At our last meeting, you began by speaking to me with as much dispassion as ever.
Yet my contrived verbal jousts and rhetorical feints seemed to bother you just a bit more than usual. As ever, you asked me to state my name, and like I always had before, I replied that I was Nameless.
But then, before you could resume your questioning, I cut back in again, letting loose with a joyful jeremiad of truth: “Oh (I said), but I know that you have a name, my friend! How could you not have a name! As much as I am Nameless, you are Name-ful! You are nothing if not a designation. You are the dweller in daylight, and I am the skulker of the small hours. I am Invisible; you, however, are naught but Visibility… And yet, for all of that, we two, we are in fact the same, are we not?”
I could tell, even as I let loose this unrestrainedly rapturous proclamation, that I was actually reaching you. The impassivity in your eyes dissolved, replaced (it seemed to me) by a kind of unstated, bemused quizzicality. So I went on, answering the question that seemed to overtake your mind:
“We’re the same, yes, because both of us are quite aware, aren’t we, of the permeability between our two worlds! We know, in fact, that there are two worlds, no more, no less. We know, too—you and I know—that every man must, at some point, become his own twin. We know that all souls coexist in concomitant, parallel form. We know that the schism in our souls runs directly down the deep scar in the center of our schizoid consciousness. We know, you and I alike know, again, that this division cannot be other than dual in nature. We are not ‘One,’ like the stupid shallow pseudo-spiritualists like to say, because this cannot be, but neither do we ‘contain multitudes,’ contra that bearded, buggering Poet; instead, we are exactly Two, no more, no less.
“We are Two… that is to say, we can be our own ‘company,’ while avoiding the rotten crowd that is entranced by those illusory intimations of bogus multiplicity. Two: the only number that counts, the sheer symmetry of the schism, the clean cleaving that runs neatly through the very center of the human heart and soul… Two!”
I sounded ever-more manically unbalanced as I rattled on, but by then you had regained your needful self-possession; once again, you regarded me as a certain type of man dispassionately scrutinizes a colorful fish flopping about in its death throes. Yet my desperate antics were in fact a shameless charade, as perhaps you knew.
What am I saying? Of course you knew what I was really up to all along, because you and I are one and the same man! And surely it cannot only be me who recognizes our kinship, our twinship, our essential ontological conjoinedness, symbolic of the cleaving which cuts deep into the heart of all experienced human reality! “Cleaving,” after all, means at once “to join” and “to split,” but in either case, please note that each is indicative of the twinliness of our being: indicative, that is, of the fact that one is never far from himself, no matter how lost and lonely he might feel. For right there, just across the way, within plain view, he can always see… himself!
Himself, that is, yet in different form; separate and unique, yet at the same time exactly the same; a double, a replica, a being surely distinct, yet just as surely like unto oneself.” Remember this truth!” I spoke again to you, my replica, my self-not-self! This time, I took our conversation down an unexpected path. For at this point, I spoke of Joseph Mengele, that monster master-man, that infamous death doctor, pursued as he was by a maddening Muse, a Muse which sang to him always, from within the very bowels of his being… a Muse who provoked him to yearn for communion with that eternal, infinite, divine principle of The Two.
Mengele, that death doctor and soul poet, sought to collect all permutations of this essential truth, much like one attempts to catch rainwater in a cup. He wanted to know all about twinliness, and everything that this twinly principle revealed about the riddle of existence. It had to be unveiled to him, rendered explicitly manifest; thus, his ghoulishly dedicated experimentation upon individuals born with DNA duplicate pairs…
Mengele’s Muse pushed him well past the bounds of conventional morality, into a hellish terrain of vast psychic cruelty, but then such things are bound to happen when one’s Muse sings her siren song… In spite of his obviously objectionable behavior, I nevertheless assert that Mengele was, in his way, a dreamer and an artist, one who saw that life and death themselves were intimates, even twins, of one another, both possessed of attributes unique to them both, each fitting perfectly into the others’ world, finishing one another’s sentences, as it were…
Yes, Mengele was a visionary! A ghoulish, monstrous man, to be sure, but nevertheless, a man possessed of towering insight, which propelled all of his subjects deathwards, towards that thing called death which is in fact but the dark double of life!
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Once I wrapped up my “Mengele” discourse, to which you appeared to listen with measured equanimity, I clammed up for good. We thereafterwards sat in complete silence, you and I, for what could have been twenty minutes, perhaps even longer. I believe now that we were testing one another, each silently daring the other to break the spell. Neither of us spoke, of course, because we both knew better. And then, after this long spate of mutually-assured silence, you rose and dispatched me back to my cell.
Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. Visit his Soundcloud page and his YouTube channel. His author page is Alt Right Novelist.com
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