I am afraid of blue skies with white fluffy clouds
you're probably familiar with the (in)famous photograph, Bliss / Bucolic Green Hills by Charles O'Rear — it's the default wallpaper on Windows XP.
yeah, that's the one!
Bliss captures a landscape that, to my understanding, is considered pretty (maybe not this image after serving its time as wallpaper, but you know what I mean). To me, though, it's terrifying to a nausea-inducing degree, at least when experienced in-person. A lush green hill against a blue sky with white fluffy clouds. It is a claustrophobic reflex.
I say claustrophobic for a particular reason, which relates heavily to the flawed ways that "Western" culture grapples with the world we live in.
There is, firstly, the idea of human dominance over dirty, wild, and brutal nature. Nature is ugly, bloated with disease and deformity, with toxic plants and animals killing each other, with death around every corner, writhing parasites in every body. Through our superiority (inherent, technological, intellectual...), humans exert influence over nature, identifying and selecting for the good parts, transforming the landscape of horror into one of beautiful gardens, inventing means of destroying disease and deformity.
Likely in response to this, there is the pastoral/bucolic cottagecore overpriced-organic-mystery-supplements wave, which I think is reactionary in nature. This takes the above and inverts it: humans are a corrupting disease upon nature, which flourishes in our absence.
These positions are more similar than their initial impressions betray. Both consider "humans" and "nature" to be fairly distinct things, and treat both categories as monolithic, with inherent qualities. Both conflate badness and ugliness. The only difference is which one is considered good or bad.
The "blue sky with white fluffy clouds" is a very common symbol of goodness, present in both perspectives: human control and improvement of stormy nature, or natural cleanliness clearing out human pollution. Media uses it as shorthand for clearing out disease and corruption and evil. It often feels too pretty — it's a lie.
That's where the fear starts, for me, for my delusions. If I look up and it's sunny, the sky is rich blue, the clouds without a wisp of storminess — if I look around and it's green, without muddy wallows, without corpses, without brown-dead plants, galls on leaves — someone is lying to me. I'm in a diorama, a terrarium. The sky is a photorealistic painting on a low ceiling. I'm in a structure & I don't see how it's staying upright.
I need to get out of here.
It's too neat and tidy to be real, the world isn't like that, it's visually cluttered and ugly sometimes (more often than sometimes), and that's fine.
...except sometimes, it is that pretty from a particular point of view, at a particular time. Bliss is a photograph of a real place, after all. The cultural baggage here has me running scared from a nice day.
Maybe I'll get better if we fight harder to recognize that ugliness is normal and fine and can be allowed to exist. I have a visual difference after all, developed from my disabilities. I'm part of the unaesthetic landscape. & I would very much like to be allowed exist in your ideas "utopia" ... if I wouldn't be there, then what happened to me?
...
thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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