He put his pale hand between the candle and the wall. His hand’s shadow was magnified on the coarse blue stones.
“Can you tell me what you see?”
I looked at his face to find the hint of a joke but he seemed serious.
I replied in a mock mystical tone, “I see a shadow of your hand, cast by the light of the candle” I smiled at him to see if he was playing but his grave face remained.
“And what is more real?”
I looked back at him and hesitated. I thought he had invited me in for a tea. So why the philosophy?
“What’s more real? My hand or the shadow it casts?” His moved his hand back and forth so that the shadow moved too.
I now felt equal parts discomfort and disappointment. Discomfort at this all of a sudden probing question and disappointment at the lack of tea. However, I was his guest and so I answered as best I could.
“It’s all real. Your hand, the shadow it casts and the candle’s flame. They’re all as real as the question you just asked and the answer I’m giving now. It’s all as real as the room we’re sitting in.”
I looked around and studied the coarse blue stonework, the creaking wooden chairs we were sitting in, the large, wax covered table from countless candlelit dinners and the wine and beer stains that discoloured the wood in between. My eyes fell to the hooded monk who sat opposite me. He shook his head and a nasty look crept into his eyes.
“If you put half of what you put into thinking you’re clever into thinking itself you’d be cleverer than even you would think” Then with an otherworldly quickness he then flicked his hand a few inches from the candle and extinguished the flame. His movement was so precise, effortless and natural it was as though all the millennia of the world had existed for that singular act. It was so fast that if I had blinked I would have awoken to a slightly darker room not knowing how it had become that way. But I did not blink and I now sat, in a dark chamber with a petulant monk who was still holding out his goddamn hand. I didn’t like where this was going.
“So now, my friend, what is more real? My hand is still here yet its shadow is not. My hand needs nothing to be real, whereas its shadow needs light.” The monk looked triumphant. It was as though he had once again found success in visually demonstrating his own obscure metaphor to a modern but ignorant foreigner passing through his developmentally stunted hamlet. I realized I must have been just one of many who he had given this quasi-Socratic lecture to. Ideally, I would have kindly gone along with it, exclaiming out loud when the old prune had made a point he considered to be profound but his apparent forgetfulness about offering me tea had left me feeling bitter. I decided then and there not to be so accommodating. He spoke again.
“So please, my good friend, which is more real?”
My bitterness came out more suddenly and awkwardly than I expected. “I’m afraid I’m not your friend, monk”
It only took a sentence but the built up serenity and solemnness that hung in the monk’s chamber had now vanished. As I expected the monk was taken aback. What I didn’t expect was the speed of his retort.
“Oh but you are you see”
“I do not see”
“I consider you to be my friend whether you consider me to be one or not. Friendship, my boy, is not necessarily reciprocal” His beady eyes gleamed. He then chuckled and waggled his hand around as he did so.
“Oh my good friend. I do love thee indeed”
Ignited by the out of the blue utterance of its opposite, hatred had suddenly filled my body. I wanted nothing more than to smack this monk as hard as I could. My eyes glazed over for a moment and I watched a few repeats of myself smacking the monk in the face.
“Goddamn that feels good” I drooled, slightly catatonic. My imagined monk was lying on the floor whimpering.
“What did you say?” It was the real monk but I could barely see him anymore. My day dream was becoming increasingly vivid as I let the anger engulf me. My soul was hurting and crying out for help but I put a finger to my lips.
“Shhhhhhh. It’s ok baby”
Thump! The monk smacked the table and pulled me back to my current predicament. He flapped his hand around even more incessantly.
“Which is more real boy?!”
“Uh –“ I was back. I looked around and saw a darkly lit chamber with a hooded monk trying to explain some ostensibly meaningful visual metaphor that would lead me to see life in a different way. But I also saw something I don’t ever remember seeing before. There was a door letting in a tiny amount of sunshine through the crack at the bottom. The monk’s voice filled the room again.
“The hand or the shadow boy!? Which is more real?”
I’d had enough of this claptrap.
“What are you actually trying to say monk!? Just spit it out!”
He violently hit the candle off the table and stood up.
“Fool! The hand is more real because it doesn’t need anything else to exist! The hand represents reality and shadow represents thoughts, symbols and representations of reality!”
“You” I stood up as angrily as I could and filled my lungs so I could yell. “Are a fucking psycho!” I didn’t have a candle to hit off the table so I knocked my chair backwards.
When the chair hit the floor a weighty silence I had always known descended upon me. My eyes closed and showed me deep currents of the Indian Ocean scrawling a picture in the sand. The picture moved closer, something I’d hoped for, an outline of door, carved in the sea floor. A shiver ran up my spine. Tears filled my eyes.
What was more real? This was.
I looked around the room and saw the coarse blue stonework. I saw the monk jumping up and down waving around his stupid hand trying to explain his stupid monk metaphor. I looked down at my own hands and felt my pulse. My heart rate was sky high. I felt the anger surging through me, adrenaline and cortisol exhausting my body. How long had I been here? It didn’t matter. I could now see the totality of the scene. My pointless arguing with this hooded stranger in a chamber, the endlessness of trying to grasp the ungraspable.
“This is more real” I said.
“Oh yes? And what is that?”
I didn’t answer. I walked towards the door, opened it and went outside.