[Image: “Learning to Fly,” by the master photo manipulator known as “endegor,” on DeviantArt.]

The phenomenon of twinning, at root, just represents an extreme on the continuum of otherness. Like the kids’ song says, “One of these things is not like the other / One of these things is not the same.” Even when we perceive two things as indistinguishable, even microscopically, we know they are not the same: they do not colocate; they do not coincide; one stands here/now and the other, elsewhere/elsewhen. Yin and yang. Prince and pauper. Alpha and omega, fore and aft, surface and edge…

Twinning, of one kind or another, seems lately to have become the trope in popular fiction. The recent TV series Counterpart, for example, posits a world which an East German scientist had split in two in 1987, just to see how the two worlds evolved differently. A single underground passage links the two; and over time — although existing, essentially, in two separate universes — the worlds have established diplomatic relations. Furthermore each often sends spies through the passage to gather intelligence available only to their (heh) counterparts in the other.

(You are forgiven if all that reminds you a lot of China Miéville’s novel The City & The City, from 2009 — or in some respects of the Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Of the latter, Wikipedia says: “Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived.”)

Anyhow, courtesy of whiskey river last week, I came across this poem:

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton [source])

Which leads me to…

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