You can buy the author of the following recondite mumbo-jumbo a coffee here.
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If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Wittgenstein, TLP
A library of frozen clouds, what would that mean ? I have one stashed in my room from all around France, principally Paris. Seized in their moment of peculiar expression, of eternity, they hover without landing, their twists and turns, pulling apart like molten aerial statuary, gone now forever – except in my private collection.
Something odd about Parisian clouds. I don’t know if I can express it without sounding like I’ve gone off the deep end. Clouds are shaped by their ambient environment: the damp, rainy Northern climate, storm fronts off the ocean, the undulating ground below – Paris is a bowl or gentle valley surrounded by hills of relatively slight elevation, Belleville and Montmorency in the Val d’Oise being the highest – sculpted so as to form a kind of hyperbaric chamber where the cloud cover paces back and forth for days on end until a surge off the Atlantic brings a downpour, a regular punctuation in this town. French is rich with words to describe the phenomenon: tempête, assaut, orage, tourmente, averse...
Sure, you say, nodding. Nothing new. Am I studying at night school to become a weatherman ? (A choice with some exactitude: weatherman and writers, journalists especially, are all too often wrong when they make predictions.) Better question: do clouds reflect the culture of the place they inhabit? If Paris (or any city) is known for attracting a certain varietal of the human species (while other types ran away as quickly as they can), are clouds formed by the culture around them ? Do they reflect and exaggerate what’s taking place on the ground below ? Do I approach a certain animistic piety here, the peasant sagesse that regards the whole world as a living being ? Our reportage would be more accurate if we abandoned the proof of this or that theorem, and were content to describe the thing in front of our face. Let the jury decide.
-What about it ? asks postmodern man, a skeptic to his very bones. -Where’s the life hack in any of this ?
I entertain my prisoners, aka the passengers on the tour bus, as we roll through the Loire Valley, between the time we roll past the nuclear power plant and before we cross the longest river in France, with the story of the friendship between the hothead young king, 21 years old, fresh from the trenches and the old man, an artist out of favor, long hair, one arm in a sling, the two meeting in Bologna in December 1515 when de Medici Pope made peace with French King.
The only graphed region where the Venn diagram of da Vinci and myself intersect are clouds and their endlessly changing configurations. Leonardo was interested in storms, rain, hail, where tempests came from and their effect on the towns below. His point of view hovers in the air at the level of the clouds themselves, as if he were on a hilltop nearby. Perhaps the old man levitated mentally as he sought to understand the workings of nature.
Whereas I, a simple paysan, am intrigued by the show. The clouds sail by, a never-ending fantasia, practically inviting you to collapse on the nearest stairs while people hurry by on their appointed rounds, too busy poking their latest niaiseries into the phone to notice anything around them. There’s a story or poem in that: our life is crammed with information coming at us from all directions but too little imagination, too little idleness, too little freedom to be in the moment. You have to kill the screen for a few hours and let your mind wander. Humans can now pass an entire lifetime without having a single thought, or one that came from somewhere else.
My library of Parisian clouds preserves the artifacts of strange wonders, the skeletal glories of our strange visitors. One leaves the happy superficialities of life behind and encounters things without names.
It is a universal law that attention, undivided attention, pays unexpected rewards. The more attention to a phenomenon, the more one sees, the more often one notices. Which gives a certain autonomy to the event itself: we are complicit in the creation.
Which brings me to an unlikely cast of characters ! You couldn’t dream up the five vélo-taxists that stood in Place Concorde one overcast, freezing January afternoon, waiting for someone, anyone, to demand our services. It was too cold even for cars. A truly hopeless bunch from several continents and islands but perfect cloud watchers. We had little else to do.
Suddenly my Latin American friend G. called out, ‘Gringo! Turn around!’
A delivering angel approached, hovering just above the trees, nearly brushing the tall, stately columns in the old thoroughfare. An enormous butterfly or dove, come to deliver or extinguish us ? We danced in the shivering cold. Were we delusional ? What to make of this celestial visitation. It seemed to be coming closer. A hashhish vision ? (I place the photo below in court records. The prosecutor explodes. You, you expect any modern person to accept this as proof ? No, I reply. But there may be others.)
Before I could say, - I think we should... we were down on our knees, good Catholic boys all, whispering our inane requests in mock prayers. The butterfly-bird-angel vibrated its wings.
-If you want to tell us something… But the cloud did not speak, it merely hovered for what seemed like minutes, revealing itself to us, the city’s ragged outcasts. The lanky, redhaired Englishman stood to the side, chortling. -It’s all so meaningless, he said more than once. An unbeliever, he wouldn’t have got down on his knees if it was his ticket off Devil’s Island. Finally, a smart aleck among us could no longer resist. -I’ve got the best prices, if you need a lift ? Still no answer but one could imagine with what mad gaiety we would have carried the cloud into the Cour d’Honneur at the Palais Élysée…
And just so I captured the voluptuous lady hovering behind Louis XIV as he makes his way through the tourist hordes. A marvel, no, or am I seeing things ? She appears to be flirting with the King. You see it too, yes, or are these things mundane where you come from ?
A supremely independent artist, she’s too good for the Louvre. She prefers to watch the scene from above with a certain disdain. Louis is occupied by something in the distance, an invasion of the Lowlands or a knife fight in the Tuileries. Only the horse notices. Humans are always too busy.
A few friends have already seen them but I’ll spare you the images of the cherry tree in bloom while God or some old Nordic warrior streches out overhead, taken at the moment when people were returning to church in droves during COVID-time. The figure appears to be laughing and has a nice stiffy to boot. Another message! Would it prove my point? I don’t want to go too far...
A library of clouds in my closet, what does that add up to ?
(Except for shading and sharpness, photos are unaltered. I wouldn’t know how but in the New Age of AI alteration, one had better say so.)
Feeling generous but not rich ? You can buy the poor scribbler a coffee here. In six months not one of you ingrates have dared to go that far. Water seeks its own level: I’ve got the readers I deserve.
Consequently let us too, having around us such a cloud of witnesses, take off everything heavy, and trammeling sin, and run steadily the race that lies before us.