top of page
“Micheal Tournier wrote a novel, Les Météores, in which one of the set of identical twins Jean+Paul spins a yarn of universal twinship. ‘Every pregnant woman carries two children in her womb,’ claims Paul. ‘But the stronger will not tolerate the presence of a brother with whom he will have to share everything. He strangles him in his mother’s belly and, having strangled him, he eats him, then comes into the world alone, stained with that original crime, doomed to soliariness and betrayed by the stigma of his monstrous size.’ These ogres live on, incomplete, seeking that perfect communion they sacrificed before birth” (Schwartz 20).
Because I am a twin I know what it is like to have my other there and visible. I am not a singleton looking for their vanished twin but someone who has my other piece visible, but still separate. The desire to assimilate is still there. The desire to no longer be a singularity is there. This must have something to do with our particles wanting to be joined again in the universe after we die. The small bits of ourselves are more comfortably collective than we get to be.
In The Culture of the Copy Hillel Schwartz recounts the lives of Eng and Chang (46- 52) who were conjoined by an elastic band flesh across the waist. What I want to highlight is the description of the end for these men, where Chang dies (still attached via the band of flesh) and “Eng his brother die[s] in two hours after from fear and the sudden shock he received on awakening and finding his brother, instead of a breathing living soul, a cold and chilly corpse by his side” (Schwartz 49).
What proximity to death. What would it be like to have the Other die? Suddenly silence without Seymour.
bottom of page