Words about clouds are clouds themselves

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It’s no secret that I have developed an obsession with clouds.

It’s not a scientific obsession like the one Richard Hamblyn describes in his book about Luke Howard—the Quaker amateur meteorologist who gave us words to name and thus classify clouds: cumulus (heaped), cirrus (mare’s tails), etc.

I love Hamblyn’s The Cloud Book with its beautiful photos and meticulous differentiations: Cirrus uncinus, Cirrus fibratus, Cirrus spissatus, Cirrus castellanus, and on and on and on—so many mare’s tails!

With Klaus Reichert, my daily photos are a sort of Wolkendienst (service or dedication to clouds). Like him, I’m fascinated by the infinitely varied and constantly changing forms that painters from John Constable to William Turner to Gerhard Richter have explored.

Yesterday I found Wendy Mark’s and Mark Strand’s 89 Clouds in my mail, a gift from my dear friend Alex Caldiero.

Wendy Mark’s monotypes are 10-inch squares at most. Mark Strand’s 89 thoughts about clouds are single, spare lines. Words about clouds, as Strand writes, are clouds themselves.

And, I think while reading, pictures about clouds are clouds themselves.

Clouds are thoughts without words, Strand adds.

It’s a beautiful book. And it accompanied me into my dreams.

I woke out of vaporous dreams at about 2:30 this morning. Lying there thinking about the coming day, I turned on my side and looked up out of the long, narrow, east-facing window that has always reminded me of Holbein’s painting “Dead Christ.” High mountains dominate the view to the east, although this morning, from my bed, I was looking at a scene just above Tower Mountain. Here you see the mountain and the long window during the day:

I was staring up into a dark sky when I saw a beam of light shine up through what I realized were thick clouds, light that gradually furled up through what looked like spiral in a seashell. The clouds shifted, opened, and revealed the half-moon—sharp and brilliantly white. Over time the clouds thinned and encouraged by a north breeze alternately veiled the moon and left it bright against a sky so black that it had the texture of velvet. As the clouds thinned further, the moon was clearly visible behind them even as they covered it. I realized that the moon was not only visible, it was making the cirrus clouds visible. Their illumination contrasted dramatically with the black sky, crossed it and marked it and colored it. I watched the light for half an hour till the moon drifted up out of the long window.

Utterly enchanted.

Here’s a photo taken a few hours later from our deck showing the light clouds and the mountain from which the moon rose sometime after 2 a.m.

Alex, thank you for the book and for the dreams it evoked. The 30 minutes that followed will lift my spirits for days.