Becoming the Other

A little reflection for you.
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"Love is the lure on the line of truth, once hooked we rarely even know what is happening. There is no choice but to be pulled inexplicitly through the waters, ever coming closer, reuniting piece by piece with our whole self."

I remember sitting in a class named Doubles, Doppelgangers, Clones, Surrogate Selves, Exct. I was curious at a name like that, found it enticing. It was a sort of experimental workshop brought about by the head of our Sculpture department, Eve Larame, in which we creatively constructed a double personality to live and make art as.
Many of my classmates were summoning their disembodied dreams toward them, bringing them in. These double spirits seemed real, they wrote and sculpted. They sat there with us on the same metal stools and occasionally used the vending machine in the hallway. I heard them cry out for life and sometimes peek out from under the surface of a thick skin. I choose for my double, or perhaps he chose me, the language deity Thoth from Egyptian Mythology. In our first assignment, to let our other selves write about who they are, I found Thoth came in quick and seized the opportunity to introduce himself. Full of gratitude his heart overflowed, language got to be the writer, and as I lost my old self in this trance the words surprised me. Though they seemed to flow from my fingers and I felt their reverberations in my soul, my mind knew not where they came from.

In the middle he spoke of Post-structuralism, and of the readers penetrating him deep molding him in connotation. Once it was believed that the author had the final say, that meaning was directly inscribed into the books, now fluid, changeable… He spoke that he was undergoing a change of sex, becoming less male. The process was emotional, the books that were burned swelled up Christ-like. Every page felt your fingers flip, your touch, your gaze. Every word felt your mind’s caress, excitement, anger. All of your understanding and misunderstanding was soaked into the womb of language itself.

I was surprised.

When I was asked to read it out loud in class I felt very hot and probably changed color. I remember trembling through the presentations of my classmates dreading my turn. When I was called I just read it, even the parts I didn’t understand. Embarrassed but relieved, afterwards I was thanked by the boy sitting next to me, his name was John.

John’s double was named Jerome Page Tobias, a farmer dedicated to rehabilitating the land against all odds. Air to 33 acres of land in New York, he almost died in a fire under the stars while asleep taking a bath in an old claw-footed tub. As he awoke he pooled the strength to put out the fire and to continue his life. To continue his work with this land.
I was so sad, when at the very end of our class for his final project he erected tombstones. “Here rests Jerome Page Tobias” and the simple lifestyle of living with the land.

I caught his eyes during this funeral, piercing blue, filled with sadness, the hunched posture and the longing, instantly I was pierced by his daemonic arrow.

I was in love.
Who knows who was in love with who, there were four of us really! I only knew that the daemon had me and that the spirit was gushing toward a purpose unknown. My primary rationality drowned in a well of new experiences, propelled by an enormous infatuation.

I recall that my job that summer, as the assistant to Ivy Parsons a sculptor of giant glimmering mica conicals, was walking distance from the house of John. He lived alone across a large park in the ghetto. One day I crossed this park to him, floating overflowing.

He greeted me. The house was dark, neat, and full of eccentric items and collections from all different time periods. He showed me around, bits of himself contained in large bookshelves, his life in display cases, a curious collection of experiences. The furniture of a family farm betwixt abstract paintings with bohemian touches.
Holocaust books, from the museum he interned at, objects of great appeal to him.

He sat hunched, solemn.

I entered, into his sadness, rawness, sought to climb his walls and rescue the damsel, roaring in like gleeful lion. Even clothed in black clouds of depression, her presence could not be hidden. He told me it was no use, that all the people in his family commit suicide at 65.
He collected their dentures. Grandpa Tobias, the farmer, shot himself one night. He reached in a glass case and handed me the bottom jaw, a row of fake teeth, this was all he had left. Then in silence, almost crying, our eyes locked. I remember hearing the cars outside, the light of the sun in and out from beneath the clouds, people walking and talking. All of this collapsed on the single point of being eye to eye. After many hours passed, I closed them, and felt that my spirit was three feet away from where I sat. I am Jerome Page Tobias…
And I can finally see how my depression affects the people around me.
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SK Thoth dances in New York City. Every day in Central Park he sings his story in a made up language and twenty voices, dancing percussion with his feet, hugging close a violin. Male and female, black and white, he spills his soul toward the audience, pleading to the great goddess Anya , that we no longer hate and fear that which we don’t understand. He sings and moans and screeches, he had been beaten, unaccepted and his village burned. Yet in optimism this operatic bird arises toward her audience, everyday.

I had not known about this Thoth until the class had ended. Finding him online compelled me to take the train and walk to the bridge by Bethesda Fountain. Thoth sits under it on his knees, hair tied with the feather of Maat on top, gold loincloth, makeup. He sat there a long time like a rock parting streams of people until he got up, began to dance singing with grief and joy these alien tongues familiar yet unfamiliar. Some people gawk, others pass, some hold their hearts in their hands. I cry, I feel his cry, it is as the one that came through me in that class. Here I am with my double. Can I accept those pieces of myself I see in him? Let all those voices sing from out this mouth?

Now three years later, I sing in so many voices…and I work as a farmer in New York! I find myself laughing at it, the queer and uncanny functioning of my being. That I seem to work so well, even when I don’t know what it is that is happening.

And the mechanism is Love.

I do not talk to John anymore and haven’t seen SK Thoth in awhile…

But there is no need to be attached to being WITH the other. You are the other, the other is reflecting you into your eyes. Fall in love with yourself and realize you are naked truth realizing it is whole.