Doppelganger

DOPPELGANGER

Νοw I know what I could not have known then.

Could not have known on pain of being destroyed.

Does this mean that now I am stronger, wiser, more solid?

One would think so.

But, then again, οne is never one.

Forgive me, please. I’ll try, I promise, to make sense.

But it’s been happening for such a long time now that it has left a crack running through me, of self-doubt.

I’ll try. Not to explain, that may be too high a stake.

I’ll try to speak about facts instead, as best I know how to, which, as a matter of fact, is no great guarantee.

- There is a poem you might know, written decades ago, by a man called Wystan, that takes its reader into:

“…The dark chateaux where wind sobs

In the pine trees and telephones ring

Inviting trouble to a room,

Lit by one weak bulb, where our Double sits

Writing and does not look up.”

Well, I have been inside the room inside the poem.

In a monastery in the South of France, a place of retreat where, outside the uncurtained windows, the constant sighing of the pine forest imitates the sea. Breathing in and out, its murmur multiplied tenfold down the silent corridors, as I made my way to the cell where, for a spell, I lived and wrote and prayed. A small, bare room, beloved, as I cherished the notion of a bedroom-study-cell, where life and work and faith are indivisible, where writing and believing could be wrestled with, though rarely settled.

And, like a prophesy, what the poem of long ago spoke about, happened to me.

Crossing into the darkness of the cell one evening, I stopped mid-track sensing a presence, welcoming, warm and familiar, as if someone beloved was waiting in the room, to offer an embrace. Yet, maybe not! This was my scent, my temperature, my frequency, my aura, my own psychic imprint softly vibrating in space… I switched on the single bulb, half expecting… I’m not sure what. I think maybe my double, my Doppelganger, quietly sitting in the dark, putting his arms out to hold me…

No one was there, although a presence was, more personal, more certain and more real than that of anyone I’ve ever met.

I truly knew it to be myself, except refined to a perfect stillness and clarity, and amplified, filling the space like an exquisite perfume from another time, perhaps another century, a memory of godhood now muted to an afterglow.

Having no name for it, really, I called it a moment of sheer awareness, deciding it could only be a condensation of my prayers.

-Then, afterwards, long after I had broken my monastic vows to keenly feed my hunger with more experience of the world, and more!, the same puzzling visitation would show uninvited at my door.

In those years that ensued, if I may briefly digress, I’d made a hobby of collecting hotel rooms.

To my favorites, the specimens worth keeping, I gave names: the Air Balloon, perched on a rooftop, was spacious and airy; the Aquarium had bright blue peeling paint; and the Sand-timer, was where time kept ending and restarting.

They really were time capsules of a sort, small, temporary worlds inhabited by me alone. (Or so I thought.)

Downtrodden shelters mainly appealed to me, the tenements of bare light bulbs and peeling paint.

In classier establishments, all traces of previous guest are extinguished for the sake of new arrivals. But the ones I chose were more absorbent. They better retained the errand strands of hair and the fingerprints and out-breath of previous occupants.

After the years of celibacy, now, a kind of anonymous intimacy was in order with my race. An unbounded promiscuity...

I would leave the family mansion and spend the night in a rented room somewhere in the urban sprawl, looking for places as much as possible unlike the starched environment of home, places that hadn’t yet been claimed, a terra nullius.

I signed in with a fake name, followed the threadbare carpet up the stairs into the room and had a shower, to put myself on equal footing with the ghosts that might still linger in the dark and cool interior.

By taking off my name, my smell, my history, I was rehearsing a kind of freedom. Or, acting out a pretence that the version of the life I had lived up until now, was merely optional.

Invariably, a night would come when, straggling back to the hotel from a night of extravagant debauchery, wrung dry of my senses, I would walk in and know the place anew. No longer the dishevelled dive of a few hours previously but something else, brand new, as if by an act of sorcery. An amniotic pool of softly rippling light as if somewhere, somehow, it was decided I once again needed to be baptized.

The effect was all the stranger because of recognizing that this tranquillity and clarity in the air summed up my very best qualities, a rarefied version of myself, everything most essential in my makeup.

I am trying to say that, perhaps, the most important things may be unprovable. To say that it was myself I walked into, every so often, or a distillation thereof, not an embodied version, yet one every bit as real, or even more so.

 And what to make of this? A self belonging to another order of existence, one to which the living, breathing me stood as the lowly coal to a diamond...?

You mustn’t for a moment think I didn’t struggle against this …grandiose folly, and all its implications about the way I lived. I was vitally disturbed by this knowledge I never had invited in, and every single time I tried in any way I could to silence and obliterate it. To no avail. So, in the end, I had no choice but to capitulate.

It may be that we are neither singular nor consistent, inhabitants of the one only, factual dimension. Beware! Individuality may be a state we are anchored to, and not a fact. And one’s self may be a graded ladder reaching up and outwards to God knows where. Nor should you think it may not happen to you!

In sum, for anyone who relates, this would be my advice today:

Watch out for the lovely strangeness that sometimes descends, when, suddenly, you feel you know every passerby in the street: the migrant paterfamilias, the high school girls, arms interlaced, the homeless woman with her razor-blade cheekbones. You don't remember when you met or where, under which circumstance or what the pros and cons were. But the familiarity of the faces is impossible to doubt: you have actually met. No matter who they are, there is significant connection there.

It’s not the onset of a psychotic episode like psychiatry is prone to claim, an oceanic meltdown, the self coming unmoored and losing its boundaries… No.

It is more likely a sign, remember that. A visitation...

Your Higher, and wiser, Self has dropped down from another plane, to check out on this human scene. At first, you may think him a stranger, an intruder even, but he’s no more that than the air you’re breathing in. You can feel Him behind your eyes, looking out as through windows, fully engaged and prodigally curious. Skin-encased individuality puzzles and entertains the Higher Self. Vitally connected to all things living, separation is to Him a localized state, not the rule but a miraculous exception! This is what you experience as re-cognition of every stranger you might come across of an evening.

Now, though, watch out for any impulse flowing out to those assorted passersby. No chatting up or curious touching or overly friendly overtures, please. All that must be reined in with a steady hand. Indeed, you mustn't hesitate and, if necessary, treat His Highness like an unruly pet. After all, you are the host, while He is only here to refresh His memory of embodiment.

Remember, this is your home ground, whereas He is only visiting...