Cloud Breathers

Architectures of Apposition

Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist Cathedral at St. John’s Abbey, St. Joseph, Minnesota.

‘Be water’ - the Bruce Lee quote most often uttered by market gurus when referring to the ‘go with the flow of capital’ attitude needed to trade profitably… let’s take it literally for a moment.

We are a water molecule in a wet, warm, pink and peaceful bronchial tube of a Benedictine monk. Exhaled in song - we are flooded with heat and expand. Voluminous and vibrating in vellum breath streams from a chorus of cloud-breathers, we rise. Warm updrafts of song lift us out of cracked cathedral windows into the sky.

Crashing, combining and clumping we churn into a cumulus.

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After college, I sold my car and most of my shit and moved out into a cabin in the woods and apprenticed myself to a Karatsu style master potter. I wanted to be Walden.

I spent my days chopping wood, managing a forest, making clay we dug from the ground, and cleaning the kiln. At the end of the day, I’d spend 2-3 hours practicing ‘throwing discipline’ - throwing pots on a Thai-style kick-wheel, with each pot arriving more as an effect of a prescribed set of precise gestures.

The master potter dude turned out to be a total pseudo-guru asshole, but his studio was on the campus of St. John’s Benedictine Abbey in Northern Minnesota — and that is where I learned to chant with the monks.

The apprenticeship was more like slavery-light, so I started spending more and more time with the monks chanting morning and evening prayers. They welcomed me. Especially Friar Clarence who worked in the bakery and his robes smelled of caramelized wheat and cinnamon bread. He would help me decipher the melody and the Latin with great patience and gentle understanding.

Our sounds swirled in a cloud within the cavernous concrete brutalist Breuer church, punctuated by shafts of stained glass light in a honeycomb of hexagons. I remember a feeling of simultaneity - singing out with the joy of unwatched individuation and melding into our swirling univocal praise. We were all part of each other in the fleeting event of song.

I wasn’t religious — but wondered while chanting. We were bees — a buzzing swarm of solidarity in a honeycomb of light.

…

The other day I listened to some Gregorian Chant while walking and looking at clouds, and experienced a kind of synchronicity. That both are form without edge, essentially in movement — a polyphonic respiration of condensation and dispersion.

We see a cloud like we hear chant - a body together and separate at once - without contradiction. Each exist in echoic chambers of sky and cathedral — architectures of apposition.

We can only define their edges, shapes — clouds and songs as such — in retrospect. We experience cloud and song as movement itself within and without… Springing forth - birthed in the parenthood of perception.

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We are back in our cloud - churning from cumulus humilis into a towering cumulus congestus… weighing more than a herd of elephants we continue to rise, pushed violently upwards. Clotting, swirling cauliflowers crowning and freezing as we approach the troposphere. Seen from beneath, we grow darker as we block the light.

We are so many - we begin to fall.

We rain and bounce on the balding foreheads of monks, as they walk to their cars. Beginning to heat on their brows. Ready to rise again.

-Andy

Post-Script: It seems timely to draw an analogy between the life cycle of clouds and the markets. Markets will rise and continue to grow as long as there is an updraft of liquidity provided by central bank policy, and subsequent lending and spending into markets. There is a great deal of speculation that the Space X, Anthropic and OpenAI IPO’s mark the atmospheric roof, or tropospheric limit of the current market cloud and that rain will soon fall. This is as absurd to predict as the timing of a cloud turning into rain. Yes, markets have grown enormous, richly valued and dense - this darkens them somewhat and tells of rain to come. Wait for it, and be water.

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