“You’re too closed minded!”, he says with an increasingly condescending smile. “I mean, come on, you yourself admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than anyone can possibly know, then what makes you so sure, holding on as you do to such a rigid, repressed worldview? Why! Life should be free; life is worth nothing without the freedom it affords us. And love manifests itself in multifarious colors, like the glint and glisten of a seashell. And you have to just be moved and swayed by the spirit of the moon and waves and just feel it. You must learn to be flexible instead, because there is so much beauty in life and you cannot hold them all in a single moment, they only slip through your fingers like a sandy stream. And do you know what you’re really missing? The beautiful vagueness of the poetic, of the enraptured swaying, swooning, like a hot lover’s mouth on your mouth, sliding down your chin, down on your throat, down to where you really need it.”
And right about here his eyes sparkle with an exuberant confidence, his lips a mixed contortion of someone trying to prove his point, and someone half-embarrassed of having to talk with a child, someone unenlightened and uninitiated to the freedom that he calls his world. He starts twirling his poetic-cigarette poised between two fingers, and with the other hand brushes his slick and glossy hair. He sighs the sigh of being too noble with his patience. He almost bends to take a drink out of his untouched beer bottle on the table, but in a gesture of charity, postpones to teach his newfound student a lesson.
“See, I’ll show you what you can really do. Now take a close look at my hands.” He puts down his cigarette, then proceeds to position his hands like a juggler would do, both palms level and opened upward. And just like a juggler he deftly begins to move his hands up and down in an alternating fashion. But no sooner has he begun when sparkling and rainbow colored words begin to appear and tossed into the air like magic props. And he says almost in a trance, “Now in every single word known to man exists a world, and the world ever changes and evolves, and universe piles upon universe, and there is a circle of meaning ever widening, every yawning, but it all comes back and leads to One, to the infinitely compact center. And all lives are justified and beautiful, and we are all connected by this great and majestic scope, sharing a bond that shifts and shapes into the various, and you simply live your life as you will live it.” In the meanwhile he begins to juggle the colorful words in his hands, words like ‘sublime’, ‘cerulean’, ‘sea’, ‘moon’, ‘lips’, ‘honey’, ‘skin’, ‘kiss’, ‘enchant’, ‘dance’, ‘embrace’, but later, as he begins to juggle more and more, the words themselves become barely recognizable, and become completely foreign to my senses, yet still recognizable to my soul, and I see words that I cannot give utterance but mean something like: “when points of light dance in a landscape, and begin to vibrate, and leap sparkling into your eyes: the landscape fades and ceases to be real”, “when the hot breath of your mouth passes through the back of her hair, and she begins to shudder, her name will cease to matter”, “when souls travel and pierce every other particle in the universe after death, and then recomposes to a fresh, reincarnated life, all is well, all is well.” Then suddenly he juggles even these so fast that instead of individual meanings I see a vision: (Of myself, living life on the spur of the moment, of being able to try this sensation and dancing, spinning on my axis, embracing the universe and the stars of love and romance and lying with the great fertile goddess within the clay womb of the earth, of caressing the dew of her lips and breasts and warmth, of the religion without religion but only transcendence. Of life lived pure and open and liberated, as the world celebrates in joyful exultation! Fireworks streaking the sky in freedom.)
“Do you see? Do you see? Do you see what you deprive yourself of? And all for what? For a rumor that says you are worth so little, wretched, and unworthy? Can’t you see the expansiveness of it all? The great sprawling wonder of fields and seas? And in the end everything is relative, and it is an ancient gem of truth latched onto the back of your intuition. Just look inward, inward, inside, and you will begin to open your angelic, inner eye.” With this his hands go limp, and he drops his arms and, almost exhausted, begins to catch his breath. But he doesn’t fail to first toss a smile at me, like he just proved his point and there can be absolutely no refutation.
I look at him and, half wistful, confess to myself that this man does have a certain, irresistible charm. You see, even my dopplegänger need not really be my exact representation. In fact he looks more like me as I never ever could become me. And it is a strange incident indeed to be invited, perhaps a once in a lifetime occasion, to sit and casually debate with your curious clone over a couple of drinks—with all preliminaries taken cared of in advance and where you get straight to the most grueling points. He had already ordered his regular strong beer and I had my glass of water. And so I look at him, and then, maybe without meaning to, stare out at the window onto the city street. And it is a curious paradox, that even in the element of novelistic, magical realism, things outside the window will nevertheless look solid, real and unperturbed. And it is not visions of quixotic colors or inebriated spheres or gaian raptures, but simply a busy street with litter and people minding their own business, and stray cats and cars with their engines roaring, and the smoke coming out from their exhausts.
And then I look at him again, at the wrinkles in his skin that should have been there, at the flaws on his face that are miraculously absent, and I am tempted to perform something equally as impressive, like say, force his mouth wide open, like a carnival lion, and climb into it, head and body and feet and all, so he can swallow and rediscover the unmagical me. And yet there is an element of the restraining real that stays my fancies. And I resort instead to simply lowering my eyes to the floor, and invoke our mutual collective memory, “This is all well and all, but you and I both know that life is not absent nor severed from the one we've had, that I peer into our past and I do not find any trace of the this otherworldly mystical poetic dimension. That the most you really remind me of are the times when we would lie on our bed, times past midnight, and think about the things our life could have been, were we better, were everything worked out together and conspired for our good. And every time those nights came, I’d lay and squirm from side to side with eyes open, dreaming, fantasizing, trying to strain free of the mundane aspects of my life, as though in constant resentment of the way things really are. And in the morning, after waking up groggy and dissolute, we’d walk the world just like other people do, and do the things they do, while resenting the massive tug of it all. And instead of your kind of freedom I only did that things that I did not want to do, and was constantly drawn, helplessly, into what I knew must surely be dissipation. And that is what enraptured us, if not for this Spirit which has claimed me and you call rigid and repressed. And in your dazzling spectacles I feel once more that hollow promise, that says this life is beautiful when it is really not, though you insist, insist and so elegantly insist. That man is inherently good, so be who you are, when it really means: disregard real life, yes, and shut yourself up in dream, and you will see the goodness of man—but as long as you stare outside windows onto dirty streets, and as long as you have the capacity to remember your sins and the sins of others, you are wretched beyond all imagination.
“Or don’t you remember the time, once when you were still young but already past the age of innocence, when walking home alone through narrow alleyways and under the deep shadows of grey buildings, you bent and snatched up a little kitten on its nape that happened to wander your way, almost on impulse, and caught this strange feeling, for you had always loved cats since you were a boy—but this impulse was different. There, in the darkness of the shadows and the dying violet sky, with no one watching, there descended something malicious. Because that’s the way a glorious man is, isn’t he? That the things we think we love we are also so excited, inflamed, to own, but sometimes to own it through more than just mere possession, but to own it by seeing it dead. And all of a sudden this young boy who always loved cats became a mixture of worry, of self-reprimand, but was soon quickly overcome and conquered by the thrill of the base, the unspeakable, and walked faster, little kitten dangling from one hand. And just beside the building there was an old, abandoned clubhouse, and a dirty swimming pool with wooden planks sticking from the surface of dark green water, and discarded styrofoams floating. And we crept through a hole in the wire fence to enter, and there on the edge of the pool, we hesitated a moment, but only a moment (a moment that said, perhaps this moment you will never live to forget, and it will stick, and see now that time will sear itself much deeper on you than your skin, for all our past sins will be recorded), then we flicked our hand and tossed the kitten into the water, and it cried, and it wailed, and we ran, ran as fast as we could, through the fence, through the dark alleys, faster into lighted alleys, but all the while it still wailed, and the kitten is wailing still, though you dream of the bright and heavenly poetic.
“And tell me, what then, of incidents that you can forget but never mend? And you speak instead of losing yourself in the beautiful when yes, yes, that’s what we would gladly do if we only could! But even should say so, again and again you fall headlong into the same old sins, the same old mistakes, and you don’t get any younger but only unimaginably older, and lonelier, and numb. For that kitten that dangled in your hand symbolizes also everything that you loved and will love, like a girl, dangling, dangling on your hand—who you never really loved. Like everything you thought could make you happy, like those accomplishments that grow pale and stale, the friend you would so easily betray by your negligence, the God you would so easily toss in a pool and drown. And you, cursed to squirm in your bed every now and then and wonder why everything never conspired for your good, though people keep insisting on this good, that life means a linear free fall that just keeps on gaining speed and accumulating its wrongs, and you can never climb back to fix it.”
“Ah, This is just too negative for me!”, he bursts out, raising his arms in frustration. “I want to offer you somewhere that will go beyond this, but instead of gaining the courage and taking the plunge you insist on remembering your childhood! Many people have done worse and have lived to redeem themselves! Can’t you hear the world chanting that you only need to think positively, stay in the brighter light, and the world will rearrange and conspire for the sake of your good? And it’s as easy as looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself that you are worth better, that you are well-deserving, that the weight and value of the universe is in you, and—”
“—And in this mirror, it is you who I see, right?”
“Why yes! And I am all you will ever need! And forgiveness means forgetfulness, and the beautiful, colorful nothing which is the void. And trust me, there is really no need for this nonsense that you hold on to as repentance, or salvation, and stop putting yourself down unnecessarily but lift yourself up with your own strength, and raise your chin defiant against all that the world may accuse you of! Be strong without any apologies!”
And here a wave of doubt flickered through my body, like a shiver, like a tingling sensation brought about by an invisible, ghostly passing. Because it is not only this man in front of me who speaks such words of encouragement, but the whole wide world speaks it too, and louder! A confident chorus of voices, and some of whom I even called my friends. And they have all such wonderful reports to tell, of being independent, of living for the moment and just simply being happy in the here and now, and pursuing dreams, and real life stories that seem grow butterfly wings that fly as ever-afters. Like chasing after their movie-inspired dreams, and romantic novels, and love songs and erotic poems. But only as quickly as it passes through my skin this same spirit is expunged by something else, something wholly other. And it feels like being pushed off your balance but suddenly being able to crash and lean on a thick, solid pillar. And I turn around and see that this pillar is actually the wooden foot of a cross, and on this cross they've etched an account of everything I have ever done, along with dried stains of blood. And I raise my eyes towards that crux where time intersects space, and the absence of a body which means it has been raised.
And I find enough sense to say: “But… I cannot… how can I anymore? Because all my life I did look into that mirror, and many times I saw you there. And many times I can still remember us having these same talks, though perhaps not so verbal or verbose. But you kept reassuring me then, as you try to reassure me now. And I believed you, oh God, how I did believe you, believe in myself, but also could never believe enough! And it was you who squirmed with me restless in my own bed, weighing me down, with the weight of a life that said it would be something it could never be, until it could only stare into space in unsatisfied defeat.
“And on that day I gave up I… saw someone, and he stepped not out of a mirror but out of thin air, and well no, rather, he stepped out from where I could never know where, and he said he would tell me the unsearchable things that I could never know, and instead of your confused tangle of promises he wielded a sharp-edged blade, and he thrust it into my chest, and at once I said—oh, not out of any reason or logic but just, just… just! I said now I believe! Believe! And though you accuse me of making a mistaken choice I would say instead that he appeared out of nowhere and killed me because I always wanted to be killed but could never bring myself to it! And it was… it was unprecedented, like an invasion, like a violation, and I said ‘yes’ but not like I could say anything else.”
My doppel smiled, and completely changed his tone. “And this man you speak about, who is he? Though I know already, and you need not tell me, and you yourself know how this story ends because this story is in you, dialogue-monologue, and I know very well you intend to have me die before the end, and have everything I tried to assert come to naught. And you would have Him be lifted up as your Savior and Prince, proclaimed without shame in the anterior of this imaginary space. And no, no, don’t answer, but let me continue, so I can make the most of my fictionalized existence. Let me direct you instead, for the sake of creativity, how I want to die. Because I feel that my apprehension of beauty can still count for something here—and it was me, when you died, I died too, and we both. And I will confess that the moment we died I did wonder why it was not so grim like a tomb but finally found what I thought I represented, oh, everlasting life, painless, and not so confused as word-juggling but changeless! And paint this feeling with my own words, with my colors, paint it! As I fade into unreality paint me! More than sublime cerulean skies and…”
And slowly my double began to wither in front of me across the table, his skin drying up and crumbling like parchment. And I did paint him, or rather, I did the best to paint his death, and I keep the portrait even now, in my own secret chamber, painted with words that can mean but cannot be uttered. And soon I found myself sitting alone, with no one across the table, and the window still near. But what comes after that? What comes when you kill yourself in yourself by recollecting yourself being killed once already? Someone else, in white linen garments, with a face as bright as the sun, sits in his place, and turns the glass of water in front of me into wine, and then all the words I can ever write ceases to mean and---
