Is the rain cliché? Or is the fact that you must ask the question indicative of a larger problem. The sky doesn't ask these things. The creek and the pond don't ask these things. Anywhere the water goes, it doesn't ask. Nature doesn't audit its own thought. When you drink from a cup of water, you don't ask yourself whether that's a trite action. It is necessarily done. The water reoccurs, it necessarily falls. And yet, when writing, there are those internal voices that question the most simple of happenings.
We look for them everywhere, things to say well. The thought begets structure, it is the essence of projection. And so the writer develops for themselves a well-organized circulatory system for how the narrative will progress. Lines are traced. King has his magic. Patterson his mystery. Contemporary writers will have the luxury of their social issues. Each serves the same function, to protect the writer from the derision of superfluity.
And into nights when bats were on the wing
Over the rafters of sleep, where bright eyes stared
From piles of grain in corners, fierce, unblinking.
from 'The Barn' by Seamus Heaney
This may be the disease of our era, that everything must matter and each thought must be its own revelation. There is no room for the banal. Dry things evaporate in the heat. Even those works once thought to be masterpieces are pushed aside under the guise of a presupposed understanding.
At one time, you might've said, We don't know it but someone else does. That has changed. Now, what you hear is, We know it because someone else does. It is the fallacy of vicarious knowledge. Pedants exclaiming the virtues of pedants. There is no room in that system for simple things. They are seen as so far from the philosophy of the moment, so understood, that to engage with them would threaten one's own intelligence. So writers begin to distance themselves. This only exacerbates the issue. Rain cannot be rain. To be such, would be to return to something so far beneath the veneer, it can only threaten to disrupt a well-curated status-quo.
“—a spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when.”
from Ulysses by James Joyce
So we sit listening to our lo-fi in the rain. Sleep music with pleasant piano. We disappear. It is peaceful behind the waterfall. Can you write about that? The rule is that you can write about anything. Right? Is that true or is this more of a regulatory platitude? You can write about everything, within the confines of a bumpers-down bowling lane that has been prescribed to you based on a table of factors that may be audited at any time if the work produced is not satisfactory. How many writers have endured this fact, written, and once ecstatic to be finished they were given the side-eye of disinterest? The labors of fine-print.
banked fire
on the wall a shadow
of the guest
Bashō
On comforting thought is that the rain and those dry things don't care. The level of interest at which they are held means nothing to them. Another cliché, the relative indifference of nature. More reason for irreverence and disinterest. People today are so interested. We live in a time of hyper-interest, where interest has been conflated with the aforementioned understanding, as well as some vague outline of moral absolutism. It's enough to drive you crazy, screaming at the crowd to go outside, play in the grass. The grass did not grow for you. It simply grew. Fleas in the hay do not jump closer to humanity. They are for the horses and the sheep. We understand better now the confines of Poe's science, that death at the end of Horatio's straight line.