In the 18th century, the great traveler and scientist Alexander von Humboldt walked around the world recording temperatures, humidity, and altitude with forty-two precision instruments that he protected in velvet-lined boxes. He even carried a cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky in each place and drew the clouds, their changing colors, and their evocative textures.
As children, effortlessly, we see all kinds of animals, fantastic objects, faces, monsters, and riddles in the shapes of the clouds. When we stop imagining all that, we are only adults without imagination or time to look, so high and unhurried, at the free spectacle of the sky.
A little older than Humboldt, the chemist and pharmacist Luke Howard was the man who classified clouds into seven basic types that have now been expanded to ten. But poets have continued to be the ones who have best known how to write about these gigantic masses of water vapor that are born and grow mainly over the seas and fill the earth with life when they precipitate as rain.
Another contemporary of Alexander, the poet John Keats, wrote: “To one who has been long in city pent, / ’tis very sweet to look into the fair / and open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer / full in the smile of the blue firmament” and it is true, we city dwellers have forgotten to look up and distract ourselves with the clouds, we prefer to be tangled up looking at the small screens of our phones or the bright screens of our televisions, but if we manage to forget all that and look far away again, we rediscover the wonder.
The water that the sun evaporated thousands of kilometers away, that the breezes transported and stopped the highest mountain peaks, will then fall by a sophisticated physical mechanism of saturation and dust particles that makes water molecules turn into drops with enough mass to precipitate to the ground. One cubic meter of cloud barely contains three grams of water. If more than twenty liters per square meter have fallen today, what is the immense volume of a cloud? With this water, the countryside fills with greenery, flowers, insects, life. In this way, the earth is saved from bad omens and certain climatic changes, but for how long?
In another remote age, or not so much, men invented dances and spells to attract the clouds. A piece of evaporated sea, a huge piece of ocean over our heads. Imagine, we throw the silk to the sky, and it falls onto water that was recently far away and was breathed by merlins, tunas, corals, and sargassos. Now, we also breathe that invisible humidity.
Nothing exists without water, nothing would have a name without clouds, that’s why there is no poet who hasn’t named them at least once. José Emilio Pacheco wrote:
In a world bristling with prisons
Only clouds always burn free.
They have no master, they do not obey orders,
They invent forms, they assume them all.
No one knows if they fly or sail,
If in their light the air is sea or flame.
Woven with wings, they are flowers of water,
Reefs of moments, foam net.
Islands of fog, they float, they dissolve
And leave us sunk on Earth.
As they are immortal, they never oppose
Force or fixity to the hurricane of time.
Clouds last because they dissolve.
Their matter is absence, and they give life.
Ramón J. Soria Breña
| Season 1. Chapter15 | Nubes de solsticio |
| Recording date | June 12 to 22 , 2019 |
| Duration | 2:14 minutes |
| date of Issue | July 6, 2019 |
| Location | Sierra de Guadarrama. Madrid |
| Municipality | Comunidad e Madrid. España |
| Image and sound | Ernesto Cardoso |
| Edition | Ernesto Cardoso |
| Opusculum | Ramón J. Soria Breña |
| Music | Scott Holmes |
| Song | The edge of nowhere |
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