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by Matthew Talamini THE CLOUDS AND THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOUDS

Table of Contents Compendium Obscurata 1. The Empire Never Ended 2. The Immortal Science of Murder About the Author

COMPENDIUM OBSCURATA





BULFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY Jupiter and Juno, although husband and wife, did not live together very happily. Jupiter did not love his wife very much, and Juno distrusted her husband, and was always accusing him of unfaithfulness. One day she perceived that it suddenly grew dark, and immediately suspected that her husband had raised a cloud to hide some of his doings that would not bear the light. She brushed away the cloud, and saw her husband, on the banks of a glassy river, with a beautiful heifer standing near him. Juno suspected that the heifer’s form concealed some fair nymph of mortal mould. This was indeed the case; for it was Io, the daughter of the river god Inachus, whom Jupiter had been flirting with, and, when he became aware of the approach of his wife, had changed into that form.



The Albatross did follow;

And every day for food or play

Came to the Marinere’s hollo!



In mist or cloud on mast or shroud

It perch’d for vespers nine,

Whiles all the night thro’ fog-smoke white

Glimmer’d the white moon-shine.



"God save thee, ancyent Marinere!

"From the fiends that plague thee thus--

"Why look’st thou so?"--with my cross bow

I shot the Albatross.



COLERIDGE’S THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE And a good south wind sprung up behind,The Albatross did follow;And every day for food or playCame to the Marinere’s hollo!In mist or cloud on mast or shroudIt perch’d for vespers nine,Whiles all the night thro’ fog-smoke whiteGlimmer’d the white moon-shine."God save thee, ancyent Marinere!"From the fiends that plague thee thus--"Why look’st thou so?"--with my cross bowI shot the Albatross.



your sins like the morning mist.

Return to me,

for I have redeemed you.



ISAIAH 44:22 I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,your sins like the morning mist.Return to me,for I have redeemed you.





LAMENTATIONS 3:44 You have covered yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can get through.





NIETZSCHE’S BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep". The German himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING, he is "developing himself". "Development" is therefore the essentially German discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas,-- a ruling idea, which, together with German beer and German music, is labouring to Germanise all Europe. Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the conflicting nature at the basis of the German soul propounds to them (riddles which Hegel systematised and Richard Wagner has in the end set to music).





DAVID MITCHELL’S CLOUD ATLAS I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be by ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.





ARISTOPHANES’ THE CLOUDS SOCRATES: Will you not, pray, now believe in no god, except what we believe in--this Chaos, and the Clouds, and the Tongue--these three?



Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

HERMIA. Methinks I see these things with parted eye,

When every thing seems double.

HELENA. So methinks;

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,

Mine own, and not mine own.

DEMETRIUS. Are you sure

That we are awake? It seems to me

That yet we sleep, we dream.





SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM DEMETRIUS. These things seem small and undistinguishable,Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.HERMIA. Methinks I see these things with parted eye,When every thing seems double.HELENA. So methinks;And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,Mine own, and not mine own.DEMETRIUS. Are you sureThat we are awake? It seems to meThat yet we sleep, we dream.



In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.



EDGAR ALLEN POE’S ANNABEL LEE And this was the reason that, long ago,In this kingdom by the sea,A wind blew out of a cloud, chillingMy beautiful ANNABEL LEE;So that her highborn kinsmen cameAnd bore her away from me,To shut her up in a sepulchreIn this kingdom by the sea.





JOB 22:14 Thick clouds veil Him, so He does not see us as He goes about in the vaulted heavens.

1. The Empire Never Ended This is the story of a murder -- and I, the unfortunate author, am the murderer. When I was young, I had a recurring dream in which I sat on a dirty wooden floor between towering, canyon-like shelves and leafed through stacks and stacks of old, dusty books, looking for something; but I didn’t know what it was. Floorboards creaked under the feet of unseen customers elsewhere in the labythinthine space while ancient particles of dust, illuminated geometrically by edges of light from the little windows, outlined eddies and currents in the musty air. It could have been the archetypal bookshop of eternity, present to my sleeping mind through some ethereal Platonic quirk. These dreams occurred on seven consecutive nights and they lasted, subjectively, hours and hours. My eyes would float across the page, seeing but not understanding, until suddenly, finally, I would come to the word 'cloud', and my gaze would stick fast to it. At that moment I would feel a sensation all over my body of such coldness and wetness that it was as though I had been drenched under a heavy rain. After this I would wake up, eyes wide in the darkness, my pounding young heart working its way through an adult-sized dose of adrenaline. Soon after those dreams, I began keeping a journal. In all my reading, no matter what the genre, whenever I come upon the word 'cloud' in a book, I copy the citation down. At those moments I can feel a palpable chill at the mere sight of the word and I remember the dream of my childhood, and I am helpless in the grip of the clouds.

2. The Immortal Science of Murder I don’t remember going back to my room, curling up in bed although it was still light out, and sleeping until the next morning; but I must have, because that’s where I was when I woke up, and I had no memory of the intervening hours. The last thing I do remember was fleeing from a terribly distressing conversation with a classmate named Peter, and so it was not unrealistic to suppose that I had hidden myself away and slept. I sat up in bed and took a quick drink of water from a bottle I kept on my shelf. My dorm room was optimized for visitors and for conversation: There was wine in the little refrigerator and chairs with actual cushions stood in a little space apart from my bed area. My dirty clothes were in a hamper in the closet and my bed was concealed behind the standard-issue college desk, upon which sat a stack of computers and an array of flat-screen monitors, several of which I had mounted on the wall since they wouldn’t fit side-to-side on the desk 1 . In any case, this wall of monitors created an effective little partition between the communal area and the private section of my room, which was really no larger than the bed itself, in which, that morning, I lay back with a creak, sore in body and mind. S omething seemed to have come between myself and these other people. Language, which was supposed to bridge the divide, had instead come between, and pride and lies had come between, and there was nobody out there I could reach out to without bumping into something that had come between. I found myself occluded. E very single person I had ever come into contact with was either an idiot or a serpent-hearted liar. S trange light came through my window that morning. I wanted to go back to sleep, but I had a class to go to, so I got up, put on pants, grabbed my toothbrush and the various equipment needed to perform my morning ablutions in the bathroom down the hall, and found that I couldn’t because my door was stuck. The knob wouldn’t turn. I fiddled with it, turned the lock one way and then the other, rattled it, yanked it, hit it with a book and finally hit it with a chair. I t was unmoved. It was stuck as solidly as though the architect had designed it to be impassable and indestructible. I pounded on it and yelled for help, but nobody came. M y cell phone had no bars. Service was entirely unavailable. My computers could get no response from any of the local servers they were accustomed to chatting with over the campus network, and school-wide wireless connectivity was absent. I got my pocketknife out of yesterday’s pants, determined to disassemble the doorknob, or possibly even the door’s hinges, but no screws presented themselves to me, nor any other means by which I could break the mechanism down into its component parts. I t was when I went to the window to yell for help that I noticed the clouds.

All I could see outside were shades of white and gray. Nothing was visible except for clouds. The ground was gone. The other buildings normally observable from my window were gone. The trees were gone. The sky didn’t seem to be gone, since I could see it in brief glimpses if I looked straight up. The clouds appeared to be mostly cumulus, the fluffy type of clouds that scurry across the sky on a fair weather day like cartoon sheep. It was as though my building had been lifted into the atmosphere and set down level with the tops of a complex of well-developed cumulonimbi on a stormy day, when on the ground below all is downpour. I opened the window, but had to destroy the window-screen2 with my pocketknife before I could stick my head out and look around. A light breeze touched my cheek, and the clouds moved past in gigantic, serene labyrinths.

One was just below my window, and I reached down to touch it. It was wet and cold, and surprisingly firm. I would have rated its firmness at somewhere between a mattress and a loaf of bread. I wondered if it would hold my weight. When I put my head back inside, the stale, slovenly stink of my room was revealed by its contrast to the delicious, clean smell of the outer air. Thinking scientifically, I first scooped up some of the cloud into my water bottle and closed the lid. I wondered if it would need to be refrigerated in order to last long enough to be studied later, possibly under a microscope, or, if the university would allow it, in the chemistry department’s GC-MS.

I held my computer mouse by the cable and dangled it over the edge of the sill. The mouse sank in a little ways, but didn’t fall through. Same with my keyboard, then my table lamp, and finally my chair. The chair fell over, but stayed up. It proved quite difficult to get the chair back into my room through the window. Eventually I had to climb out and shove it through from the other side. I wished I had put on my boots first, because my socks were soaked through immediately.

I t was a nice feeling, though, to stand on a cloud. I decided to explore.

B efore long I lost sight of my building, and although I had tried to remember the various turnings of my path, the constantly shifting nature of the floating landscape meant that in fact the path no longer existed. It was not too long before I was totally lost. After a while, I started to make my way towards the ground, always taking the downhill choice whenever the path split. I descended as through an anthill of frozen smoke. E ventually I saw something dark, obscured and far away, but solid and green against the backdrop of swirling gray and white below me, somewhere below me. I began to pick my way downwards toward it, crawling sometimes over and sometimes under the tree branches that occasionally blocked my way. A s I approached, the dark area resolved itself into a patch of grass, an opening in the clouds roughly twenty feet in diameter, and in it a man, wriggling frustratedly. He was bound to a chain-link fence by dozens of heavy duty plastic zip ties, upright, legs together, arms spread apart. The posture of Jesus being crucified. His head was free, but he was gagged with packing tape, really an unreasonably huge amount of packing tape, and what was probably a sock. T he fence bisected the little circle of space, and the dim outlines of trees could be seen through the wall of surrounding clouds. Hanging from the edge of one particularly low-hanging cloud and dropping down, I finally reached his level and saw that it was Peter, dressed just as I had last seen him the day before, but looking much the worse for wear. “ W hat are you doing here?” I said. “Do you know what’s going on?” H e struggled, making incomprehensible noises. I laughed. “ Y ou know, your arguments actually make a lot more sense with that gag in. Really, I think, all in all, the clarity of your communication has been increased. Rendered down into a single, purified and essential message: You want to be let go. Right? Nod for yes.” H e nodded, panicky. I took a quick inventory of his facial muscles, or tried to. “ H old still,” I said. “I can’t see your orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris, buccinator, or risorius muscles.” I cut the packing tape off his face. Maybe I drew a little more blood than he would have liked. But yes, the facial musculature inventory completed, I could see that he was indeed afraid.

A purer fear expression I have seldom seen, even in example diagrams. With some difficulty I removed the sock from his mouth. “Shhh,” I said. I examined the blood- and saliva-laden sock. It was one of mine. “What are you doing out here with my sock in your mouth?” I asked. “Don’t answer that!” I held up the knife. He looked from my face to the knife and back, and nodded. “Well, it looks like somebody has got you all set up for something nasty out here, doesn’t it? You’re helpless.” Meaning curled out around us like flower petals in the morning. “Hey! I just thought of something. Pursuant to our discussion not yesterday but a few days ago. There actually is an experiment that you can do to determine whether God exists. See, if God exists, then the soul probably exists. And if the soul exists, it’s definitely immortal, or else it wouldn’t be a soul, just another type of body. And if there’s an immortal soul, and if the evidence of the many religions of the world is to be believed, then after death the soul leaves the body and has, eventually, some sort of contact with God, for good or for ill.” He started shaking his head, first just a little, then more and more, faster and faster, moaning and weeping. “What do you think?” I asked him. “Go ahead and answer.” “No,” he said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “No, no, don’t do it, man. You don’t want to do this. Please. You and me are cool. We’re cool. We’re friends. You don’t need to do this, man, I know maybe you feel a little crazy, it’s okay, it’s okay, we can get you help, there are doctors, psychologists, they can help you, man. Just please, don’t do this.” I raised the knife. “I was asking you about God.” “Sure, yeah, God, I mean, what do you want me to do? I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t do this.” “Just answer me honestly. That’s what I want. It should be easy. Just look inside yourself, find the true expression of the true state of your inner being, and tell it to me. Do you believe in God? Would you like to try an experiment that will settle it one way or the other?” “Oh, sure, yeah I believe in God. There’s no need to try the experiment, man, I was just faking the atheism thing. This is college, it was just my pride, I was just trying to look cool, you know, progressive, of course I believe in God.” I raised my eyebrows. “I believe in God,” he said, then started crying. “I believe in God, I believe in God, I believe in God!” But he was lying, and I could see it in his face, so I cut out his lying heart, and a few of the more honest muscles in his face, thinking I might find a use for them later. I had to disassemble the face down to the skull in some places to get at what I needed. However, it was not his facial muscles for which I found a use, but his blood. As it flowed down his twitching body and began to splash and drip onto the grass, I noticed the thick mist at his feet grow patchy, then threadbare. In a moment, it had vanished, and a widening pool of clear, transparent air began to spread out around us. I held cupped hands to his neck, gathering blood until it ran down into my sleeves, then throwing it into the air all around me. The clouds melted away like dry ice in boiling water. Then I left and walked through the woods down to the beach. It was a fine, clear day, and I swam in my clothes out past the breakers, where I treaded water for a while, then took off most of what I had been wearing and let it fall down into the deeps. I let the pocketknife go, too, and the little pieces of muscle and bone, and wished there had been any way to keep a little of his blood. I floated for a while in the loving, life-giving ocean, then swam back to the beach, found where I had left my car, put on my spare clothes, and drove back to school.

to be continued...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hi! My name is Matthew Talamini. The Clouds and the Shadows of the Clouds is a philosophical horror novel I’ve been working on for a very long time. It takes the form of a letter from an unnamed serial killer to his next intended victim and deals with issues of identity, politics, gender, spirituality and especially epistemology. If you like Philip K. Dick, Mark Danielewski or Søren Kierkegaard, you might enjoy it.

I have a BA from St. John’s College and currently work as a computer programmer in Durham, NC. I designed and built this website, and the photographs are mine as well. The Clouds and the Shadows of the Clouds is 67,000 words long and I am very interested in talking to agents and publishers about it! Contact me at matt (at) matthewtalamini (dot) com.