Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Here are the words that the bass sings to the couple, given first in the original German and then in my own translation, respecting both the meter and the rhyme scheme of the original:

O du angenehmes Paar,

Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen,

Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen

Und dich leiten immerdar,

O du angenehmes Paar!

O thou charming bridal pair,

Providence shall e’er caress thee

And from Zion God shall bless thee

And shall guide thee, e’er and e’er,

O thou charming bridal pair!

Are you struck, dear reader, by something rather peculiar about these words? What struck me forcefully is that although they are being sung to a couple, they feature singular pronouns — du, dir, and dich in German and, in my English rendition, the obsolete pronouns “thou” and “thee”. On one level, these second-person singular pronouns sound strange and wrong, and yet, by addressing the couple in the singular, they convey a profound feeling of the imminent joining-together of two souls in a sacred union. To me, these poems suggest that the wedding ceremony in which they occur constitutes a “soul merger”, giving rise to a single unit having just one “higher-level soul”, like two drops of water coming together, touching, and then seamlessly fusing, showing that sometimes one plus one equals one.

I found translations of this aria’s words into French and Italian, and they, too, used tu to address the twosome, and this, just like the German, sounded far weirder to me than the English, since tu (in either language) is completely standard usage today (unlike “thou”) but it is always addressed to just one person, never ever to a couple or small group of any kind.

To experience the same kind of semantic jolt in modern English, you’d have to move from second person to first person, and imagine the opposite of the editorial “we” — namely, a pair of people who refer to the union they compose as “I”. Thus I shall now counterfactually extend Cantata 197 by imagining one last joyous aria to be sung by the united twosome at the very end of their wedding ceremony. Its first line would run, Jetzt bin ich ein strahlendes Paar — “I now am a radiant couple” — and the new wife and husband would sing it precisely in unison from start to finish, instead of singing two melodies in typical Bachian counterpoint, for doing that would inappropriately draw attention to their distinct identities. In this closing aria, “I” would denote the couple itself, not either of its members, and the aria would be thought of as being for the couple’s one new voice rather than for two independent voices.

Soulmates and Matesouls

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

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

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

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

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

Children as Gluons

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