Category: Doubles

7.30: dawn is coming. Purple light; the outline of the pipe that runs along the kitchen’s edge, the white wooden door to the lane; the wheelie bin. Purple and black and white: those are the colours of this threshold. This morning – is it morning? – I feel as though I have kept vigil all night; that I have seen to it that the body of the departed was watched over. I watched; I was vigilant – but who was it that died?

I kept vigil over my own death; I was awake aside the corpse I am. You should not die alone and no one should be alone in their death. Of course, it is in the memories of others that you will live – your friends, your sisters and brothers give you a kind of life. As long as you remember, you will remain in limbo; neither in this world or the next. When will they release you into forgetting? When they, too, are forgotten. But when will that day come?

Last night, this night, which is becoming morning, I outlived myself. Upstairs I can hear my neighbours passing from one room to another. Water drips from their bathroom into mine: there are others around who are alive. But last night, was I alive? Who was I, who watched over my own death? Who was I, companion to the one who died?

Ulysses passes among the shades, but where do I pass? Alongside myself; among myself – but that is not right either. The body is a stone withdrawn into itself. The body has turned aside from the world; its attention is turned to its heart. That is sleep: the body is turned to the heart and the heart expands to become the whole night. And you who watch over your body? You, awoken, who watch over your own sleep? Witness, vigilant one, who are you that withdraws from me now, at the shore of morning?

Light in the bathroom of the house opposite; the sky is light blue, and the colours of the world reveal themselves. It is 8.00 AM; two hands wrote this post. As night crossed into morning, so was there a crossing from death to life. The body has awoken; its attention is drawn into the world. The companion withdraws; no one is required to keep vigil.

‘Where you really with me all this time?’ His smile says, ‘I was with you’. – ‘Were you watching me all this time?’ – ‘I watched, and inside your watching. I breathed inside your breathing. I lived for you, I dreamt for you, and now you must die for me’.

1. He needs me, I know that. He cannot die his own death, I know that. But who is he, who is never the same as himself, or who knows the same only as the fire of self-transformation. I am dying, he says. But I cannot find him, he who dies where I cannot see.

Shadow, why do you ask me to die for you? Patient one, do you intend to wait the entire span of my life? But you know I will always be unequal to what I am; that my life appears in place of itself. Sometimes I think you would disappear, if ever I could coincide with you; if ever we could inhabit the same instant in time.

2. ‘A shadow is a region of darkness where light is blocked. A shadow occupies all the space behind an opaque object with light in front of it.’

‘A shadow cast by the earth on the moon is a lunar eclipse. Conversely, a shadow cast on the earth by the moon is solar eclipse.’

But now consider the shadow temporally. Imagine it is the present, as it falls into the future, that bears the shadow behind it, as a comet does its tail. It is the light of the future that sets the past into darkness. Only the future matters. This is a version of the solar eclipse, where the sun is the future.

More difficult: what if the past is the sun, and the future is the shadow that is sent ahead of the opacity of the present? The lunar eclipse. But now imagine, thinking of Kafka, who said he case a shadow on the sun, that you are the one who throws the shadow ahead. Everywhere there is light – everyone living from the past to the future, but for you, who cast a shadow.

To say: everything in me simple. To say: and by that simplicity, you can see, as in a still pool, the face of him I really am, and with whom I have nothing in common. But who is he that speaks from nowhere? Who is he for whom my life is only a way of bootstrapping himself into existence, and who lets me write only to indicate the ‘to say’, the ‘to write’, a writing without definite article? I will not know him. I cannot draw close to him. But he knows me by what I cannot know of him, and he is close to me by way of his distance.

Many pregnancies see one twin miscarry. Sometimes, the dead twin will simply vanish, absorbed into the body of the mother, or into the surviving twin. Occasionally, one twin fetus will not develop, and becomes parasitical on the other. Even more rarely, that parasite – almost always brainless and lacking internal organs – will grow in the body of the other, conjoined by an umbilical cord.

It is he who dies in me, vanished twin, parasitical twin. He draws death to himself, so that I can live. Or is it I who is his parasite, and he is the one who lives and acts in a world realer than the one in which I find myself? My body is borrowed, my body is missing, that’s what he says of me who has always survived inside him.

Elvis Presley had a stillborn twin brother. How to imagine a twin who brings death continually to birth, who says: everything that is possible is impossible? Philip Dick’s twin died at six weeks, but he imagined much later she became his protectress, and it was her soft, feminine voice he heard as he began to fall asleep. But he does not protect me; if he watches, it is not from concern.

There are many cases of ‘mirror’ identical twins, one being right handed, the other left handed; the hair of one will curl one way and the other, the other. In this condition, there is a risk the organs will be found on the wrong side of the body, a condition called situs invertus.

To say: tonight, you will dream of a dead man. To say: you will dream of one who never lived. To say: what kind of thoughts does he have, the one who has limbs and half-formed digits, but who doesn’t have a brain? His hair and teeth are growing. He says: you are the tumour who prevents me from living.

Up early to write and then nothing to write. Read instead. I pick up a travelogue, and envy the narrator who could feed the desire to write with stories about his passage. Wandering in the world is the correlate of writing; what hope is there for me who travels nowhere and has no desire to travel anywhere?

In the end, I put the book down, telling myself its narrator was frightened to face himself as the ghost of his writing – that he travelled only to remove himself from the double that was set back within him as soon as he began to write. He would become something like a ghost, I told myself, but a ghost of this world, hungry for experience.

But isn’t this the avoidance of writing, or the attempt to answer its demand by throwing everything into its sacrificial flame, and letting its flames rise higher? In the end, it is the flames that triumph, dying down so there is nothing left but a low flickering and white ash. Writing will not extinguish itself, though it will burn everything you feed it.

Writing’s revenge: one day you will no longer have the strength to write. One day, you’ll fail writing, by having nothing to offer it. What will you write then, traveller without the means to travel? Writing will let you wander from yourself as though you had been buried at the crossroads. You will not find a place to die: so will writing have its revenge.

But what of those who were never able to write, who had not life enough, adventures enough, who lived in the same quotidian world as anyone else? I have a friend who visits crack houses in order to have something to relate; filling himself up with drink for Dutch courage, he wanders into the most dangerous parts of his city. He saw a man die in front of him, and defended his dealer from an attack; who, at dawn that morning, when they sat together in Platt Fields, told him he wanted to give up the business and lead, like him, a regular life.

All this my friend tells me on the phone, along with his new plan to join the Foreign Legion. Imagine starting a chapter, he says, ‘And so I joined the Foreign Legion.’ Then my friend would fill his life with events in order to feed the demand to write. Sometimes he charges me with writing his adventures. What matters, for him, is that a record be kept. He is like the Greek hero who writes so his deeds will reverberate across the world.

In the East and West, the ghost is often thought as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’, since it is still attached to the world; a Vedic purana has ghosts living on the excresences of the body: on piss and vomit, on tears and coughs.

I think my friend is haunted by a hungry ghost. But does he know the ghost of writing, writing’s demand, will eat up the whole of his life, his tears, his coughs, his vomit and his piss? He moved from one flat because he soaked a sofa with piss after his binges. He moved from another because he was beaten by rivals to his dealer. Writing will lick up piss and blood and more besides.

One day, my friend will find his way back to prison, and lie again in the upper bunk, smoking weed. One day, once again, he will again have to show himself the tough man of his wing, and send me letters about life inside that I am to keep as a record.

Meanwhile, outside prison and spreading everywhere, the mundane world, the quotidian, which seems to deprive writing of all topic. The world is the world, and nothing besides. The world is the world, and there are no more adventures. How, then, to write? How to let rise your own ghost and stir the fire of writing?

In Chinese traditions, I learn that some ghosts, especially those of the drowned, try and murder the living to steal their right to reincarnation. To be killed thus is to be substituted, to become a tìsíguǐ (a ‘substitute death ghost’, a ‘substitute devil’) as your capacity to die and to pass into rebirth is taken from you.

How to substitute for writing? How to steal from it the capacity for rebirth, its return as the same gaping demand? But I know it is I who have already been substituted by writing; that there is one in me who is always the tìsíguǐ, who writes with me and dreams with me, all the while drinking the tears from the corners of my eyes.

When Jesus is called ‘the image of the living God’ – isn’t this a sign that he, too, was an icon? And when God made the first human beings in his own image, was it the first icons he had made?

I remember well the wet marks made by kisses on a framed picture of Mary in the church in Stockport, and the icon of Jesus that used to stand in the corner of our living room with a vigil candle burning in front of it. Then, too, there were images of the saints all around us, cut out from calenders and then mounted on wood.

We used to talk, my landlord and I, about icons, about the Incarnation. Christ, he said, was perfectly divine; he was perfectly human. Christ was the God-man, my landlord said, joining image and prototype. St John of Damascus argued that something similar counted for the icon: like Christ, it was also a hypostasis; it too let God dwell in matter.

I learnt that according to the dictates of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in which the bitter struggle between the iconoclasts and iconodules was resolved, to venerate the icon of Jesus, Mary or the Saints is to venerate its prototype; the mundane touches the divine.

This is why we should be censed along with the painted icons in a service, I learnt, and he remembered a priest who would wave incense out of doors, censing the whole of nature, as if it, too were an image of God.

An image of God? And of whom, then, was I an image, who was outside the charmed circle of believers?

I fell into that house after a long period of hardship, and lived there safe in the network that reached from there to the corners of the world. Many guests came; many tenants lived alongside me in the rooms of the house. Never was I tempted to convert; I knew nothing of churches, of Christianity, but I enjoyed it that the house was somehow set back from the world; it did not belong to the last decade of the second millenium.

Above all, I had time to seep back to the space that should surround work. No more madness, no more penury; in the stillness of a room at the back of the house, I set up my computer. A whole year had passed since I’d begun my studies, and what had I written? It took another full year for me to find my way to the beginning. And in the meantime? I wandered out on the streets, from cafes to bookshops. Days passed without marker.

I read Lossky’s classic account of Orthodox theology. The mundane is touched by the divine; matter becomes a cradle for spirit. But what if the mundane itself were divided? What if it could be said the mundane became a cradle for itself, or touched itself? What if I myself turned around a point that remained mysterious to me?

In my imagination, an icon was bound to no prototype; or rather, it spoke only of itself, of a kind of doubling of itself, by which it was set apart from the ordinary world, even as it showed how that world, too, might be set apart from itself. Then it was as though the icon was a way to unhinge the world, to break apart that vast and secret labour that allowed it to make sense.

A way of breaking oneself apart too – or rather, that part of what I was that was set against the other for whom wandering was possible, and whose descent into the streets could be followed by a period of work in his room. How to live from the time between when the world became a threshold and wandering without term? How to know the world as icon, and to cense it by writing?

To write – but that was impossible. I lost myself on other paths; I wrote, I published, and found myself in another city. The question that had died away returned: how to let the mundane be touched by its double? How to write of the wanderer, or let him type within my typing fingers? How to double in writing the opposite of hypostasis – that undoing which lets the world wander from itself?

The icon is the double of the Incarnation. But now now to think the disincarnation, the fleeing of matter from form, but by way of form? How to let the world let slip itself within itself, for the detour within the same to escape the same?

Questions without answer, and ones it has taken a long time to form. And yet I must also say they asked themselves in me – asked and thereby demanded formulation, searching for themselves by way of writing. As though to write was to come into contact with what wrote against me, or that the intention to write was met by the intention of writing.

What did it want? To be born, to be written. What did it ask for? To determined in matter, the questioning that was without form. To come to presence, that which was without presence.

Tonight, the summer spreads before me. Should I work? Should I find a new project? Or is there a way of writing to be found by writing, to let writing turn on itself and to look back at me through eyes that are something like mine?

I saw you, writing. No: you saw you in myself. Saw and said: I will rejoin myself by this seeing. Writing said, I will return to myself, and through you, hinge, point of articulation. For where you are the world is broken.

In occult literature, I read the simulacrum refers to a small image of a whole: a particular person can be represented by some of his hair, or a fingernail, which can then find place in a ritual. Didn’t Parmenides press the young Socrates as to whether there were Ideas of these offgrowths of the body? And wouldn’t Bataille have included them in the (non)category of the formless?

Either way, it is as though we could be known, each of us, by way of what is sloughed from us; the path to the essential is to be gained via the inessential. But magic always placed faith in secret correspondences, in the connection of symbols and the order of things. The simulacrum would be just another symbol; the image grants the chance of the manipulation of the whole. This is what the child believes in writing the name of his infatuee on his exercise book. If I have her name, then I have something of her. How many times do I need to write it for the love-spell to be cast?

The poppet, I read, is a doll that is meant to be substitutive of a person to cast spells of healing, fertility or binding. A physical trace of its object is unnecessary; the poppet can be made from wax, clay or branches, or any number of substances. But the effigy so produced stands in for the person it is meant to represent; to act upon the poppet is to act on the person. This practice, which is called ‘image magic’, is to be distinguished from those famous practices from New Orleans Voodoo that centre on ‘voodoo dolls’, which are, I read, ‘power objects’ rather than proxies.

Image magic: isn’t this what I work when I speak about you, rather than to you? As adolescents, I remember learning the power of speaking about others. Immense power: alliances were formed and dissolved, secrets kept and broken. X. spoke about Y. to Z., and then Z. spoke to Y. about X.: our relation to each other acquired a new kind of depth. Where was the immediacy of our childhood friendships?

Add to this the drama of the diary, of written confessions; every relationship was doubled. Strange discovery that to write was to begin to reconstitute the world, to discover patterns and correspondences. To keep a diary was a magical operation; if it allowed the development of interiority this was only insofar as it made an image of the world, and even an image of oneself. Who were you, the writer? And what was the world you were writing about?

Could I say I began to relate to myself as to an effigy? That something of my substance was captured in the ink covered pages of my five year diary? Now I was like the fairy-tale ogre whose heart was buried outside of him. Then writing was something like the hair or fingernails that were the basis of the simulacrum. I had doubled myself using my own substance.

But wasn’t there another, more difficult lesson? To double myself was only to separate out that doubling that belongs, also to the original. To speak, to write, was to redouble a doubling that had already set itself back into the conditions of my life. For isn’t language already the outside inside? Isn’t it already what has turned me from myself?

It is Plato, not Aristotle, who understands the threat of writing. He banishes the poets from the polis because he fears the power of a language that no longer refers, that doubles itself, that belongs to the alogon rather than the logos (Schmidt). Aristotle accommodates the tragedian; but Plato knows the tragedy embodies something more frightening: a struggle at the limits of the polis, a struggle against the Ideas and for the proliferation of the magic of the image.

Alogon: the double of language. Or, language become simulacral, material, all hair and fingernails. Language that lets itself be carried in the direction of the formless (Bataille). But what if there are no Ideas, and the sky is empty? Then language was always made of hair and nails, and the logos is always doubled. And I, too, the speaker, the writer, have a kind of double, a companion, like a vestigal twin, who speaks with me and writes with me.

He is writing now, his ghostly hand within mine. And when he speaks, I hear his murmuring in my voice. Sometimes I want to confront him, and ask him who he is. But from what angle can I see him, he who is also me? How can I turn so as to meet what gives me the power to turn? In the end, I have to look for him in my own face.

But what mirror will show him? I wonder whether writing is the mirror in which he seeks to find me, and that somewhere he is as though reaching out his hand to press against mine. But his hand is already mine; his reaching is my reaching; we are joined, but we do not occupy the same time. I imagine he lags behind me, that he draws me back into the past, but also that the future is only his return, the return of the past. I don’t know which one of us is writing this.

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.’

There are several recipes for the Homunculus, a golem-like minature of the human being, who, when generated in the right way, is supposed to become a willing servant of the alchemist. For Paracelsus, who claimed to have made one, not more than a foot in height, though his little servant quickly turned on him and escaped, you have to take sperm, a bag of bones and fragments of hair and skin, and lay it in the ground encased in horse manure for forty days.

Later alchemists claimed the sperm must come from the final ejaculations of a hanged man; where it falls to the ground, a mandrake will grow, which must be picked at dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog. Pour it with milk and honey and the mandrake will become the little human being it resembles.

David Christianus, in the eighteenth century, instructs us to take an egg laid by a black hen, and, after making a hole in its shell substitute a part of its white for human sperm. Seal the egg with virgin parchment and in thirty days, a homunculus is born, which you must tend with earthworms and lavender seeds. (Note that the alchemist Konrad Dippel, who lived in Castle Frankenstein, and may have been an inspiration for Mary Shelley’s book, was a student of Christianus at the University of Geissen.)

My impression is the homunculus is a more capricious creature than the golem, catlike rather than doglike, with sharp little teeth and wild eyes and no desire for death. But the word the homunculus is also used in contemporary theories of consciousness to designate that part of brain function that unifies experience. Then the homunculus is a principle of self-identity and preventing any infinite regress when reflecting on the ultimate locus of experience.

But this means the homunculus provides the condition of thought, the possibility of reflexivity, but cannot be reached through introspection. Other theorists suppose there is not one homunculus, but many – a thousand little witnesses who are born and die at each moment. But I like the idea that the homunculus is the blind spot of consciousness, which sees without being able to see itself. Unless one can imagine a thousand blindspots flashing open and disappearing like light-flecks on the water.

Obscure double, witness that cannot speak of itself: I think of those ancient Indian theories of the witness self, still alive, still there in the deepest sleep. Dreaming, I imagine – but of what? Of lifting itself from the Stygian depths, of showing itself to the one to whom it grants the unity of a self. Homunculus is a word too small for this most frightening of doubles, whose face is like my own but full of darkness.

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the latter – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say? If it speaks it is only as the reverberation of form, the stirring of an indeterminable life without contour.

Life – but it is the shadow of life, for who would say the golem is alive? Life’s shadow, the edge of life as that edge becomes a threshold and then a plateau. Are you alive? Are you dead? Or is it that you’re death in life, death given life, death that looks for itself on the ice-field like Frankenstein’s monster. How can death know itself except by way of the wilderness? Death looks for itself there, in the wilderness. Death looks for itself in the golem, whose soul is only death turning in itself, seeking itself, restless and insomniac.

‘I would like to die’. – ‘Only when you have done my bidding’. – ‘I would like to die.’ – ‘Death will be your reward, when you do my bidding.’ There are many stories of Rabbis who took golems as servants. And there are stories of golems summoned as figures of vengeance. Rabbi Judah Loew raised a golem from the clay of Prague’s Vitava river, to defend the Jewish ghetto. As it grew, the golem became more violent, killing without discrimination and spreading fear. Rabbi Loew rubbed out the first letter of the word he had inscribed on the golem’s forehead to give it life. Emet, truth, became met, death.

The golem’s prayer, even in the wildness of its violence: to return again to clay; no longer to give death contour, for isn’t that the greatest pain: to live death, to live death in life, death trying to find itself, to rub out the first letter on its forehead.

Other stories speak of the power of the golem to raise witnesses from the dead, who were allowed to testify in court. The golem once again at the threshold, but now charged with watching over the dead in the name of justice. ‘Let justice be done, and I will lie down to die.’ As though death itself were demanding justice. Or that justice holds sway over death.

But I prefer Loew’s wild golem, who has grown too large, too quickly, and whose growth is his pain. No – the pain of death in search of itself, death made to live a life in the world, and taking revenge on the others that live, returning them by violence to the state for which the golem longs. Death gone mad in the world, because it cannot die.