Storm-Cloud

A performance lecture in 39 fragments, responding to Ruskin’s 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century 'through contemporary practice. Part research, part provocation, part weather report.

24. A Moral Science of Light

For security, therefore, and simplicity of definition of light, you will find no possibility of advancing beyond Plato’s “the power that...

25. Solemn Dignitiy in Saddening Colour

Returning now to our subject at the point from which I permitted myself, I trust not without your pardon, to diverge; you may...

26. A Good, Old-Fashioned, Healthy, and Mighty Storm

These three instances are all I have time to give of the former conditions of serene weather, and of non-electric rain-cloud. But I must...

27. The Cloud, of Perfect Form

We so rarely now see cumulus cloud of this grand kind, that I will yet delay you by reading the description of its nearer aspect, in the...

28. The Modern Plague Cloud

Thus far then of clouds that were once familiar; now at last, entering on my immediate subject, I shall best introduce it to you by...

29. A Dry Black Veil

The first time I recognized the clouds brought by the plague-wind as distinct in character was in walking back from Oxford, after a hard...

30. A Wind of Darkness

Since that Midsummer day, my attention, however otherwise occupied, has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of...

31. Malignant

(2.) It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its...

32. Trembling

(3.) It always blows tremulously , making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness...

33. Intermittent

(4.) Not only tremulous at every moment, it is also intermittent with a rapidity quite unexampled in former weather. There are, indeed,...

34. Degrades, While it Intensifies

(5.) It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before I read you any description of its efforts in this kind, I must correct...

35. Thunderstorm with Plague Wind

These extracts are, I hope, enough to guard you against the absurdity of supposing that it all only means that I am myself soured, or...

36. Blanch the Sun

(6.) And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they...

37. Entirely Pure Weather

Now I’m going to show you a diagram of a sunset in entirely pure weather, above London smoke. I saw it and sketched it from my old post...

38. The Men of Old Time

I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit of plague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can see enough of it...

39. What is Best to be Done?

What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain. Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can the signs of the...