«You are able to see without looking?»
«Do you want to try me?»
«All right. How many eyes have you got?» inquired the fox.
«A pair of them, I suppose,» said the Dragon absent-mindedly.
«Did you count?»
«I told you, dragons do not have to. Our very ability to think and to talk is all about replacing things with ideas, with signs.»
«An idea of a thing is not its perfect image!» protested the fox.
«Just so. It needs to connect, above all, with other ideas and only so much with the thing itself. New ideas are thus determined by old ideas and cannot exist without them.»
«Unlike new things.»
«That is immaterial. When we think we talk about a thing, we really talk about an idea of a thing.»
«A thing precedes an idea, no?»
«I would not put it precisely like that,» said the Dragon.
The sun was setting and the sky was turning purple. The shadows were creeping upon the water of the pond, drinking colors from whatever they touched, dissolving outlines, softening shapes. The night-time was upon the woods.
«A single idea does not suffice. The best idea can come from many good ideas. And good ideas come from many ordinary ideas.»
«What about your ideas?» asked the fox critically.
«If you understand me at all, you recognize them as senseless.»
«Surely that is a contradiction.»
«To contradict each other, ideas must have something in common,» said the Dragon. «Otherwise, they cannot be compared effectively. The world is different for us, how more so our ideas!»
«In this respect they are all similar, are they not? I wonder, may it be possible for some ideas to be more similar than others?»
«Any idea may be of an advantage, if that is what you are asking about. Besides, the merit of an idea can only be stated in comparison with another idea. Any idea can be compared only with other ideas. Whether it should be – that is a separate issue.»
«I thought it was your point,» yawned the fox.
«You cannot understand an idea without the support of other ideas, and other ideas without the support of each other. Advancing with one idea, you increasingly depend on another. Consequently, your understanding improves as a whole but declines with any given instance. To understand everything is to understand very little.»
«And the moral of this?» asked the fox, exasperated.
«You do not need me to tell you,» said the Dragon.
Beyond the Sea
Gray skies.
Gray clouds.
Remote waterfront,
awash with the sound
of waves.
At the edge —
stars beyond the sea.
Rising.
The Tides of Night
Eternal darkness of the void beyond seeped into the world at the beginning to become night.
Indeed, the darkness was the world; for ages it had reigned unchallenged and pure, unmarred by light, hidden inside itself, until some star a distance away caught sight of it, and then another, and the corruption commenced.
The darkness strained and strived, foreseeing that it might prevail in the end, even if vanquished at the moment. The light tore at it, banished it, and the darkness suffered, and its loss was great. It kept coming back, always, yet was no longer able to endure. Irresolute and restive, it shifted from one place to the next, all the while repeatedly forced to give up what it had just reclaimed.
Thus the night and the world were divided.
Before, the void beyond had nurtured the night, its favorite progeny, and had sent shadows to act upon its behalf, shadows inseparable both from the night itself and the dark world it engulfed. Now, disconnected, in torment, they gained shapes in wavering starlight and grew distinctive and independent, guarding the night and guiding it from harm.
The shadows found themselves familiar with the dragons, who took no sides, for whom both the darkness and the light were alike. They traveled and they conversed, they ran together and flied together, and sometimes could be mistaken for each other, to mutual amusement.
Many creatures and things of the dark, however, changed their allegiance and were transformed, led to light and to life, but not the shadows, which remained unto themselves. They were all different at first, and neither their appearances nor desires nor doings were remotely the same. They inhabited disparate regions and seldom met in an encounter. They harbored secretly an aversion to each other, as did the darkness and the light.
A ravenous fiery star of extraordinary brightness once drifted from far off and preyed upon the darkness of the world, crippling it with searing shine. The shadows perished in numbers uncountable, were reborn, and perished anew; but the star never withdrew. Insatiable though it was, it could not devour the darkness wholly – from what was left the night and its shadows emerged time after time, weakened but unbroken for all that.
On these occasions, with the fiery star done for the day, the night was able to roam free, unchecked. It swept over the waters and the lands, and filled the air, reuniting the world with the void beyond. It was neither cool nor warm, dry nor wet, supple nor rigid, and it was everywhere. The night was everything, and everything was the night, albeit briefly.
The stars, myriads of them, flickered on all sides, piercingly visible, illuminating nothing. Their soundless songs rushed by and across like currents in an ocean, coalescing into a single celestial harmony of many facets and layers, driving a listener mad and stealing one’s very self.
The dragons did not listen, or if they did, they made no resistance whatsoever. They did not care not to be themselves anymore, or for anything to be anything, for that matter. The tides of night took them across the sky and the stars, holding them firmly in their grip, and the dragons were aware of this firmness, of the steady pulse that ran through the night, of the heartbeat of the void echoed in the rising and falling black waves.
Had any of them glanced sideways, they would have noticed other phantoms, all sliding noiselessly ahead, farther and further – more dragons, all indifferent to the presence of the others, all submitted to the power of night. Their minds were vacant, their senses detached, and night was with them and within them.
More stars began to arrive whenever their fiery kin abated, and some stayed. They had no light of their own, no hunger; instead, they chose to reflect any light that came their way and mutilated the darkness with pale glow nonetheless. Only the clouds provided an incidental relief. Yet, the ancient balance was destroyed. The night of the darkness ebbed and flowed in relentless tides, never at peace, biding its time ever since.
As for the shadows, they were bound to the custom of the world and so restrained. They were made to mimic, as if in a kind of dream, whatever creature or thing they approached and to be at the mercy of all the stars and fires, and any other light there may have been. They were deprived of their strength and of their form, reduced to bear the uneven shape of the others, devoid of color or substance, constantly driven to no escape and brought back. Only the dragons had no part in that and still conferred with the shadows on equal terms, as of old.
It would not last interminably,