Francisco Miraval
In 1926, Gabino Coria Peñaloza wrote the lyrics for the tango Caminito (“narrow urban road”) and Juan de Dios Filiberto composed the music. In the second half of the first verse, this tango says (in a free translation), “… a shadow you (the road) will soon become / a shadow like myself…”
It always caught my attention the ability of those two musicians to express and accept that everything thing is such as shadow. I find that’s a fascinating and enlightening thought, because it is a reference not only to time passing, but, as this tango implies, an identification between the walker and the road, between the internal and the external, including to the point of death.
Another tango, written in 1943 by José María Contursi with music by Francisco Lomuto, is called ¡Sombras… nada más! (“just shadows”.) The topic is similar. One verse ends saying, “Just shadows between your life and my life / Just shadows between my love and your love.”
In this second case, it is clear that shadows are the true reality, a reality even truer than the life and love the tango singer can experience in his/her supposedly “real” life. This tango also talks about “this unending drama” created by shadows, because shadows and darkness make impossible for anybody to find even himself/herself.
So, according to these two traditional Argentinean songs, when we identify ourselves with shadows and we acknowledge shadow is the true reality, then everything becomes just an illusion, including our life and our love.
The idea that we are but shadows is, obviously, very old. In the first page of the first book of the Hebrew scriptures (Genesis 1) it is said that God (or the gods, Elohim) created humans (adam) “in their image.” In Hebrew, “image” is tselem, which means “shadow” and even “illusion.”
The Greek philosopher Plato, in the passage known as the Allegory of the Cave in his book Republic (514a–520a), suggests most humans do not realize they (we) are just looking at shadows and, therefore, they don’t know the true reality.
In other words, the existential tangos from Argentina, the Hebrew poetic-theological tell about the creation, and the Platonic philosophy seem to agree that we are not who or what we think we are because in reality we are nothing else but shadows.
And now some scientists also seem to agree with those theologians, philosophers, and composers. The so-called Holometer Experiment Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory already began and, if successful, it will prove our universe is but a projection (a shadow) of a larger universe.
In fact, according to Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, if the experiment is successful, we will have to abandon the ideas we have been using for thousands of years.
The experiment will take more than a year to be completed and it may finally prove that, as people in both ancient and modern times said, we are “just shadows.” But, what it means to live as a shadow?