Watching a Storm
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth...
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Like any good drama, a respectable thunderstorm starts strong, grabbing your attention with splayed-out flashes of light or a sudden pounding tumult of water. If you're inside, you can turn the television up and wait until it blows by.
Alternately, you can turn it off — and turn off the lights — and sit by the window, watching the storm unfold with all the false endings, acoustic changes and intricate thematic variations that mark a great symphony.
An unbroken span of sky is ideal. After the storm's onset, you'll want to keep track of all the action. But any sky at all will do; light bounces around, and lightning strikes framed by buildings are still mesmerizing. It's just a different way to read the storm's narrative.
Or, more accurately, what seems like the storm's narrative. Your brain will force anything with a beginning, middle and end into a narrative whether you want it to or not, so sit back and enjoy it. Enjoy the intense build-ups to sheets of water falling from the sky. Enjoy the way raindrops rattle off the tops of cars, the leaves of trees and the flat expanse of asphalt road.
And enjoy the violent stabs of light that arc from the sky to the ground. That's the cayenne in this particular meteorological stew. It's the thing that makes a good storm like a NASCAR event or an old-fashioned circus — the distant lingering specter of potential death.
Watching the ebb and flow of rain and seemingly willful strikes of lightning, it's natural to sense an intelligence behind the weather. A narrative needs a writer, a symphony needs a composer, and a rainstorm needs an anthropomorphic deity working some kind of superpowered spiritual switchboard.
That's just lazy thinking. The storm is a product of evaporation and condensation, wind currents and frontal systems, temperature differentials and topography.
But at the height of a strong storm, it doesn't feel that way. It feels like giants chucking boulders. Wizards lobbing spells. A super-charged bearded guy in a white robe letting loose on a Saturday night. A close lightning strike feels, for an instant, like a death threat.
For a brief bright moment the world is vivid.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
— photo by George Kourounis
