A/N: Clouds are amorphous individuals who are about as rare as any of the Wee Folk. They have strong opinions about being captured on camera and yet they are permanently captured in our imagination. As such, the following drabble and upcoming travel post were both inspired much more by the magic of imagination than anything so dull as a common photograph* (according to the resident cloud experts being the persons known only as Just Argument and Unjust Argument who are most commonly located in The Middle of a debate on Proper Education**).
Below find two piquant examples of the wisdom of The Clouds:
Clouded Perspectives
Just so you know, we see you all as you grapevines of hairless ape, see fish. Flowing, occasionally or often (depending on the day), across a sea of checker boards.
Other occasions (not birthday parties, unless you're the parent), struggling against a sea, turbulent and tumultuous. Strenuous and solitary.
Travelling in schools, learning in boxes begotted by boxes.
How you lot manage to stand inside four walls when you're a stick of angles and elbows we clouds have yet to discern a reasoned method. Much like how you lot have yet to figure out the dolphins have been experimenting on you for a millenia. Those clicks and clacking? They're laughing. At you lot.
Honestly, just take a moment to think. How is it even possible to survive in the sea of the world if most of the time is spent secreted away within the coral concrete of boxes. Windows are a measly invention. Again, the four corners and sides thing. And only just so far in four directions and a single distance. Unless there happens to be a tree blocking the view and then, what's the point in living? A tree is blocking your view. (And don't chop it down. Another one will grow by the time you all have gone extinct via apple-crate suffocation).
We haven't even delved into the dissolution of touch but that'll be in a whole other epoch dictating the Misinformed Melodies to various monstrosities of the Modern Age.
Technology is one. That scrawny boy, Commerce, is another.
But we have gotten side-tracked while we stand on this soap bubble for a moment.
As creatures of the sky we are free from your boxes. Untangeble. Poor old William Wordsworth tried desperately to contain us in a poem. That didn't work out by the way. If you haven't read it, we'll spare you the pain and just say he ended up realising being human is terribly lonely business. Stuck in bodies and minds which ooze a combination of gangreen and ice cream. Simultaneously. How exhausting.
We come with less of the toothpaste ooze which combine humans and physical bodies and more sequence. The closest available metaphor to this particularly narrow word happens to be a classic game of cat's cradle. Done to the tune plucked on the skeins of a lyre.
Do that childhood thing again. Watch us for a while. Pearly bulbs, grey streaks, bulbuous black masses which fall across blue skies, turning all to shadow. Then, slowly, on a breath of wind we flow away, leaving a mass of pale grey blue which encircles the land from green hill to green wood.
Until you have been a cloud, spread eagled over grassy parkland, untouched by picnic baskets and playthings, you won't learn the truth of the universe.
A truth which is a cloud, coming up the lake on an August afternoon.
Moony.
*This thereby meaning my next travel post on the Isle of Skye got centred around the notion of clouds when really, after the fact, I realised captured more photos of hills and picturesque cottages then clouds.
**See Aristophanes The Clouds for further Proper Education on methods of rhetoric disguised as a rather hilarious comedy between a father, son and Sophocles himself.
Below find two piquant examples of the wisdom of The Clouds:
How can I study from below, that which is above?
ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds
The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.
ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds
Just so you know, we see you all as you grapevines of hairless ape, see fish. Flowing, occasionally or often (depending on the day), across a sea of checker boards.
Other occasions (not birthday parties, unless you're the parent), struggling against a sea, turbulent and tumultuous. Strenuous and solitary.
Travelling in schools, learning in boxes begotted by boxes.
How you lot manage to stand inside four walls when you're a stick of angles and elbows we clouds have yet to discern a reasoned method. Much like how you lot have yet to figure out the dolphins have been experimenting on you for a millenia. Those clicks and clacking? They're laughing. At you lot.
Honestly, just take a moment to think. How is it even possible to survive in the sea of the world if most of the time is spent secreted away within the coral concrete of boxes. Windows are a measly invention. Again, the four corners and sides thing. And only just so far in four directions and a single distance. Unless there happens to be a tree blocking the view and then, what's the point in living? A tree is blocking your view. (And don't chop it down. Another one will grow by the time you all have gone extinct via apple-crate suffocation).
We haven't even delved into the dissolution of touch but that'll be in a whole other epoch dictating the Misinformed Melodies to various monstrosities of the Modern Age.
Technology is one. That scrawny boy, Commerce, is another.
But we have gotten side-tracked while we stand on this soap bubble for a moment.
As creatures of the sky we are free from your boxes. Untangeble. Poor old William Wordsworth tried desperately to contain us in a poem. That didn't work out by the way. If you haven't read it, we'll spare you the pain and just say he ended up realising being human is terribly lonely business. Stuck in bodies and minds which ooze a combination of gangreen and ice cream. Simultaneously. How exhausting.
We come with less of the toothpaste ooze which combine humans and physical bodies and more sequence. The closest available metaphor to this particularly narrow word happens to be a classic game of cat's cradle. Done to the tune plucked on the skeins of a lyre.
Do that childhood thing again. Watch us for a while. Pearly bulbs, grey streaks, bulbuous black masses which fall across blue skies, turning all to shadow. Then, slowly, on a breath of wind we flow away, leaving a mass of pale grey blue which encircles the land from green hill to green wood.
Until you have been a cloud, spread eagled over grassy parkland, untouched by picnic baskets and playthings, you won't learn the truth of the universe.
A truth which is a cloud, coming up the lake on an August afternoon.
Moony.
*This thereby meaning my next travel post on the Isle of Skye got centred around the notion of clouds when really, after the fact, I realised captured more photos of hills and picturesque cottages then clouds.
**See Aristophanes The Clouds for further Proper Education on methods of rhetoric disguised as a rather hilarious comedy between a father, son and Sophocles himself.
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