Abstract

Since antiquity, philosophers and poets have understood clouds to be principles of generation and procreation. They can turn, Aristophanes tells us, “into anything they want.” They are bound up with the act of begetting and giving birth, of bringing into being the new – hollow vessels, as Seneca would later put it, with solid walls. And yet the creative force of clouds is a strange, even counterintuitive, one: what they generate and bring forth is often evanescent, incorporeal, and unsubstantial. In this essay, we explore a poetics of clouds as a site of tension between the empty and the procreative, the material and the immaterial, the perceptible and the imperceptible. Clouds, we suggest, are instances of conveyance whose power of mediation gives shape to the unsayable, the unrepresentable, and the apparently unknowable. Their meteorological trickery draws our attention to the infinity of the cosmos by obscuring it. Their rhetorical obfuscations – what medieval tradition called the integumentum – draw us into their truths by turning us seductively away from them. Expressions of both cosmological and poetic becoming, clouds are therefore inseparable from epistemological and esthetic considerations of the ways meaning and knowledge are at once hidden and revealed.

摘要

自古以来，哲学家和诗人就将云理解为生成和繁殖的原理。阿里斯托芬告诉我们，他们可以“变成他们想要的任何东西”。他们受制于生育和生育的行为，如塞内卡后来所说的，用坚固的墙壁使之成为新的空心容器。然而，云的创造力是一种奇怪的，甚至是违反直觉的：它们产生和带来的东西往往是短暂的、无形的和非实体的。在本文中，我们探讨了云的诗意，作为空虚与繁衍，物质与非物质，可感知与不可感知之间紧张的场所。我们认为，云是传达的实例，其中介的力量塑造了不可说、不可代表和显然不可知的事物。他们的气象诡计通过遮蔽宇宙，将我们的注意力吸引到宇宙的无限性上。他们的修辞混淆——中世纪传统称为外被膜——通过诱人地让我们远离他们来吸引我们进入他们的真相。因此，作为宇宙学和诗意生成的表达，云与意义和知识同时被隐藏和揭示的方式的认识论和美学考虑是分不开的。