I Am a Strange Loop

Soulmates and Matesouls

The real point of the Twinwirld fantasy was to cast some doubt on a dogma, usually unquestioned in our world, which could be phrased as a slogan: “One body, one soul.” (If you don’t like the word “soul”, then feel free to substitute “I”, “person”, “self”, or “locus of consciousness”.) This idea, though seldom verbalized, is so taken for granted that it seems utterly tautological to most people (unless they deny the existence of souls altogether). But visiting Twinwirld (or musing about it, if a trip can’t be arranged) forces this dogma out into the open where it must at least be confronted, if not overturned. And so, if I have managed to get my readers to open their minds to the counterintuitive notion of a pair of bodies as the potential joint locus of one soul — that is, to be able to identify with a pairson such as Karen or Greg as easily as they identify with R2-D2 or with C-3PO in Star Wars — then Twinwirld will have discharged its duty well.

One of my inspirations for the Twinwirld fantasy was the notion of a married couple as a type of “higher-level individual” made of two ordinary individuals, which is why bumping into the O du angenehmes Paar scrap of paper was such a stunning coincidence. Many married people acquire this notion naturally in the course of their marriage. In fact, I had dimly sensed something like this intuitively before I was married, and I remember how, in the anticipation-filled weeks leading up to my wedding, I found this idea to be an implicit, moving theme of the book Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce by Francine Klagsbrun. For instance, at the conclusion of a chapter about therapy and counseling for married couples, Klagsbrun writes, “I believe that a therapist should be neutral and impartial toward the partners, the two patients in the marriage, but that there is no breach of ethics in being biased toward the third patient, the marriage.” I was deeply struck by her idea of the marriage itself as a “patient” undergoing therapy in order to get better, and I must say that over the years, a sense of the truth in this image helped me greatly in the harder times of my marriage.

The bond created between two people who are married for a long time is often so tight and powerful that upon the death of either one of them, the other one very soon dies as well. And if the other survives, it is often with the horrible feeling that half of their soul has been ripped out. In happier days, during the marriage, the two partners of course have individual interests and styles, but at the same time a set of common interests and styles starts to build up, and over time a new entity starts to take shape.

In the case of my marriage, that entity was Carol-and-Doug, once in a while jokingly called “Doca” or “Cado”. Our oneness-in-twoness started to emerge clearly in my mind on several occasions during the first year of our marriage, right after we’d had several friends over for a dinner party and everyone had finally left and Carol and I started cleaning up together. We would carry the plates into the kitchen and then stand together at the sink, washing, rinsing, and drying, going over the whole evening together to the extent that we could replay it in our joint mind, laughing with delight at the spontaneous wit and re-savoring the unexpected interactions, commenting on who seemed happy and who seemed glum — and what was most striking in these post partyum decompressions was that the two of us almost always agreed with each other down the line. Something, some thing, was coming into being that was made out of both of us.

I remember how, a few years into our marriage, the strangest remark would occasionally be made to us: “You look so much alike!” I found this astonishing because I thought of Carol as a beautiful woman and utterly unlike me in appearance. And yet, as time passed, I started to see how there was something in her gaze, something about how she looked out at the world, that reminded me of my own gaze, of my own attitude about the world. I decided that the “resemblance” our friends saw wasn’t located in the anatomy of our faces; rather, it was as if something of our souls was projected outwards and was perceptible as a highly abstract feature of our expressions. I could see it most clearly in certain photos of us together.

Children as Gluons

What made for the most profound bond between us, though, was without doubt the births of our two children. As a mere married couple without children, we were still not totally fused — in fact, like most couples, we were at times totally confused. But when new people, vulnerable tiny people, came into our lives, some kind of vectors inside us aligned totally. There are many couples who do not agree on how to rear their children, but Carol and I discovered happily that we saw eye-to-eye on virtually everything regarding ours. And if one of us was uncertain, talking with the other would always bring clarity into the picture.

That shared goal of bringing up our children safely, happily, and wisely in this huge, crazy, and often scary world became the dominant motif of our marriage, and it forged us both in the same mold. Although we were distinct individuals, that distinctness seemed to fade away, to vanish almost entirely, when it came to parenthood. First in that arena of life, and then slowly in other arenas, we were one individual with two bodies, one sole “pairson”, one “indivisible dividual”, one single “dual”. We two were Twe. We had exactly the same feelings and reactions, we had exactly the same dreads and dreams, exactly the same hopes and fears. Those hopes and dreams were not mine or Carol’s separately, copied twice — they were one set of hopes and dreams, they were our hopes and dreams.

I don’t mean to sound mystical, as if to suggest that our common hopes floated in some ethereal neverland independent of our brains. That’s not my view at all. Of course our hopes were physically instantiated two times, once in each of our separate brains — but when seen at a sufficiently abstract level, these hopes were one and the same pattern, merely realized in two distinct physical media.

No one has trouble with the idea that “the same gene” can exist in two different cells, in two different organisms. But what is a gene? A gene is not an actual physical object, because if it were, it could only be located in one cell, in one organism. No, a gene is a pattern — a particular sequence of nucleotides (usually encoded on paper by a sequence of letters from the four-letter alphabet “ACGT”). And so a gene is an abstraction, and thus “the very same gene” can exist in different cells, different organisms, even organisms living millions of years apart.

No one has trouble with the idea that “the same novel” can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern — a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus “the very same novel” can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart.

And so no one should have trouble with the idea that “the same hopes and dreams” can inhabit two different people’s brains, especially when those two people live together for years and have, as a couple, engendered new entities on which these hopes and dreams are all centered. Perhaps this seems overly romantic, but it is how I felt at the time, and it is how I still feel. The sharing of so much, particularly concerning our two children, aligned our souls in some intangible yet visceral manner, and in some dimensions of life turned us into a single unit that acted as a whole, much as a school of fish acts as a single-minded higher-level entity.

CHAPTER 16

Grappling with the Deepest Mystery