Marvelous Clouds

The beautiful Finnish word for world, maailma, in combining two words, earth or land (maa) and atmosphere or air (ilma), catches the right spirit. We cannot return to Dante’s cosmology, but geocentricism, long castigated as the sign of a medieval outlook, might deserve a critical revival. This is my final proposal not only for scholars but for humankind: a ravenous gratitude for the Earth.

After the shipwreck of our species, which is as inevitable as our own individual deaths, everything in James’s human cloud bank will go, but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind. The end of the human species is a comic prospect, not only a tragic one, in the strict sense that comedy involves the regeneration of life. Melville wrote: “Yet there is hope. Time and tide flow wide.”15 Perhaps some other intelligent species will evolve after millions and millions of years, and will do a better job. Time and tide flow wide! As long as we have the clouds, we have hope and fight and love. Knowing that we have their beauty and each other now is too much to take. It is enough and to spare.

Thoreau, tuning to the same wavelength as Darwin, celebrates apocalyptic destruction as the sign of nature’s recuperative vitality. He is not cele

Bathed in the sky’s serene, exasperating sunlight, clouds will never call you by name or tell you that they care, and that, precisely, is what makes them marvelous.

Not all that is meaningful comes from minds; and not all that comes from creatures with minds is intentional, either, as the study of nonverbal communication among humans and other animals shows. This brings up my final suggestion for my fellow scholars: We need a better name for the infrastructural aesthetics and ethics of being alive with others in the cosmos.

Currently nonverbal signifies the remainder that is left when you take away language from human communication, but it ignores the meaningfulness found in nonhuman nature. How odd to describe that part of communication that most ties us to nature as lacking!

If this book had one policy proposal to make, it would be to call for a vastly enhanced weather report that moved beyond the daily kairos of the weather to the generational chronos of the climate

skulls that we have, our media—and our world—would look very different. Media old and new are embedded in cycles of day and night, weather and climate, energy and culture, and they presuppose large populations of domesticated plants, animals, and humans, to say nothing of an old and cold universe. The digital implies basic facts of biology. We should make a greener media studies that appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.

A rainbow could be explained, but a poem was understood. There is much of nobility in the interpretive sciences, which came to include much of the social sciences as well, but they did not help us see meaning on nature’s side too. They were typically defensive against natural science and mathematics for their “disenchantment of the world.” This story, in broad strokes, positions the humanities, especially art and poetry, as saviors of meaning by rescuing its habitat, subjectivity, against the onslaught of objects.

son can be read as saying that nature has a mind, the Oversoul, and that it is some kind of subject that we could encounter, but he is much subtler than that. One of nature’s greatest services is precisely not to care about our concerns.