When I was little, my mom played a lot of Kate Bush. From that time to now, the song that’s stuck with me the most, the one I listen to on a semi-regular basis, is “Cloudbusting”. Between the violins, melancholy but determined with a sort of childish hopefulness, the drums like a soldier’s marching beat, and the lyrics — dreamlike, a little childlike, innocent — I always saw it (and still do) as a song about a lost or fading childhood; dreams out of reach but still holding out hope (perhaps naively) that something good is going to happen. Even if you don’t know when; even if the forecast isn’t looking good. It never occurred to me to look up what cloudbusting actually is. I think I just thought about it in the context of the song, assuming it had something to do with a dream/ideal worldview being burst… whatever; anyways, I looked into it.
(Let it be known that I don’t partake in pseudoscience like chemtrails because I have too much to actually worry about.)
So in the ’50s this guy named Wilhelm Reich built a device meant to produce rain by encouraging the gathering and formation of clouds, much like a lightning rod attracts lightning. One interesting detail that Reich claimed about his device was that it could manipulate “orgone energy,” a sort of mysterious universal life force (also called “the anti-entropic principle of the universe”) somewhat similar to vital energies in other cultures, like qi, odic force, etheric energy, etc. These energies also supposedly exist subtly in people.
Nowadays, cloudbusters are sold as chem-busters, which are pretty much like they sound: chemtrail busters for conspiracy theorists. I think its original concept, though, and the idea of the energy Reich wanted to attract with his machine are both very interesting ideas. People always want to make sense of things that they don’t or can’t understand. Life, death. The weather (lol). I find it endearing when I learn about cases where people put their life’s efforts towards making sense of things. Trying to control weather in particular is interesting to me; wanting to have a hand in the forces of nature; wanting to connect with divine, unexplainable forces of life and the universe. I kinda get the yearning. People want to be more than they are. They want to build clouds and not wait for them to form.
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