Cloud Poetry

“The Signature of All Things” by Jacob Böhme, who suggests that God marked objects with a sign, a “signature” for their purpose: the concept that every object in the real world has some hidden meaning, and particularly how these signatures interact.

A first century BC didactic poem by Lucretius (99-55 BC) explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.

Excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A history of walking”, 2000

Biblical, ancient, historical sacred texts from dead and living civilizations

JG Ballard’s dystopian novel set in a waterlogged London

Excerpts from medieval Japanese author and Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283-1352) Essays on Idleness, or Tsurezuregusa.

Baudelaire’s lovely poem encouraging drunkenness

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch

Atmosphere. A familiar yet extremely vague phenomenon The term atmosphere has its origin in the meteorological field and refers to the earth's envelope of air which carries the weather. It is only since the 18th century that it has been used metaphorically, for moods which are "in the air", for the emotional tinge of a space. Today this expression is commonly used in all European languages; it no longer seems artificial and is hardly even regarded as a metaphor. One speaks of the atmosphere of a conversation, a landscape, a house, the atmosphere of a festival, an evening, a season. The way in which we speak of atmospheres in these cases is highly differentiated - even in everyday speech. An atmosphere is tense, light-hearted or serious, oppressive or uplifting, cold or warm. We also speak of the atmosphere of the "petty bourgeoisie", the atmosphere of the Twenties, the atmosphere of poverty. To introduce some order into these examples, atmospheres can be di- vided into moods, phenomena of synaesthesia, suggestions for motions, communicative and social-conventional atmospheres. What matters is that, in speaking of atmospheres, we refer to their character. With this term character we already bring our understanding of atmos- pheres close to the sphere of physiognomics and theatre.

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.” ... “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.” - Adam Kirsch, New Yorker, Aug 2017