Clouds have so much to do with how the day feels, with what the day seems like. Clouds, more than any other weather that touches your skin – the snow, the cold, the rain, the sun, the wind – talk to your insides. As though somewhere in your chest (or is it your head?) vapour is forming, changing shape, dissipating and forming again. It’s why people need water: to feed their interior cumulus.
A cloud below the clear blue of your head, and above your gloomy heart. Thunder and lightning in your mind, and the rest of you soaked through. Something wispy and white happening in your stomach – delight, nervousness.
We wake up and look outside, practising cloud divination, searching the sky for something, anything, that will confirm that there is some relation between how the world is and what it feels like.
We go outside and, if we are happy enough, if we have time to spare, we lie down on the grass and look at the sky and see shapes: the continent, the animal, the face. If pressed, we will admit that the shapes aren’t real. But something in us – the clouds – believes something up there has seen Africa, a whale, a smiling man in a hat, and wants to talk about it.
“The emotion is to be found in clouds / not in the green solids of the sloping hills / or even in the grey signatures of rivers,” Billy Collins writes one day. He looks up on another and sees one cloud “always moving eastward, from left to right / the way the eyes move over print / as if it were reading the earth with its blind shadow”.
Joni Mitchell looks up at dusk and sees “feather canyons”. She looks up midmorning and sees something in her way – the word cloud comes from clud, or clod, and she sees this – a hill or “mass of stone” blocking out the sun.
Joanna Newsom stares at the horizon and knows she has “got no control / Over my heart, over my mind / Over the hills, the rainclouds roll”. Kate Bush sits bolt upright in her bed; she has dreamed about Wilhelm Reich’s son Peter, watching his father at their home, Orgonon. Wilhelm has woken up to clear skies and rushed outside to set up the cloudbuster: he believes he can make it rain.
“Cause every time it rains / You’re here in my head / Like the sun coming out / Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen.”
Clouds form when air cools enough to become saturated with water. The temperature at which this happens is called a “dew point”. I’m pretty sure I have a dew point too. I’m pretty sure it is right now.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
