“5G satellite trialling,” commented someone to stir up the tin-hatters. “It's a hidden nuclear laser beam.”
“HAARP,” said another, possibly for the same reason.
HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme used for ionospheric research was believed by some to control the weather or cause earthquakes.
This week, you are invited to outline in pen, pencil, chalk — whatever you like — a form or forms you see in the picture, photograph your artwork and mail it in.
Yes, it's a slow news month. But lockdowns are notorious for prompting all kinds of visions, scenes and portents in cloud forms.
The cloud has also long functioned in literature and art as a starting point for imagery. In Daniel Defoe's book A Journal of the Plague Year, we find a lockdown-literature crossover as Defoe notes that during the 17th century, the bubonic plague — a recurrence of the Black Death that originated in China in the 1300s, created religious, social and economic upheaval in Europe — “the imagination of the people was really turned wayward and possessed”.
“And no wonder, if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had nothing in them but air and vapour. Here they told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city; there they saw hearses and coffins carrying in the air to be buried”, etc.
In Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet, the grief-maddened, vengeful prince messes with his girlfriend's pedantic, patronising father, Polonious.
Hamlet — Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius — By th' mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet — Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius — It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet — Or like a whale.
Polonius — Very like a whale.
Rennaissance man Leonardo da Vinci saw inchoate patterns such as those seen in clouds as an opportunity to free the imagination.
“It may be that many would consider such power of invention absurd but I, by my own experience, know how useful it is for arousing the mind to discoveries and projects.
“Not infrequently on walls in the confusion of different stones, in cracks, in the designs made by scum on stagnant water, in dying embers, covered over with a thin layer of ashes, in the outline of clouds — it has happened to me to find a likeness of the most beautiful localities, with mountains, crags, rivers, plains and trees; also splendid battles, strange faces, full of inexplicable beauty; curious devils, monsters, and many astounding images. I chose from them what I needed and supplied the rest.”
For Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, this technique was just their fur-lined cup of tea, while Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach used a similar method to measure various unconscious parts of a subject's personality.
So, take a picture of your imaginings, visions, unconscious deviances and email them to
The winner will be awarded a chocolate fish. Or chocolate whale. Or a chocolate fish very like a whale.
