Epilogue: Dialogue
by Joseph O. Garrity and Philip S. Garrity
A chapter from Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 483.
JG:
Four faces gaze at me, side by side across two photographs, Polaroids snapped in a heat wave the year after we were born [Figure 19.1]. We are crouched in the backyard lawn at dusk, wearing only our diapers, hair slicked from the sprinkler spitting at the end of a hose. From our eyes, our four fiery blue eyes, beams the steady bewilderment of wild animals being observed, interrupted by onlookers. We appear remarkably similar, remarkably at ease, remarkably natural with one another. Studying the photos, I move between the faces, resting in each gaze, waiting for a spark of recognition to arise, for the veil of anonymity to lift. I experience the same phenomenon I always have in these early photos: I sense your quizzical expression, some essence beyond appearance call up to me. Then I move to the face beside yours, the one that by default is mine, realizing, in this case, that I can only find myself by process of elimination. Then I realize that in every case, in every sense, I am because you are. There was no me before you, no you before me. There was only our one at the same time, who was YaYa.
Until we were five, we didn’t use our given names. I called you “YaYa,” and you called me the same. We were YaYa. “YaYa” meant “you and me and we, all at once.” No one else referred to us this way, nor would we have responded — the name was ours alone, emerging from a proto-language that preceded, and almost certainly blocked, our uptake of English. Linguists call it “cryptophasia.” It was like the Yorùbá Às̝e̝, the “sacred unconscious energy with which spoken words arise… [and which] twins themselves embody.”[1]
Mom wrote her observations in our baby album, its puffy yellow cover emblazoned with HERE I AM:
When they were babies and Philip would cry for a toy Joseph had, Joseph would give the toy to Philip while making a squeaking sound (somewhere between a cat’s meow and a mouse noise). Eventually the sound became soothing for Philip to hear. Later when Philip would cry for Joseph’s toy, Joseph only needed to make “the sound” to stop Philip’s crying. Joseph would not need to give up the toy. I saw this strategy in action today when Philip wanted to keep the fishing rope to himself. Joseph made his squeaking sound and Philip said “OK” and they shared the rope.
The sound, loosely translated, meant: Remember, I give for you. Even as we assimilated English into our lexicon, YaYa remained. At four years old, helping Mom prepare breakfast, you asked me, “YaYa, why aren’t there any birds in these eggs?” I explained: “That’s another country that has birds in their eggs. Our country doesn’t have any.” Before our parents, before our older siblings, we were each other’s poor teachers. Our definitions, limits, boundaries were all determined by our committee of two, and were therefore porous, malleable, and subject to change. Because of our congruence, we tended to repeat, rather than learn from, our mistakes. At three years old we escaped onto the first-story roof from the window of our bedroom. Despite Mom’s repeated attempts to prevent us, we later summited the second story. Multiple times we had to be given ipecac to purge the medicine we binged in the hall closet. The hardwood floors of the kitchen had to be resurfaced not once, but twice — first, when we trampled the drying resin and received a hellacious warning from Mom, and later, when we trespassed again in order to report back to her that the floors really weren’t dangerous, “only sticky.” You were my terrible influence, and I was yours, but this grew into our greatest strength: boundless, leapfrogging curiosity. Taking one step further than the other, inventing and mutually defying boundaries, we mapped a vast territory. We asked foolish questions of our world and together, foolishly answered them. No single child could have deviated so far from common sense. We created and amplified our own rules, those foundational myths that were more convincing than anything that came afterward in our lives.
Entering kindergarten, our classmates quickly noticed our moniker, YaYa.
They didn’t understand that it was ours alone, but that simultaneously we had our other names, too, for them to identify us, if they could. I remember it was you who yielded to their teasing, telling me on the walk home from school one day that we had to stop saying “YaYa,” and make a hard switch to only our given names. We were five years old and I had never heard you say my name. You spoke it aloud then for the first time — “Jo-seph” — and the sound of it in my ear was cold, alien. For months, forming yours in my mouth took conscious effort — “Phil-ip” — like using my opposite hand to write. The feeling was something new, a distant sensation I would later name “grief.”
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PG and JG:
We are 25 years old and find ourselves again in an Ohio town originally called Millsville, purchased and renamed as Twinsburg in the early nineteenth century by renowned brothers. Moses and Aaron Wilcox were identical twins who married sisters, had nine children each, lived and worked together, held all property in common, fell ill of the same disease, and died within hours of each other on September 24, 1827. They were even buried together in the same grave. The interconnectedness of the Wilcoxes lives on in Twinsburg as a pilgrimage site for thousands of twins and other multiples from around the world who convene at the annual Twins Days Festival. [2] Like the ancient Yorùbá cities of Ilobu, Igbo Ora, and Ile-Ife, Twinsburg repeated their paradigmatic celebrations: “Cities that were traditionally founded or inhabited by twins not only collectively honor twins . . . but recount their founding myths and festivals and rituals associated with the town.”[3]
(Joe) Garrity, 2016. Photo by Teresa Castro. Jog Films.
We are embedded in the mile-long twin parade wearing matching vintage powder blue suits trimmed in blood red. A film crew follows us in the August swelter amid the thousands of other twin pairs, aiming cameras and microphones, lugging makeup kits and fresh costumes. The spectators lining the street notice this smaller spectacle within the larger one. They murmur: Are they famous? Will we be on TV? Or in a movie? They project a false reality onto the powder-blue twins, but the deception is mutual; shrouded in artifice, we play roles that are realer than either of us can fathom [Figure 19.2].
JG:
We are shooting a short film that I am writing and directing. I play “Jerry” and you play “Paul,” brothers who have attended the Twinsburg festival for as long as they can remember, first brought there in diapers by their parents. As young adults now living on opposite coasts, Jerry still clings to their childhood tradition, while Paul’s enthusiasm has waned. The film’s premise: this is the year they will confront the fact that the feeling is no longer mutual.
PG:
On the set, a meta-plot unfolds, blurring art and reality. I begin to take on features of my character, resisting the demands of your production the same way Paul resists Jerry’s festival. Toward the end of one long day of filming, I refuse to do any more takes, leaving the set and disappearing for several hours. I am pressure-testing the production and the disruptions exacerbate an already fragile set. The script is in flux as you rewrite dialogue — at night in the hotel, during the car ride to set, even between setups while the lights are being moved. Your distress mirrors Jerry’s, afraid that your show of unity may be falling apart.
We are filming the climactic fight scene. Paul has just sabotaged the final event of the festival, and Jerry erupts in the midday heat.
Jerry: “Why did you come?!”
Paul: “Because you’re still terrified of being alone!”
Jerry: “And you can’t be with people — what happened?”
Between tense takes, you pace with your arms folded, eyes fixed on the ground, diving deeper into Jerry. We reenter the frame to repeat the scene again and again. The crew looks on in strained silence as the emotions build with each successive take. I am agitated and concerned as I struggle to separate Jerry from Joe. My polyester suit is stifling in the humidity and I desperately want to step out of the scene, to say something to you, to ask if you are OK. But instead I remain silent as my character Paul continues to shout his lines.
JG:
This is where the filming ends, with the script unfinished, the story unresolved. Jerry and Paul shed their matching blood-red trimmed, powder blue suits, becoming Joe and Phil once more. In bitter silence, we leave Twinsburg and return to opposite coasts.
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PG:
A few years after we finished filming Twinsburg, when I was a graduate student in Boston and you were back in California continuing with filmmaking, I stumbled on a course in the catalogue with the subtitle of this volume: “Twins and Twinship in Mythology and Religion.” It was the last thing I expected to find at divinity school. Somehow, though, it seemed fitting that the topic of twinship might have a place among Christian mysticism, Buddhist philosophy, and Sufi poetry, the things that had drawn me to study theology and philosophy in the first place. To me our twinship had always seemed mysterious, defying easy analysis.
Despite being intrigued, I was reluctant to enroll. The complexities of filming Twinsburg and the turmoil that followed made me wary of retreading that terrain. Plus “twin studies” seemed more your thing than mine; you had immersed yourself in research for years leading up to the production. You would send me arcane books and articles on archetypal twin personalities and twin psychology: I browsed them with lukewarm interest. But here was a whole course that the universe had sent me like another book, giving me another chance to read it. With ambivalence, I agreed. Some part of me felt that I was doing it for you.
I knew you’d be thrilled to hear how, when I told Professor Patton about Twinsburg, she had the class watch it — and how surreal it was for me to witness a classroom full of students critically discussing its motifs and character arcs, drawing parallels between the film and the twin legends and sacred histories we were reading. How had our misadventures in filmmaking made their way into a Harvard classroom? It was the beginning of a clash of realms — of modern art and millennia-old traditions, of self-created fiction and eternal truth, colliding. Mythology, as I was learning, is the quintessential arena for this kind of collision. This resonated with another convergence I encountered at divinity school, between the transcendent realm of ideals and the immanent realm of my own experience. Esoteric mysteries and universal truths, enshrined in the spiritual traditions I venerated yet held at a safe distance from life’s entangled messiness, would gradually be subsumed into partial, finite realities. In search of wisdom figures like Christ and Buddha who could offer clear and absolute principles by which I could meaningfully live, I would instead find flawed, complicated characters in my daily path, hidden teachers who offered murky, harder lessons about love and life that more often challenged than consoled me. More than anyone, you were one of these hidden teachers.
In her introduction to Gemini and the Sacred, Patton asks this: “How are ‘real’ twins related to those of sacred history, if they are in fact at all?” We set out to address this question, drawing on our own experience as identical twins. As we read the myths chronicled here, separated at times by thousands of miles, I came to see how the light of religion and mythology could illumine the subtleties and particularities of our dynamic — the interchange of consonance and dissonance, intimacy and alienation, recognition and non-recognition — which often felt capricious and beyond our control or understanding. But writing this Epilogue was not a simple matter of listing what about being “real” twins was illumined by the mythology of twinship. Like Twinsburg, even this project was far more fraught than we anticipated. I now recognize a certain seasonality in those movements of resonance and dissonance, a natural ebb and flow that situates us in a broader pattern of human experience spanning places, cultures, and histories. I see clearly that at the root of our lived experience as twins — the narratives about twins that we’ve encountered outside ourselves, as well as those we’ve created from within — is something eerie and recurrent. “That there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one” is what Joseph Campbell called “the basic theme of all mythology.”[4]
JG:
We tried for a long time to “co-write” this piece in a ghostly shared voice, congealing our perspectives into an omniscient narrator that sounded exactly like neither of us. Perhaps it sounded like whoever our “singleton” might have been, had our zygote not divided to form us as distinct people, what they call “identical” twins. In this voice we attempted to relate each of our experiences and the personal myth enacted in our short film Twinsburg, as well as the broader legacy of twin myth this anthology divulges, echoing up from antiquity so many of the dynamics we instinctually recognize but have struggled in the past to articulate. The result was an amalgamation I eventually couldn’t stomach, as I tried in successive attempts to make clear to you, eventually by yelling through the phone from a street corner in Mexico City. It’s funny and sad how a project revisiting this complicated past could transport us right back to that time — but this is the story of our condition, funny and sad, tragic and absurd, what many wish in ignorance that they had, too. You are my living biography, and I am yours, for better or worse.
PG:
During the year after college I lived in Cusco, Peru, the oldest city in the Americas and the seat of the Incan empire a thousand years earlier. I would walk the narrow, cobbled streets, passing the great Spanish cathedrals on my way to work. As elaborate as the churches were with their towering spires, the foundations upon which they stood were even more impressive. The massive stones had been carved and fitted so precisely that mortar was unnecessary. They were the remnants of Incan temples upon which the Spanish had built their churches — one god supplanted by another in a brutally literal display of cultural and religious dominance. I would see a Quechuan woman standing by the church, dressed in traditional garb with a llama in tow, offering to take photos with tourists for a fee. When dusk would fall she would walk into the foothills, headed to some outlying village, to the descendants of those who had built the foundations of this place.
Sometime during that year I learned that the term “Yaya” in Quechua translates as “wise one,” “elder,” or “shaman.” The translation seemed to be more than coincidental. I imagined us as five-year-old boys discreetly invoking our sacred title, guarding the mystery from the uninitiated, from the “civilizing” forces that pressed in from all sides. Olúpònà explains how cultural factors gradually eclipsed the Ibeji’s traditional kingly names of Táyéwò and Ké̝ hìndé to fall out of use in Yorùbá society, citing a campaign
against these names “in an effort to normalize and desacralize twins.”[5]
Ultimately, we ourselves succumbed to a similar pressure — whether real or perceived — to assimilate to a culture of individual people with individual names, to supplant the shamanic YaYa with our Christian names. Nearly three decades later, I wonder how my five-year-old self came to that decision, what sort of logic framed the dilemma in such starkly binary terms: either remain in our private world and be ostracized from the outside world, or sacrifice the intimacy of YaYa in return for integration with wider society. Like the Yorùbá Ibeji and the Vodou Marasa who act as liminal figures mediating between the realm of social life and the realm of wilderness, or the human and the spirit realm, as YaYa we seemed to be standing on our own threshold between two worlds.[6] YaYa was wild and undomesticated, primordial, while “Philip and Joseph” were tame and orderly, domesticated and above all, distinguishable.
Could I have made another calculus, one in which the value of our twinned
intimacy outweighed any loss of connection with the wider group? Might I have then been strong enough to ignore their mocking, to resist the colonizing power of individualism? Even so, how long would that have lasted? When would have been an “appropriate” time to start using our given names with each other? This speaks to a fundamental dilemma: Was the “natural” course to maintain a fused identity and the “unnatural” one to individuate — or vice versa? Did I give into fear when we were five, and tarnish some sacred bond? Did I break our unity for the sake of acceptance by the wider world? Or did we simply outgrow a juvenile phase as we rightly should — indeed, must have?
Someone told me recently that motivations are never pure; they are alloys of different emotions. Perhaps the two countervailing forces — one toward convergence and the other toward divergence — were both natural. Just as there was a desire to merge with the wider group, evidenced by the retiring of YaYa, there was another desire to affirm the anomaly of our twinship. But perhaps both were sourced in a deeper need to feel accepted, to feel connected to something larger. While that need was at first met within our dyad, increasingly we looked beyond it to the attention and special treatment we received from others. After all, we wielded a unique power, even if in our earliest years we weren’t aware of it.
I have hazy memories of us as three-year-olds venturing down the street to our neighbors’ house, standing on their front porch and alternately parroting “cookie, cookie” until they opened the door with those cookies. Yorùbá Ibeji traveled “from house to house and place to place, dancing the twin dance and collecting gifts.”[7] Our “dance” was not rehearsed or premeditated; it was driven by a simple desire shared by all children: to reach out to the world and taste it. Had we been not two children but one, we would likely have had neither the courage to venture away from home nor the charm to endear our neighbors. It was they, not we, who saw it as a dance.
Mom’s friend saw it that way, too. She worked for a talent agency and encouraged Mom, against her reservations, to audition us for commercials around age four. Identical twins were highly sought after in film and television, as labor laws limited child actors to work no more than four hours per day; with twins playing the same role, production could go for twice as long. We were unaware of this economy, the commodification of twins to achieve greater productivity. To us, the auditions were just adventures in San Francisco where we would go into brightly lit rooms and strangers would tell us to play with a toy or put on socks or eat some pork product and parrot back phrases in tandem. It’s delicious! Mom got us out of the business before we were old enough to understand that what had been for sale was us.
The line between unsolicited and solicited attention is a subtle one. A kind of Pavlovian response can develop to others’ attention; the feeding produces a hunger for more of the attention even if unsought in the first place. Moving into elementary school, we came to learn twin tropes and stereotypes, playing into other people’s intrigues and indulging their perennial questions about telepathic powers, shared pain, and synchronous dreams. We developed gimmicks like the “word game,” reciting in unison a seemingly random list of words to the amazement of our peers; the sleight was that we had memorized them beforehand. Obeng writes of orphaned twins in Ghana who “develop their mystique to fend for themselves.”[8] While never in dire straits, we, too, developed our mystique half-consciously, blending the authentic and the artificial to put on a show in exchange for social sustenance.
JG:
Strangely, we grew up next door to a family with identical twin boys our same age. We weren’t the best of friends with them — our four parents didn’t get along well — but what was odd was that I didn’t sense that we were all, collectively, twins. The neighboring boys were fiercely competitive with one another, their arguments often erupting into violent assaults. You and I were mostly averse to confrontation, inclined to make truces and return swiftly to cooperation. Perhaps the difference was related to the deliberate ambiguity of the neighbor twins’ seniority. They defended their mother’s outlandish claim that neither one was older, that they had been born at the exact same time.[9] Though it couldn’t be disproven, I remember struggling to imagine the anatomical scenario.
The fact was that both pairs of look-alike brothers were told many things about who we were as twins. Just like our given names, the explanations and lore of our twinship were just that — given, prescribed by outsiders. Yes, I understood that we were seen differently than other children, but only by being largely unseen as individuals. The casual observer couldn’t or wouldn’t see past our veil of sameness, and even some relatives were prone to mistaking us for one another. To allay their embarrassment, we offered up to them our spiel of the usual cues, somehow always stemming from you: your ears stuck out more, you had a brown birthmark in your right eye, and beneath that, a scar from a leap onto a coffee table when we were two. By default, I was the other one, the blank slate. From within our twinship, the partial anonymity became routine. I could blend into our two-ness, fade to the background when it suited me, and when it didn’t, I could try — often in vain — to speak out.
I have to trust all those who have told us we are alike, because I am largely blind to it. Even in the doubled confusion of our earliest photos, it isn’t that I see my likeness in you; it’s that before a certain age, I simply disappear among the two faces. I study the expressions, read the gestures, and always discover — without fail — your face first. Out from that fog of uncertainty, the ambiguous face that remains, I adopt as myself.
Likewise, I have to trust the doctor who declared me three minutes older than you (unless of course a fateful “twinversion” had occurred, a permanent swap). Growing up I never intuitively sensed my 180-second seniority over you, regardless of that trivial fact being ingrained in me through sheer repetition of the most inane of all questions asked of twins: “Who’s older?” To be honest, I often felt you were the older one, more capable and pragmatic, more ruthless. At times I was quietly thankful that by mere minutes, in this one department, I had bested you. I sometimes imagined what it would have been like had you held the title of first-born. You might have lorded it over me, not heeded my cat-mouse sound of compassion. I was oddly comforted to hold the title, to show to you that a slightly older brother could defer to his younger, could demonstrate forgiveness. The universal names applied to first-born and second-born twins of the Yorùbá, Táyéwò and Kęhìndé, simplify the dilemma, and the arrangement resonates with me: as Olúpònà writes, the first-born serves the second-born, is sent out by her or him into the world “on an errand,” to report on it. That I arrived first, ounces lighter than you and banged-up in the journey — my nose cartilage bent, my ankles turned inward — seems to prove that you sent me on ahead as scout, taking one for the team. From a young age we seemed to fit this model: while I would venture out to test the waters among others, I often allowed you to navigate the waters among us.
On rare occasions I can see what they see, catching a glimpse of me in your image: at an odd angle, in a far mirror, when you wear my clothing, in low lighting, when you are dancing. In these passing moments, I suddenly get it, and just as suddenly, I don’t again. Our vacillation between recognition and non-recognition is found among the Lwa: “As a divided unity, the Marasa are their own mirror image; thus, they stand on both sides of the cosmic mirror, making them uniquely capable of sonde miwa (fathoming the mirror) simultaneously from both sides.”[10] All our lives we have been fathoming the mirror, its reflections and distortions.
PG:
There is an image seared in my memory: I see you on your knees, your face contorted and howling at the ground as you clutch the carpet with your fists. I am startled by the intensity of the white-hot rage and sorrow that has engulfed you. Mom has just told us that she put the house on the market again, despite promising us a few months earlier that we would stay in our hometown. Someone has bought it and we will be moving within a few weeks. It is the climactic end to several years of dislocation that had begun as small tremors with our parents arguing, with Dad moving out and in and back out again. Nearly all of my memory of that time — the separation, the divorce, the move — is fused with that one visual: a ten-year-old boy on the floor, shaking from the pain of being uprooted and, even worse, betrayed. I’m sure I was crying, too, but I can’t remember. As I search for my own feeling, all I find is a reflection of yours.
The move was more than a loss of place; it was a loss of the land from which YaYa had emerged. Grim writes of “ecological imaginaries” of Native American cultures, which he describes as “the deep, attractor relationships between place and people that activate the affective, cognitive, and creative forces at the heart of cultural life.”[11] An integral part of myth-making is land-claiming by which “an indifferent landscape is transubstantiated, turned into an icon, and the elementary idea is established in a local habitation.”[12] The fluidity and intimacy of our connection as twins seemed fused — appropriately, entangled — with our relationship to the natural environment of 1870 Tanglewood Way. There was the bed of deep green ivy in the side yard that ran up the walls of the house, the trees on the other side that we scaled like the twin e̝dun (colobus monkeys) of the Yorùbá, the forts we would build out back from logs and branches and planks from an old fence, the two great walnut trees towering over the front yard, standing like sentinels keeping guard. Every autumn they would blanket the lawn with a mosaic of brown, red, and yellow — a sea of color in which we buried ourselves. We didn’t need toys. We had our hands, our imagination, the trees, and each other. In the weeks before we moved, the realtors had one of the walnut trees cut down, claiming it was diseased. The yard looked bare, unbalanced. “When the homelands of indigenous peoples are literally cut down or mined away . . . the whole possibility of imaging oneself and one’s community in place and in words is fragmented and subverted.”[13] The spirit of YaYa stayed buried in the land we would soon leave.
I helped Mom look for houses near Sacramento where she had found a new job, while you opted out in protest. You always seemed more embittered by the experience, more hung up about letting go and moving on. Our three older siblings would go in separate directions: one to college, another to live with a family friend, and the third to live with Dad. You and I would go with Mom to a one-story, cookie-cutter house with a barren backyard of dirt. A year earlier we had been a family of seven; now we were scattered across hundreds of miles of dusty California farmland.
JG:
From our earliest experiments with the family camcorder, stopping and rewinding the tape to get the moment right, we were natural stand-ins for one another. The boundaries between actor, writer, and director were porous, and ultimately the subject was always the same: exploring our strangely conjoined humor, our congenital curiosity that propelled ideas into action. When Mom gave us a rudimentary digital camera with its own editing software in junior high school, our cinematic universe exploded. Our freewheeling creations proliferated with sound effects and stock music, ricocheting across genres from action to horror, commercial parody to stop-motion fantasy, many with cameos by Peter, our runty, surly dachshund.
In the classroom we discovered another creative pursuit, developing a mutual interest in biology, specifically the unit on genetics. We learned about the genetic code that united all living organisms, distinguishing one from another through tiny mutations carried over generations. Every once in a while, that code would be repeated in a rare, but persistent, phenomenon: identical twinning, the unexplained splitting of a days-old zygote. Rarer still, we learned, we were mirror image twins — opposite-handed, our hair whorling in reverse directions. We were electrified by these insights into our strange origins. For the first time we were learning about ourselves in absolute terms, an empiricism that was as alluring as it was misleading. There was knowledge there, secrets we believed could tell us who we were, and we were hungry for them.
PG:
Of Achilles and Patroklos, the warrior and his sacrificial substitute whose name means “healer” (therapōn), Gregory Nagy highlights “an uncanny mix of intimacy and alienation that only twins will ever truly understand.”[14] As children, everything in our lives had been public domain to one another. Only with adolescence did our social landscape begin to fragment as increasingly large tracts of our world became sequestered into private realms, hidden from each other’s sight. Our social circles began to diverge ever so slightly and romantic interests were kept hidden from the other. Perhaps, as might have been true for our older siblings, Catholic shame muted us, but I suspect that the silence between us was deeper than theirs. The price of the new intimacy we found in relationships seemed to be the intimacy we had once shared.
As twins, I suspect, we may have felt the burden of being “models of enhanced human interaction and communication.”[15] There was a painful mismatch between our reality and the expectations the world had about us being symbiotic best friends. Vijaya Nagarajan wonders about the dissonance felt by devout Hindu Indian-American parents between the harmonious portrayal of Lava and Kusa and the more fraught dynamics of their own twin children.16 It may be that this very ideal of a sublime connection inevitably brings with it the double of disillusionment, and the risk of an even steeper fall into disconnection and discord. Occasionally I would confide in Mom about my darker feelings, my melancholy, and my romantic woes. She would gently encourage me to talk to you about it, hinting that you, too, had revealed to her much the same sentiments. It would be years later when we would finally would tread into those sequestered realms. Until then, we would keep our silence.
Later in high school I would scold you for making mistakes during lacrosse practice. Under helmets and pads, the coaches couldn’t tell us apart. I remember shouting at you after practice — “You’re making me look bad!” — and demanding that you work harder and get better. Of course, I made mistakes too, and yet you didn’t seem to complain. I was channeling a sense of indignation at the fact that my identity was tied so inextricably with yours — that your weaknesses could be my own.
And then there were times we got into real fights. We would punch each other in alternating succession with increasing force. It was as if we were fencing — you would attack as I retreated, I would attack as you retreated. But then there would be a moment, perhaps when the blows got too hard, when one of us would say the other’s name in some sort of tone or frequency — maybe like that toddler squeak. It was like a whistle that indicated we had crossed a line and needed to stop. The other, who would have won, had to concede, because the plea was earnest, irrefutable. In an instant, we would lower our fists and walk away.
Nearing graduation, we found ourselves retreading these territorial disputes more frequently. In the heat of it all, I insisted that we attend separate colleges. I knew you were hurt, but too proud to say it. I felt I needed to live on my own, to be my own person for the first time in my life.
JG:
Once we separated for college, I staved off loneliness by writing loose scripts for us to shoot on holiday breaks, enlisting our high school friends to act in the supporting roles. I could direct you like myself, because in our lifetime together I had memorized your every sound and gesture. You were capable of everything I was, and more.
Late in college, I used the media lab to digitize our family’s earliest home videos, from a time before we moved behind the camera, when we were still peering into the lens from walkers and playpens. Watching us on the monitor, I could see our resemblance the way others did, how strikingly similar the infant faces were, often uncertain which belonged to me. I remembered Mom describing a recurring nightmare she had in the months after we were born: entering the nursery, she would discover two truly identical babies, no longer able to distinguish them. As I watched the tapes copy over, her nightmare didn’t seem so surreal. Could we have been mistaken in infancy, one for another — permanently? I scoffed at the idea. After a lifetime of minor identity swaps, many of which we either instigated or exploited, what would a major one even mean? Probably nothing. But the question nagged, the laugh caught in my throat, and I entertained conspiracy theory.
In our last year of college, I cast you in a short film, Twinversion, in which future versions of ourselves discover that they had been switched at birth. By bizarre legal mandate, our hapless characters are forced to trade identities as adults — Joe becomes Phil, Phil becomes Joe. Throughout the deadpan mockumentary I scattered the home video footage, those two ambiguous faces searching in the lens as our future selves searched back, looking in vain for the fateful moment where it all went wrong. It was moronic. It was oddly prescient.
With the short film completed, the “twinversion” premise lingered in my mind, a satirical, but sobering, question of our identities. I wanted to take the idea further, bring it to a bigger stage. Where could we raise the alarm on this hidden (fictious) epidemic?
I searched online for twin conventions and discovered one almost immediately: Twinsburg, Ohio, a city founded by twins who lived and died together, and home to the annual Twins Days Festival, the world’s largest gathering of multiples. Twinsburg would be our most ambitious project yet. I bought plane tickets from our opposite coasts to reunite us in Cleveland. Tepidly, you obliged. Approaching each other in the airport, as was the custom, we exchanged bashful smiles and a stiff hug. Introductions were always unnatural to us — we’d never had one to begin with.
In the city of Ondo, Jacob Olúpo̝ nà — his middle name forever Kęhìndé even though Isaac Táyéwò was long dead — reports, “Everywhere I turned during the three-day celebrations I saw twins — twins of various ages, identical twins, fraternal twins both of the same and opposite genders — twins, twins, twins!”p17] There is a word we first heard in Twinsburg, Ohio: singleton. You laughed at how coarse the term sounded, like a slur — and in a way, it was. A pejorative for those born with individuality, for whom the experience of being twinned could never be truly fathomed. We heard it often in the banter of the festivalgoers, dressed in matching outfits: “Singletons would never understand.” The truth was, I didn’t understand either, and at this stage, I felt closer to a singleton than a twin. Among the spectacle of the Twins Days Festival, I didn’t sense I had found my people; instead I felt the alienation of someone who wasn’t twin enough, not card-carrying or flag-waving, the kind who never knew how to answer the benign question, “Are you close?” In reply, my mind always ricocheted in defense: did they mean, could we be closer? Or, should we be? I had internalized the belief projected onto us since we were infants, that we were automatically and forever united, and that anything less would be an
aberration.
PG:
After college, I didn’t come home. There was some guilt around that, as if I was meant to rectify my hasty and rash decision to part ways with you after high school. I had assumed I would move closer to home, perhaps to the Bay Area where you had been all that time. Instead, I went even further away, to volunteer doing humanitarian relief work in Peru for a year before moving to Boston to work for a global health nonprofit. My immersion in efforts to alleviate poverty and disease led me into deeply existential and spiritual questions about suffering, hope, and God. The vulnerability I saw around me was reflected back at me, showing me that I, too, was implicated in the forces of disease and chaos that I confidently thought I controlled. As Nietszche warned, I had been gazing into the abyss, and now the abyss was gazing into me.
It was an intensely solitary journey living on my own the following year in Boston, deluged in spiritual and philosophical reading, struggling to find answers to help assuage the anxiety that would well up and overtake me. I would sporadically reach out to our family in fits of existential angst, the depths of which I couldn’t seem to communicate. I remember I called you once, desperately trying to articulate the questions that amazed and tormented me. In response, I heard mostly stunned silence.
A deeper problem would reveal itself: a rare and aggressive bone cancer had been developing in my right leg. In the wake of the diagnosis — and the news that I would need to immediately start an intensive, year-long regimen of chemotherapy and surgery — I might have expected the mental and spiritual anguish that had plagued me for the past year to ratchet up; strangely, the cancer had the opposite effect. Instead of terror, I felt a profound kind of assurance, an unshakeable trust that things would be alright regardless of how the illness unfolded. As difficult as it had been to articulate the mysterious existential crisis of the past year, harder still to communicate was the sense of awe and peace following the diagnosis.
JG:
Lying in the radiology room across the country from you, I secretly hoped for the technicians to call up in my bones whatever had been found in yours, to make us identical again. You had called me on my lunch break earlier that week. The knee pain you noticed after a run was something more. In a routine X-ray at a sports clinic, the technician had discovered a lemon-sized mass at the end of your right femur. A biopsy confirmed its malignancy: stage II osteosarcoma, six months old, no signs of metastasis. On the call I remained calm, calculated, listening to you describe the uncertainties, asking you pointed questions, hanging up and returning to work. I made an appointment for my own scans. I was tranquil as the technician left the room, the machine imaging my body in successive bursts. If I were sick and doomed, I thought, then we would do as we always had done: endure whatever came together. The alternative was unthinkable, standing by as you endured a gauntlet alone, with the potential of total loss. The radiologist returned with my results — clear — and that’s when it hit me, the deferred disbelief, panic, despair.
We were on opposite sides of it now.
My well-being was always ritually linked with yours, conditioned upon it. As a child I vaguely understood that as long as you were OK, I would be, too. In the top bunk at night, alongside the other bedtime prayers, I would add something like, “and keep Philip safe.” Watching you suffer was in some ways more visceral to me than my own discomfort, more unbearable. Perhaps it was the anxiety of being helpless to alleviate your distress. The cat-sound Mom had observed had its limits. Homer’s tale of Patroklos sacrificing himself in battle as the therapōn of Achilles rings true. I was more comfortable with the idea of this substitution into your role than playing my own as helpless spectator. Leaving the radiology room that day, a disk of grainy images in hand, my lifetime of braiding our fates together began to unravel.
PG:
That year of chemotherapy is mostly a blur to me now. I remember you coming to visit me in Boston a few times, slouching into a chair across from my hospital bed. You were mostly silent. We would exchange some sarcastic banter or stumble into petty arguments. I knew that you were having a hard time, but I didn’t have the energy or patience to be the spillway for your bottled feelings. I felt mostly aggravated by your persistent melancholy and passive aggression, the negative energy you seemed to bring into the hospital room. It was hard for me to sympathize with your struggle since it seemed to be smothering my own.
The chasm that had separated us during my year of spiritual angst divided us again; only now, I was on the side of some incommunicable hope while you were stranded in a private despair. And yet that hope was fragile, threatened by that despair. There was something about your grimace that reflected back to me a hollowness to my supposed contentment. Here was the ten-year-old boy howling on the carpet, mirroring back pain I had buried deep, that I couldn’t — or refused — to feel.
Nearly a year later, when I finished treatment and had returned to good health, I went to Ireland to spend a summer on my own before the start of divinity school, taking time to reflect on the previous years of upheaval and healing. It was deliberately solitary — a chance to get off the grid, to slow down, and to sift through my experiences in the hopes of writing a spiritual memoir. After a year of being so utterly dependent on others — to eat, to bathe, to walk — venturing into a new country with only a hiking backpack was a radical assertion of self-sufficiency, of my hard-won independence.
I remember when your calls came, like the tug of a leash. You were pressing me to wrap up my travels by early August. You had been getting things in place for us to return to Twinsburg and film once more, this time with a crew and a script and budget. This was the year to do it, you said. But I demurred, saying I couldn’t promise I’d be able to make it this year. To me, Twinsburg was just another video project, an inconsequential lark — like the homespun videos we had made as teenagers with the family camcorder. Beneath my apathy was annoyance. Your continued fixation on our twinship seemed worn-out and pathetic, like our gimmicks to impress our classmates. But I also sensed, to you, my time away in Ireland was just another vacation, not a vital pilgrimage of sorts. You didn’t seem to care that I was working on my own project, one whose creation didn’t depend on you. I wished that yours didn’t depend on me, but I knew it did — your insistence told me as much — so I gave in.
A few days before I would fly from Ireland to Ohio to begin filming, I had a dream:
You and I are driving to meet friends for lunch. I’m sitting in the passenger seat as you drive, your face rigid and expressionless. As we approach the restaurant, you keep passing open parking spaces, as if ignoring them on purpose. I point out several spaces but you don’t respond. Exasperated, I say, “Pull over the car. Clearly you’re not capable of doing this.” You stop the car in the middle of the road and I walk around to the driver’s side door. You just sit there, staring out the windshield. I try pulling you out of the car, but you won’t budge. I then reach into the backseat and retrieve a green, cloth-bound book. It is an anthology of Shakespeare’s plays we had at home as children. It doesn’t belong to you, but you have claimed it like one of the many family albums or keepsakes that you have rummaged through over the years. I am holding the book hostage, trying to lure you out of the car when you suddenly pull out a brown book with gold-lined pages which I recognize as my Bible. I freeze, speaking slowly. “Don’t…” You suddenly hurl it out the window and down into a deep gulch beside the road. After a moment of shock, I scream at you to get it. The decline is too steep for me to retrieve it myself, as my leg is post-surgery. You seem to understand my outrage and my physical limitations and you begrudgingly get out of the car and climb down into the gulch to retrieve the Bible. There is a man on the far side who is approaching through the trees, so I tell you to hurry up. Then the dream ends.
JG:
The farcical comedy that had been gestating since our first trip to Ohio was
steadily transforming itself during your cancer. The mockumentary about Phil and Joe championing a meaningless cause became the dramatic comedy of Jerry and Paul learning to articulate a long-buried grief. While Jerry contended with shedding his idealized twin identity, Paul accepted his desire for individuality. Each of these characters, I told you, was a part of me. But I needed your help to enact the myth.
The Gospel of Thomas was named for the Christian apostle who was given another epithet, Didymos, meaning simply “twin”: Jesus says to his twin brother Thomas that to enter the kingdom we must become a “single or solitary one.” To do this, one must make the one two, and the two one again — make peace with his otherness, with the strange truth that he is not simply one self. Yet one must also remain whole, encompassing his duality. This was the other secret aim of Twinsburg: to reconcile the one and the two, the half and the whole — the division within each of us, twin or singleton. We had to root out our assumptions about who we were as two in order to redefine what being someone, anyone, meant.
PG:
I arrived in Ohio, barreling onto the set with reckless abandon. Like Junajpu, the fiery “overzealous trickster” of the Popol Wuj, both my character Paul and I interchanged continually, upending the scripted order both on and off the set. “It’s a game,” Paul says derisively of Jerry’s ritual in Twinsburg. During a scene in which Paul is meant to be tipsy, you caught me sneaking drinks between takes with another actor. I knew it was a cardinal rule not to drink on set, lest it slow production, and I argued that it was to get into character. Really it was to break free of the tedium of the shooting schedule. You scolded me and I laughed, goading you to go ahead and fire me. I was chafing at the constraints of a production in which I was an integral but unwilling participant.
You continued tuning the dialogue to our dynamic darkening in real time — a mirror of life in art, the unresolved tensions between us coloring the longing and anguish you wrote into Jerry, and the apathy and hostility emerging in Paul. As the shoot went on, I began weighing in on the script, deciding what was authentic or inauthentic to Paul’s character, and let you know with increasing fervor: Paul’s love interest Nancy was too thinly developed; his character arc was stunted; the dramatic lows and comedic highs of the story were out of proportion. For years you had encouraged my input into your projects, but I had demurred; now you were suddenly overwhelmed by my aggressive attempts to reshape the script and set.
JG:
We each had our stories to tell. On the car ride to the Cleveland airport after we had wrapped filming, we argued loudly, hurling grievances at one another. I said you had deliberately hindered an already stressful production. You said I had handcuffed you, manipulated you, inviting everyone involved to act in my public therapy. You reminded me that I had mentioned your cancer as part of a fundraising appeal in pre-production. You said it wasn’t my story to tell. “Well, this is my cancer story,” I said.
In the weeks following the film shooting, we hardly spoke. Our attempts at
conversation devolved quickly into impasse and more silence. One night, as the argument strayed far beyond Twinsburg, you told me you wished I had better controlled my emotions during your cancer treatment. You said my grief wasn’t helpful, and that you would have been better off without me there. Something shifted then, a final piece clicked into place, because as I left the call, I felt ready to let you go. To let everything go. I looked up late night bus routes to the Golden Gate Bridge.
I stayed awake, made deals with myself, waiting for it to pass. It broke like a fever in the morning, thinking of Dad.
PG:
“I don’t know how you spent so many nights in a place like this,” you said. You spoke from the darkness, an eye mask covering your face. The hospital room was dim, with only the fluorescent hallway light breaking in at the edges of the drawn curtain. I sat at the side of your bed in a plastic chair.
“I would have just been a hollow shell,” you said.
I could hear the depression in your voice. You pulled the eye mask up to your forehead and some of the light caught your face. I had never seen you look so old. Your eyes were empty, deadened. You didn’t look like my twin. It struck me then, the weight of all the years that we had lived apart, the time and circumstance that had carved us, imperceptibly, glacially, into different people.
It had been six months since our argument on the phone that had pushed you nearly over the edge. You told me about it a week later, in the middle of another knock-down, drag-out fight over the phone. I was laying into you about something when you interjected with some kind of whimper, maybe something like that old sound. Or maybe your voice cracked. It forced a pause, and in the silence you told me. I thought we were in a wrestling match. I didn’t realize how close we were to the edge of the abyss — of absolute alienation and mortal disconnection.
I had moved back to the Bay Area for the summer for a hospital chaplaincy
internship, in large part to be closer to you. Earlier that night I had been at a bar in San Francisco when I got a call from Mom telling me to get to Kaiser Oakland. You were having a suicidal episode, believing that nearly everything around you was a weapon. When I arrived you were in a bed in the ER, trying to self-calm in the dark. Sitting beside you, I felt helpless knowing that you might succumb to something far beyond my control. It struck me that you had sat in this same kind of chair, looking across another hospital bed at a brother you hardly recognized, one who might slip away. Even now, the mirroring is hard to fathom. But this is where mythology becomes useful, when the invisible world can break into the visible one.
Of the Marasa, McGee says, “Should one die before the other, it imperils the life of the still-living twin, who may be pulled to the other side to restore the balance of the pair.”[18] I see us now tethered to one another, oscillating in alternating motion, following the same trajectory, just out of sync. I venture into the underworld of chaos in the shantytowns of Peru, spiraling into my own existential crisis that manifests in my body as cancer. As I mirror your mortality back to you, you descend into the underworld of chaos, which manifests in your mind as suicidal depression. Maybe it was your desire to unite with me that, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, pulled you down into the lethal realm from which you had initially been denied when the radiologist failed to make us identical again. Or maybe it was the universe’s intolerance of imbalance, of the dangerous instability that ensues when life circumstances treat twins differently. In Vodou, “ritual propitiation” is needed to restore the balance of the pair. Was this ours?
Perhaps your creation of Twinsburg, all of your archaeology into old family videos and memorabilia, was your preemptive creation of an Ère Ìbejì or a plat Marasa, in case you lost me. Perhaps you believed that this transformation of pain into art would conjure healing, like the Diné Stricken Twins, whose weeping turned into a song affirming their restoration to health. Maybe that’s what provoked the resistance in me and the turmoil between us, particularly in the wake of cancer: you seemed to be eulogizing me before I was gone. And perhaps it stoked a death anxiety that was smoldering even before cancer. I wonder if I unconsciously equated “unity” with “death,” with the annihilation of the self as it merges with another. Maybe “I” didn’t want to disappear inside “us.”
Between two who are entangled, as twins must always be, what looks like conflict can actually be love. There is a courtship ritual among eagles called a “talon lock” or “death spiral” in which they interlace their talons mid-air and spiral chaotically to the ground, letting go at the last moment. An act of seeming struggle and mutual destruction is rather a stunning display of intimacy. With us, it’s often hard to sense the love that abides beneath the strife and silence that have often littered the surface of our relationship. But others see it, even when we don’t. I think of Mom’s deep intuition as a young mother that each of us would have had a harder time losing our twin brother than losing her.
There’s something terrible about that kind of love. Like a magnet, it’s both attractive and repulsive. It explains your pull toward unity and my push toward independence. I resisted the entanglement and the vulnerability that comes with having an aspect of my identity outside of my control, like having my heart go walking around outside my body. It is why I insisted we retire YaYa, why I scolded you on the lacrosse field, why I demanded we go to different colleges. The vulnerability persisted through the cancer experience, and beyond it. While holed up in my hermitage in Ireland, I asked Why do you need me for Twinsburg? But there was a deeper question beneath that: Why do you need me in order to tell your story? And beneath that, one that touched bedrock: Why do you need me?
It is a question meant not really for you, but for the universe or God or whomever wove us together as two-in-one, whomever stitched us into the fabric of everything and everyone else. I pull at the threads to free myself, insistent on finding security in selfhood, safety in self-sufficiency, but find it only unravels us both. Your downfall could be mine, and mine yours.
JG:
Editing the film each night after work, eventually I reached the part I had
been long avoiding: the fight scene. Months had passed since the filming in Ohio ended, yet it still made me queasy to watch the footage from that scene, to relive how raw and explosive we were. Filming the moment had been hard enough, but to have to sift through take after take in order to assemble the scene overwhelmed me. It was too much to enter that moment again on loop, watching myself explode in tears that I knew were all too real — real anger, real grief at having you almost disappear from me. If I was going to complete the film, I needed some separation. As a sort of optical sleight of hand, I tried applying a flop effect across the footage, flipping left and right. For most images without clear giveaways (like an “F” facing the wrong way), a flop effect can be difficult to discern. The slight asymmetries in the face, however, give the subject a subtle alteration, recognizable as themselves but somehow distorted. With us, the result was transfixing — we appeared less like ourselves and more like each other. For the first time, I could see myself in you, and you in me. The mirroring solved my hang-up, and now I could cut the scene with a degree of objectivity, tune it to make the conflict of Jerry and Paul impactful. In the finished film, I decided to leave the fight scene flopped, feeling the slightly disorienting effect was merited. No one ever seemed to notice the change. Did you?
PG:
There is something extraordinary about identical twins, what Nagarajan describes as “a sense of supernatural ‘abundance.’”[19] We had lived this. But reading the chapters of Gemini and the Sacred has caused me to ask whether the myth of our twinship had become too grandiose. We had created — or bought into — the idea of ourselves as members of a priestly or royal class set apart from and above singletons, like Yorùbá ibeji, “surrounded by an aura of sacredness.”[20] We had built a religion around that primal, mystical unity, believing more in the structure than the substance: a vast cathedral around an oasis, a wellspring that had once surged but had since dried up. The plaques on the wall told its story. We greeted the guests who strolled by, curious, peering in. “This must be a holy place,” they would say. “Yes, quite holy,” we would say. But they would leave feeling as parched as we were.
We are left now to face the potential hollowness of our special bond, calling everything into question. We are drawn back to our origin, to the spark of creation. What if the dawning event of identical twins — of one zygote becoming two — is as ordinary as any other cellular division? What if we are as alone and random as everyone else? What if, in the final analysis, all are singletons?
Perhaps these doubts don’t erase the mystery, but release it beyond the confines of a self-satisfied identity, destabilizing the way we view all other cellular events as merely ordinary. The spark of mystery is there within each: the fusion of two gametes to become one zygote, the differentiation of one pluripotent stem cell into any number of cell types, the division of one skin cell into two. The mystery expands, permeating all facets of reality, “transubstantiating an indifferent landscape”[21] into something supernatural. Martin Luther wrote, “If you could truly understand a grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.” In the Popol Wuj, as Vincent Stanzione notes, a single maize kernel symbolizing the skull of the First Fathers germinates into all of creation, into the maizeland. The apparent simplicity of a seed reveals an elegant complexity that would enrapture or even rupture the mind if only we could “truly understand.”
The boundaries between the miraculous and mundane, extraordinary and ordinary, twin and singleton become porous. The Gospel of Thomas moves beyond binaries to a place of non-duality where movement and repose paradoxically coexist. This is what is so scandalous about the secret gnosis that Jesus imparts to the disciple Thomas when he says, “I am you.” But it is not a simplistic equation of the two; with the unus-ambo, duality is not subsumed by the unity.[22] Otherness and non-recognition are still honored. When Jesus asks his disciples to tell him who he is like, Thomas says he is “wholly incapable of saying whom you are like” (§13) and Jesus commends this response. Admitting the other’s ineffability shows the depth of one’s intimate knowledge of him.
JG:
We stumbled our way into this world foraging for words and their meanings, scouting the territory beyond our nation of two for larger and more exotic words, flocks of phrases, whole species of thought. These names entered our nation like specimens to inspect as we pleased, to test and mutate, to bat back and forth, to interbreed and concoct novel varieties. What grew was a brother-tongue that short-circuited itself, rife with misuse, malapropism, and private vernacular so malleable as to be meaningless. Remnants of our jabbering persist to this day in the voices we use to speak to animals, as we spoke to Peter the dog, whose own name metastasized into more derivations than we could catalogue. Until middle school, I managed to retain our personal definition of “approximately” to mean “exactly,” failing numerous math tests and forever stunting my mastery of fractions. But did you know we are a fraction? To this day I haven’t mastered this concept, how one human being can be divided into two halves and become two whole human beings. How can these once-halves who were so admired for their halfness, fawned over and ogled so persistently, magically assume their separate wholeness? I am still doing the math. What I know is that this no-man’s land between your personhood and mine is wired and treacherous.
So we’ve cleaved the text and chosen this epistolary format, something like open letters to one another. Looking back over this all today, in the very town where a central part of our story is set, Twinsburg, I admit your letters don’t always feel very lettery. Perhaps mine don’t either. But I forget, once again, that we aren’t in our private, assumed language anymore. There are others looking in at us. I will greet them, that great singleton world, and the sprinkling of twins, too — on behalf of both of us.
Do you remember the tattered Oxford American Dictionary that floated around the Tanglewood house, with its red paperback cover? I have it. It has two contradictory definitions of the word “identity.” The first, more common, reads: “the condition of being a specified person or thing.” The second, more specific, peculiar to us, is: “the state of being identical, absolute sameness.” Side by side, those two vastly different definitions. Like you and I — and YaYa too — our absurd paradox.
PG:
You and I had largely denied our differences, seeing them as shameful signs of a fall from grace, from the “sacred intimacy” and unity we once had. We romanticized the idyllic time during the reign of YaYa when we lived in the trees of Tanglewood Way, before the fall when we were banished from the garden. We’ve tried to return to that place through art and spirituality, to find a common voice, only to be frustrated when we’ve found ourselves out of sync, stepping on the other’s story. It’s why we resorted to writing separate sections for this epilogue, as we were unable to speak in a unified voice, despite our best efforts.
Yet the tales told in Gemini and the Sacred show how differences between twins, even divine ones, are not only inevitable but in fact necessary. Having vanquished the death-lords of Xibalba, Junajpu and XB’alamkiej, are reborn to become opposites of each other, the sun and the moon. The Navajo-Diné Stricken Twins compensate for each other’s deficits, the blind one carrying his crippled brother on his shoulders. Olúpònà, Doniger, and nearly every author in this book describes how, despite their entanglement and the impossibility of perfect spiritual freedom from one another, each twin of a pair has his own orí-destiny and karma; each has her own role to play and their own path to follow.
Perhaps the “sacred intimacy” of twinship is as fragile and at times as volatile as all human relationships. Perhaps there is a relief in this. It means that you and I are invited to descend our pedestal — built as much by us as by the cultural forces from which we emerged — to rejoin the wider human family. In releasing our sacrosanct relationship as twins, perhaps we are welcomed into another kind of kinship altogether, that of mere brothers — to accept the work of negotiating differences and flaws, of learning to love the other as neither mirrored nor contested self, but instead as truly “other” [Figure 19.3].
Photo by Teresa Castro. Jog Films.
This work will not be effortless, as it seemed to be in the Tanglewood garden, when that mysterious unity poured forth from the wellspring into which we were born. It will take patience and humility, a trust that the water will flow again, even in these dry and dusty lowlands.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
JG and PG:
YaYa has made 5.1 revolutions around the sun. It is early autumn and they are in a kindergarten classroom full of singleton children, individually named. The singletons have taken notice of their mutual utterances of “YaYa” and begin to tease them. YaYa? they laugh. You are Philip! And you are Joseph! YaYa feels a sense of shame and separation from the singletons. YaYa are walking the three short blocks home. As they turn down their street, YaYa stops YaYa.
“We can’t use “YaYa” anymore,” YaYa says.
YaYa, confused, picks delicately through the words that are like shards of glass. He doesn’t reply, so YaYa continues.
“They notice us. We have to use our real names,” YaYa says. “You have to call me Phil.”
YaYa has never heard YaYa utter this name before.
“Promise,” Phil insists.
The other is silent and motionless, trying to understand.
“Joe, OK?”
YaYa has never heard YaYa say this name before either. He has never felt this kind of distance. A gap opens up between them. He hesitates, then speaks.
“OK,” says Joe, who once was YaYa.
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
Notes
1 Jacob Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins: Ìbejì in Yorùbá Cosmology, Ritual,
and Iconography,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 84.
2 Estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 in 2019. Katherine Dill, “Annual Twinsburg Twins Days Festival Injects Millions into Local Economy,” June 25, 2019. https://twinsdays.org /economic-impact/. Accessed June 17, 2020.
3 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins,” 87.
4 https://billmoyers .com /content /ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-first -storytellers -audio/. Last accessed 5.25.22.
5 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins,” 73.
6 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins”; Adam Michael McGee, “Marasa Elou: Twins and Uncanny Children in Haitian Vodou,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 127–53.
7 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins,” 86.
8 Pashington Obeng, “Twins: Welcome and Unwelcome Danglers in African Religions,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 114.
9 This could well be read as this family’s attempt to triage what Olúpo̝ nà calls a crisis of “two individuals occupying the same niche in the lineage webs . . .” by lionizing that crisis, rather than attenuating it through remembering which twin was born first. Adam McGee writes of how “the Marasa’s mystical power” disrupt social norms of birth order by opening up “a dangerous mystical and epistemological space where chaotic social forces are unleashed. By restoring age-normal social order, the parents
are believed to be protecting their children and their family by returning them to the good graces of society” (McGee, “Marasa Elou,” 140).
10 McGee, “Marasa Elou,” 132.
11 John Grim, “Twins in Native American Mythologies: Relational Transformation,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 168.
12 Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 248, quoted in Grim, “Twins in Native American Mythologies,” 169, and n. 25.
13 Grim, “Twins in Native American Mythologies,” 168.
14 Gregory Nagy, “Achilles and Patroklos as Models for the Twinning of Identity,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 283.
15 Philip M. Peek, Introduction, in Philip M. Peek, ed., Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 27, quoted in Obeng, “Twins,” 122, and n. 47.16 Vijaya Nagarajan, “Twins in Hindu Mythology and Everyday Life in the California Diaspora,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 235.
17 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins,” 71.
18 McGee, “Marasa Elou,” 133.
19 Nagarajan, “Twins in Hindu Mythology and Everyday Life in the California Diaspora,” 232.
20 Olúpo̝ nà, “The Code of Twins,” 93.
21 Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers, 248, quoted in Grim, “Twins in Native American Mythologies,” 169, and n. 25.
22 Charles Stang, “The Divine Double in Late Antiquity,” in Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology, ed. Kimberley C. Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 387.
