The weather is an extremely useful topic: so often the springboard for conversation between strangers; so often, too, the metaphorical barometer of our feelings and state of being. We make heavy weather of stressful times, we leave under a cloud when we transgress and all too frequently brew a storm in a teacup – allowing some small incident to blow up out of all proportion. Of all the metrological conditions, fog is the most disorientating and thus the most pervasive metaphor for uncertainty. I dislike very much driving through fog – its impenetrability frustrating the usual assurance with which I recognise the contours of my world. Authors have fully exploited this obscurity. Charles Dickens begins Bleak House with a swirling description of London in a pea-souper. The city evoked in his tangled tale of lives destroyed by labyrinthine inadequacies of the legal system seems to be as formless, morally, as the fog in whose grip it lies.
From Bleak House, Chapter 1
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Charles Dickens
The poet, Thom Gunn, in his poem, Human Condition, uses fog to evoke the difficulty of making one’s way though life. Gunn’s poem seems to contain within it echoes of another fictional character wavering in an uncertain world. There is more than a glimpse of Hamlet’s shrouded battlements in the opening verse. Yet this narrator seems to make some progress through the fog. Should we take heart from this? Don’t we all emerge, eventually, into a world of clear outlines and known shapes? The wait for this clarity can seem overlong.
HUMAN CONDITION
Now it is fog. I walk
Contained within my coat;
No castle more cut off
By reason of its moat:
Only the sentry’s cough,
The mercenaries’ talk.
The street lamps, visible,
Drop no light on the ground,
But press beams painfully
In a yard of fog around.
I am condemned to be
An individual.
In the established border
There balances a mere
Pinpoint of consciousness.
I stay, or start from, here:
No fog makes more or less
The neighboring disorder.
Particular, I must
Find out the limitation
Of mind and universe.
To pick thought and sensation
And turn to my own use
Disordered hate or lust.
I seek, to break, my span.
I am my one touchstone.
This is a test more hard
Than any ever known.
And thus I keep my guard
On that which makes me man.
Much is unknowable.
No problem shall be faced
Until the problem is;
I, born to fog, to waste,
Walk through hypothesis,
An individual.
Thom Gunn
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