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Doppelgänger
in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is defined as the ghostly double of
a living person, a sinister form of
bilocation. In German,
doppelgänger
has come to refer to
any double or look-alike of a person. The word is also used to
describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral
vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could
have been a reflection. They are generally regarded as harbingers
of bad luck. In some traditions, a
doppelgänger
seen by a person's friends
or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own
doppelgänger is an omen of death, or results in immediate death
upon the two coming face to face. In Norse mythology, a
vardøger
is a ghostly double
who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions
in advance.
Doppelgängers are everywhere. I have them. And so do you. It
is the first discovery you make when you
Google yourself on the internet. Here a namesake.
There a namesake. Everywhere a namesake, namesake. And it's disconcerting.
Some of my doppelgängers are younger, and are real goofs. Some
of my doubles are older, and are equally strange. I'm sure they
think the same of me when they
Google themselves and I pop up. They work in
various occupations. Some work in my old and current occupational
area. They exist all over the world. For all I know they may
exist mondo beyondo as well.
Some of these
ghostly doubles have stolen my identity. I lost my wallet once.
I found it the next day just outside the student pub where I
had been drinking the evening before. My student card was there
to mock me. But my pertinent government identification was missing.
A year later, four of me sprang up in the local telephone listings.
One has sprung up in Toronto
whose birth day is one day off from my own, and one has sprung
up in my home town with professional credentials so close to
my own that it is truly spooky. Cry identity theft and let slip
the dogs of war, with apologies to
Shakespeare . I feel plagiarized.
When we were
young, our parents and teachers inculcated us with the notion
that we were unique. What do we do when we discover that our
mentors were wrong, that we aren't unique? What do we do when
we realize that we are, in fact, quite pedestrian, and that there
are duplicates or doppelgängers
of us here, there, and everywhere?
I suffered culture
shock, then anger, then depression, and the feeling of uselessness
that went with it. I fantasized about going on a sick psychological
quest to murder my doubles around the world. But alas, I am not
crazy enough. I wish I was. It would be a
raison d'être. Then I thought, what if one of my
doubles Googled himself, could
not live with the thought of his own
doppelgängers, of which I was one, and was indeed
crazy enough to actually implement the quest I had so fancifully
imagined? Thank God most of
us are separated by vast distances.
What we are talking
about are the knuckleberries
who have been noticed, who have a web blog, page, or site, who
are celebrating something, or who are selling something. God
knows how many hundreds, thousands or more
doppelgängers exist out there who I and my current
ghosts will never discern because they have remained low key.
You are safe there leading your anonymous lives. But once you
become noticed by the media, in any capacity, your name, our
name, my name will surface on the internet, and you will be noticed
by us, as well, and shall be vulnerable.
There is much
of the instinctive desire to murder the man-god, as described
in Sir James George Frazer's
The
Golden Bough, in
the quest to annihilate your doppelgängers.
I understand that. There is also the desire to be unique, to
destroy the others that pretend to your identity, and to become
the one true alpha dog bearing your name. There is also the suggestion
of alien genetic experiments and cultural tracking by names,
as depicted in The X-Files by my cousin
Chris.
Know this: none of us is unique.
If we were it would be impossible to manufacture clothing or
foot wear in standardized sizes to satisfy our needs. That's
just one example. The cult of uniqueness is a conspiracy foisted
upon us since we were children to make us feel warm and fuzzy,
but it is nothing more than a lie used to lull us into complacency.
I have been saying for years that there are only so many human
patterns, only so many variations on a theme, if you will, perhaps
ten thousand and maybe less before it all repeats. Considering
the current population of the world, that would account for a
lot of doppelgängers
for each of us, unless you're not really you at all, but a
doppelgänger yourself. Get your head around that
one. Yikes. And people worry
about clones.
As of September,
2010, there were 1,137
people with the name Mark Carter
in the United States alone. They're everywhere. So,
just for
the record, I am not a
wannabe actor. I am not a real estate agent. I am not
an attorney from several places although many of my
doppelgängers are. I am not a medical doctor. And
I am not a distributor of water tanks, the owner of a pet store,
a stock and station agent, or the training manager for a transit
company.
Read:
Hephzibah Of Heaven to see how I worked myth,
religion, and rite into my latest creative work. By the way,
I have branded this website with my
mug just so you know it's me.
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