Some Weather

My thought drifted to the weather as I walked on. It struck me that the weather was not only coloring my thoughts in a certain way, but was actually directing them. The specific play of wind and clouds and temperature seemed to make certain thoughts possible while precluding others. There was something to this. I began keeping a log of the weather, jotting down each day's particular combination of atmospheric elements, as well as the thoughts and moods that they entrained.

I could not let it go. There was a charette coming up at the journal, a deadline approaching on a translation, and my apartment was developing a nasty plumbing problem that had me wearing flipflops in the bathroom and pinching my nose. But I could not stop thinking about the weather. The days wore on, and infatuation tilted into obsession. I was not unaware of this greased gradient into folly, but I would not be persuaded that my obsession was anything less than fundamentally healthy, that mine was a solipsistic or irrelevant descent, or that my quest, if pursued with diligence, would not yield up a pearl stunning to behold--a pearl whose at once prismatic and cloudy surface would show its reverent beholders that their true evolutionary destiny lay in not in riding elevators to the tops of air conditioned skyscrapers, but in joining the ranks of homo sapiens meteorologicus.
I saw my hunch confirmed every time I looked out my window onto my wide view of sky and water: There really was something to the weather. More than a shifting background or a convenient foil to smalltalk, weather constituted the fundamental conditions of our daily experience. My conviction grew like a seed that had found purchase in good soil, and soon I thought that the world needed to know. And I already had the perfect forum. My swelling notes on the spiritual mechanics of meteorology could be turned into a running feature in Anatole. Some Weather, I would call it--The Vaporous Science of Meteorology.
Being a literary and cultural magazine, Anatole was perfectly suited to the topic. Any reader who stopped for just a minute to think about it would know that weather and literature were inseparable. Observations on the interplay of sun and wind and rain, or fictional admixtures of the same, seem to be sine qua non tools for the writer's art if it is to live up to its mandate to chart out limitless exemplary maps of the human experience.
As much by instinct as by read example, I knew that the body of human literature contained as many portentous thunderheads and blazing sunsets as did the history of man's tenure on the planet.
And with good reason, too. Weather not only frames the mood; it impels it onward in an incessant series of small adjustments, taps on the soul's steering wheel. Just as man's Enlighted understanding of the world cast fields as diverse as physics and history as dynamic, evolving, revisable, so any latterday holistic understanding of the human experience must cast mankind not as a blessed creature apart, but as a creature of the weathers. And, continuing in the Enlightenment tradition, the weather itself must be seen as an unremitting act of physical becoming which tows the receptive spirit closely in its wake. The examples in literature are as numerous as the storms that have fed and battered the earth thorugh the ages, and are too many to cite here. [But consider, if only for a moment, Defoe's publication of observations on the winter storm of 1703, when the lead roofing on Westminster Abbey scrolled up like parchment, and up to 8,000 souls came to grief at sea. Or the fact that poetry, regarded on the whole, is well and truly the result of meteorological measurements performed on the atmosphere of the poet's brain.]
If all this seemed obvious to me, it also seemed uncanny that no one had before thought to systematize the effects of weather on the soul. Indeed, there was a yawning gap at the very heart of the humanities. Who has ever undertaken a systematic examination, not only of weather's role in literature, but of its function as a barometer to the human spirit, and as the missing ingredient in nearly every attempt to chart the course of human history? That this failure stood in such sharp contrast to the hurtling progress being made on the apocalyptic meteorological problem of the age made it even more egregious. On a personal level, I also thought that such an exercise would be good for me, since it would help me understand my own moods and prejudices much more objectively. It might, for instance, help in parsing my own reactions to any future Braxator installments.
To answer this plaintive calling, then, I decided that I would continue making my daily notes on the weather, with consideration paid to its dynamic and dictatorial nature, while leaving open the possibility of asking important questions or drawing tentative conclusions as I saw fit. The idea was for this effort to function as a spur to reader contributions, since the experience of the weather was sure to be as diverse and enriching as the fertile field of humanity itself.
What were the questions I asked myself? Maybe, I thought, the experience of weather was genetically conditioned. Maybe there were people out there who were impervious to it, people whose spiritual constitutions were insusceptible to variations in temperature and sunlight by virtue of an ancestral bequest of storms and other extremes, and who as such were most qualified to lead institutions through times of turbulence and uncertainty: Icelandic helmsmen, the shepherds of the Caucasus, Bedouin. Or perhaps it was quite the opposite, that the centuries of storms running in their blood made them too volatile to be trusted at the helm? And what role did ancient weathers have as an ingredient in religion, in philosophy? Was it a coincidence that the cruelest and most impossible of the monotheisms was hatched in and then flourished across an unremitting desert? Did Siddhartha's upbringing in a lush Nepalese valley play a part in the detatched equanimity of his teachings? Might not the diversity and capriciousness of the Hindu deities have something to do with the subcontinent's endless succession of monsoon verdure and dire drought? And do the surviving pagan superstitions of Europe have anything to do with the cruelty of that continent's weather in prehistorical times? What about paleometeorology? Could ice cores and fossil records tell us something about the conditions that formed the crucible of human perception?
And what of the way the weather mirrors the human metabolism? Typical days start still and sluggish before progressing to a mid-afternoon peak of activity. Body and soul both ride the crest of this wave through the afternoon. But winds quiet again at dusk, the waves on the water die, giving way to a time of withdrawn reflection. The wind is still, the surface of the water reflects its calm. Might not the waves playing on the surface of the mind suddenly still in the same way? And if such waves do not settle at the approach of velvety dusk, is it not desirable that they should--that the proper condition of the human soul is to be receptive to and reflective of the weather, lest we miss an important message coded into the elements?
Finally, does it make a difference to the human metabolism that hyperborean twlights are more prolonged than in the middle latitudes? Do breaches of the diurnal cycle, whether by virture of dissoluteness or of nocturnal duty, impose a spiritual penalty? These were the things I wanted to find out.
So much for lofty thoughts. Here is what I eventually settled on for an opener to the weather serial:

Some Weather: The Vaporous Art of Meteorology

--"Wrap me in the weathers of the earth. I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones."

My life long, I have heard people complain about the weatherman. The usual charge is that his forecasts are inaccurate. Some even suspect him of duplicity aimed at clearing the golf course or the beach of impediments to his view. But we all know full well that he has no greater hand in the forecasts than we ourselves do, determined as it it by complex computer models and weather satellites. I do share the plaintiffs' general sense of grievance against the weatherman, and have always found him to be possessed of a sorely deficient character. But my gripe has nothing to do with the accuracy of the forecast. I am always filled with quiet pleasure when computer models are disproved by the weather's true complexity. Another relatively common complaint is that the weatherman is boring, which is closer to my own assessment. For me the problem is that the weatherman as we know him is too trifling a character to address his topic with the gravity it deserves. To the average weatherman/woman, weather is like traffic, or the day's lottery draw. To prove how completely he has failed in addressing himself to his task, let us ask ourselves a leading question: Is there anyone more vapid than the weatherman?
No. Nobody is more vapid than the weatherman. But why? This question is best answered by way of another: What is more profound and inscrutable and sublime and awesome than the weather? The answer is nothing. The weatherman is vapid because he fails to live up to the weather's profundity. Of course, the weatherman's inadequacy to his task should hardly be surprising. The weatherman is employed by and panders to the same people as the newscaster, after all; and to weather the news requires exactly the same gravitas, integrative critical ability and wicked humor required to announce the weather.
It is a very sad fact indeed that the marks of a good weatherman are limited to a smooth delivery, an upbeat attitude, and a pleasant sweeping motion.
But what would a man truly worthy of the weathers do in our banal weatherman's stead? What improvements would he undertake in the realm of weathermanhood? We'll start with what he would look like. For my ideal weatherman I envision a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, elderly but vital, with a glint in his eye that could be interpreted as either sprightly or malicious. For his garb I see a simple tunic or kurta, perhaps a Nehru shirt, and for the understory baggy pantaloons and unpretentious thong sandals. This would be the foundation, and a sage one at that. Over this he would place accessories appropriate to his forecast: A yellow fisherman's slicker and galoshes to cover the sandals in the event of rain; a panama hat and a wristband for a hot day with strong sun; and a walrus pelt parka fitted with an ermine collar for days with temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit--and maybe a hat of otter fur thrown in for the truly frigid days.
More than just a mark of good taste, appropriate dress would be a touchstone for appropriate behavior. Which is to say that the weatherman's style and mood of presentation would be as variable as the weather itself. Meteorology affects us all more than we know, and it would affect him the most. It would be the ideal weatherman's task to heave open the floodgates and abandon himself to what we'll call the total meteorological experience. He would not embarrass himself, as today's weathermen do, by simply relaying satellite pixellations while actually contemplating his next round of golf or his next assignation with the woman unfortunate enough to be the mistress of the weatherman. My weatherman would not put the weather out of mind as soon as the studio door shut behind him. The forecast-watching public deserves more!
This man, this Utopian weatherman, would live the weather. His waking mind would be bent on it, his dream life would be populated by fantastic and freakish weather phenomena, and his home would be all portholes and skylights and aneroid barometers. He would go for long meteorological walks every morning and afternoon, often with friends and disciples, not to trump the information about storm fronts and pressure systems provided by satellites, for that is impossible, but to subject it to a more relevant, you might say spiritual, human exegesis. I am not afraid to say it: My ideal weatherman would be a philosopher, and it would be a sign of his very profundity that he has taken what is commonly held to be such a banal topic for the object of his philosophy. Like certain poets, his trick would be to access the numinous and the sublime in the ordinary, the everyday--though of course weather's everydayness is not as much a fact as it is a mark of our own calcified perception and growing intellectual poverty.
His philosophy would be transcendental-epicurean. Which is to say that, while able to meet the buffets of stormy weather not only with equanimity, but with a keen view to its philosophical lessons, he would also take childlike delight in the blessings of fine weather--the enthusiasm would be infectious. Such a weatherman would never be caught dead moaning and groaning about snow or rain or cold in the fashion of our base and childish crop of modern weathermen. He would delight in the extremes that serve convincing reminders to sensitive souls that they are alive.
The philosopher weatherman would be sensitive but never lachrymose, reflective but above brooding, wonderstruck yet not easily mystified. For instance, when discussing snow, he might take a moment to discuss the wonder of seeing water in a different phase, the beauty of crystal structures, and the bittersweet melancholy that attends the certainty of their transience. He would pay homage to snow's knack for blunting the edge of hibernal darkness, and cite the role of snowmelt in the coming regeneration of life. The current vapid manner of talking about cloud formations and atmospheric fronts would be completely revolutionized. Cloudmasses would be infused with the spirits that they eminently represent. A thunderhead would be cast not only as a source of inconvenience and destructive potential, but as a stormy disturbance fast approaching the percussive skin of the collective soul. Generally, clouds would receive a great deal of attention. Like snow that is sure to melt, clouds are a convincing reductio of life's frail transience, but also of its heartrending beauty. My ideal weatherman, then, would be a serious connoisseur of clouds. He would encourage his readers to take as their ideal a life floating among the clouds. His segments might feature footage of clouds taken from the ground, from buildings, from airplanes, from space. On certain days he might invite viewers to call in to pick out the shapes of faces or animals or other things that sometimes flicker through passing cloud formations, awarding some meteorologically relevant trinket to the most imaginative caller. He might also sponsor contests in which viewers made competing predictions about how long it would take lone clouds passing over a great desert to expire.
Furthermore, there would be no mention of Canadian-born cold fronts without concomitant mention of the clarity of the faculty of reason that cold weather never fails to inspire. Finally, in those cases when weather causes loss of property or of life, the weatherman-as-philosopher would firmly spurn the usual platitudes about tragedy and calamity (on which the health of the modern economy and system of governance is anyways predicated), preferring instead to look on such events as a lamentable but nonetheless bracing and healthy expression of the human condition's frailty. And he would instantly terminate and maybe even rough up any acolyte weatherman with the gall to film a "why did this happen to us" segment in the wake of a natural disaster.
Rather than as a predictable broadcast of anticipated annoyance or pleasure, how much more uplifting to see the weather report forecast in detail what is about to transpire in the viewer's soul! It goes without saying that to pull this off, you need experience. The ideal weatherman must be elderly, or at least seasoned. To fix matters somewhat more precisely, I think the bare minimum should be a lifetime experience of 200 seasons, or 618 moons.
Of course, like most good philosophers and spiritual people, my ideal weatherman would also host public forums for discussing pressing weather-related issues. He would invite friends both serious-minded and frivolous, personages both esteemed and despised, to participate in panel discussions on weather-related issues. This charged atmosphere of debate, this serious-mindedness, would go some way toward rehabilitating the weather as a subject for earnest people. The obvious topic, of course, is global warming. It is worth asking how the ideal weatherman would approach it. To begin, he would not be content to ignore the issue in the fashion of the stooges and fools who now pretend to be weathermen on television. His would not be a tightly scripted refusal to entertain the notion that the weather has a spectral and even apocalyptic dimension. He would not shy from the issue that the weather nearly always carries whispers of an approaching calamity. I suspect that the ideal weatherman would be fundamentally sympathetic to concerns about environmental stewardship. At the same time, however, he would be wildly intolerant of the common class of fanatics who use the mantle of environmentalism as a foil for misanthropy and nihilism. No, our philosopher-weatherman would be too smart to reject the legacy of the Enlightenment and whatever Utopian traces it might contain. In short, his attitude to global warming would be one of restrained alarm. While refusing to shy from the plight of the poor African villagers hounded by desertification, he would punctiliously tack away from the siren call of defeatism. And if he could find an economical way to do it, the old sage might even put a cap on his own carbon emissions.
Is it really a secret that weather is inseparable from the world of the spirit? Am I alone in thinking it deserves such attention? Hardly. Through the ages, writers of every stripe could not have done more to corroborate my thesis. Open a novel and see how many pages pass before there is mention of rain or snow or sun or wind. If you look at it honestly and without preconception, you will glimpse clearly and without reservation that literature and meteorology are inseparable. Better put: You cannot have literature without meteorology, and while you can have meteorology without literature, why the devil would you want to? The link is fundamental. Weather is not cited in literature as an empty flourish of convention. It is strummed on with such frequency because weather is both the legend for decoding our lived experience and the surreptitious boot that spurs us to think and act as we do. More than that, it is the soundtrack without which nothing in the movie makes sense. Depending on our circumstances, stormy weather provokes either the desperation of exposure or the cozy comfort of interiority. A day of merciless sun is a cipher for the fragility of human endeavor, of nature's implacable indifference. And who will raise his head to disagree with me that the description of a storm at sea is the language of brute terror itself? There is a very good reason that, on recollection, these events nearly always seems portentous: Nothing happens in the atmosphere without its immediate complement in the heart.
But just as the philosopher-cum-weatherman does not yet exist, nor does the transcending humanist compiler of weathers. Yet instead of lamenting their refusal to be born, I will step into the breach. I will put my money where my mouth is. I will give birth to the ideal weatherman, with this publication as my midwife. In a grotesque turn of the metaphor, the ideal weatherman to whom I give birth will initially be myself. Yet it is my deeply held hope that he will go forth and multiply so that, before long, many of my readers will have converted to the gospel of said ideal weatherman. That said, I will leave the birthing of the transcending humanist compiler of weathers to someone else--I do not feel it to be my place, as I do not hold an endowed academic chair, which would be a distinctly more comfortable perch for such a lofty undertaking.
Here's what's happening, folks: Beginning with the next issue, I am going to put out a weekly weather report. As befits a text that aims to be philosophical, far from being a forecast aimed at minimizing inconvenience and helping you make money, my report will be a reprise of weather that has already occurred, and will tend to celebrate nasty weather wherever I find it. Nor does it lay claim to comprehensiveness: There may be some weeks when I report on the weather on seven out of seven days as a tribute to the weather's joyful motleyness, but others whose vapidity leaves me cold and with nothing to say. Also, in the interest of leaving enough space for Anatole's readers to file their own weather reports, I will try to keep my philosophical points as pithy as possible, with nothing approaching the magnitude of the above excursions.
By way of reader encouragement I would like to note that each of the following may be thought of as weather phenomena in the holistic way we like to see things at Anatole:

1. The way the setting sun gilds the top of a hill.
2. The way colors grow richer and more profound the closer they come to their final shuddering surrender to darkness. Witness the blue of the sky opening hallucinogenically into the infinitude of space. Witness the color of grass flaring into an impossible green at the threshold of dusk winking into night.
3. The way clouds or fog can inspire you with a feeling of interiority, making you feel, even when you are outside, that you are in a low room with a ceiling made of plush white cushions.

Readers, knock yourselves out!

~

This is what the three sets of meteorological observations I felt compelled to make the following week looked like:


1

Returning from town along the highway by bus the vehicle entered a drift of thick fog. I wondered if it might be coal pollution, but the thickness of it told me we would all soon be dead if it were. Most remarkable were the floodlit banking skyscrapers lining the highway. One of them looked particularly eerie. Spectral. The building panels were the color of alabaster. It was a white building ducking in and out of thickest white fog, its alternate appearance and occlusion like a tentative act of will faltering its way through tendrils of mist. In the topographical bowl of my neighborhood the fog had massed so thick that not even the bottom of my hill was visible, let alone the blotted currents of the strait beyond. It made my apartment feel even more like a ship's cabin. It also, more suggestively, made me feel that the things that happened that day would have no bearing on the events of any other day. It was a day encapsulated by fog, to which no other day could have any relation.

2

It was a day with the inscrutability and remove of a black and white photograph. The Bosporus was still, but the clouds overhead fled mistily westward along the backs of the hills. Most remarkable was the dramatically narrowed color spectrum. Almost all the blues and greens seemed gone from the usually vaguely florid water, and what blues were there were so profound as to be nearly undetectable, so that the water presented a palette ranging from turgid slate to marine cobalt. The aspect of the day seemed unfinished, as if it had somehow not yet come into its own, as if its painter had denied it a final touch or two of color before walking off. Yet this poverty of painterly detail somehow made its perspective deeper. I felt my vision liberated, as if my gaze could range up the seaway as far as distant Odessa.

3

The sky I saw when I peaked my head out the mudroom window in the morning looked like what the chief of Asterix's village used to see before he declared that the sky was falling. It was cold when I left the house. The rain was not steady. It came flicking down in spurts like the dangled prospect of punishment, a hint of sadism that its brandisher never quite applied. I felt that the sky and its particular pressure were filling me with malevolence.