Clouds and Sunrise

            Well, here we are again, reader. Or maybe not again. Maybe we’re not even here anymore, or at least maybe you aren’t. Could be a ships passing in the night kind of thing. Although to be perfectly frank, if the ships are going to pass it won’t matter much whether they pass in the night, at high noon, or under the rosy light of a lazy dawn sun—which, mind you, is itself passing over the horizon, locked in that rhythmic ascent all unguided, then off to punch his card like the rest of us come evening. I ask you, reader, have you ever seen a perfect sunrise? It’s a rare event, for one because the clouds have to be perfect—odd, come to think of it, that the clouds are such a crucial ingredient in a sunrise. We would tend to think they’d just get in the way, simply obscure the brilliant light. Which, of course, they do. But by that very token, they set up this intricate play of reflection and interrelation, an overabundant vivacity of light far more subtle, far more harmonious than anything that we could glean from an unobstructed view. But I digress, and for that I apologize; digressions are in my nature.

            But as I was saying, the perfect sunrise. I’ve seen it only once in my life, when I was out walking the dog about a year ago. I didn’t see the whole of it at first, since there were some buildings in the way—walls, naturally, obscure the sunrise in a far more destructive way than clouds. Still, I looked up and saw this curtain of cloud, covered all in this absolutely delicious shade of pink, tending to red as my gaze descended. I hurried my pace as I walked around the library; I could tell this sunrise would be one worth the seeing. And it was. Half the sky was filled with clouds, tapering off to the center, out of which peeked a sun that was red and distant, the way the moon is distant. (Even the sun likes to imitate the moon sometimes, strange to say.) The total effect was like an amphitheater in the sky, where yellow drifts upward into red, and beyond to delicate pinks and roses at the zenith. It was a breathtaking sight. Perhaps a poet could have written on it. I looked on with awe, but also with a kind of unease. It was so perfectly constructed it reminded me of the Argument from Design.

            Should have taken a picture, come to think of it… But, to be perfectly honest, reader, I’m not exactly a technology enthusiast. In fact, you could call me a bit of a Luddite. True story!

            Let me see, how to tie all this back to writing so it doesn’t look like I’ve been waxing on about ships and sunrises for no reason…Well, for one, I think that the clouds can teach us a lot about the way narratives get constructed. What, after all, are writers looking to say when they write? For the sake of argument—as always, pending further reflection, speculation, and (most importantly) spectation—let’s say the author’s really just saying something along the lines of, “I am here. I feel such-and-such. There are other people and I like some and don’t care much for others. They feel so-and-so. We do things. It is now.” That basic fact, or some very simple fact, lies at the heart of all writing, and in a lot of writing it appears in some allegorical form; depending on the author’s temperament it can appear as an object to be obtained, a thing to be destroyed, some state of affairs to be brought about. King Arthur searches for the Holy Grail while Ahab’s out hunting the White Whale, kind of thing. But it’s always something lost, or else something we have—say Frodo and the Ring—that we’re trying to get rid of. In this analogy you see us drawing, this thing—call it the terrible ecstatic brute fact of being a human being in a human world—is the sun.

            But of course, if you just come out and say it, you take all the fun out of the game—writing, like life, is of course just a game we’re all playing. Look there, we’ve dispensed with it all in a paragraph… the totality of our existence, there laid out plain as day in a few bald sentences. It’s time to bring in some clouds.

            Clouds are obstacles, of course, but obstacles are what drives the whole narrative engine we’re building here. You’ve always got the sun in place, but the writer’s real work is (fortunately) a bit closer to earth, in the now-harrowing, now-tedious, but always rewarding task of standing there in the sky, working out new and old ways of catching the light. So we create characters, wind them up with their own quirks and motives, and watch them out there in the world in and between the lines. Sometimes they butt heads, sometimes they get confused and forget themselves utterly, sometimes they have so much to say and do that they worry they’ll explode. Some are lost, some return, and some are out there still, wandering cold and afraid without a compass. All die in the end. But that’s life, that’s literature, and it’s the writer’s job to take all these clouds, so much vapor, and make of them something of love and beauty.

Or try this one on for size: say the words are mirrors, and life is a light that shines dimly, from an unknown source. It’s your job to arrange the mirrors to catch as much of that light as possible, to let it free, to make it dance. Do you see that light, reader, do you watch it move? I hope that it lights you safely home.