Dragon/s Dream. A Postmodern Fable

«It will fall,» insisted the water rat after a pause, tossing another pebble. «It always does. That is the rule. And a good rule is an offspring of a good experience. It is well to have the rules and uphold them. Saves time and effort.»

«It is apt, then, for those who wish to save their time and effort. Although, why would anyone desire that, I cannot say.»

«Eh?» The water rat was busy with its pile.

«Nothing has invariable value. No rule has invariable use. Also, you realize that you learn whether the rule is good enough only after you have applied it.»

«After the rule has proved itself useful we know its effect before the actual application.»

«It is guessing, not knowing. And you are free to make a guess about anything.»

«Some rule is better than no rule at all, would you not agree?»

«That scarcely makes any sense at all. How can you conceive a better new rule without breaking the old one? And to conceive any rules you should have no rules. But do not take my word for it.»

The water rat brooded about this, turning the idea different ways in its rat mind, shaping and reshaping it. It did not fit. And twittering of the birds was of no help either, distracting the water rat’s wandering attention.

«Rules notwithstanding, there is reality,» protested the water rat.

«So, something that repeats over and over is supposed to be real?»

«Yes, because it means there is some order there.»

«What has order to do with reality? And why cannot unreal things have order?»

The water rat was lost for words for a few moments.

«What is your point here?» it asked, defeated.

«There is none,» said the Dragon. «Now, what would you make of that?»

He picked up a large boulder and launched it straight up. Both he and the water rat watched it getting smaller and smaller, until it vanished completely. It never fell down.

«It does not fall.» The water rat was astonished. «Is it all real?»

«Whenever I throw things, they always fly off,» said the Dragon. «Why, I have no idea.»

«Why?»

«I have no idea.»

«I have not seen that before!»

«You have now,» said the Dragon and walked away with an air of conclusion. After a few steps he paused and added over his shoulder: «Experience, you see, makes no mistakes, unlike our judgment, when it expects to find something that is not there.»

Stunned, the water rat remained motionless, still clutching a pebble. It examined the ground, doubtfully, then the water and then the stone in its hands. «He might be right,» it thought. «It would be so more entertaining to have things behaving in a more manifold manner. Only, would it not be also confusing, being unable ever to predict it?»

The water rat loosened its grip and let the pebble slip from its little fingers. It fell with a thud.

The Dragon meanwhile strolled alongside the river, passing a few bends, until he came upon a comfortable spot, much like the one he had left. He found a lump of rock of decent proportions, weighed it solemnly. With a fluid motion he sent it plummeting at full speed lengthways the river, in the direction he had come from.

The rock was building momentum, traveling above the water, practically touching it. An instant, and it was lost in the misty distance. The Dragon never saw it fall.

«I am growing superstitious,» he thought.

Embers in the Storm

The color of fire
in the dark
of night.
Embers in the storm
– fireflies.

Snow All Around

The Dragon lifted his head and smelled the air in his cave, discreetly. Nothing was out of the ordinary, only familiar scents of stone, earth, wind and sunlight – the ones he was well accustomed to – and yet something was not as usual.

The Dragon opened his mouth and tasted the air with his tongue – again, nothing uncommon or exceptional. «What made me wake up?» thought the Dragon, and immediately he realized that it was the silence outside, the silence he had not encountered before, since he dwelt high in the mountains, where gales howled incessantly.

Uncommitted and unprejudiced, especially with so long a life he had lived, the Dragon lowered his head on the stone floor, fully intending to go back to sleep; but he could not. He decided he might come out and have a look at the sun or greet the adjacent peaks with his song. The Dragon now opened his eyes, the color of emerald, and surveyed the cave idly. Something was weird with the light, too – it did not exactly feel like sunlight, although the Dragon smelled one distinctly, and neither like moonlight nor starlight.

Wise as he was, the Dragon never cared about his wisdom, never pursued any knowledge, never searched for reasons for his actions. And of many strange things he had seen he could not remember a single one that did surprise him; for he always accepted things for what they were. When he found himself outside the cave and scanned the surroundings, he was not quite taken by surprise. Even though it was nothing he had confronted before, and it seemed positively peculiar.

The snow was falling so thickly, it was impossible for the Dragon to see the end of his own tail. And much worse – impossible to make out the sky, or the mountains, and worse still, impossible to hear their song. The snow, falling soundlessly, was muting all other sounds as well.

Given that the Dragon did not normally distinguish beautiful from ugly and pleasant from distasteful, he did not find the snow appealing. For one point, it was not singing, for another, it had no smell; and how could one understand the true quality of so incommunicative a thing!

Then the Dragon thought that, perhaps, the snow was no more expecting to meet him than he expected to meet the snow; he tried a welcoming song but soon broke off, for he felt the snow was not listening. «So be it,» said the Dragon to himself. «It will stop going down and the horizon will be in sight again.» He went back to the cave.

The snow was not stopping. It was falling all the next day, and the day after that, and the day after. The Dragon did not count the days – he never measured time in such short paces. He only sat and gazed at the snowflakes.

«No thing can go on forever,» he thought. «Who knows that better than me?»

So he gazed, entranced by slow and subtle dance of the white. The snow was sparkling and glittering in the air, swirling in circles in a light breeze, and was coming down on the Dragon’s wide-spread wings.

«Maybe it is coming from the stars,» thought the Dragon. But with clouds extending from one horizon to another he could not see the stars. Many were good friends of his, and he missed their song, their shining, their whispering in his dreams. He decided to pay them a visit. He stretched his huge wings, hit the nearest snowdrift with his tail and breathed out a long golden flame, melting all the snow up to the edge of a precipice, the rest cascading lazily on the sides.

The Dragon looked up once and jumped into the air, waving unhastily, and in several powerful strokes found himself high above his mountain, which was glazing silver instead of dark gray, with a newly cleared passage already disappearing.

The Dragon rose up and up, until he virtually reached the clouds; the higher he ascended, the fiercer was becoming the snowfall, when finally it was going so dense that the Dragon lost his bearings, blinded and deafened by the white whirlpool. He struggled, strong as he was; the force of the snow was stronger. Fatigue was taking hold of his body, but for the time being he was loath to give up – there was a price to be paid for chance.

Like all his kin the Dragon could see his future as plainly as his past, not as a design of events but as a flowing of his inner feeling. Like all the wise he knew that when the time came, his feeling would conduct him to the path of his true fate. Therefore, in following his cravings and fulfilling his will the Dragon lived his destiny, caring not for danger or destruction. He struggled more.

Yet, excessive persistence was not by its own nature a way of success – this the Dragon knew only too well, especially from the days when he was the young Dragon. He was by no means troubled to succeed – that was a devotion for lesser creatures; he merely beat his wings against the storm.

For all one knew, there might have been a reason behind, or possibly an aim ahead, or neither, or both at once. The wise did not seek answers where there were no questions. Believing was enough. The Dragon believed nothing and everything. And believing did not necessarily imply understanding – the Dragon was not that foolish as to believe in what he did not understand or to understand what he believed in.

Was not the world itself a product entirely of his own imagination, after all? The stars existed because he could see them. The snow was cold because he could feel it.