It’s often said that people speak of the weather only when they have nothing else to say. This cliché is an attempt for whatever reason, to separate us from the world, to install us instead in some half furnished future where the air-conditioning works overtime to delude us. “Meteorology”, as W.G. Sebald taught, not long before his death, “is not superfluous to the story. Don't have an aversion to noticing the weather.”

Some day’s ago, in any event, suffering under the sort of malaise beneath which Sebald himself seemed invariably to be struggling, I had the idea to head out toward the coast, with a few members of the Malvern Surrealist Movement, to see the watery part of Sorrento. It’s a way many of us have, if we’re lucky, of driving off the nameless despair, which envelopes us once every while, like a smoky vapour. The purpose of these expeditions, if the truth be known, is merely to notice the weather in a little more detail.

Whenever I find myself growing weary of my own company, whenever a weedy abandoned block opens out in my heart, whenever I find myself wistfully contemplating the precarious height of bridges and window ledges; and especially when old people, far from appearing somehow holy, (by virtue of their being so close to death,) seem exceedingly stupid instead, stumbling unthinkingly as they do across the barren years towards their inevitable and unconsidered end, then I reckon it about time to get out coastward and go snorkelling.

A little while ago, during the 1920’s, the French poet Francis Ponge was a very angry young man. “Too angry”, according to Margaret Guiton, “to commit himself to much more than sporadic gestures of one sort or another. He was angry at all human institutions and arrangements, most particularly the words whereby this sordid state of things insidiously penetrates our minds.” Gradually, Ponge came around, to the point where he was able to declare, that all poems should bear the title “Reasons for Living Happily.”

“At least in my case, he said, each (poem) I write is like a note I try to hit when, during a meditation or contemplation, a rocket of words bursts from my body that refreshes it and encourages it to live a few days longer.”

This self-renewal through language is always initiated, according to Ponge, by the mind’s “return to things.” In the soupy present world, where we are surrounded as much by the absence as by the presence of things; the return to the real, to tangible objects and to the weather, by some careful recognition, almost inevitably precipitates the desire to live happily, at least for a few extra days.

Ponge writes of “things” in a way that few poets have ever been capable, or willing. He writes of “The Mollusk”, “Bread”, “Vegetation,” “The Cigarette”, “Dung”, The Pebble” and “Moss”, but by utilizing a constant process of defamiliarisation and by transforming the language of science with the urgency of an elemental philosophy, these insignificant “things” are revealed again as they might be to a child or to the first human, as essentially miraculous.

Of The Seashore, Ponge writes:

…An elementary concert, made all the more pleasurable and thought-provoking by its discretion, has here been offered to nobody through all eternity. For the first time since it was formed by the insistent action of the wind on a boundless platitude, a wave, come smoothly from a great distance, at last finds someone to defy.

But only a single brief word is vouchsafed to the pebbles and shells, which seem quite moved, and the wave dies uttering it; and all that follow will die uttering the same word, sometimes a bit more loudly. Climbing over one another as they reach the first rows of the orchestra, each draws itself up a bit, bares its head, and gives its name to whomever it is addressing.

To my mind, there is no one who can speak so well about the weather. “If speaking of earth like this makes me a minor poet, Ponge said, “an earth tiller, that’s what I want to be! I do not know a grander subject.”