Monday's cloud: ‘The Aerial Ocean in Which We Live’
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Not only was the aerial photograph splendid, but also I find the quotation from ‘The Aerial Ocean in Which We Live’ from The Fairy-Land of Science very moving. I would be very interested to know more about the history of this perception, that we are all creatures of the air. I first encountered this thought in Diane Ackerman’s book “A Natural History of the Senses”, in which she writes about how heavy our atmosphere is, and how we are all standing in it. This perception has greatly intensified my own emotional response to the air we bring into our lungs and release, transforming ourselves and our world in the process. I had not heard of Arabella Buckley’s work before this morning. I am a scholar who studied for a long time the work of a poet who often speaks about breath, and now I am working on the poetry of a different poet, with severe pulmonary disease. If anyone has information about the tradition in which Buckley and Ackerman are writing about air, especially in the latter 19th century, when Buckley was writing, I would be very grateful to learn about it.
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I am at a bit of a disadvantage here since I do not get Cloud of The Day hence have not seen the aerial (I wonder if it is possible to post the link here when such a picture is discussed?).
But the general subject reminds of a favourite pop song ‘The Air That I Breathe’ by The Hollies:
MikeL’s floaters are great, I think.
And this time, Emily, my link seems to work – again a picture replaces the link but it plays OK. So perhaps CAS have updated.
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Thank you so much, Graham, especially for the reference to Humboldt and to Wulf’s book. Thanks to your help, I have now located the phrase in an article on Humboldt by Bernard Debarbieux, writing (reference below to the English translation) about, specifically, Humboldt’s rhetoric surrounding mountains, characterized in terms of their role connecting the sea and the sky. He considered them as among other things rather like aerial versions of ocean reefs. Debarbieux locates the phrase “reefs or shoals of the aerial ocean” in Humboldt’s “Asie centrale. Recherches sur les chaines de montagnes et la climatologie comparee”, cited in a French edition of 1843. Thank you very much! Of course, now, if one stands in the low California desert of Death Valley and sees where the waters once stood, Humboldt’s observation seems even more natural — in a boat in a Norwegian fjord and looking up at the surrounding high terrain, I was immediately reminded of Death Valley — somewhat to the consternation of my companions! This does take us far from our interest in the nebulous, but I think it does speak to modern climate and environmental issues. Thank you again for your help!
Bernard Debarbieux, « The various figures of Mountains in Humboldt’s Science and
Rhetoric », Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography [En ligne], Epistémologie, Histoire
de la Géographie, Didactique, document 618, mis en ligne le 21 août 2012, consulté le 13
mai 2016. URL : http://cybergeo.revues.org/25488 ; DOI : 10.4000/cybergeo.25488 -
(N.B. If you go search you seem to lose anything just typed)
Apophenia
Wiki: Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random dataIt has been a while since apophenia appeared in the CAS Forum as a word for ‘clouds that look like things’. I think you have a good example of it, Emily, in linking Death Valley and a Norwegian fjord.
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Well, linking Death Valley and a fjord is not exactly linking ‘random data’, in that the bottom of Death Valley was water-filled (the ‘sea’ there very occasionally does get water in it, enough for jokesters to float little boats in, and then there are the pupfish), and if you imagine what it would look like if the water actually came back, the view up to the surrounding mountains is not so different from a fjord. And the effect of the height of the mountains is of course enhanced by looking at them from the lowest spot on the planet, while the fjord mountains look more dramatic than mountains of similar height in, say, California, because you look at them from sea level, which if you are in California you cannot. Or one could of course think of the fjords without their water. I think Humboldt’s responses to mountains may well have been affected by his experience at sea. I don’t think it’s “random”. The link is in the presence, or not, of the ocean or other sea as a visible reference point.
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And yet another reference, even earlier. This one I stumbled across when glancing through next week’s Radio Times which I received this morning. There’s a preview to “Storm Troupers: the Fight to Forecast the Weather” which is on BBC4 at 2100 on Monday 23rd. The preview begins, ‘”We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air,” wrote the Italian physicist who – more or less by chance – invented the barometer in the 1640s.’ No mention is given of the Italian’s name but it would seem to be Gasparo Berti. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer).
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And here’s an example of some waves in our ‘Aerial Ocean’ that I saw a couple of mornings ago.
The group of waves on the right, above the goalposts, show a hint of a much longer wave-train running at an oblique angle to the shorter one. This is a little clearer in the wave-crests closer to the horizon where the upward convex curve is more marked.
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