A former astronaut speaks of a planet hidden from the earth because it is always on the other side of the sun, a planet that is almost the exact double of earth, then he runs his wheelchair into a mirror. As a child, I saw the last few minutes of a film I learnt just now was called Doppelgänger. Travel through space, and you only return home (Solaris). Earth is the only alien planet (Ballard). But this astronaut travelled to arrive somewhere that was only like home; a planet alien because it was only the image of what he had known.
And I remember another childhood experience of the doppelgänger, this time from the Six Million Dollar Man, where Steve Austin was displaced by someone who looked exactly like him. Fear: what if it happened to me? What if I were displaced by the image of myself, my double? But not entirely fear, for wouldn’t an adventure begin for me then, as I left my old identity behind like someone who had faked his own death.
X. tells me on the phone he wants to join the Foreign Legion: they’ll fake your death for you, and, providing you can do fifty press ups, will disappear you into the desert for a minimum term of six years. You’d end up speaking fluent French, X. says, who has only a year to decide, the Legion refusing to accept anyone over the age of forty.
Some traditions take the doppelgänger to be a vision of death. When Abraham Lincoln saw two images of himself in the mirror, one of them pale and deathly, his wife knew he would not serve the second of his presidential terms. Shelley’s doppelgänger appeared to him in a dream just before he died.
In folklore, the doppelgänger appears to give you advice, but this advice might be misleading. Furthermore, the double casts no reflection in water. I suppose this means the doppelgänger has no doppelgänger, that he, who is all image, has no image himself. The play of mirroring limits itself; or it is as though the doppelgänger belongs to something like the blindspot of sight, fow what shines darkly back through the eyes of your own reflection.
‘Is that me in the mirror?’ – ‘It is and is not.’ – ‘Is it me?’ – ‘You cannot see what allows you to see who you are. The doppelgänger is the blindspot of your seeing.’
At one point in Mirror, a young woman sees herself grown old. She wipes the mirror with her hand. Sometimes I imagine my image is like that: elderly and looking back from the end of life. As though we had met at a crossing point, he heading backwards to my birth, and I forwards to my death. I will be born, he says; I will die, say I. But sometimes I imagine the image of a mute child. Who are you?, I ask, and though he does not answer, the corners of his mouth turn upwards. He smiles, and I do not understand him. Then he is gone.
Doppelgänger: the double who goes, who passes. The one who walks alongside you, the companion, but you see only when you come close to death. ‘Were you really with me all this time?’ – ‘I was with you.’ – ‘Were you watching me all this time?’ – ‘I watched, and inside your own watching. I breathed inside your breathing. I lived for you, I dreamt for you, but now you must die for me.’
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