Coudwatching

Cloudwatching is a microcosm of everything we try to do as humans. Here we are, confronted with the shapes of some swirling chaotic system, unpredictable from moment to moment and uncaring and inscrutable from day to day, and we look upwards and out gray matter immediately—and, importantly, effortlessly—grabs some motif, some geon, some pattern to play connect-the-dots with, and assembles it into an “object”; sometimes an “idea”. This is like a dream-soliloquy, except it is actual and tangible and takes up most of our visual field. It does not dissipate with our brain-states. It is The World as we want to see it. Nothing is extant, no value or object, without observers. So the observers eke and hew and strain—effortlessly in this case, but not all others—some pattern and some mechanism. Whence our myths? They are cloudwatching. Whence our purposes and analyses and interpretations? Look to the child vegging out on the lea.

Yes, it’s muddled. But an idea like this takes a while to express. Perhaps it is best served by dancing around the meat of it for a while. But we’ll return to it. (Not, however, in essay form: you will se no fleshed-out arguments from me, no fascinating thought-experiments. Only intuition and, if I may permit myself a small self-serving word, wonder.) First, there is one more important piece of groundwork before we begin.

Cloudwatching is an afternoon activity. What lies on the flip side? Night, of course; specifically, sometime after the deepest hours of the night, probably the 4 a.m.’s of the insomniac or the blaring alarms of the ambitious worker. The night is not a good time for cloudwatching. You’d need floodlights so powerful that they could suck out the electric needs of entire countries. Nighttime belongs to astronomy, of course. Astronomy: the genesis of the mechanistic view of the world. Astronomy: the tracing and careful measurement of the movement of stellar bodies. Astronomy: from which all of our science derives, which nourished those wonderful myths: “but it spins!”. Principles which were laid out in the night do not apply to day. There is the mechanistic night and the hermeneutic daytime. Daytime: the strict domain of chaos theory. Nighttime: the playgrounds of Newton and Keppler and Galileo and Copernicus—the academic parents of all us scientists. Maybe, just maybe, that is why sunrises and sunsets are such universally accepted and appreciated phenomena: the strictest mechanist and the loose interpreter come together at this boundary event—boundaries have always been more interesting that the interiors, the outside-in perspective topples the inside-out as parochial. (I should mention that, having no training in classical mythology of ancient and modern people, I was forced to make up my own. To some, it contains too much that is sterile and mechanical. I have to beg to differ: my intuition tells me that I’m not being mechanical enough. But perhaps I’ll explain myself in a roundabout way later.)

So, we have cloudwatching, we have the night, we have the circumstances of my own life which I seem to owe the reader. We have countless clashes and boundary conflicts, as we’ll see. But what else is there?

Consider: "Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing."