Duke looks at that and thinks: “that’s not a duck.” It’s the shadow of a duck. If that’s all you ever saw of a duck, its shadow moving around like that on the wall, but you could never actually see the duck, you’d know something about a duck. But you wouldn’t really have the experience of the duck itself. Also, the projection could mislead you. The projection necessarily abstracts the thing being projected. The idea of an apple tree or a lemon tree is projected into the theater by the presence of an apple and a lemon. Duke lives in a theater. A shadow box. His art, the art that he makes and receives and is, is the projection of a shadow of something else. Duke is a shadow of Arthur. Arthur can be thought to exist because we see Duke. Lord Duck can be thought to exist because we see this shadow.
A shadow projected onto the wall of a box you can’t see out of . . .
. . . accurately represents the object being projected in all ways.
. . . can tell you something about the object, but not everything.