ON SHADOWS: SOME INVESTIGATIONS

What’s in a shadow? Not the stories colors tell (how hair can honey or silver in sunlight, what that red rock the size of a buffalo heart said). A shadow, in fear, can’t deepen its pink like a flounder or squid. It won’t go opaque like a chip of beach glass or behave like a plum clouding with bloom. A shadow can’t bronze a leaf in fall (though neither one holds on very long). No iridescing like oyster shells, the wings of cicadas, gasoline puddles.

Shadows begin by leaning into the west, cinch up at noon, and by dusk reconstitute, holding their breath until disappearing low and thin in the east. All day long shadows rehearse their leaving.

How to move through the world with yours? Gently. Shadows are porous and, though hinged to the body, are easily overcome by the darkness of others. In the postures of shadows are expressions distilled—reticence before crossing a threshold; some hunching or bristling; your dark, upright joy thrown onto the street. Such intimacy with muddy curb, fire hydrant, pile of trash! A shadow rests on anything. So deftly fills the space it’s poured into, alights on dry land or water or rock, and leaves no print at all.

Passes over and leaves not a trace.

Shadows are tests of specialized seeing: at what micromoment does a subject’s bearing turn from bent to a task to grieving? From hide-and-seek counting to on the knees, praying. Shadows won’t return a frank gaze; you have to suss out their inclinations—look up from your book and see in the tilt of your beloved’s head (projected there, against the wall), degrees of mood, that something has changed. Voices override and insist, but the body’s inflection won’t lie.

Reconsider the usual attitudes toward shadows: dark-therefore-evil, while light’s the pure good. How sharp distinctions are called night-and-day. It’s hard to shift conventional stances what with language like shadowy and shadowed by. Followed fast by the light of reason. Shadows are really hybrid things, so those foxes/birds/rabbits crossing tent flaps and night walls? All born of a flashlight’s beam and your hand.

A shadow’s a form of relief. The eye can sink into it, relax and unfocus—no pixels apparent, no zillions of tiny particles zinging. A kitchen table is wild with emptiness, but we, untrained for conceptual shimmer, agree to see only heft and stillness and call our tables reliable objects.

But a shadow is reliable and steady. Its edges don’t bleed. It won’t crest its banks. It’s a tidy leak. Shadows suggest certain lines or states are terribly fragile, mysteriously easeful—say, the one between Sleep and Death.

Intending to stay in motion (light at their backs, conditions just right), shadows end up, despite their restlessness, gone—gathered back to their source, in the way all passionate makers of atmosphere use themselves up entirely.