In the library, there is a branded water that claims to be ‘remineralised’ with added electrolytes. A vendible juice of cloud. A page visited too many times attains a thickening. Attention drifts. There is a brain fog you say ‘set in’, as though one could have an allergy to time. There is a somewhat opening.

The first time I wrote with cloud storage, poured words into a browser document, was on shift. I was waitressing, supposed to be polishing candle holders; but instead of scraping the white wax out of glass I decided to write. The wax would break apart, float in a dispersed gel upon boiling water. I scalded the prints off my fingertips from doing this daily. The shift involved a thickening of time, hot white with chores and demand. Warmed by the kitchens, kinesis, lifting, I was adrift and steaming. This was poetics: ‘like looking at a movie of a rainbow’, the difference between chronology and duration (Lin 2005). The lapse between the tint of a mood and reaction. The shift is a history of bodies and materials collapsed in temporal window.

‘The world’s clouds are shifting, but not in a good way’: the changing dispersal of cloud is causing the earth to ‘warm faster’ (Scully 2016). The ‘bright-white’ quality of cloud ‘increases the planet’s albedo’: its ‘ability to reflect the sun’s energy and radiation back into space’, allowing Earth to cool (Scully 2016). More cloud please, we’re bristling. I was reading Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures (1982), obsessed with the way it would hold the weather as a kind of prefix to event. I was always thirsty, then, carrying plates from sweltering kitchens, scaling stairwells and gliding around with weighted trays in my hand. My thirst was in lieu of a type of speech: ‘By this chemistry is fabricated a language…which shifts and reveals its meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky’ (Rodefer 1987: 15). And what would you like with that? What would you like with that? There is a tonal association between the transient formation of clouds and the assemblage of Rodefer’s long-form poem, with its variant horizons and moods. Sometimes, his speaker would spend a long time gazing around into distance, sucking in culture; other times, he’d look down from the sky and right at you: ‘Let’s have another drink’, ‘Let’s have a quaalude orgy’ (Rodefer 1987: 12, 38). This casual intimacy of summons, like the reader was just drifting by. Want to sleep but I’m still reading.

Shall I pretend to lecture on the topic of clouds? Let me take shape in the form you imagine: a butterfly, a Cheshire cat smiling wryly; a dinosaur, a wisp of text.

Does the ‘Codex’ to Four Lectures promise the weather’s unlocking? I can’t help but think: Four Lectures, Four Seasons. Imagine at the end we all had a shared hormonal surge, thanatos vibe, excitement. And the clouds dispersed with a promise of clearing, they were a kind of address, a phatic event in weather; and the clouds became eros, they were lonely without each other. I wondered about the ozone, the troposphere and a lifetime of gauzy sunlight, reacting. We can blame its damage on the rising use of industrial halocarbons (refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosols, ‘blowing agents for making plastic foams’). Since The Montreal Protocol (1987), the ozone is ‘expected to recover over time’ (Wuebbles 2018). There is a story of damage and reparation, with the ozone, that we can’t just apply to the world as such. While we might ‘repair’ the ozone, as though we might air its wounds in the sky, such thought is damaging in the anthropocene, for it only perpetuates our generalising sense of ‘human’ mastery and hubris. So I would think of the wax stuck in the drain, the future as a fractal in the world we had now. Something wedged a crescent moon beneath my fingernails. Or, ‘The future is nothing / But a flying wing’ (Rodefer 1997: 48). A glimpse in motion, which was poetry.

In the changing rooms at school they would say, you girls use enough deodorant to clear holes in the ozone. I watched the gym teachers smoke cigarettes in great inhalations during lunch.

There’s something cloudy in my mind these days. It happens whenever I think of the future, not so much a ‘flying wing’ as the dark grey stain that blots the sky.

‘The association between clouds and minds is so commonplace as to go unnoticed […]. The thought-cloud has become part of our sign language’ (Harris 2015: 11). So how to unthink the cliché of cloud? How to think clouds at all, when they so commonly serve as ‘symbols of obfuscation’ (Hood 2018: 2)?

There is something in the rhyming that makes a cloud of the days. When Karen Dalton sings ‘Something On Your Mind’, she sings to open up. Her guitar beneath is bright and clear, but she is addressing the not-knowing that needs a motive to breathe. To live, to ‘make it’. This it of the thing in something, which is trying to live but doesn’t name. There is something sweeping, cirrussy in her lyric gesture of intimacy, teased apart. To ask, something’s on your mind is to offer an ear. But the altitude is high, higher than her warbling voice. There is an upheaval of the days, turned into night. The colouring of the sky is wrong; there shouldn’t be shadow. As if we could ‘make’ our days. What does it mean to complete a thing when you want the unfinishing and ceaseless blue. Your storage is full; the cloud is dragging. Someone is on the line, questioning; someone is there with a call. Please hang up and try again, and the white linen looks like clouds on the line, and what to wear, and when to rain. Anyway, you make it through the day.

In her novel Água Viva (1973 – often translated as The Stream of Life), Clarice Lispector’s narrator addresses as one whose mode of communication is that of a cloud: ‘What I wrote you here is an electronic drawing without past or future: it is simply now’ (2014: 5). To be ‘simply now’ is to delineate a quality of presence that flickers in the trace of what it erases of past or future. A cloud trace, scrolling like Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002): a passing nowness that (in its constant shift) cannot be ‘reduce[d] to an atomic point of whatever size’ (Morton 2016a: 70). Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds does the expressive work of this ‘simply now’, stripping Nintendo’s linear, platform game of Super Mario Brothers to, as Arcangel puts it, ‘Just the clouds’ (2012). To put the video together, Arcangel ‘hacked’ a cartridge of Super Mario Brothers, adjusting the game’s code to strip all sound and visual elements of the game except for its ‘iconic scrolling clouds’ (Arcangel 2019). This tendency towards abstraction stretches the dynamism of gameplay into a slowed-down ‘nowness’ which presents erasure itself as mastery — rather than complete the game traditionally, Arcangel mastered the code to ‘unmaster’ the game, transforming its cloudily absent-protagonist into a kind of abstracted avatar. Just as Lispector’s narrator is already doing the work of the scroll, writing back to what was written ‘here’: an ‘electronic drawing’ that elides its ‘past and future’ appearance. We know there is something missing. This is also a work of critique. I call it hypercritique because it is beyond the game it lives inside.

In Arcangel’s video, YouTubers comment ‘I love the part with the clouds’, ‘I love putting it on the highest speed and watching it move slowly across the screen’. This kind of writing clouds the panel of the glasshouse I write on (call it a laptop or cognitive theatre). I cannot see through to the glassy ‘world’. We are a part cloud. Strange dissonance of speeds as you read very fast across the line, and yet the cloudy words are slow as early snow. A snowblink. Click. If we have the technical capacity to speed up, something in us demands a drag to slow that thought. We are blinking too fast, cursorial beings. We are. We are. Here, I draw a line. Arcangel’s piece reminds us of the pleasure of drawing, rewiring the understory of a world — its code — to focus on ‘simply now’, however it seems. Follow the whims of a thought as it gathers air, space, form, weight.

In her poem ‘Lyrical Dance’, Jazmine Linklater writes, ‘some time the hang clouds very low’ (2017: 16). Inversions of syntax dramatise a shimmering time, a ‘some time’ of clouds hanging out very low and close to humans. Time in this poem is loose, falling long over enjambed lines to a kind of ambient fragility the subject is lost in. There are these shimmers, ‘unflickering your lightful fiction’ (Linklater 2017: 16) where assonance and consonance make prosody of being’s contingency. Desire has a kind of ‘dropped’ effect, the slumped clouds are pregnant with longing, repeat and loop: ‘keeping-repeating-reaching’ (Linklater 2017: 16). Language as a constant deferral of the almost-same. And when I am near you, I drift into feeling I am.

To shift gears, I sip water. Come to something.

What does it mean to study cloud? Grasp this or that textual instance of cloudy presence? What kind of writing would look up to the task?

Clouds emote a distributed syntax: the order of I watching or writing cloud is dissolved. As Sam Buchan-Watts’ writes in his recent pamphlet Cloud Study (2020), ‘The clouds preceded us’. Cloud Study’s physical presentation foregrounds horizons: folded in half, lengthways, its stanzas accumulate wisps of stratocumulus drift across vast space. Like Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (2001), this is an ambient poetics of tint, repetition and variation, which highlights its own materiality as text, offering language as an indeterminate orientation between subject-object relation. Buchan-Watts teases with the premise of words as viewpoints, clouds as objects of study, but the lyric effect of Cloud Study as a sequence is an ambient hypercritique of our medial intimacy with clouds, their vaporous collapsing of inside/outside, their mutable bearing and obscuring of sociopolitical histories. These lines are performances of typing-in-motion: as though the clouds were writing themselves in the Cloud, as though we found ourselves inside every correction:

This is a pamphlet that never quite begins until it’s all over. It demands recursive rereading and drift between variant centring and indentation. In its placing, the classic or default font choice of ‘Calibri over Times New Roman’ hyperbolically implies an epochal shift in media history. The surface implication of textual aesthetics becomes weighted with the shape and consequence of computational articulation in general. One font obscures the other; font being at once a receptacle for water and a collection of characters, an undecidable play between containment and the flows of writing itself. Cloud Study’s format invites you to hold that ‘page break / over two columns’, in its tilt of landscape layout. The paper density is fine enough to show through text from the previous page, creating an atmospheric effect of translucency and flicker. This overlay adds to the ‘drafting’, indeterminate and performative dimensions of the text, which seems always to be in the drift of potential inscription as much as the loop of repetition — I am reminded of moving, scroll text which was popular in the html heydays of the early 2000s. For every auto-scripted element to Cloud Study, there is also an emphasis on perception and making-with — a deliberate, ecological aesthetics held in painterly terms such as ‘Chiaroscuro’, a word that captures the play between shadow and light. It is difficult to stay still or extract definitive meaning from the text. The pamphlet’s offering of language as scarcity, a dialectic between space and text, suggests chiaroscuro is also a shimmer between semiotic possibilities. Cloud Study happens over Marshlands, but the speaker quickly realises the study participates with these marshlands. What violent glimmer of the ‘god-trick’ vision ‘of seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1988: 581) is subject to lyric aporia and critique; its omniscient gaze is dissolved. The shifting capitalisation indicates an uncertainty about the authority and specifics of place and placing — leading to a more ambient sense of drift and recollection.

Ambient poetics, of which cloud writing is just one strain, offers ‘a materialist way of reading texts with a view to how they encode the literal space of their inscription’ (Morton 2007: 3). Ambience calls attention to the poetic workings of space and identity. Appropriated by advertising and corporate architecture, ambience becomes part of the marketing of atmospherics: a performative tool for producing ‘specific emotional effects in the buyer that enhance his [sic] purchase probability’ (Kotler 1973: 50). As opposed to this hard, directive, quantitative and commercial staging of atmospherics and their affective yield, lyric opens up what Lisa Robertson calls the qualitative, ‘soft architectures’ (2006) of spatial dimension, where poetics is a device for ecological attunement, for hypercritique. Ambience has a quality of the here-and-now which tethers hopeful imaginaries to material realities. ‘Capitalism’, as Morton puts it, ‘dreams of ecotopia; it is the dreaminess of this dream, rather than its content, that sustains the identity-theme of capitalism’ (Morton 2002: 55). This ecotopia, premised on technofix and heroic, capitalist individualism, on the chronic capitulation to naturalised market forces, gets in the way of the real, communal dreamwork of hypercritique within the simultaneous, unequal end- and present-times of the anthropocene.

Buchan-Watts’ Cloud Study performs the risk of a cloud thought premised in the harsh binaries of ecotopia or total extinction. With some theatricality, its final stanzas witness the bullish appearance of clouds that are blocked into sinister historical personifications:

The rainbow can symbolise something unreachable, intangible: a meteorological phenomenon made of droplets, reflection, refraction and atmospheric dispersion of light. The ‘awful rainbow’ echoes the ‘awesome’ power of the sublime — Cloud Study leaves us with the exit of this Romantic cliff-hanger, overshadowed by the violent, ‘warrior cloud’, the atomic (Little Boy) and nuclear (Fat Man) bombs thrown over Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States during World War II. Introducing the resulting mushroom cloud explosions of these historical bombings as ‘cocky fascist clouds’ calls out the masculine, dominating war machine behind them with disarming bathos; the blank space that follows prepares us for a different kind of beyond that is a kind of atmospheric annihilation whose legacies are particulate, dispersed, ongoing. The ‘dim view’ of low volume, ambient cloud appearance in the rest of the pamphlet reaches this sublime conclusion in a way that dislocates our every relation with the enveloping, ‘awful rainbow’ of historical aura — aura being ‘a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (Benjamin 2008: 23). Buchan-Watt’s horizon could be utopian, historical, or that of the event in general; the event of the poem, the event of politics, war or atmospheric destruction.

The event of a passing cloud is not merely meteorological but laden with sociohistorical traces of matter, treacherous chemicals, affecting the lungs of those who breathe it. Buchan-Watts leaves us with an undecidable, porous wound in the sky. Once the horizon of the poem recedes, ‘awful rainbow’ becomes an overwhelming experience of the plasmatic glitch stuff, atmospheric trash, the language of the Cloud turned inside out to a meaningless, scrambled aurora of pixels. One reporter on the Nagasaki bombing recalls ‘a giant mountain of jumbled rainbows’ in the wake of the mushroom cloud; ‘Much living substance had gone into those rainbows’ (Glines 1997) — Walter Benjamin’s auratic ‘tissue’ thus acquiring a more sinister, fleshy meaning. Is this poem elegiac or does it reach for rainbow’s ephemeral possibility, after the moment of extermination? Is the rainbow a kind of exit or opening, where the appearance of the ‘warrior cloud’ feels more like a block or wedge in the otherwise dissolve of the text: a stamp of worrying closure. As potentially toxic bodies, clouds carry traces of socio-atmospheric control; in the poem, certain clouds literalise the visual appearance of domination. The rainbow encapsulates Buchan-Watt’s refractive, embodied poetics of atmosphere.

At the end of Buchan-Watts’ poem, I am caught by the atmosphere of vertigo and sublime in a moment of visceral, hypercritical attention. Elsewhere, the poem already introduced atmospheric entanglement with the couplet: ‘The cloud spooled into the room. / The rain spoiled our afternoon’ (Buchan-Watts 2020: n.p.). The assonant ‘oo’ sounds perform that spooling, so language seems to wrap us around space and time, the room/the afternoon. While Buchan-Watt’s cloud writing takes us to the edge of anthropocenic space-time (one proposed start date for the anthropocene is the first atomic blast in 1945), ambient poetics also has utopian inclinations. Offering a sensuous dissolve of identity and what Robertson calls a ‘synthetics of space’, ambient poetics ‘improvises unthought shape’ in the ‘civic object’ of ‘erotic hope’: ‘We [the imagined, multivocal entity that is the Office for Soft Architecture] propose a theoretical device that amplifies the cognition of thresholds. It would add to the body the vertiginously unthinkable. That is, a pavilion’ (Robertson 2006: 69). The pavilion is a subsidiary building, a space adjacent or functioning prosthetically to the body: a poem. A theoretical device; a cloud writing whose attunements heighten our awareness of thresholds, of spatiotemporal borders, while opening ‘the vertiginously unthinkable’ — the ‘awful rainbow’ of abyssal multiplicity, indeterminacy / shifts
writing with cloud in the dark and future
something beyond which throws, stimulates and encourages
connection / synthesis between material particulates, ongoing storms, and to go—