The Geography of Clouds

I can control the weather with my moods, I just can’t control my moods.

- Nick Cave

Queensland is (not alone in being dubbed) the Sunshine State, and I’ve always joked that I’m a sunshine baby. I tell people, my blood is too thin for the cold weather. And I think I’ve figured out that in the same way they say ‘it’s not the heat, but the humidity that’ll kill ya’, so too is it not the cold, but the cloud cover that will ultimately break your will, bend your shoulders, and bow you down. 

I was raised in country that raises Cumulonimbus: those thick, towering clouds like explosions in the sky, expanding. Clouds for dreaming. These guys are the ones you think of when you picture renaissance paintings. Divine, metaphysical; you try and squint to find some cherubic angel plucking lazily at a harp, nestled somewhere among the folds of this duvet. 

But you don’t even need to squint.

As a young fella (as I’m sure you did too, if you were born before iPhones) I could wile away my afternoon manipulating the tableau, the shapes and forms (people, animals, symbols) found in clouds; the art in the sky against a resplendent backdrop. A perfect Rorschach Test whose results were always joy and creativity and bliss. 

Afflatus.

I don’t know exactly when it was I stopped finding images in the shapes of clouds, but I do know the joy and creativity and bliss in my life was greatly diminished when I moved cities and ignored my sky. 

I don’t wish to name the places, not the titles on the ground, the suburbs and towns, but I’ll tell you it was the landscape up above that was overhanging – or I suppose I mean, foreboding.  The Nimbostratus: those dark, impenetrable sheets; formless, the colour of dishwater; dreary and overcast, blocking out the sun for months and months. 

These were cold cities I moved to, but it wasn’t the chilly weather that did me in – temperature could be in the negatives, I could be shin-deep in snow but so long as the sun was out, I could cope, and on good days even thrive. It wasn’t long before I realised it all came down to light, or lack thereof. 

My home state has the highest rate of melanoma of anywhere in the world, so the same way I scoff at sun-cream that’s anything less than 30+SPF, I baulked with the same vigour at the idea of having to take Vitamin D supplements. Surely I’d already absorbed a lifetime’s supply … yet here I was, shuffling off under my dripping umbrella to the drug store, sullen, spending money on something I had in surfeit back home – no! Something of which I had too much, and used to spend money protecting myself from, and was now emotionally atrophying from lack of! 

And it was silly at first. I felt weak and foolish for being so shaped by the fucking fickle and unimportant weather.  But seasonal depression is real. Who am I to believe I can battle and conquer the elements: wind and rain and the storms that build high pressure systems and thereby stir up a tempest within the soul.

Here I’d like to direct the reader to the Tom Waits song ‘Emotional Weather Report.

It’s not merely anecdotal that low sunlight and high depression cohabitate the same cities – it’s not a trivial thing to be laughed off, or at times, with dangerous results, ignored.

But I think I may have figured something out; in the same way that every problem contains the seed of its solution, so too can I find respite in the sky.  A measure of solace in the solstice – and here I’m not simply talking about those clear days that come to me few and far between: days of clarity. 

As a cloudy day gets us down and compounds the stresses in our lives, so too can a starry night project us towards a greater cosmic happiness. Sapiens have looked to the night sky forever for navigation and meaning, order and inspiration, but I find there’s a kind of panacea in the depth and mystery of it all too. Looking out at the stars and feeling simultaneously infinite and infinitesimal, one can be a tiny speck of dust on a chaotic rock hurtling through endless nothingness: a quintessence of dust, but that same star-stuff can unite us with the spheres and leave one feeling so very, very small – but to also look in all directions, out into space and the galaxies, and become suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of ownership and place and (on those nights of clarity when I’m feeling particularly grateful and optimistic) purpose. 

This realisation came to me when I was in high school and camping out on Fraser Island with a buddy of mine. It was the first time I’d been that far out of the city where there’s minimal to no light-pollution and I could see the entire southern sky for what it truly was – not just the firmament, not just some black canvas girdling the planet, with the stars and planets and all that astral shit somewhere behind the scrim – no, I saw that it was there, right there, and it had always been right there, and there it all would remain, forever. 

The same way, as a child, I used to sculpt the clouds to suit my imagination, so too can I, as an adult, connect the dots to paint my own picture – stars like braille, unreadable, only to be felt, mores code, perforations and patterns in an enigma that could unlock the secrets of the universe if only I could decode the indecipherable sidereal message. 

They don’t always provide answers, the stars, but sometimes the question is enough to calm one down. 

It’s seems to be only on cloudy nights that I become overwhelmed. 

No sun, no stars, nothing uniting me to the heavens. I become detached and dropped down by gravity, till I fall ever inward. Therefore I’ve come to realise I must cherish the stars when I see them; I must embrace the nurturing warmth of the sun, because that’s the ticket … isn’t it? 

Those heavenly bodies I see of an evening are just the reflections of sunlight that has touched those planets and the light has now found its way to me … little old me. Regardless of unimaginable time and distance and dilution, we are always considered, and gifted, even in the depths of night. 

MLK told us that only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars.

There are ways of dealing; we needn’t always let the weather dictate our happiness. So when next you get a chance to stargaze uninterrupted, let’s hope clouds don’t get in the way. If they do, I apologise, because I (like Nick Cave) can’t control my moods either. 

June 25, 2018.