A Familiar Pain

We were broken but found each other.
Our cuts healed over and
our bones knitted together.
I thought we were one.

But it seems I was wrong:
you need your freedom back
and in trying to pull away
old wounds are re-opened
and memories re-kindled.


27 April 1986
  
 

The laws of attraction. Not quite sure what they are. And no one can seem to agree what they are. There are laws of affinity and if you look up the Wikipedia entry you’ll even find formulas but the laws of attraction are a bit murkier. Does, for example, like attract like (as Plato proposed in his first law of affinity) or, as sociologist Robert F. Winch proposed in the fifties, do opposites attract? It’s pretty much a moot point. Quantum physics has seen to that. We now have something called field particle exchange which, as with most things quantum physicy, doesn’t listen to reason if it doesn’t feel like it.

I never took science at school except when it was compulsory. Once we got to pick our own subjects I dropped all that and never looked back. What is odd is how often science crops up in my new novel and not just any ol’ science but cutting edge stuff. I don’t watch many science programmes on TV but I can enjoy the odd one. I especially love the ones that tell us time doesn’t exist or reality is only real when we look at it.

In 1 Samuel 18:1 we get the phrase “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David” and the metaphor of a body being made up of more than one individual is a common biblical one: “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Ephesians 4:16). We two are one. You don’t have to be religious to think that—it’s sweet on one level—but what if we were an alien race where marriage involved physical conjoinment? That would make divorce another thing completely, wouldn’t it? There’s a scene in my new novel where I describe a disjoined twin standing next to a full length mirror so he can feel whole again. There’s also one where Chang hands Eng a fiver and tells him to sod off to the pub.