"One of my earliest memories of any substance or context is of Kindergarten or daycare, making me four or five at the time. And the teacher/supervisor/lady-person says to us all, "We are going to make clouds today." And I can remember being really excited by this, because -let's face it- clouds are cool; what's more, at four or five they're downright amazing. In fact, the only downside to clouds at that age is that they're so high up, so what this lady was proposing seemed really ideal to me. And then she proceeded to gather us around a stove where she boiled a pot of water. When the water was sending up great veils of steam she held a frying pan about a foot over it and made us watch as water condensed on it's bottom and dripped back down. That, she said, was exactly how rain was made; the steam was clouds.
Inarticulate as my thoughts may have been at that age, I can recall their substance: which was that I didn't know what, exactly, had just happened there, but those were not clouds. All of it was like a cheap magic trick and I remained unconvinced by it. I still am to this day. Clouds may well be condensed water waiting to fall back earthward, but they are also magic, and they have nothing to do with frying pans."
- excerpt from Introduction to The Magic of Music by Jeremy Owen (pub. John Murray, London 1807)
No comments:
Post a Comment