a founder of the codex

Cloud

Nubifacies mutabilis·the Floating Likeness

From Latin nubes, cloud, and facies, face or form, and mutabilis, changeable, a cloud whose faces change as they are seen.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Verticalityimage schema
Class: Boundaryits entrainment
Niche: Producerraw experience
Mode: Metamorphosishow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Dream

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Inorganic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: Element · WordNet, 1990: Object · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Floating Likeness, the whole specimen — Plate XI. Nubifacies mutabilis, the whole specimen.

A cloud is water condensed into droplets fine enough to float, its outline remade by every wind, and its changing forms are where the mind most readily finds faces.

Water held up by air takes every shape the wind gives it, and the mind gives each shape a face.

behavior It builds out of clear air in an afternoon, changes outline minute by minute, and thins away when the air beneath it dries.

provocation

What face did you last see in a cloud, and whose was it?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its boundary, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Cloud — Fig. 1. Kernel
Saturation
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Air holds only so much vapour, and when it cools past that limit the excess condenses into droplets so small that the faintest updraft keeps them aloft.²
drawn as: saturation · view: microscope

Boundary of Cloud — Fig. 2. Boundary
Entrainment
❦ dominant organ
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
Its edge is where moist air meets dry, and every wind that stirs dry air in evaporates droplets at the rim while new ones condense inside, so its outline changes minute by minute.³
drawn as: entrainment · view: at work

Intake of Cloud — Fig. 3. Intake
Thermal
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on warm moist air rising from sea and land, bubbles lifted off sun-heated ground, up mountain slopes and over cold fronts.²
drawn as: thermal · view: in situ

Mechanism of Cloud — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Condensation level
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Rising air expands and cools, and at the height where it saturates its vapour condenses, so a field of cumulus shares one flat base.²
drawn as: condensation level · view: transparent

Output of Cloud — Fig. 5. Output
Cumulus
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
Its heaped forms shade the land and change as they are watched, and the eye finds in them animals, faces and omens.^{1, 4}
drawn as: cumulus · view: detached

Dispersal of Cloud — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Mares' tails
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
Fast winds high up draw its ice into long hooked streaks that run ahead of a coming front, and weather lore reads them as the sign of rain within a day or two.¹
drawn as: mares' tails · view: series

Decay of Cloud — Fig. 7. Decay
Virga
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
When its updraft fails or dry air wins, its droplets evaporate, and its rain hangs in grey streaks that vanish before they reach the ground.⁵
drawn as: virga · view: cross section

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Diamond, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Wind

same kind in Wilkins Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, River, Storm, Wind

same kind in WordNet Archipelago, Lake, River

same kind in Llull Amber, Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Diamond, Emergence, Entanglement, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Iridescence, Lake, Petrification, Rain, Reflection, Resonance, Resonance (second reading), River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Winter, Self-Ending Order

same phylum Awakening, Erosion, Faith, Innocence, Miracle, Rain, Vertigo, Weightlessness

same dominant organ Amber, Aura, Diamond, Equinox, Frost, Possession, Reflection, Solitude, Threshold, Tongue Horizon, The Shared Cell

Genome

vapour also in Frost
suspension
shape
omen also in Prophecy, Rain
drift also in Sand, Simultaneous Remembering, Tongue Horizon

III In the world

Echoes

a cumulus over summer fields
the cloud Hamlet sees as a camel, a weasel and a whale
mares' tails before a storm
fog filling a valley at dawn

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 5, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	volvellae
symmetry	radial 5
organization	nested
silhouette	sac
scale	immense
proportion	compressed latent
growth	faceted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	lattice latent
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	walking latent
pattern	gradient latent
coloration	disruptive latent
substance	crystal
surface	iridescent
palette	malachite
luminosity	none
transparency	layered latent
gesture	hardens
unity	composite latent
modality	unmarked latent
causation	final
determinacy	crisp
fusion	replaced
anomaly	scale clash
graft	scaffold
technique	stipple
viewpoint	below
value	flat latent
balance	grounded latent
density	graded detail
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	accent latent
appendages	ocelli
anchor (body)	a termite mound cut open to show its ventilation shafts
anchor (detail)	a diffusion-limited aggregate, a feathery fractal cluster

Sources

Luke Howard, On the Modifications of Clouds (1803)
B. J. Mason, The Physics of Clouds (1957)
Henry Stommel, Entrainment of Air into a Cumulus Cloud (Journal of Meteorology, 1947)
Aristophanes, The Clouds (423 BCE)
World Meteorological Organization, International Cloud Atlas (1956)

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