The Not Not-World
What escapes a doubled existence
I recently had that deliriously doubling sensation we call déjà vu. French for already seen, déjà vu is often described as a phenomenon wherein our current experience echoes a remembered experience—often one we didn’t know we recalled until within the echoing moment. But my already seen of the other day felt not merely as something I had already seen, but as something I was watching unfold—a doubling of the doubling, so to speak. I was in the kitchen talking to my kids about something or another—the content of the moment was achingly unremarkable—and as experience opened its portal into a twin then-and-now space, I stood behind myself as I spoke, witnessing the scene without participating in it. I watched myself behave as me and I thought, almost in the exact words that Percival Everettt uses to conclude his novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier:
I am not myself today.
Haven’t we all had this experience of self separating from self? Or maybe more on the nose, isn’t this not-myself experience the more common experience of self? Do we ever quite feel in sync with form, time, space, memory, consciousness? When we look in a mirror or watch a video of ourselves, does it not strike us as quite strange that that person is us? And yet it isn’t. A mirror reverses you front-to-back so that you can face yourself as a two-dimensional version towards you can reach as you return yourself the favor. A video is a you from moments, days, or years earlier—never quite the you watching it. Mirror images can only provide—as Tim Morton calls it—a “map of the past”: the you that got that scar years ago or was tormented by teenage ache or bears loosened skin from a smoking habit you abandoned months ago—these pasts delineated on and intruding in your present. Yet, counterintuitively, the reflection/reel often feels realer—the original and the double confused, fused, or even separated enough to prefer the double that evidences something more known, more familiar than the self.
The various neurological explanations for déjà vu point to a divided self. Some suggest our attention is dividing—suddenly becoming conscious of the environmental awareness we usually take in subconsciously. Others posit some kind of asynchrony between normally synchronous cognitive processes. Still more suggest perhaps the sensation arises out of similarity between the current moment and one from our past—a likeness for which our memory begins to search and attempt to match into a coherent pattern. Whatever the scientific reason, the déjà vu doubling of self—the sense of being self and simultaneously not self—may point towards a more honest rendition of the experiential than the single self we furiously attempt to inhabit.
This doubled self mirrors a doubled world. Knowledge and information double in an exponential acceleration we cannot keep pace with. As these advances run away from us, the half-life of movement from one advance to the next shrinks. Things double upon themselves in an ever-shrinking amount of time. We’ve never seen so many doppelgangers.
Media repeats us—but more consequentially, it offers a world where truth and falsity compete opportunistically for algorithmic ascension. We already know the problem—there is nothing at the top of the mountain. The mountain itself is a mirage.
In fact, we love a good double. Perhaps the split self appears quaint—just another leftover dualism in a world where endless multiplication is our stock in trade. Frankenstein’s appeal continues to hold sway at least in part because the monster represents Victor’s doppelganger—two beings, psychologically linked, one revealing the repressed impulses of the original. The darkness within. Or, if you like, the not self quite fantastically revealing the self as we never quite knew it until its double came along for the ride. At one point in the novel, the monster tells Victor: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Who comes from whom? Who is the self and who is the double? Here, the monster elucidates the futility of those questions because Adam himself was a sort of fallen angel, expelled from the Garden of Eden by another fallen angel—Satan in the guise of a snake. Doubles abound. Everywhere we turn, the mirror is already in front of us.
I am not myself today.
In Freud’s exploration of the uncanny, he muses on the seemingly irreconcilable, though hardly opposite, meanings of the German word, heimlich—intimate and home-like on the one hand, concealed and withheld from others on the other. In our original self—indeed our foremost home—we hide our most intimate being from others. We are both most familiar and most concealed in the self. As he digs deeper into German dictionaries, Freud finds the meaning of heimlich
in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious: . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge. . . . “Do you not see? They do not trust me; they fear the heimlich face of the Duke of Friedland.” Wallensteins Lager, Act. 2. 9. The notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that “heimlich” comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to “unheimlich.” Thus: “At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him.”
To which, Freud concludes that heimlich “is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.” The un-home, the terrifying, the concealed is produced and contained by its heimlich, its home. The not-self is not the opposite of the self, but a version of self always encompassed within self itself. Yes, it gets a little mouthy. To put it another way: the strange double not-self is not so much a mirror, but a deeper intimacy. And, as we all know, deeper intimacy can indeed be foreign and terrifying.
Emily Dickinson once wrote in a letter to her mentor, Thomas Higginson: “Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted.” If nature produces the otherworldly as a natural byproduct of its existence, is the role of art then to recreate and contain its own uncanny? Or is art trying to become the not-self self that nature is well…naturally? Can art only attempt this endeavor? Or can it succeed? We often talk about copies of an artwork as reproductions, but art itself is reproduction, already always a copy—of a person, a feeling, a thought, an intention, an absurdity. The key, according to Dickinson, is not whether art is of a certain style or achieves a particular appeal, but whether it produces the mystery which the world offers up effortlessly.
Some art succeeds because it begins inwardly, as with the paintings of Edward Hopper which explore the many facets of loneliness through their use of urban scenes, voyeuristic framings, or light that heightens the viewer’s attention on subjects. In his work, A Woman in the Sun, a woman gazes somewhere beyond the frame while the striking shaft of light from the window highlights her as our focus. Her nakedness is interesting only insofar as it complements the spareness of the room. Just as with reality, loneliness need not be a singular state. Some variations of loneliness might be aching and acute, others quieter and melancholic. Also like reality, the painting distorts what we think we see. Hopper’s wife—who is the subject of this painting—was close to eighty when he painted it. We wonder not only what she is thinking, but what is outside the open window through which we cannot see—a clever doubling of the opacity of our insight into others and our failure to understand what brings attention to those things right in front of us.
Other art doubles, but from the outside in. In his Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, Egon Schiele depicts his friend the doctor in a seemingly hurried moment in-between patients. Despite Schiele being commonly lumped with other Expressionists of his era, Zachary Fine explains how that label implies:
that his art moves from inside to outside: a molten core of angst and psychological tension canalized through the limbs, into a brush, and then released onto the canvas. This squares nicely with the Freudian world view of repressed thoughts welling up, in dreams or in slips of the tongue. But what makes the relationship with Graff a clever lens is that it reverses this reading. The Schiele of the hospital starts with surfaces. Once he’s put a subject on the blank page, he can turn the exterior of the body into an arena for all kinds of play, psychological and somatic. In one self-portrait, he gives himself blue hair; in another, he disappears his penis. There’s even one piece in the show where Schiele presents himself thrice: as snarling enfant terrible, in a caftan; as smiley angelic bystander; and as tight-lipped bureaucrat. He always seems to be palpating his sense of self, testing its variety with a little smirk.
What unites both works is not the doubling, but the leakage of multiplicity itself in the process of that echo. The real uncanny of the double occurs not in a clean break where there is one and then other, but always in the other other—the adjacent self that slips past our grasp in the process. The boundary—of the painting’s frame, of memory, of the self—is destabilized without ever being fully erased.
Every object—including our selves—has, according to Tim Morton, “a necessarily withdrawn or mysterious quality; to exist means that one cannot be laid totally bare, one cannot be completely splayed out to the accessing intellect, or hand, or eye, or particle beam. One cannot be reduced to a measurement of oneself. Perhaps I is simply a measurement, in the same way as 2:30 p.m. is a measurement, not time as such.” Similarly, the not-self is simply all the measurements that are not 2:30 p.m. We contain multitudes, but push them out into the world as well. Endlessly so.
I am not myself today.
And still the double dazzles and deludes us. Hot and cold are opposites, right? How then can hot become cold and vice versa? Our thinking selves categorize for convenience into binaries, but our sensing selves are relative beings where information arrives comparatively—warmer, colder, closer, farther, sweeter, sourer—the linguistic and cognitive structures that we create always collapsing in on themselves. Christians know quite well that Jesus is not the copy of God. That would be idolatry. Jesus is the not-God who is also God—the other who is simultaneously everything. We are always passing from one thing into its opposite—past into present, young into old, here into there, the orgasmic back into the mundane, but never quite existing anywhere but here in its expanding, fluid immeasurability.
Does that make the not-self more real than the self? In many ways, yes. In Percival Everett’s novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, the main character Not Sidney spends the early part of the novel trying to prove a negative. His name—Not Sidney—means he is repeatedly encountering scenes like this one:
“What’s your name?” a kid would ask.
“Not Sidney,” I would say.
“Okay, then what is it?”
“I told you. It’s Not Sidney.”
“Ain’t nobody called you Sidney.”
“No, it’s Not Sidney.”
The boy would make a face, then look at his friends and say, “What’s wrong with him?”
And I would say, I always thought in a polite and nonthreatening way, “Nothing’s wrong with me. My name is Not Sidney.”
This would be about the time the first punch found the side of my head. They were understandably and justifiably frustrated and angry with me. They thought I was being, if not petulant, then wearisome, but I saw myself as merely answering the question honestly.
He is trapped constantly by the very thing he is not—Sidney Poitier. He even looks just like him. He is also trapped in a perpetual rerun of past events (or distorted versions of scenes from Sidney Poitier films) which prevent his preparation for any self-directed future. In hopes of fighting back against the bullies that torment him during his weekly trips to town, he takes martial arts, but his lessons occur on Thursdays which is
unfortunate because my trips to town were on Wednesdays. Though [my teacher] was able to observe the damage, debrief me on the tactics used against me, all of his instruction was lost into the air during the following six days, so that by the next Wednesday I was facing either a brand-new attacker or an old one with new tricks.
The relationship of cause and effect is turned on its head throughout, including the instances of the one forward-propelling action Not Sidney seems able to enact—his Fesmerizing. Fesmerizing is a hypnosis technique Not Sidney learns and is successful in using to direct the actions of others who do not have his best interests at heart. However, its application proves unpredictable leaving Not Sidney to wonder whether he has “succeeded or failed, a state worse that failure itself.” Outcomes cannot be trusted, not even the ones you seem to effectuate.
The world seems to function under conditions of magnetically opposed forces (Not Sidney observes Jane Fonda tanning while his black teacher gets seasick such that Jane “grew darker as Betty grew lighter;” Not Sidney buys a fake driver’s license when he could just as easily have gotten a real one) or more often than not, nonsensical happenings untethered from any truth. He leaves his “so-called home” Atlanta to drive to L.A., only to get arrested just outside the city in Peckerwood County—a place with trees that fail to provide shade and farms whose crop is dirt itself. When the prison bus he is riding overturns in an accident, he finds himself crawling across its ceiling to a welded shut emergency door which has been torn off by the force of the rollover. The absurd becomes his literal reality and, amidst a confusion running alongside him, he realizes early that:
The only matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life.
The truth is that the truth falls away. If nothing is the truth, then any version of reality is just as good as any other.
In a not-self real, nonsensical world where you bear the name of that which you appear to be, but are not (Not Sidney Poitier), these are some of the principles Not Sidney lives by—moment to moment, and not in any strict adherence (because, of course, absurdity resists adherence as much as coherence):
An untruth might well be the truth: “That sounded so much like a lie that I wanted to believe him.”
Place conforms people to its own reality, as much as the other way around: ‘These were sad people, and for the world I wanted to think of them as decent. Perhaps they were decent enough, but the place that made them was so offensive to me that all who lived there became there.”
Our incessant and sometimes maddeningly repetitive personal experiences are still not enough to teach us anything about others: “I could remember his face and I didn’t recognize his name and this apparently offended and angered him.”
And, ultimately, that we humans are both “self-identical” (as his professor blathers on about) and also not either ourselves or our not-self: “Gladys Feet would have to go up to her room and imagine me or Sidney Poitier; it apparently didn’t matter which.”
That is how you can wind up having “no idea and every idea” what something, what anything is about. And, more importantly, that is how the former statement makes perfect sense.
As Not Sidney makes his way through a circuitous, non-circular journey in which he is never quite believed to be “Not” and therefore doesn’t quite exist—at least not as himself and also Not as other—he finds himself accused of murdering a man in Smuteye, Alabama as he attempts to provide fifty thousand dollars to a group of women who insist they’ve been called to build a church there. When that accusation is quickly proven false, he is asked by the chief of police to look at the body. In the morgue, he finds the negative that has defined his entire life disproven when the body looks exactly like him: “I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of logic and double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier. I was Sidney Poitier.”
Disproving a negative requires showing that something doesn’t exist, finding evidence of an absence—a difficult, though not impossible task which Not Sidney or the man we now know as Sidney seems to have achieved. In a world of nonsense where the only class we ever hear about him taking at college is called Philosophy of Nonsense, it is the erasure of the double that erases and frees the self. While attempting to kill Not Sidney for the cash he is bringing to the church women, a miscreant named Thornton Scrunchy accidentally murders Not Sidney’s doppelganger. But what is the doppelganger—the copy—of a negative? For the rest of the novel, he sinks deeper into the illogic of being not Not Sidney Poitier until the final scene where he is on stage at the Oscars in Los Angeles accepting an award for “Most Dignified Figure in American Culture,” where he gives the following speech:
Thank you. I came back to this place to find something, to connect with something lost, to reunite if not with my whole self, then with a piece of it. What I’ve discovered is that this thing is not here. In fact, it is nowhere. I have learned that my name is not my name. It seems you all know me and nothing could be further from the truth and yet you know me better than I know myself, perhaps better than I can know myself. My mother is buried not far from this auditorium, and there are no words on her headstone. As I glance out now, as I feel the weight of this trophy in my hands, as I stand like a specimen before these strangely unstrange faces, I know finally what should be written on that stone. It should say what mine will say:
I AM NOT MYSELF TODAY.
We’ve long known that doubling can actually be singular. When recessions destabilize the economy, some portion of the population responds by “doubling-up”: young adults move in with their parents and unrelated families decide to become one household. Our DNA inheritance from two separate people becomes the single self we know to be our one home. Two becomes one.
Maybe the problem wasn’t thinking the reflection was real but mistaking the mirror for anything other than an object destined to crack. The screen world which we so often mistake as an equally flattened world is just as embodied and distorted as reality—just differently so. Humans have always lived in doubled worlds, but now we encounter them at a speed and visibility which frightens us into the mistaken conclusion that the doubling is the danger. In reality, the danger is the illusion of purity or singularity for which some desperately grasp.
Walter Benjamin warned that the reproducibility of the world might “lead to fascism,” a fear that has hardened into a broader collection of hysterical narratives about copies, mirrors, and simulated selves. Naomi Klein reaches the height of this anxiety in her recent book, Doppelganger, where she argues that this Mirror World is the threatening heart of darkness in a world full of people who refuse to look inward, but also of people who are too self-involved, but also of people appearing to be “the nice, normal people down the street [but] who turn out to be capable of monstrosity,” but also of people who are rigidly divided into two peoples—a doubled populace who is not “having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality…[but] about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.” The book reads as a prolonged attempt to re-stabilize a world Klein experiences as out of control, beginning with the public’s confusion of her with Naomi Wolf—an opposing political and cultural force—an encounter that reasonably unsettles her sense of self but is ultimately elevated into a diagnosis of full-on societal disorder. In Klein’s own telling, this uncanny encounter becomes “part of an expansive web of forces that are destabilizing our larger world.” Doubling, in Klein’s version of the world, is a sign of danger. The double manages to be a sign in a world she argues has divorced signs from meaning. Contagious panic seems to be doubling at a speed we can contain less than an unknown virus, yet we appear less aware of its invasion.
The most troubling part of Klein’s book is not its schizophrenic conflation of personal doppelgangers with a screen “mirror world,” or with political division and “ethnic doubles,” but its suggestion that Klein’s reality—the apparently stable one—is not only the one being improperly undermined, but worse, that the rest of us are stuck in reactive binaries wherein we are “not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.” And yet. Somehow Klein’s thinking stays complex and nuanced and principled and…intact. She claims diagnostic authority over the condition she simultaneously inhabits—positioning herself as participant and critic without acknowledging the contradiction. Her own doubling is lost in the very shadow world she describes.
The mirror world is not a byproduct of screens and social media, nor is it a symptom of late-stage capitalism falling into disarray. Klein is sucked into the intentional provocation of a particular strain of online life which argues institutionalists like Klein are stuck in the “matrix.” The “mass formation psychosis” Klein rails against being a part of is precisely what she accuses those she disagrees with of giving themselves over to—this mass delusion built on a narrative lacking evidence. Klein is stuck in the mirror world she claims to elucidate, allowing provocation to…provoke her. This is precisely the point of an economy built on algorithmic maximization. Klein’s shadow world comes off less like diagnosis than alarm—about inequalities from which she benefits even as she decries them, and about voices she calls irrational because they fall outside the boundaries of her own frame. It is not the screen world that is inciting doubling (our online selves might aptly be considered shards of ourselves rather than flattened versions), but the moment itself which is a double. This has happened before.
I am not myself today.
In Euripides’ Helen, the well-known myth is flipped inside out: the real Helen never goes to Troy—instead, a phantom double runs off with Paris. The shocking meaning of this doppelganger for ancient Greeks is that a culture-defining war is reimagined as having been fought over a copy. In the first scene, Teucer—a Greek warrior who fought at Troy—speaks to the real Helen as she simultaneously refers to the phantom Helen as the true one. When asked whether the heroic sons of the Spartan King are still alive, Teucer uncannily replies: “Dead, and yet alive: ‘tis a double story.” When Menelaus and Helen meet, they are struck by how the other bears such resemblance to their spouse without, of course, recognizing each other fully as just that. Doubling has long exposed reality’s multiplicity. For some, like Klein, the unfamiliarity indicates an unprecedented instability which they argue will inevitably lead to large-scale crisis. The crisis, however, is not the existence of doubles, but the failure to recognize their existence all along. Distrust of institutions terrifies those at the heights of those very institutions, but repeats a moment we should recognize—from the Reformation to the French Revolution to post-Watergate America. Instability is not our wobble, it is our baseline. To the question: are we in a moment or its double? The answer is yes. The answer is no. The question can only be asked by a self that is already something beside itself.
Of her photographs in which she appears variously as pinup, centerfold, commuter, society dame or countless other permutations of an ever-elusive identity, Cindy Sherman has said: “Once I’m set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person,” she has explained. “I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her—the image the camera gets on the film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.” In her article on the photographer, Eva Respini writes about how Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series spawned endless interpretations as to their significance and meaning. Some critics argued they were a reflection of the media’s manipulation of the female image, others argued they indicated a “mythic unconscious” in the vein of Freud’s uncanny, still others thought they were the artistic evocation of Baudrillard’s simulacra,
the condition of being a copy without an original.” The “Stills” are all this and more. They struck a deep nerve within critical art historical circles and became a talisman of many of the emergent ideas of the 1980s, when photography and art were commingling and the nature of photography’s veracity was being debated. The “Stills” engender a number of different readings because they contain and support all those meanings—their strength is their mutability and elusiveness.
The problem might be less that copies are endlessly interpretable, but that we keep turning to them to provide meaning to the original—us.
I often tell people I’ve lived an unconventional life. Some are turned off, some cheer me—wow, nice work! But this is a negative description, a statement of absence—my life, in this framing, is merely not conventional. The life I travel through and call mine is formed through subtraction. There is no particular agency to an un-state, to an un-self. If it were intentional, then it wouldn’t be unconventional, it would be something else—iconoclastic or radical. If you allow it, the double negative of life will offer up repeated negation as an opening.
I am not myself today.
Language enables the kind of double entendre, doubling down, and subject doubling which may give us anxiety about having anxiety, but also allows for the comfort of repetition that we recognize in its once-removed unfamiliarity. Moi, je veux une poire, the French say in a grammatical construction where the self echoes within a single sentence—the effect being not confusion, but clarity. Language itself doubles and separates us from our experience. We become our symbols in writing, process the world, and re-incorporate our understanding back into our embodied lives in a copy of a copy of a copy that brings coherence, not calamity, to experience. The recurring motifs in the film Father Mother Sister Brother—such as questions about whether you can toast with something other than alcohol—reveal the tension inherent in family dynamics when children outgrow their role as children and parents no longer know what role to play. Doubles layer themselves on top of a friction that pre-existed their arrival.
At the end of Euripides’ Helen, after Menelaus has discovered the Helen he returned from the war with to be a phantom and his real wife to have remained in Egypt, faithfully waiting for him, but in danger of being forced to marry the Egyptian king, he and Helen devise a plan for escape. They trick everyone into thinking Menelaus is dead and request a ship for a funeral at sea. Once aboard, they reveal themselves, overpower the crew, and escape together, leaving the king deceived. In a scene right before their getaway, Theoklymenos (the Egyptian king) gives Helen assurance he will be as good a husband as Menelaus. Your husband is dead, he tells her, and grieving won’t bring him back; it is only logical to move forward and marry me. After he tells her: “The state of the dead is nothingness; labor for them is vain,” Helen replies “There is something of what I say both there and here.” What we say about the dead matters, she gently contradicts him. This line doubles not only where her words have reach—the realm of the dead and the world of the living—but also the phantom story and the real plan of escape, or even what is believed but is an illusion, and what is not believed but is real. The same words, Euripides tells us through the character Helen, are true and not true at the same time. The same words create aftershocks in the world you see and in the world you don’t see. Doubles don’t exist as binaries, but as overlapping meaning—coexisting, layering reality on reality to dimensionalize a world that requires such layering so as not to exist as ours alone.
Just last month, a North Carolina man, Michael Smith, made a deal with federal prosecutors after being accused of music streaming fraud. The man had created thousands of bot accounts on streaming platforms and was, at first, streaming songs that he owned. At a certain point, he realized how much money could be made with tens of thousands of songs streaming to the bot accounts, so he moved to using AI-generated songs—with “artist” names such as “Callous Humane,” “Calvinistic Dust, ” and “Camel Edible”—which the bot accounts then streamed billions of times over. Robots listening to robot-generated music. Or in our materialistic language: fake + fake = real. Real money. And ultimately, real prison time. Maybe the best part of this story was when US attorney Damian Williams lamented that the man had siphoned money from the pool of royalties that should have gone to legitimate artists and argued…wait for it…that it “was time for Smith to face the music.” Clever, in spite of the fact that real value moved from rewarding human creation to rewarding the simulation of it. Right now this may be a crime, but isn’t this also our future? And our past?
AI chatbots of the Claude or ChatGPT sort are strange and strangely familiar. If you interact with them often enough what you will find is that they produce both conversation and creative work that is not human, but also not not human. Human adjacent. Large language models have been trained on the whole span of written work available on the internet—from the very good to the manifestly awful. Is it any wonder we are now awash in AI slop considering we had already flooded the world with our own? Theorists and critics consider AI-produced written work both exciting and unsettling—something shockingly new which is simultaneously an artifact of our past. We too are our own artifacts—man-made objectifications of our object-ness which looksmaxxing and gooning implicate as the fundamental purpose in life: a ceaseless manufacturing of our reality, our bodies, our pleasure in pursuit of the dissolution of self—the disintegrating condition that was the reality all along. To those who wonder what is real or not, where truth lies, why nihilism seems to reign, the answer might just be what we have known all along—that form is an endless and exponentially repeating absurdity. This turn is not just a rejection of the preciousness of self, but of any framework that claims final authority in a world built by its own refusal to stay still.
In an interview with artist Jim Dine, journalist Jeremy Sigler works up the courage to share his theory of Dine’s understated and yet impressive success: “I call it the Jim Dine paradox—you are a forgotten artist that no one can forget. And even weirder, nobody can remember why they forgot you.” The double is just this sort of déjà vu—the experience you can’t remember why you forgot. And in the illogical logic of a forgotten remembrance, we can see that this is not new. We are not in the midst of a catastrophe. Being and not being, form and dissolution, living and always—always—dying at the same time: this is what it is to exist in a world that was never singular to begin with. A world where we are always at home. A world where that deepest intimacy is always just out of reach.
I am not myself today.
And I will never forget that I never was.