SOMEWHAT OVERCAST

As a child, one of my favorite activities was lying in the grass, on a warm summer’s day, staring at the clouds in the sky and imagining stories around the shapes they formed in my mind. Sometimes, I would see angels, or dragons, and even Neptune, the God of the Sea. I don’t know what Neptune was doing up in the sky, but, according to my fancy, He was there. Then the clouds would shift, and so would my images.

When grownups learned about my game, they tried to enlighten me by explaining that clouds are only a collection of tiny droplets of water or ice crystals, but I never quite believed them. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

In 1921, a psychologist named Rorschach developed a test where he recorded subjects’ projective perception of inkblots. Then, he interpreted what they saw in the blot.  I never took the inkblot test, but assume it was a cousin of my “cloud in the sky” game.  His test was later discredited as not being a valid tool in diagnosing mental illness (or I guess mental wellness.) I know that had I taken that test, he would have probably found me completely bonkers, because it’s no secret that I never was made for this world, and I probably would have said, “Looks as if you spilled some ink.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Grownups are still trying to ruin my cloud game. Recently, I was told that all the information, that the three billion users of the Internet, spew forth, is now stored in one of my clouds. As hard as I look, I have never seen the mass of floating pieces of data in the sky. However, I think I saw two turtles trying to catch a baby elephant. Maybe there’s a weird cloud hanging over Silicon Valley. 

I have learned that people hear what they want to hear and see what they want to see. “A lady viewing a portrait of a nude woman, said to the artist, Toulouse Lautrec, ‘Sir, Your painting is obscene!”’  “No, Madame,” he replied, “The obscenity is in your mind, not on my canvas.”

I don’t see any beauty about having floating data in the sky, but I’m sure that concept came from someone’s imagination. I wish he had imagined a filing cabinet and left my clouds alone. Then 3 billion people could file their information in an iCabinet instead of an iCloud.  Makes sense to me!

Esther Blumenfeld