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.
