A carp, a dragon, and the Red Queen

I went to Yokohama yesterday for a public lecture and there was a dragon.

There is the legend of a carp going upstream in a  fall, and then becoming a dragon.

Masaru Sato, a former diplomat and author, recently said to me that a carp actually does not become a dragon. A carp remains a carp.

How true.

It would be rather that in a streaming water a carp needs to keep swimming, just to stay at the same place.

In this sense, a carp in a stream is similar to the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, who famously said to Alice: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.