Cloud,
from old english Clud [mass of rock or earth]
Cloud
Seed #1
Dirt
from the construction site where buildings are beginning to be formed lifts up
and moves into the atmosphere. Once a part of the earth's crust now set loose
into the air: a potential staging ground for the condensation of water vapor;
seeds for the formation of a cloud.
No
more permanent that anything else. Everything is a momentary apparition. Oh,
but beauty. My eyes open each morning, and some mornings are full, like a song
that makes me sing along. I am here. I am here. And it will not be forever.
Thankfully. Because there is too much to see, and nothing would be worth trying
to remember if my eyes will open every morning like a hose spraying infinite
nows. Nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.
Cloud
seed #2
A
man who spent half of his Saturday afternoon kicking a can down the promenade
comes home and shakes his jacket before hanging it on the coat rack. Small crystals
of salt, deposited on his jacket from the spray of the sea are set loose,
moving out of the open window and into the atmosphere. The salt crystals
mix with the dust from the construction site, more water vapor condenses,
freezes and the cloud is growing.
And
looking at The Sea. Looking at the sea. From up here. “And now we are
here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of
its dish. The wine waits.”[1]
“Who watched the forms of the clouds over this
part of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them today?”[2]We will watch
and we will try to hold on, but surely they will change. We will cry – tears falling up
into the sky – cuss – spittle flying under the clouds'
haunted arches – we will roll in the meadow inhaling the mist
while stains form on our trousers – whelm of joy mixed with dread – we will lay on
our backs looking up listening to the sound of the blades of grass flittering
in the wind and remember nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime,
always.
Cloud
Seed #3
Sitting
at the bar at dusk, watching the dusty antiques on the wall lose their
definition with the fading of the light; a mass was forming before the
drunkards’ eyes. Looking down at his drink, trying to avoid
the scene, he suddenly felt an absence forming behind him. He fell of his
stool, bumped off a table and a couple of chairs before he stumbled out the
door.
It was damp
outside; it was as if the clouds were sleeping in the street. Trying to make
out the shadowy forms through the misty veil before his eyes, he picked a point
and staggered towards it. After walking for some time, bumping
off of various landmarks-changing his course with each bump, he could feel his
body gaining weight from the droplets of water collecting on his skin and
clothing, after some time he was swimming in the cloud and after some time he
was becoming it.
“What is in any [Sea] ocean but a multitude of
drops?”
[3] An awesome body of matter all tangled up more incapable of seeming an
object than land, but then there’s air, The Sea as the entropic
middle. And this, viewed from a distance, the edge of the universe perhaps,
looks like Brownian motion, all of it bouncing around and against itself,
changing course, the collection of these glancing blows becoming lives. Matter
drifting in the system with the illusion of acting. But one cannot bounce off
of belief - and vicious acts, or virtuous acts, are precipitated by belief. But
without invoking some grand narrative in which to protect our fragility, why can’t small joy be
joy? We can drift, and appreciate the view, and seek to collect these views
into a remembered joy, always more possibility in the future, until there is no
more future. Smiling into the face of a finite existence of little lasting
result, manufacturing small meanings that add up, a joy in having participated
instead of being frozen in the want of gifted meaning.
Cloud
Seed #4
Down
below a couple is sleeping side-by-side covers up to their chins. Clouds are
forming in front of their mouths with the rise and fall of their chests. Quietly, while
they dream their bodies are regenerating tissues. They wake up in
the morning look in the mirror, see themselves the same face, look at each
other say “good morning” seeing nothing
as changed, maybe only the date on the calendar, but everything has changed.
Everything. Clouds. Each morning we wake up and meet our self ...
meet the world. Our mostly-water bodies, our loose collection of matter,
regenerating always. Clouds. “ We are all potential fossils still
carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of the
world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds
from age to age.”[4] But only the crud, none of the actual stuff.
And still our hearts hurt when they are broken. Still we collect something.
Small, tiny in fact, but ours (us).
An
object is like a pattern of movement instead of a solid separate thing that
exists autonomously. [5] Look through the microscope and pick
your favorite, follow it closely, like a star, like drift wood, like a
maybe-face in a cloud. Organization used to be understood as order. Databases,
cordoned off, categorized. But clouds. Leaving those things we collect where
they lay, and giving them keywords, signs, so that we might search for them
later, the algorithm, the duplicitous web (put it in the cloud), cloud
computing, more reliable, and more appropriate to our shifting understanding of
relationships; time going by, entropic ephemeral re-structuring. Us to the world,
us to nature, coffee to the morning, the world to the world.
“As for astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing
the movement of the earth consisted in renouncing the immediate feeling of the
immobility of the earth and the similar feeling of the movement of the planets,
so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of the person to
the laws of space, time, and causes consists in renouncing the immediate
feeling of the independence of one’s person. In the first case, the need
was to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and
recognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just as
necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do
not feel.”[6]
Clouds
are like momentary apparitions; their possibility is in the air always, like
mist settling down in the cool evening before burning off in new sun. A cloud
looks like an object, but isn’t it really just the way air looks
when the atmosphere conspires to make it so? I am a cloud.
[1]
Strand, Mark. Reasons For Moving, Darker
& The Sargentville Notebook, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 75
[2]
Thoreau, Henry David. Autumn From the
Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &Co., 1892, p. 429
[3]
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas, New
York: Random House, 2004. p. 509
[4]
Eisley, Loren. The Immense Journey, New York: Vintage, 1959.
[5]
Bohm, David. On Creativity. London:
Routledge, 1998.
[6]
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p.
1214
This epilogue text is by Stephen Fiehn & Tyler Myers / Cupola Bobber.
This epilogue text is by Stephen Fiehn & Tyler Myers / Cupola Bobber.
Posts
