How do you know when you have finally found the perfect cloud? I’ve made a point, in recent years, of looking into the sky for that cloud, one of those puffy clouds, beautifully asymmetrical with a flat bottom and artfully arranged billows of white against a backdrop of deep blue. As a child I was encouraged to snap out of my daydreaming, get my head out of the clouds and plant my feet on the ground. Perhaps this has been an idle use of my time, looking for the ideal of a cloud, the kind of cloud I was taught to draw as a child without really seeing what clouds looked like, a cloud ubiquitous as a weather forecast icon and now as a symbol of data storage. This is not how clouds typically look. The beauty is really in the unending variety of forms they take which makes my quixotic search all the more absurd.
But if I have raised my eyes to the sky for a few moments longer than I would have otherwise, then my goal has served a purpose. I once took the time to watch as a large cloud, held in place by windless skies over a Cambodian coast, gradually evaporated and disappeared. And another time, from high up on a clear skied Himalayan mountain, I watched as a large mass of white rushed up the slope towards me, first engulfing me in a dense fog and then soaking me in a dramatic downpour of rain. It reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s song Clouds:
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all.
Paul Roorda, Cloud Memory II, vintage photographs and paper, 2012.
I’ve also spent a lot of time searching for clouds in boxes of old photos in Berlin flea market stalls. The skies of these snapshots and scenic views are an incidental backdrop to the intended subject. These skies have stayed much the same, though faded and tinged in yellow, but the landscapes, buildings and people are anonymous, forgotten or gone. The discarded photos are an archive of sky, a cloud memory, a historical accounting of the lower atmosphere. There is something dependable about the sky, constant in its dynamic predictability, whether you are here or somewhere else.
Or maybe not. Maybe that is a reassuring hope we tell ourselves when we look out the window to see what weather the day will hold or read the fourteen day forecast as we plan ahead. Climate scientists, the kind of people with their feet firmly planted on solid ground, have been looking at the future of clouds the same way they have looked at polar ice and sea levels. As with so many of the predictions and speculations, nothing is precise or certain about the effects of carbon in the atmosphere except the fact that too much will create dramatic and catastrophic changes to weather patterns. And clouds are no exception. Quantities and patterns of different types of cloud cover are expected to change, reducing their role in keeping the earth cool. Some studies predict a feedback loop in which much of the thick layer of cloud that covers our oceans will be lost exposing them to increased solar heat. Others predict thickening of cloud layers, further trapping heat at the Earth’s surface. It is easy to desire or demand more precision in climate change predictions, but with the possibility of losing the sky as we know it it is obvious that we need to heed the warnings.
Paul Roorda, A Flake of Sky, cyanotype postcard, 6 x 4 inches, 2021.
I wrote a poem recently, for one of the abstract landscape wall photographs in my Somewhere Anywhere Postcard series. Now I wonder if it is too optimistic.
A Flake of Sky
One chip of pale blue paint
A flake of sky on a hazy morning
drifting to the ground.
The sky is falling
but gradually enough for us
to catch the pieces.
A number of years ago, I completed a project called Sky Notice which had polaroid photos of clouds stapled onto pages that were nailed and wired to utility posts around the city. The instant photos of white clouds against blue sky often came out of the camera in strange reds, purples and yellows, colours distorted by the deterioration of the chemicals in the expired photo paper, Further damage was caused by exposure to the weather as they were left on the posts. A poetic warning, a strange and disturbing image of sky revealed.
Paul Roorda, Sky Notice/Stormy Change, Polaroid photos, broken barometer, wire, nails, staples and paper, 32 x 18 x 2 inches, 2012.
Perhaps what we see when we look into the sky today is not what we can count on seeing in our future tomorrows as we let conditions dramatically change around us. Maybe we see only what we want to see, if we look at all. We are seeing things in clouds that reflect our own idiosyncratic state of mind, another case of apophenia. Perhaps the overlooked skies in old photos will be examined in some decades as an important archive of the sky as we once knew it.
I did finally find my elusive ideal cloud. It was with a childlike excitement that I took one photo after the other as the cloud billowed into its perfect shape and then dissolved into irregular masses of white above the sea on a Vietnamese coast. Hopefully I can retain some of this innocent oblivion while looking into the sky. Hopefully my children can look into the sky when they are my age and enjoy its beauty rather than harbour concerns. And hopefully the carefree pastime of lying back and looking at shapes in the clouds will be a possibility for a long time. I do want to believe that the sky is falling gradually enough for us to catch the pieces.
