making people feel both wonder and fear.
I can appear and disappear very suddenly, take on shades of orange, pink, or even green, sometimes be invisible, and change the way you hear things through my effect on sound waves.
Gothic weather is operatic, the scream behind the silence. Novelists use weather the way a painter uses shadow. Weather is both a mood and a moral force. Gothic fiction is always about what cannot be said directly. It’s about aura and unspoken tension. The weather becomes emotional shorthand. And sometimes, it’s the only character honest enough to say: Something terrible is about to happen. (Robin Solit)
In stories and in art I symbolize a variety of related things: obfuscation, mystery, dreams, confusion and a blurring between reality and unreality.
Here’s the thing, I can clear myself away. While I hang around, though, you can’t see much beyond your own noses, and this feels uncanny
I bring confusion, suicide and death; but also anonymity, mystery and beauty.
When you load me up with coal particles from chimneys, then you get a big problem. I turn into green, yellow, black, greasy stuff that sticks to your clothes. I become deadly but don’t blame me.
I can surround you and erase boundaries. I can make certainty impossible. I am the physical manifestation ambiguity itself. I am the space where reason reaches its limits. You are afraid of the mystery I impose because mystery implies vulnerability.
The ghosts you think I contain aren’t the ones that matter. Those are inside you, the selves you bury, the lives you don’t live. You should thank me for waking them up. Ghosts and love occupy similar territory. Neither can be measured. Neither can be proven. Neither can be reduced to data without losing something essential.
Humans need room for mystery. I give them that. I transform lives. I make people feel. I may hide nothing at all or I may hide something essential. Walking through me you never see reality directly. You must use your imagination. I blur the line between objective reality and subjective experience.
I am cosmic, more than the weather. I am mortality itself.
I am a reminder that your greatest questions cannot be answered conclusively. Does God exist? Are you free? Is love real? Is there life after death? Do your choices matter? You are surrounded by uncertainty. I am the natural climate of existence, the permanent condition of being human.
Who is more real? The author? The character? The reader? I dissolve boundaries. Life is partly discovery and partly invention, always enveloped in a mist. I represent the impossibility of seeing what lies beyond.
If a character in a book can question whether he is real, why shouldn’t you? You are written into a world you did not choose. You awaken inside a story already in progress. You search for meaning without knowing who the author is or whether there is one. That’s life inside me, inside the fog.
I don’t just surround you, I am the very medium through which you live. You can never possess complete clarity. You make decisions, fall in love, grieve, create art, and seek truth while unable to see very far ahead.
Wisdom is not hoping I disperse but learning how to walk through me where some of the most important dimensions of life remain permanently veiled.
NOTE: Fog is the principal character in three stories in my new collection Pieces of Time (Don’t Explain It Away, Salt Fog, and Dreaming of Gogol).