More Clouds

Unbending he swept aside the many crinkled shards that curled around the corners of his ears while the sunlight straightened and stretched its flagrant pins upon heads bowed and restlessly repeating echoes of events long dead. Seconds shredded into a million silver silent slits among the corners of the street’s dead ends and bricks of buildings. Flower bursts of light collapsing into a thousands questions beat upon his side cocked head and straight into his ear drum’s center. And yet the minutes blurred, the answers faded before clearing into cognition. He paused and pondered if it was the hope of answers holding him or if in a pure moment of clarity he would dissipate leaving only a faint exclamation mark where his bent body once stood.

There is this certain moth that keeps fluttering up against my computer screen as if looking for entrance into the brightly lit (though 2 dimensional) land of its technology. I too, these days, have felt that keen pull to push myself up against blank beautiful things in a kind of knowingly ineffectual attempt to bury myself inside these pieces of sparse illumination.

Clouds

Indiana - 1:42pm

The Malady of the Quotidian:

Change.

"But time will not relent."

Clouds

In the chaos and confusion of moving and the strange emotional upheaval that tags along in that process, I have wanted to find some kind of stability and continuation. I look ahead to uncertainty only and change in every direction. And so, to fill this gaping void, I decided to look to the skies and start taking pictures of clouds by the recommendation of Abigail Pettit. This is by no means a new idea, nor would I want it to be. People have been taking pictures, painting and have been fascinated with these puffy floating objects for, well, a long long time. It is this long tradition of cloud obsession that draws me to this picture taking task. I have been secretly in love with cloud pictures (and who isn't in love with clouds?) ever since being introduced to Alfred Stieglitz many years ago and his Equivalent series (for an example of said series see above picture.) This is not surprising given that Stieglitz was a contemporary of Kandinsky (a favorite of mine) and this series is generally regarded as being infused with Kandinsky's ideas, particularly "the belief that colors, shapes, and lines reflect the inner, often emotive 'vibrations of the soul.'" (phillipscollection.org) Kandinsky is great, no?

That, coupled with the fact that I was moving away (have now moved away) from the mountains and towards the plains where the sky grows and curves, leaving lots of space for cloud viewing, I prepared myself to experience the variation and yet continuance and stability of clouds.

And so, the day before leaving Chattanooga I took some pictures of the clouds there.

The day I pulled into Indiana, all my earthly possessions crammed into Hovhaness (my car) and my sister's car I looked up to discover the sky looking like this:

And, no, that is not a cloud there, that is a moon. Not a single, solitary cloud adorned the sky that day and despite the fact that I knew there are days where clouds are beyond visibility, I find the irony far too funny to keep to myself. I wonder what God is trying to tell me in these blank skies. There are a few clouds today (slightly sad and lonely looking), but for several days after moving back and through a trip up to Michigan, clouds stayed pretty much absent from the large sky mocking my desire for any kind of stability.

I still plan on taking pictures of clouds, if of course, they ever decide to grace the sky with their presence.