This floating world
We’ve lived for three months in this house, and I catch my breath multiple times each day when I look at the view of the Northern Catskills outside our windows. I ran into friends Joanne and Tim at an outdoor winter festival a few weekends ago. They live one hilltop away. “Do you take dozens of pictures of the mountains every day?” Tim asked. We laughed as I admitted my obsession with the view and how I never feel that my pictures represent the true awe of the chain of peaks to the south of us.
Ten years ago, I saw a rare U.S. installation of Katsushika Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.” Hokusai was a prolific Japanese artist of the 19th century whose most famous work was a series of “ukiyo-e” of Tokyo’s most famous sight: Mount Fuji. (Ukiyo-e refers to multiple-color block prints on paper and means “pictures of the floating world.”) At the time, I was captivated by Hokusai’s process of depicting one landscape feature so many times, and over such a long span of time.
Hokusai experimented in the series (which ultimately resulted in many more than thirty-six prints) with prevailing Japanese, Chinese and Western styles, and showed us different compositions, some with the mountain close up, or in the distance, some with the mountain as the main feature, or with the mountain as an aside. He also depicted the mountain in all seasons, under varying weather conditions, and at different times of day.
My attempts to document the peaks I see every day—or rather, the compulsion to do so—reminded me of seeing Hokusai’s series. Two mountains that feature in my panorama, Black Top and Windham, home of the eponymous ski resort, are now documented by me this winter at different times of day. My desire to capture the mountains is not diminishing. The mountains and sky are so endlessly inspiring and changing, and I’m aware of how being in this place changes me. I think differently here than when I’m in New York City, for example.
Hokusai wasn’t the only artist to document the same landscape over time. The Lebanese-born painter and poet Etel Adnan returned frequently to depicting Mount Tamalpais, in California, during her ongoing residence in Sausalito. Orham Pamuk put down his pen and picked up a camera in 2012 to photograph the panorama including the Bosphorus Strait from his balcony in Istanbul. The introduction to his book, Balkon even speaks to that place-based influence: “There is something in this view which reflects my own state of mind, and reveals the ineffable but profound emotions running thorough me.” There’s even a recreation of “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” by contemporary photographer, Raoul Ries.
At the same time that I’ve been thinking about people documenting a fixed aspect of their world repeatedly, I read an alarming report about the world’s skies. Researchers from CalTech who have been modeling cloud behavior as current CO2 levels rise have discovered that cloud loss could help explain ancient warming episodes, as well as grimly describe what lies ahead in climate change.
Their findings, published recently in Nature Geoscience, go like this. Clouds cover two-thirds of earth at any moment. With higher CO2 levels (most of which now stems from human activity such as fossil fuel emissions and destruction of forested lands) the earth’s surface and sky become hotter. The extra heat creates stronger turbulence inside low-hanging stratocumulus clouds (which buffer much of the earth’s oceans). This turbulence pushes moist air to the top of these clouds, eventually punching a hole, which draws in dry air from above. “Entrainment,” as this process is called, is what breaks up a cloud. The results of the CalTech scientists’ modeling shows that entrainment breaks up low clouds all over the earth so much by about 100 years out from now—more or less, depending on all variables—that it leads to runaway warming. One scientist commenting on the simulation the study uses said: when the clouds break up, climate “goes over a cliff.”
Since reading this news, I’m looking at the mountain view differently. I’m reminded that what makes the mountains so achingly beautiful most days is their relationship to the sky, and specifically, the clouds occupying the sky. Yes, it’s the light from the sun or the moon that hits the peaks that makes them magical and ever-changing. But the clouds are the variable, the light filters, ever present in some form, but ever changing themselves, that provide the element of unpredictability that takes my breath away. And yet, clouds are so ephemeral that we risk taking them for granted.
Emily Dickinson channeled our current predicament when she wrote:
A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me
I’m so aware of the clouds these days, not just in terms of their beauty, but also of their necessity.
I read that ukiyo, the root of ukiyo-e that means floating world, is a homophone to “sorrowful world” in Japanese, and an intentional ironic reference during the Edo period when Hokusai lived.
If we lose the clouds to our own doing, it will be worse than a sorrowful world. As I look out at the clouds moving slowly over my mountains, I want to hang on—somehow—and not let them be forever lost to me.
