CHORUS

From a distance they looked the same as you and me. Shadowy figures waving arms and legs, torsos and head as they moved along the street from one position to the next.


Through the windows of buses spattered with rain it made no difference really. We looked or did not look as is the way in cities. And yet they never let us get too close. They stared us down and warded us off keeping to themselves at all costs.


At first we did not understand this in them. Indeed we even took it personally examining ourselves for flaws.

But when at last we did manage to find an approach, moving in from behind, closer and closer until all of a sudden they turned and there we were, facing one another in the dry clear of daylight, we became aware of the fact that they were not constituted in the same way as us. No they were made up instead of tiny little independent animals that undulated in unison one after the other over and over again and that now, faced with a spectacle so overwhelmingly vast as ourselves, they begun to panic. To lose their thread. To forget about their team-work so central to their continuing existence in the human world. And yes bit by bit they began to fall. To separate out from one another scattering on to the ground around our feet. And then they were gone. Gone from view.


After a while however we learnt how to handle the problem. We would whistle a little song and bit by bit the animals would join us, rising up in unison again until we had a great and mighty chorus by our side.

This is how we finally got to meet the little creatures who appeared to us now, as we did to them, in a sympathetic form.