THE CONVERSATION

There was once an infant who tried to talk to its shadow. And the shadow talked back. That is how they met and this is how they came to focus their attention in upon one another. For no sooner had the infant spoke to the shadow then the shadow answered. Then the infant would find a compulsion to remain in the conversation extending it into his own point of view. And this is how they progressed chiming in on one another until all the activity seemed to be of a constant hum. A single voice. A single soul. As perhaps it was.


So engrossing was this particular on-going conversation that it used up all of the gestures, all the words, all of the thoughts of both infant and shadow. They glued together and could not be prized apart and yet to the outside world; to the figures that flitted and jumped so erratically around this moment of consequence there seemed in this conversation only the frozen stiffness unmoving, unchanging and unrelenting. For like the two halves of a nut which has grown together the surface reveals nothing of the activity within. But both shadow and infant knew that though bound together it was in the very unity that the pattern and shape for their release lay dormant, guarded and now hidden from the punched out faces of the exterior look of things which seemed always to be pointing the wrong way and never could be faced.


Time passed and yet there was no change. The infant widened and grew taller and so too did the shadow. And still the activities beyond their own unique involvement with one another seemed like so many pieces of dust blowing against their backs as they turned to face one another for fear of fracture. And so for the time being they remained, the infant whispering in the shadow, the shadow whispering in the infant. And still people beyond this locked up and loaded formula could not see a meaning in the averted countenance in which it held itself in check. They could not see a movement in the repetitive action. For infant and shadow were like the balls turning in a roulette wheel. They turned, they met. They separated. Again they spoke. The shapes changed but they alone remained the same oblivious of the games of winning or losing in which the behaviour was accredited or frowned upon in a mass of movement that seemed never to bear any relationship to them.


Then one day a bird appeared small and dusty from its long flight throughout the night. Yet now with the morning light its colours shone through and gently now it tapped against the surface of this hard nut, this outer form. For within it knew there lay a world and in the dark places in which it had passed through its tortuous journey it kept in mind the look of things, distant then and distant still, yet still there. And it was this look that it saw now within the darkened nut.


And so this is how the shadow and the infant came to make room for another and the meaning that they spoke reached out into the world around until people could not help but hear their message.

This is how at last the distant world of the bird and the distant world held between the shadow and the infant shifted together and light realised itself in a sentiment called empathy, a sentiment that reaches out of the distance.