#26
Reading Clouds

I write outdoors. The wind steps up my verbal velocity simply by unwinding through the trees. Clouds flow with a terrible calm that subverts my stubborn anxiety. And nature's epic magnitude looms around me in a third person we've recognized since tribal times and dressed as deity.

My islander friends, several octogenarians I've known from my adolescence, believe the soul's art is to manipulate skillfully perceptions of nature into an awareness of divinities. They see gods everywhere. And they acquire information unavailable to most of us, because they are willing to invent things into being. "Everything that is possible to be believed is an image of the truth," says William Blake in one of his "Proverbs of Hell."

Upon returning recently from an extended stay with them in the wilderness uplands of an outer island, where I undertook a life review, I resolved to set up my own office and write indoors for the first time in my career. I thought benightedly that this civilized effort might produce more commercial results than I've enjoyed from my previous twenty-two novels. That lasted less than a week before the laptop I'd borrowed from my daughter stopped working.

My sorcerous friends claimed they had hexed the machine and promptly whisked it away to 'repair' it. Since then, I've returned to my old ways, hiking to various mountain and coastal sites near my home to write. This has pleased the old guys, who rely on me as a gofer during their elaborate restorations of prehistoric sacred sites. As a reward for remaining accessible at the beach parks where they hang out, they are refining a visionary technique they've shared with me these past thirty years: cloud reading.

The future assumes the features of the present in clouds. That's what they believe. I wrote a little about their conviction a couple decades ago in my novel Wyvern. This is a tradition made famous by the Emperor Constantine, who in 312 C.E. glimpsed the future in the sky and transformed his empire to a Christian theocracy. My forefather, Athanasius, curmudgeonly bishop of Alexandria, took full advantage of this orphic event to win the emperor's ear and fulfill perhaps the most influential editorial agenda in history by reconfiguring the contents of the Bible. So, I approach this technique with respect imprinted in my blood.

Clouds are the shed skin of time. Time itself is a monk seal, which molts between the stars and us. (The monk seal - Ilioholoikauaua - annually loses and replenishes its pelt.) We sit at daybreak on a shelf of coral marl where the sea bursts through clefts of black rock and jets spume like the blowhole of a leviathan. We are far from the symphonic press of city noise. With the departing night, the cosmic monk seal vanishes, leaving behind a Heraclitean flux of tangerine clouds in a sky transparently blue as a teardrop.

"Pay attention to the heteromorphic changes in the shapes of the smallest of the omnifarious cumuli that appear over the headland," one of the old men tells me (in his own words, of which these really are the best equivalents in our language). He's the one with a face like Beethoven's, only swarthier. He's trustworthy and, unlike the others, has never lied to me. "Observe the light within the shadow of those particular clouds. Look carefully at the shifting luster within the umbrae. There, in those umbrageous alterations, is prophecy."

His voice awakens dim instinct. I can feel the moment breathing as I write this down. My other friends squat beside me in this citrus glazed atmosphere of forgotten myth and try to take my writing pad away from me, but I won't let them. They can have the machine. I'm keeping the words.