Dark Clouds (2013) photo by Audrey Skoglund
You say it's dark. And, in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun.
- Nietzsche
I.
As Al Murray's Pub Landlord never tires of informing audiences, the British are a sensible, down-to-earth people. They're never going to put a man on the moon, or take the musings of philosophers - particularly in the Continental tradition of France and Germany - seriously. No, of course not: they're a sensible, down-to-earth people.
So I'm never particularly surprised when an Englishman tells me that my thinking is fanciful, impractical, or unrealistic.
But when an Irishman, who identifies as a pataphysical poet and playwright with an interest in all things paranormal and supernatural - including Jungian archetypes - describes my ideas as so preposterous that I might as well be living in the clouds, then I am surprised (to say the least) [1].
Well, with storm clouds gathering over Eastern Europe, maybe this is a good time to consider what it might mean to inhabit the troposphere ...
II.
Simon Solomon isn't, of course, the first poet and playwright to ridicule philosophers for their way of thinking. We might recall, for example, the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, the so-called πατέρας της κωμωδίας, whose satrirical play The Clouds (423 BC) contributed to the death of Socrates two decades later [2].
And do I resent being portrayed as a graduate of The Thinkery? Not at all.
In fact, I rather like the idea of my thoughts originating among the clouds; not so much those white, fluffy, happy-looking ones - cumulus clouds, as they are known - but the dark, heavy, menacing storm clouds (cumulonimbus) which roll into view "from out of the eastern heavens" [3], bringing thunder and lightning our way and blotting out the sun.
For whilst idealists with their sunny disposition speak in favour of blue-sky thinking and are confident and hopeful about the future, insisting that every cloud has a silver lining, etc., I subscribe to a more pessimistic (some might even say nihilistic) philosophy.
And if this clouds my judgement, then so be it. At least my clouds "come from great distances, arriving from the deeps of the sky" [4].
Notes
[1] See the comment made by Simon Solomon at the end of a recent post entitled 'Is Anything Really Worth Fighting For?' (4 Mar 2022): click here.
[2] Plato considered The Clouds a contributing factor in Socrates's trial and execution in 399 BC and he mentions the play in his defence of the latter, known as the Apology, which was written shortly afterwards.
Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a petty thief, a fraud, and a sophist with an interest in atmospheric phenomena (or what would come to be known as meterology - a Greek term meaning the study of things high up in the sky). Whilst some critics think that Aristophanes's caricature of Socrates is just a bit of fun, others regard it as evidence of the long rivalry between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Clouds', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 56.
[4] Ibid., p. 60.
The best mystics, poets and speculators live with their heads in the clouds and their feet in/on the earth (or vice versa) - otherwise what we get, Stephen, is a kind of antihumanistic version of John Lennon, whose fur coats you'd likely be brushing shoulders with up there in the stratosphere. But what Heidegger called 'the Dimension' in his late, fascinating writings on poetics and language does need to be ecopoetically connected.
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