On Cloud Nigh

What these unreal clouds have in common with real clouds is their potential for destructive power. Still, even the most torrential downpour eventually subsides, leaving the earth ravaged but renewed. Though “the calm before the storm” is more often deployed, there is calm after a storm too, and as such clouds retain their allusions to serenity, expansiveness, and hope. But real clouds feel more and more like a relic of the past. The future belongs to unreal clouds: pandemics ravaging a population enchanted by “wellness culture” as a bandage for the bullet hole of prohibitively expensive healthcare costs; the state crushing dissent through blatant chemical warfare; the world quite literally burning.

It’s appropriate that we’re in the moment of the real-unreal cloud. Even when they’re rendered with a painterly mimesis, as with prints by Phlemuns and Louis Vuitton, clouds are inherently cartoony. The most saccharine uses of cloud print lean into this, as with Lazy Oaf’s Pixar-perfect clouds, or designer Lirika Matoshi’s collaboration with Disney. (Even Matoshi’s non-cloud offerings, such as her “viral” strawberry dress, are, with their tulle fillings, inherently cloudlike.) More abstract clouds appear in the late nineties or early millennium regurgitation of Unif or the tie dye dreams of Collina Strada, but where they appear they ascribe softness, usually feminine in spirit and presentation.

For cloud patterns are never harsh or visually demanding the way other “natural world” prints, like “Hawaiian” tropicalia or hunting camouflage, can be. Outside of fashion, I encounter cloud motifs in DIY tutorials for painting children’s rooms, which suggests a subliminal rendering of clouds as cute and juvenile, which easily reads feminine. No wonder Lana Del Rey, a white woman versed in and enamored with the posturing of young white women, has evocatively titled her forthcoming album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, layering real clouds with the ur-unreal clouds, the way one obscures natural lashes with false ones. UK artist twst, whose lyrics unpack the cyberspace fantasy of submissive femme personhood, connects clouds to young womanhood more directly. For her EP’s cover, she stages herself in a bedroom lit by bisexual lighting and decorated with—what else—soft squishy clouds.

That softness is at the center of all cloud creations. Beyond clothes, recent food trends include frivolously fluffy dalgona coffee, buoyant milk toast, and candy-colored cloud bread. In the realm of visual art, no modern medium loves clouds more than anime. Japanese anime director Makoto Shinkai made international waves when he shattered box office records with his 2016 drama Your Name, but his filmography is a study in skyscapes. His latest film Weathering With You sets the climax in a magical cloud altar, a towering mass that, though benignly white and surrounded by flitting “sky fish,” serves as a sacrificial site for gods that would otherwise bury Tokyo in rain. The story’s protagonists escape by plunging through the sky, passing through cloud layers like hurdles on their race to the ground. Shinkai’s devotion to clouds is so intense that, when he realized he’d forgotten to include an intermediary layer of clouds in a particular falling shot, he went “pale with shock” and dutifully fixed his mistake before the film’s home release.

The video for Billie Eilish’s “my future” feels indebted to Shinkai’s saturated skies, as well as other anime touchstones: the startling clouds in the first opening for the gory psychodrama “Tokyo Ghoul” or the impossibly dreamy backgrounds of shoujo anime like Sailor Moon. Raised on these references, a rising generation of young illustrators like @meyoco and @maruti_bitamin have become wildly popular for an art style I read as “cloudy.” Beyond the proliferation of celestial symbols, their subjects look plump with a semi-permeable roundness, as though the objects and people in their images would burst at the slightest touch.

The softness we project on clouds comes with an inherent fragility. Clouds are shorthand for an idyllic world and impermanent suspensions, waypoints only for more certain change. And though nephology (the meteorological study of clouds) exists, most of us would read real clouds only for symbols of what’s to come. As I read Brandon Taylor’s novel Real Life, I found myself drawn to his protagonist Wallace’s observations about his natural surroundings, which often beget self-loathing about his cloistered and microaggression-filled academic existence. To underscore Wallace’s interior inertia and dejection, Taylor has his protagonist turn away even from clouds: “Wallace would like to be able to gaze out at the clouds and parse their slow language for signs and omens, but that would require a belief in a higher power, a higher order of things.”

Yet even for the skeptics among us, there is one real-unreal cloud whose total power and influence might as well be divine—“the cloud.” Though many of the tenets of “cloud computing,” central among them the shared use of faraway servers, have existed for as long as computers have, when we talk about “the cloud” (always “the cloud”) we might imagine something akin to the projected star map in the 2012 Alien prequel, Prometheus. The “cloud” descriptor was originally a branding tool that’d already been adopted by other industries, but “the cloud” was the result of tech execs in the late ‘90s surveying the uncolonized internet and predicting that the future of business was online, and people would pay to be pioneers.

One of the possible coiners of the phrase “cloud computing” summarized this vision of an expanding web with the concise note, “The Cloud has no Borders.” (“Possible” because the origin of “the cloud” is disputed due to early trademark battles, a portend for things to come.) Yet as “the cloud” and “cloud computing” ascended in the mid-2000s, becoming tech buzzwords akin to “disruption” or “cryptocurrency,” the cloud has acquired borders. Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Amazon in particular provide much of the invisible infrastructure of the internet; there is no escaping the reach of Big Tech. Everything you interface with is in the cloud, and the greatest illusion of our time is that the cloud is real to anyone but its gatekeepers.Where do we go from the real-unreal cloud? Back to the original, naturally. Cottagecore has long existed online—Tumblrs devoted to romanticizing lush foliage and clean air and isolation from the modern world’s ills, paired with Ghibli-esque dwellings and Midsommar-esque models—but quarantine gave cottagecore legitimacy. The growing consensus that COVID-19 is less of a threat outdoors has sent many people (rather, those with the means to shelter in place) into the wild, or at least their local park. The gyre of the world slowed down momentarily, bringing “Nature is healing” memes into the timeline and temporarily decreased air pollution to urban centers. And if you have to post unmasked photos from when you’re out and about, at least make sure a visible sky is in the picture.

I’m not immune from the collective un/conscious: I’ve hiked, camped, and ran more in the past six months than I ever have in my life. Even the media I consume, movies like My Own Private Idaho and Paris, Texas and The Rider, reflects this yearning for a big worry-free breath, for endless blue skies smeared with cirrus clouds. This isn’t too surprising for me; I’ve been obsessed with cloud print for the past few years. I’ve already been looking up for clouds, and now they’re everywhere. When I first started noticing them I felt like a kid again, pointing out and debating cloud shapes with my friends on the playground. I think about these communal readings when I pass the always-empty playground at the elementary school down my street.

How many more generations will look up and expect to see real clouds? This privilege is already lost in many parts of the world. Cloud-watching isn’t always about fortune telling, but the act of cloud-watching itself says something about your expectations of the future. No one praises the laborer who keeps their eyes skyward, their head in the clouds. But real clouds demand dreaming: what do you want of this world? What about this world leaves you wanting? I long for clouds, and wonder if my longing lies in what they represent or in seeing them at all.

Or maybe I’ve been searching for a sign. I started transitioning at the end of last year. One of the most obvious ways my body's changing is in relation to my regular running practice. When I run, I become a roaming cloud. A cloud of sweat haloes me; a tiny cloud of breath puffs out my mask. On especially windy days, my shirt billows out and consumes the contours of my chest, and for a halcyon moment my dysphoria parts and I float, untethered from the news and the feeds and myself. A real-unreal cloud of my own. And even when the moment passes, the feeling stays: a fragile being that shimmers before it turns to rain.

Lio Min usually writes about music. Their forthcoming debut novel is about boys, bands, and Los Angeles.