It’s bizarro-spring, here in New York. Cold crud weather, and almost May. I wonder. What is it about the darkness of a cloudy sky that terrifies us?

What is it about the ecotones between darkness and light—the syzygy of light bursting into darkness, of darkness sliming down over light—that can be both beautiful (awe-full) and absolutely dread?

We can see a frightful ecotone in every cloud (fluffy and light, but shadowing out the sun), and writers have for a long time captured different moments of cloud-dread.

Art critic and endearing madman John Ruskin was the most famous cumulophobic. He thought a mysterious “plague wind” was a sure sign that humanity is doomed:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.

—John Ruskin, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.”

More on Ruskin’s plaguesome clouds from Joel Segal.

From Cabinet.

Other great writers are more or less blunt about the doom, melancholy, and generally emo nature of clouds—all generally in contrast to the storybook associations of clouds with purity, innocence, and lightness.

Lampedusa mentions clouds after a long, bizarre scene of political discourse. The clouds block the sun. Obscuring God, future. Progress, metaphorically, is on hold—a mere trickle forward:

Day had just dawned: the little light that managed to pass through quilted clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows.

—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), 1958.

Woolf uses clouds as a gate into dream—positive, progressive dream. But this passage comes during World War I, during the death of the protagonist, the agony of the family. The dream is a temporary respite, an illusion. The reality is the obverse of the cloud-shadow, the disturbance (frog, pebble) ever-ready to splash into the pool, shatter the mirror (the mind):

In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote form the known domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

And, extending cloud to air, we have the earlier notion of limitless freedom (a fluffy, unending march of clouds, a cloudless sunny day of unforgivably honest blue) as a trap, a plane on which to always be in-view, to always be caged, forever under the moon’s eye, without ground, falling:

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…

—Virginia Woolf, “An Unfinished Novel.”

Gass is more blunt:

…the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty…

—William Gass, On Being Blue, from that famous thundering-magnificent opening litany of blues—azures, royals, sadnesses, seedies, stockings, Prussians, Russians, bruises, forgettings, and, as here, absentness, emptiness, the Modern.

I’ve quoted Gass at greater length before; this passage is such an unreal mixture of precision (clouds do have shaded slopes) and surprising, breath-robbing melancholy. The increasing absentness. Of God. The empty silver throne. (”Emptiness has such a warm subtle sting… Heaven ain’t something someone else can give.” —Eyedea & Abilities, “Paradise.”)

So clouds block us from the Creator, remove us from the natural play of planets and suns. They are a kind of white-gray chaos, a litter of un-form across a plane we feel should be whole and formal, complete.:

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.

—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.

Of course, writing chaos is not a chaotic process. Expression of un-form requires immaculate form. There is no one better than Aira, whom I’ve also quoted before, before the clouds. The “clouds” sound out a one-two dance-step hoof-hoof cadencing. They track chaos through chaos, and a pattern emerges. Form from un-form. A midnight pattern, obscuring a high noon. Or a streak of off-white on a sliver-moon night. Syzygy and ecotone, imperfect and thus more fascinating to have the clouds there but not completely of one type. Even better to take the patterns of clouds and remove them from the sky:

Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun. And shafts of rain thrust into little yellow clouds, agates enveloped in moss, pink hawthorn.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter.

Finally we arrive at the simple-lush prose of rancher-writer Verlyn Klinkenborg. He gets a dang Honourable Badge Of Merit because he writes boldly and artfully and simply and naturally. His cows come alive. (They were never not alive. I just didn’t feel much about cows until I read Verlyn Klinkenborg—and then Lydia Davis, in Electric.) Cloudy Klinkenwords, translating the pattern of the clouds into/onto birds:

What I see from the train should really be called a heronry, a village of well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense clouds or puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.

—Verilyn Klinkenborg, “Heronry,” The New York Times, 5 January, 2009.

And finally-finally—eliding the clouds themselves, because in his Wyoming the plains have stolen the clouds’ job, have skinned the clouds and wear their patterned drabness, setting out from the horizon; turning the birds back into darkness; the cows into symbolic darkness (here the light that stands out against mere “gloom,” ecotone); giving color heaviness and momentum; capturing this tectonic intermediate-ness of dawn, the beauty of that lack of grounding, lack of depth-of-field—the spark of my investigation, Klinkenborg’s “Out of Darkness,” from a recent Times:

When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyo. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects — the old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattle guards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them easily in the gloom.

But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, not so much gliding as fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. To say the light is rising is to overspeak. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky…

The gray ahead broadens and seems to grow heavier, as if there could be no getting out from under it. And slowly color begins to emerge, what color there is… Out here on the plains, pressed beneath the sky, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immensity of the drabness that surrounds them. It is a mood, I know, the wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.

Deal w/it:

From this skyscraper,
all the bustling streets converge
towards the spring sea

—Richard Wright

Bob Dylan is from another planet, a distant heavenly sphere on which it is always Christmas. He earns an Honourable Badge of Merit for this festive gem of festive gems, a very merry polka-zydeco chase sequence:

Now back to my regularly scheduled fare of Shostakovich, hip hop, and electro from other dimensions. Advised listening:

“Hold the Line” - Major Lazer

“Deadbeat Summer” - Neon Indian

Flying Lotus’s impeccable remixes of Lil Wayne

“Popular Demand” - Lupe Fiasco

Happy Festivus from Atlanta.

Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

The NYTimes reports on our ongoing war against the grotesque—and consequently against fun, against childhood, and against the imagination. The war’s a pity, since it will never be won.

By excising Scream masks from public schools, officials will only encourage children to go home and experiment in the “Satanic” (as Halloween is described in the Times piece by one Illinois school district spokesman) on their lonesomes. Sales of Left For Dead and True Blood DVDs will rise. The truly maladjusted will continue to torture housepets and use depth charges to destroy their parents’ bowls of Grape Nuts. When all is said and micromanaged, keeping schools free of darknesses, real and imagined, will not drive those darknesses from the world.

Meanwhile, children will miss out on a wonderful holiday, a non-religious day of atonement on which reckless merrymaking, sugar-consumption, and grotesque miming lead us down too-often unexplored paths in our minds.

Grotesque miming does us a real mythological service, I think: It allows us to confront our demons in the daylight, in the shapes of our friends and frenemies. A dance party full of Franken-people, vamps, James Browns, cosmonauts, Elvises, and unicorns becomes a vivid, tangible dream wherein before there was an empty floor and a pair of speakers. (Nightmares serve a similar function and can be similarly cathartic.)

A classroom full of Kanyes and zombies (oh my) asks children to externalize their own fantasies and terrors, and to confront those of their peers. The pooled child-mind purges itself of gorillas, Beyoncés, pirates, and ghosts. Darkness is made grotesque, overwrought, impossible, silly—in a word, real. And thus its power vanishes.

I wonder what is to be learned in a realm of positive costumes, where approved archetypes (unicorns) and the mimesis of role models (Beyoncés) are okay, but confrontations with fears real (pirates) or imagined (zombies) are not. On a day of what should be cathartic, real-problems-preventing rule-breaking, the enforcing of vague rules of costume-etiquette and pseudo-taste strikes me as imagination-hamstringing, at best.

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.