Clouds with depth
“Watching the clouds” is an everyday shorthand for daydreaming, aimlessness and boredom. It’s as if the professionals who classify clouds have this prejudice in mind as they go about their work, and they defend themselves by building a maze of systematic classification on top of the clouds. Just look at the remarkably thorough, carefully designed website of the International Cloud Atlas. It has to be one of the best online references I’ve ever seen, on any subject–as intellectually satisfying as the casual viewing of clouds is for the senses and the imagination.
We’ve had a lot of storms and weather in the last few weeks here in Chicago, and I’ve had more reason than normal to look at the sky. For ordinary observers, it seems to me that there is really just one fundamental division in cloud typologies: between clouds that create depth in the sky, and clouds that obscure. The atmosphere is an amazing medium. At its clearest one can see indefinitely far: to the stars, into thousands of light years, distances so large they have no referent on earth. It can also close off vision, down to the few feet reachable with one’s hands, or less.
Even in a busy city sky, when I look up, I rarely see anything. But an open sky is not empty space. A view into the sky can be much more than a line of sight between “here,” the standpoint of the observer, and “there,” the furthest visible point. An opening in the sky is an invitation to see strata: layers, a space with undefined depth, like how any unit of time can become long or short according to events.
This picture taken a few days ago looks west, after a storm; the darker stratus clouds are just moving away, to reveal a large cumulus, a tower with puffs whose true size is impossible to gauge by looking. It could be the site of a floating city, an unoccupied landmass, the extension of a continent. This is what is distinctive about the cumulus tower: its heft hints at the depth contained in the sky.
Then, too, when the stratus clouds pull back, in the foreground, those almost-featureless specks are birds–I think they’re swifts. This sky is their playground, their home. It’s wide open to them, but they take only a sliver.
