On the Clouds

"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, 

but to add color to my sunset sky." 

(Rabindranath Tagore)

Penang. MALAYSIA – 22 May 2019

 

Sky is a deception.

Sky doesn't exist.

It's just a splash of color that we can see but not touch.

“Touch the sky with a finger” is said only in moments of exaltation because it is for exalted or dreamers to think of touching what has no substance.

 

If there were no stars in the night we wouldn't even know what the sky is.

It's just up there to remind us that our place is the earth.

 

Clouds are also an illusion. They are just vapor but they have a shape.

A thousand forms.

They deceive how Nephele, a water lily created by Zeus from the clouds to prove Hera's fidelity, forced to violence by Ixion so that Hera was believed by Zeus.

 

Poor clouds, despised by Aristophanes who, to humiliate Socrates, compared them to philosophy – useless abstract vapor that makes men distant from real life.

Yet the clouds are still above our eyes, with their slow migrations.

They always made me think about the lives of migrants.

Hundreds of people we meet every day in our cities, in the space and time of our gaze on the sky, in that portion between the roofs.

Without knowing where they come from and where the wind takes them.

We know them for that long moment that crosses our fragment of sky.

 

ROME – 17 October 2020

They change shape and color.

White as cream or threatening with black.

Insubstantial vapor capable of hiding the sun and casting shadows on the ground.

The shadows of the clouds are mysterious.

Even what looks like a feather or a dream can dig up gigantic shadows; what not even the sky can, since the sky is a trick, it's only color.

 

Who has no shadow does not exist.

 

Clouds are our hopes, dreams, our fears.

This is their density.

What makes them capable of creating shadows.

We cannot harpoon them and chain them to the ground, like motionless hot-air balloons with stretched and knotted ropes.

The clouds never quiet down.

We can only think about them, decide whether to be the shape of our desires or anxieties.

Our philosophy or our emptiness.

 

Or the clouds don't care about us at all.

They are of the same illusory substance as the sky.

Perhaps they are poems written by heaven that dream to convince oneself of existing.

 

Yes, maybe the clouds are poems.

And like any poem they are useless, painful and necessary.

 

Like our lives.

 

Kedah. MALAYSIA – 20 October 2019

“Clouds ... Like me, they are a figurative passage between heaven and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, stormy or silent, which cheer for whiteness or sadden for darkness, fictions of interval and path, far from the noise of the earth , far from the silence of the sky.” 

(Ferdinando Pessoa) 

 

READ ALSO:

•  The Virtue Of Banality 
• Drop the Moorings: Olivier Föllmi 

Italian version