‘High up, a few chalky clouds doubtfully wavered in the pale sky that curved over agains the rim of Downs like a vast inverted pot-de-chambre.’ A sentence from Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons.
We can project whatever we wish upon clouds - poor things - they carry all of our transient, passing moods, for seeing whatever we wish to: the sky, the clouds are the ultimate space for imaginative projection. My grandmother loved the shape of clouds and she loved to sketch them. As an artist, you can’t go wrong with a cloud: it is the ultimate amorphous shape. There is no ‘wrongly’ drawn cloud, only the outline of a mood and feeling drifting across the sky, as stiff or as saggy as we wish. Clouds, you might say, produce atmosphere, which, is in its original Greek root form, means ‘vapour’ (atmos) and ‘globe or ball’ (spharia). So if you want to be imaginative, clouds are vapours we observe through glass balls, the sky, the celestial sphere.
In their shifting, nebulous shapes, we observe our passing moods and speculations. Clouds are visual speculations of our inner life. Hamlet sees a camel in the clouds above Elsinore Castle; fussy old Polonius sees a whale. The people of Howling village and Cold Comfort Farm, this sentence implies, see chamber pots: an upside down chamber pot to be precise. A chamber pot is a rather messy thing: it splashes and spills its undesirable contents all the way down the stairs. Turned upside down, a chamber pot produces a filthy shower.
But if we read more carefully we see that it is the Downs that provide the rim: the clouds hover and waver doubtfully over the edge of the hills. The clouds might be doubt itself if doubt were to take on any sort of shape. These clouds are chalky, the geological substrata of the Downland upon which the village of Howling and its uncouth inhabitants burn their filthy stoves, cook their porridge and clean (‘cletter’) their dishes.
In 1703, Thomas Appletree, a young Oxford graduate from Worcestershire recorded the shape of the clouds in his weather diary:
I remark we had a constant thick & heavy Sea of clouds & close dark nebulous expanse, or Black sad Atmosphere baked in massy clouds, & I could compare ye huge rising body & vast aeriall Load or ye mundane smoak to nothing more than a Diffusion of ye Ocean or steam of some infinite Abyss & what I term in my speciall Language, a Sea = sheet.
Appletree’s entry describes the clouds in the language of meterology, but it is a language that soon slips into thoughts about mood (the other meaning of atmosphere). Appletree’s clouds are dark and close and brooding. They are baked into some sort of emotional cake that rises from through the atmosphere into a vast rising body: smoky, burnt, baked to a cinder, you might say, if you were to speak metaphorically. Arising from a welter (you might say swelter) of atmosphere, clouds offer themselves as canvases for feeling — ‘aeriall Loads’ as Appletree puts it — which give rise to all sort of temporary projections of person, place, and provenance, even a ‘speciall’ visual language.