Looking Up as a Serious Discipline | The Idle Gazette

Written flat on a heath, looking up. -- ed.

One evening in December 1802, in a rented hall in London, a young pharmacist stood up before a small scientific club and gave the sky a grammar. His name was Luke Howard; he compounded medicines by day; and his lecture, printed the following year as an essay on the modifications of clouds, proposed that the drifting shapes overhead, which every civilization before his had treated as the very emblem of the unclassifiable, in fact came in kinds, and the kinds could be named. He offered Latin, so that no nation would own the words: cirrus for the curl of hair, cumulus for the heap, stratus for the layer, nimbus for the bearer of rain. The names took. Two centuries later, every meteorologist on earth, every pilot, every child with a decent picture book, speaks Howard's dead-language poetry without knowing whom to thank, and the pharmacist has a fair claim to the least contested legacy of his century: nobody has ever gone to war over the classification of clouds.

Notice, before anything else, what Howard did not do. He did not capture a cloud, produce one, or make one useful; the clouds went on exactly as before, ungovernable and unemployed. Naming is the one form of possession that takes nothing from its object, and it is the connoisseur's form: the man who can tell a cumulus congestus from a cumulonimbus at four hundred meters has acquired nothing but attention with a structure, which is another phrase for expertise, which is another phrase for love with a vocabulary. The gazette has argued before that noticing is a discipline. Howard supplied the proof that it can also be a science, conducted from a standstill, at zero expense, by a man with a day job.

The poets understood immediately what had happened. Goethe, then the most famous writer alive, came across Howard's essay in translation and was so taken that he did two things poets almost never do: he wrote fan mail to a chemist, asking the obscure Englishman for a short account of his life, and he composed a suite of poems in Howard's honor, one stanza per cloud type, in which the greatest literary authority in Europe declared that the man who distinguishes and names had completed what the man who merely marvels begins. Constable, meanwhile, was on Hampstead Heath performing the painter's version of the same devotion: in the summers of 1821 and 1822 he produced sketch after oil sketch of nothing but sky, dozens upon dozens of them, annotating the back of each with the date, the hour, and the wind, a practice he called skying. The sketches sold for almost nothing in his lifetime and are now treated as a summit of English art. A man lying on a heath staring upward for two entire summers: the neighbors will have had opinions, and the neighbors, as usual with attention they cannot classify, were wrong.

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The devotion itself, of course, is far older than the taxonomy, and its founding document is, conveniently for this gazette, a joke about useless men. In 423 BC Aristophanes staged The Clouds, a comedy in which Socrates presides over an institute of impractical inquiry, and the divinities the thinkers worship, the chorus of the play, are the clouds themselves: patron goddesses, the script explains, of speculators, quibblers, versifiers, and every other species of man who talks for a living and produces nothing a farmer would recognize. Athens laughed; the mockery was meant to sting; and at a distance of twenty-four centuries the casting reads less like satire than like accurate theology. Naturally the clouds are the patrons of unprofitable thought. They are its only public monument: colossal structures that assemble out of nothing, tower magnificently, signify nothing negotiable, and dissolve by evening, whereupon the sky, wholly satisfied with the day's work, begins another. Socrates stood accused, among other things, of teaching young men to stare upward. The city executed him on different charges, but one suspects the staring was already in the file.

Shakespeare filed the companion report from the opposite direction. Hamlet points at a cloud and extracts from Polonius, inside six lines, the successive agreements that it is shaped like a camel, backed like a weasel, and very like a whale, and the scene is usually read as a prince toying with a courtier, which it is; it is also a faithful transcript of the oldest game the species plays. Every child flat in summer grass has chaired the same committee, and the clinicians who eventually named the phenomenon, pareidolia, the mind's incorrigible insistence on finding faces and fauna in vapor, only confirmed what the grass already knew: this is imagination running at idle, the engine turning over with nothing asked of it, and producing, unbidden, camels. A mind that can no...