For each of us, of course, the shadow we fell for first. Reaching for our second or third drink at our annual conference’s cocktail party, we kick off shoes under the chandelier, bask in the presence of the like-minded. Warily at first and then more boldly, we tell our stories:
— Regaining consciousness, the first thing that entered our field of vision was the shadow line of the very fence we came tumbling off, merciful as a missionary nun, leaning over us.
— The show Mystery Science Theater, with its silhouetted peanut gallery, sent us into spasms of laughter time and time again.
— In Arizona’s Black Rock Canyon, hiking with a friend, we lost our way, and, thinking this was it, curled up in the slight shadow vestibule formed by the banks of a dried arroyo, conserving ourselves till awakened by the sound of the single-propeller and, without waiting for visual confirmation, stood out of the gulch and started to whip broad circles in the air with the shirts we’d already taken off.
— With our dad, we heard the crackle of Lamont Cranston announcing, “The Shadow knows,” about to abort some foul play or nab some perpetrator. And we wanted to know, too, whatever there was to know, even without knowing what this might be.
Less dramatic beneath the sui generis sprawls the universal, submerged somewhere in the collective unconscious. Who didn’t skip beside his shadow, marveling at it as an emperor might his lands or a peasant his erection, this view of the augmented self offering up just a whiff of omnipotence? But just when we thought it gave us boundless control, our shadow evaded us, hiding itself inside another or going its own way (priming us early for love)? Like any boy or girl, I chased mine up and down hills and on sunbaked pavement till I came tumbling, breathless, to my knees.
In truth, it began for me in a garden, a stolen kiss and hot breath in the ear, a sundial with a gnomon of regal brass, angled amid peonies and shrubs. I stood on tiptoes, arching my neck to catch a glimpse of the face, rimmed with mystery symbols, no number system I knew of. Just behind me stood the girl I’d been told all week was my cousin but who, I’d learned earlier that day, wasn’t — it had just been a figure of speech — and this discovery set free the pangs that resigned to their unrealizability, I’d stifled all week long. Now I could look unflinching into her pale seaweed eyes (brine on the palate), and even study the two faint bumps in her plain white T-shirt, partly shrouded where the shadow fell.
Maybe I already knew what a sundial was; maybe she explained it to me; maybe some adult came along to edify us. Who knows; these things are as lost as her name. I was nine and we were left alone, the two of us, while They toured the mansion with Some Period of Furniture that held some fascination for them, and as I swung around, her lips caught mine in the chill of the shadow. Would I ever recover? Is it too transparent that a lifelong love affair (with shadow, not her) begins here? Or simply unfathomable in this age that any love would last a lifetime, even one whose only constant is the peripheral figure?
What an obscure, tenebrous bunch we are. I’ve been relieved to find I am talking to a bryologist (scholar of mosses and lichens). I shake my head in time with the bluesy lament of the reprographer (connoisseur of copies and copying). I once skipped a return flight to spend the night with a woman who declared herself a pyrologist instead of merely a “chemist who studies fire” (and her brown hair indeed went embery in the dark).
At least the dictionary affirms that these exist. Others, more fledgling, more marginal, persist solely by the curatorial zeal of their adherents. I half-pity the neologist (novelty and newness across the board) and the spontanographer (doodles, sketches, and scribbles) — academia’s stooges, her warthogs, creatures who persist because nature is decidedly not beautiful, who operate under some inner need, nuzzling up against anything that doesn’t run away screaming.
Here are some tips if you are planning to apply to one of the five degree-conferring graduate programs in umbrology in the United States. Don’t make any jokes pertaining to how you’ve always had a shadow. It’s akin to writing you’ve always had teeth on your dental school application — simply beyond the pale.
Second, do your homework. Out of the five programs, two are primarily devoted to shadow theater, leaving three for strictly scientific study. In their defense, one of the theater programs is highly interdisciplinary, and they incorporate scientific principles into what they do. One, though (petrified of getting embroiled in another lawsuit, I won’t name names), finds science anathema. They seem to think the shadow world ought to be kept as mysterious as possible, as ludicrous and untenable a position as that is in this era. Now — when we can explore the stars, sunspots and eclipses and shadow images on other worlds, those that asteroids lend one another as they hurtle through space, the six-thousand-mile-thick shadow that Saturn’s razor ring casts on the planet’s surface; now, when Lew Dorris can sit beside intelligence officials poring over satellite maps of Tora Bora, distinguishing cave from cliff, searching for the slightest hint of human presence — how can they believe such a thing now, of all times?
My last word of advice: Don’t allude to Punxsutawney Phil or anything related to Groundhog Day, even in jest, anywhere on your application.
It is not what the shadow tells us about the figure but about the ground that ultimately matters.
It’s become harder and harder to catch the interest of the undergrads in Intro Umbro. Thank God for video games. With Lew’s help, I can strip away the shadows from fight scenes to expose how ridiculous and cartoonish their so-called virtual worlds are sans proper shading. And from there, I segue right into painting before they can object — first the Mona Lisa, so familiar that it might as well be a video game, the eyes tracking them as if they’re being controlled by some remote joystick. I point out how da Vinci steeps her outfit in shadow, captures the sweep of her hair, dribbles it down her neck, pits shadows at the corners of her cheeks, forcing them to vie with one another, dramatizing the enigma of her emotions.
Next up it’s Dolcinaux’s untitled work, commonly Paripurgferno, (1774), that magisterial reinterpretation of the moment wherein Virgil admits Dante into Purgatory. Where Dante strips Virgil of his shadow, leaving his metaphysical status a mystery, Dolcinaux sends it back toward Hell, adding the likenesses of the shadows of a terrace and a sphere that aren’t in the painting. From notebooks, we know that Dolcinaux believed Dante got it wrong, that hellish circles, purgatorial terraces, and paradisal spheres ought to have been combined into one, a sort of folded triptych of translucent panels. He didn’t have translucent panels, so he did the best he could, his quarrel with Dante writ large here. If I’ve done my job right, some students are still awake by the time I’m done explaining this.
In my usual spot in the library once, bleary after hours of staring into one book or another, I fell into a trance. It was as if something had pulled some of the ink partway off the page and it was hovering between the paper and my eyes. As I tried to hold it aloft, it struck me that the choice of black as the near-universal color of print was no mere convention, no mere appeasement of the eyes. My epiphany: Printed words were the shadows of referents. Things: rock, sand, onion. Ideas: carpool, justice, maximization, irrevocability. Paragraphs were composite shadows of the scenarios and subjects they captured: the overwhelming richness and messiness of the world distilled to bare, chiaroscuroed necessity. Sure, imagination, not eyes alone, was required in reconstructing the original. Yet in my carrel at that moment, I swore I could see the strand of beach rising off the page, shells strewn everywhere, jagged watermarks and slick seaweed pods, and could feel the onrush of surf, salt spatter, and greedy undertow, and I suspected I’d hit on something nontrivial. Newly awake and trembling with cold and not a little fear, I gathered my belongings and moved quickly past the unsuspecting undergrads, their heads buried in books, and exited. My manic gait mirrored the fervor of the conjecture: if words were shadows, then all fields were umbrology, all knowledge a strain of the umbrological, and all of us of a scholarly bent spend our lives peering at shadows. And what, then, did this suggest about the Bible and the Koran and the access they might offer to the sacred? In the distance were evergreens with what little snow they hadn’t yet shed and the gangling deciduous trees with their intricate interweavings, neuronal branchings. I saw the agriculture complex with its various roofs covered with swatches of snow, then the purple bruise of a cloud bank unfurling across the sky, then the orange glow like something from another world, and then I tried to see before me a page, the page, with these words upon it. As I neared the parking lot, its blue signs with white lettering felt discordant, and I fell in among a crowd arriving for or leaving a game. There was a honk and someone leaned out of a car and yelled, “Ursula’s not the whore, I am!” and everyone in earshot erupted in laughter. At once, my insight shriveled into preposterousness like a balloon surrendering, and I felt ridiculous, all the more so as I, too, was laughing along. I haven’t returned to that idea since; maybe someday.