Aris Fioretos

Clouds

Prose
James Sheppard, The Sky at Silling,
Los Angeles: New Space Gallery, 1995.
Art: James Sheppard, “Landscape” (1997)

1

. . . but the clouds, then . . . the clouds . . . these thin thickets of thought, silky spreads or pouting bulks, crisp like the scribble of skates on early winter ice or billowing like concourses of bumptious color, gaseous envelopes of fog and fuddle, reticent at first and reserved, merely hissing their intent like snakes still sleepy or beggars new and novice . . . then emerging as from cans tracked twisted turned open, lids let loose, inflated like letters growing light and nimble (already running pandorically into numbers), sighs stringing stresses to prompt sound and sound hushing syllables into words, breath exhaling cadences to cause clauses, and sentences — shyly — no longer so shyly — no longer shyly at all — drawing stretching gushing out, limbs thus becoming entangled, then loins purloined . . . so the vast strange wild abundance of circles, cones, hooks, dots, dashes, and slashes, columns raging tall and thin, may be placed preciously into perspective, like signatures on dotted lines, making their muddled mess, alas, and mist and vapor in masses unimagined, yet remain what they always were, fuzzy frames of urge and fraud, and slabs, like stabs, that aide and restrain nothing but errant air, winding, grinding, mining, molding, rotating round and around, then round again, flittering and fluttering and flittering, trembling like towers twisted or silhouettes stretched straight and straining . . . until suddenly, like the needle on a dusty record, they race rapidly astray, evaporating into airs so proverbially thin that our senses are stripped of . . . well . . . yes . . . of aspiration, and eyes are lost in the blue yonder blue beyond blue . . .

2

. . . that blurring oblivion . . .

3

. . . which is the only space willing, clemently disposed, to forgive alliterations this laboriously contrived, thus lubberly lubed, such mouthful of verbal foam . . . so much well-vented waste . . .

4

All surface play and zero seriousness, the alliterations of the loquacious are allocations of lubricant, meant merely to make mouths moist and lips liberally lapping, forging likeness where none exists and creating alliances between entities as foreign as sugar and salt, or piss and potables. Such similarities never last. Nor do they, thank heaven, tend to take hold. And unless appearing here, feebly found and feebly formed, they do not insist. Occurring between words, fluffs bolstering a contention otherwise too bumpy and barren, like the cotton candy wrapping that wooden stick, they demonstrate little persistence of their own.

5

Yet although being thus similitudes merely alliterative and aloof, they beget effects not unlike clouds. So the clouds, then . . . these clouds . . . crowding the cleft not between cloud and “cloud,” but between “cloud” and clue, thus not matter and medium but medium and motion, granting us bounties of deception and abundance of sense, but neither dint nor direction . . . resemble resemblance, perhaps, or echo hue and cry both billowing and boisterous . . .

6

Clouds . . . these clouds . . . are the volatile swellings that make the shapes we know things by.

7

Fickle integuments. Like bubbles of soap or globs of glue. Flirts. And solitude.

8

Appearing only in passing, these bundles of haze last merely as long as a row or a ruse, and the lushness they let loom is that peculiar to dream and dissolution. Yet what if such foamy dissemination, while coy and silverly sweet, a waste none too hazardous, what if it would acquire density or distinction, like spots of spurious spirit? thus be cloud turning word and not word growing cloudy? This is not the question of questions, then, oh no, not the quizz of quiddity or puzzle of presence, that Horatian horror haplessly wondering (hands wringing) how clouds — passing — never lasting — always vanishing, then revanishing — could be seized, snatched, or abducted (like daughters of kings or that magical mystery moment between fingers tipping which is . . . well . . . which was . . .) . . . no, no, it is not that hat, old as Merlin’s, and just as inflated, but merely a query, quaint and quibbly, if spaces might be shaped, domains could be wrung, or areas simply given air and altitude . . . an amply damp etherdome . . . in which they, the clouds, transient trains of flow and escape . . . there, over there . . . nomads of wonder . . . if they could somehow someway somewise come to pass. A manner of happening, thus,

9

no more,
a mouth . . .

10

. . . like the child’s pitter-patter of pulmonary rapture on window panes, a hovering hue on blank black base, say, or wisps of whitish insurrection in grim gritty gray, transitoriness trimmed and toned, thus, and impermanence unceasing. And if they could, would they then breed the lissome letters of indigo ardor or cast ebony shadows of longhand yearning? signal the sly stirrings of the illicit, red like rushing candor, or declare new tidings as pristinely as only the white digit of the blameless may do?

11

Scribble of desire or scrabble of deceit (the “noises, sounds, and sweet aires” roaming through The Tempest), such figures of smoke, such shapes of fog, such appearances of frills, froth, and smog . . . would they be akin to letters and kin of type? the lithe touch of liquid avowal or glib gloss hissing disapproval: dispersal, disappearance, dissemination? carrying with them neither content nor resolution, but the gravid signs of shudder coming and commotion? Must they not, then, too,

12

be a hue wee spick or speck violet,

13

and pregnant with thunder?

14

Confronted with certain books in his childhood dreams, Walter Benjamin would pause on the threshold to their trembling promise (a promise, that, too, of tremor). In these volumes of yesteryear, he noted spells of time and trouble later, “it thundered. To open one of them, would have led me into the midst of the womb, in which a changing and gloomy text clouded over, pregnant with colors” . . .

15

A sphere gone atmospheric, riddling and vague, though real, too, and ominous at that, a clandestine chamber or woolly womb, through which a wind, wail, whisper of shiftiness wafts, a tender trace of violence: the colors “were bubbling and flowing, but always turning into a violet that seemed to stem from the interior of an animal for slaughter. Unnamable and as laden with meaning as this outlawed violet were the titles, every one of which appeared to me more peculiar and intimate than the previous one. Yet before I could make sure of the first, I awoke without once in the dream having even touched upon the old children’s books” . . .

16

What is “this outlawed violet,” so tranquil and treacherous, staining colors and tainting action? Is it the sign of that peculiar violation, always enacted and retracted, that is reading and that is awakening? To stand on the threshold of childhood reverie, poised on the door sill of an initial subjunctive (“would have led”), having neither opened, nor read the books imagined in the would-be of dreaming, yet knowing the fatal consequences of entering tomes as cavernous as these: hence the gloom that clouds over Benjamin’s recollection. And hence the gloom clouding his text. Tainting the grays of remembrance with the seductive stain of violet, foreboding shudder like flashes in pans, the shadow it casts, the dimness it diffuses, already marks and muddles the opening of this sinister scene, ambiguously collating a book unread with the knowledge of its interior. Closed but somehow examined, known yet never quite confronted, the text remains inaccessible but continues to enthrall. Clouded over,

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fusing and confusing,

18

it, no less than its reading, is “unnamable.” Remote, yet always at hand, the text carries its illegible legend as if crossed-over or striked-through, barring entry to the knowledge out of which it nonetheless must speak. Ominous oddity, that, and dense with dissension. Like an interior made known but not available, “laden with [a] meaning” it does not expose, this is the moment, absorbing and wavering, of violation. Said to be “unnamable,” thus named and disfigured, it is, itself, always already

19

violet.

20

Among the documents and discourses treating clouds, such and similar, the figure of “Don Miguel de Unamuno” in Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla, a book so densely downy in duplicity it draws a silent flock of unalloyed letters in wile woolly fold, spells out — thus unclouding and expelling — the double-dealing demonery which matches semblance with dissemblance and parity with disparity. Explaining that “you do not get anywhere by calling things names,” he claims, and with appropriate distinction, “it is my part to indefine and confound.”

21

Fusing and confusing, clouds are the shape in which indefinition appears. Indefinir, confundir . . .

22

such is the surreptitious injunction, violet and violent, of their duplicity.

23

You do not enter us — this their promise — thus their threat — lest you forfeit access. Forge and forget.