John Berger: I’m no longer observing them, they are observing me.

John Berger meditating on natural beauty and political action, from Confabulations

https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/12/swimming-and-seeing

I swim on my back and look up at the sky through the framed glass roof. A vivid blue with white cirrus clouds at an altitude, I’d guess, of about 5,000 metres. (The Latin for “curl” is cirrus.) The curls slowly shift, join, separate as the clouds drift in the wind. I can measure their drift thanks to the roof frame; otherwise it would be hard to notice it.
The movement of the curls apparently comes from inside the body of each cloud, not from an applied pressure; you think of the movements of a sleeping body. 

This is probably why I stop swimming, and put my hands behind my head and float. My big toes just break through the surface. The water below holds me. 

The longer I gaze at the curls the more they make me think of wordless stories, wordless stories like the stories fingers may tell, but in fact here stories told by minuscule ice crystals in the silence of the blue. 

Yesterday I read in the press that 20 Palestinians in their homes were blown to pieces in Gaza, that the US has covertly despatched 300 more troops to Iraq to defend its interest in the oil refineries, that James Foley, an American journalist held hostage by Isis, was filmed during the ritual of his execution by beheading, and that 35 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, men, women and children, were found suffocating in a shipping container on a freighter that had just crossed the North Sea to dock in London. 

The cirrus is drifting northwards towards the deep end of the pool. Afloat on my back, motionless, I watch it and chart with my eyes the pattern of its undulations. 

Then the assurance the sight offers changes. It takes me time to understand how. Slowly the change becomes evident and the assurance I receive becomes deeper. The curls of the white cirrus are observing a man afloat on his back with his hands behind his head. I’m no longer observing them, they are observing me.