A former student wrote to me late one night:

“If a shadow realized it was merely a shadow, would that invalidate its position?”

Then added:

“Do you see this as a musical phenomenon?”

Students sometimes write to ask about copyright or how to persuade a club owner to answer an email. Occasionally they send a metaphysical explosive device and leave me to decide which wire to cut. I imagined a shadow on a wall. Perhaps this is closer to the human condition than we care to admit. We assume we are the solid figures moving through life. But what if we are the shadows? What if something unseen, biology, consciousness, God, or nature, casts us briefly upon the surface of existence?

The shadow also appears to lift its hand. From its position on the wall, the movement is real. It has direction, consequence and shape. Yet the cause may exist beyond the shadow’s field of vision. Would realizing this invalidate a human life? When a piano key is struck, we say that we hear a note, but the note is already the visible shadow of a larger event. A hammer has moved. A string is vibrating. The soundboard is resonating. Air has been disturbed. An ear translates the disturbance, and a mind turns it into sorrow, beauty or the sudden memory of someone who has been dead for thirty years.

Which part is the music? An overtone is another shadow: a hidden vibration produced by the fundamental note. We may not consciously hear it, yet it gives the sound its identity. Remove the unseen frequencies and the note becomes something else. Perhaps we are like overtones. We emerge from a fundamental vibration beyond our hearing. We sound briefly, contribute our colour and disappear, while the larger note continues. Improvisation intensifies this suspicion. I sit at the piano believing I am inventing the music, but where does the next phrase come from? I do not see it approaching. I become aware of it only as my hands begin to move. The music seems to pass through intention without asking intention’s permission.

Maybe what we call ourselves is the portion of a much larger movement that becomes visible.

I wrote to the student that if we are shadows of something unseen, our lives are not therefore meaningless. The opposite may be true. A shadow proves that something has interrupted the light. Its exact shape could occur only because this particular body stood in this particular place at this particular moment.

Our position remains temporary, dependent and real.

The student wrote back:

“So if I discovered I was only a shadow, I would still be myself?”

“Yes,” I replied. “But you might become more curious about what is playing you.”