According to the report, which was lost when I cleaned my messy desk in 2005 (I'm recalling all of this from an imperfect memory), Carl, who was married and well-to-do, fell in love with Lisa, whose family was not so well-off, upon seeing her for the first time. He had a videocassette in his hand; she had a videocassette in her hand. He showed his tape to the station's weatherman (sun, sky, clouds). She showed hers (clouds, sky, sun). During the contest, his eyes could not escape her beauty. After the contest, the impression she made on his mind intensified. That bewitching coin in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir," comes to mind. If a person sees this coin only once, the memory of its image begins to more and more dominate his/her thoughts and dreams. Soon the coin becomes the mind's sole reality. Lisa's face was Carl's Zahir. (...)
"We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. We think that they are Nature's poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them. We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day." This is the opening of the Cloud Appreciation Society's manifesto. The organization emerged unexpectedly in 2004 (the year before I lost the remarkable police report) from a lecture delivered by Gavin Pretor-Pinney at a literary festival in Cornwall, England, entitled "The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society."
"Lots of people showed up for the talk," explains Pretor-Pinney in an e-mail, "and came up to me afterward to ask how they could join my society. So I put up a website and issued anyone who wanted to join with a badge and a certificate with their name on it... The membership just spread in the viral way that things can on the internet. We now have more than 27,500 members in 94 countries around the world." (Pretor-Pinney also published a book, The Cloud Collector's Handbook, that, when closed, fits snugly in your pocket and, when open, provides information for identifying and scoring clouds.)
The Cloud Appreciation Society website (www.cloudappreciationsociety.org) has several features, the best of which is a gallery of cloud photographs by members and nonmembers, professionals and amateurs, the young and old. Indeed, if Lisa and Carl are still lovers of clouds (she by now is in her late 20s and he in his late 40s), they are probably familiar with the pictures on this website. Some clouds are caught at dusk, others at dawn, others in the dead middle of the day. Some are reflected by a glassy sea, others cling to the tops of green trees, others rise over the glittering ice of Antarctica. One photo captures a god-mad cloud that threatens to smite some rural road in a god-fearing country. Another shows dusky clouds that are massively stacked in the sky above Singapore's port. One stunning photo, which was taken by Nick Lippert (a resident of Tumwater, Washington) at 7:40 a.m. on October 28, 2011, transports us to the place we expect to see when it is time to pay for sins: a hellish Mount Rainier casting a demon shadow on a soaring continent of blood-red clouds. (...)
The Cloud Appreciation Society's website also has poems ("Cloud Verse"), love letters to clouds, and short essays. Much of it is bad, and much of it is wonderfully bizarre. For example, one essay, "The Advantages of Watching the Cloud Channel," which was composed by one Andrea de Majewski, a Seattleite who currently lives in the Big Apple, loftily compares watching clouds to watching TV. In a million years of dreaming and thinking, I would never have seen this connection, never found this invisible thread that links the sky to the TV screen.
"The cloud channel has several advantages over regular TV," writes Majewski. "First off, you don't have to choose between rabbit ears or taking out a mortgage to fund a dish or cable package or whatever. It's free, and whether it's on or not is completely beyond your control. Here in Seattle, it's broadcast more often than many places. Move here if you want to watch a lot. If it's not on, you must do other things. The laundry, grocery shop, whatever. But if it's on, you can postpone chores and lie down and watch it.
"It's very relaxing. One reason for this is that there are no ads. Not even the things on public television that are just like ads except shorter and more boring. No one tries to sell you anything at all on the cloud channel." The impression one gets from the Cloud Appreciation Society's website is that cloud collectors are very dreamy people, utopians to the core, and extremely sensitive to the transience of life.
by Charles Mudede, The Stranger | Continue reading:
Photo: OeilDeNuit
