Looking Up

Looking Up

Peter emails me a picture of the clouds, which he sees from his desk, along with the message: look at it and reflect, Hanna. I looked at the picture, and then out my window at the sky.

I thought: Scandinavia, and ducks,

There goes a lady, sheep with a shepherd –

Peter’s clouds became word and drifted on

The three verses above are a reference to Clouds by Martinus Nijhoff, one of my favorite poems.

The other day I was walking with two girlfriends near the northern Dutch town of Alkmaar in the bright sunshine, and we decided to look at the modest amount of clouds passing by like ships in the sea blue sky. Just as we did as children. I felt so happy then, because I had dear people with me who, after some discussion, could see the same as me, could make something out of a bunch of sky, fog, raindrops. The cumulonimbus in the far distance turned into a giant flamingo, a dragon’s head, a duck, a gentleman with too big a foot.

I wondered then if we would see different things in those same clouds if we had been ten years younger when our friendship began. Whether our view of clouds changes because of what we experience. Psychoanalysis, you could almost call it: what you first see in the clouds has to do with your memories, your id and ego. Freud. Yet we agreed in terms of fantasies: “ha yes, that’s indeed a dinosaur”. Equals. Cloud mates. A different life but still somewhat the same look.

In my opinion, like stargazing, cloud gazing has a therapeutic influence. You can lie, stand or walk beside someone in a long silence, searching for something in the infinite sky. Searching in a heap of nothingness, actually. I used to do that with my father, when I was still wearing – as Nijhoff puts it – small clothes. And small shoes, sports shoes from Pokémon. My “outdoor play shoes” that were allowed to get dirty.

My childhood home is located in a beautiful wooded area, and all you could hear if you raised your eyes to the sky, your chin so slightly protruding to listen in the dry summer air, were crickets chirping busily in the brownish grass, arguing, flirting.

Crickets can’t see clouds, I thought at the time. Their eyes are wrong. My rabbit, who was then my greatest friend because I was a shy little fart among humans, couldn’t either.

And I regretted that, because even then I realized that cloud watching was something you had to do with your friends. With people (or in my case: with animals) you loved. Clouds as glue, as the lubricant of the friendship bond. Once I tried it with my rabbit, and he then lay beside me for hours in the long grass at the back of our garden like a terribly good little animal. I – small clothes – watched the clouds, he – small in everything – watched. His little nose wiggling up and down. The sun burning my pale skin. In fact, it was so soothing, that gazing into the sky, that sometimes I thought I could hear the clouds shifting, that I tried to find an appropriate sound to go with it, blowing, blowing, hissing … but it was always silent.

When you get quiet, to see and hear the clouds, you start thinking. Recall memories. That’s also why, I think, Martinus Nijhoff’s mother wept.

Baby clouds at the parental home

H.B.

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