Voice Over
THE TWIN AND I
by Roderick Clark
There is a picture that sits on my mother’s dresser. It is a photo of a pair of fraternal twins about four years old: my brother and myself. Both youngsters are dressed in white shirts with dark-colored shorts and suspenders. Both are smiling—but there the resemblance ends. He is blonde, healthy, cheerful. I am dark, thin and intense. He is engaged. I am abstracted. My brother’s smile is bright, aimed at the viewer and the tangible world. Mine is subdued, as if the joke might be on me. His eyes look outward, engaging the world. My gaze is inward. I am only partly there in the photograph, the rest of me reflecting inward. He looks out and then in. I look in and then out. Steve becomes an artist, a painter of signs and landscapes. I become a writer, an interpreter of symbols, a seeker for truth beneath the surface of things. I am right about everything, and—of course—he is wrong about everything. This is how we have divided the world. How we became what we are.All this rushed back to me recently when my brother underwent, and fortunately survived, a recent health crisis. I began to think of all the ways that we are exactly alike and precisely different, the way that words and images have overlapped mysteriously in our lives. He, the artist, is a better Scrabble player. He sees the word rather than thinks it—knows just how many letters there are, where they sit in the “word map,” and what each letter looks like. On the other hand if we play Pictionary, my ugly cartoons are more easily identifiable than Steve’s more stylized representations. I am better at chess, he at cribbage. He is the owner/operator of a small high-tech sign business—an expert in how to make words and icons stand out. I am the owner/operator of a small writing and media development business. I specialize in shaping corporate concepts—but I also have a knack for information mapping, a rapidly emerging new field that borders on the world of visual design.
In some areas we have overlapped. We both love science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Our parents read us Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings rather than letting us watch television. Instead of Hopalong Cassidy confronting rustlers, we dreamed of Gandalf confronting the Balrog, armies of elves, orcs, dwarves and goblins clashing by night. At an extraordinarily early age, Steve begin to draw and I began to tell stories. For many years to come, my mother would ask me to invent a story to entertain my brothers and sisters. Steve’s drawings of warriors, monsters, spaceships and girls are littered throughout my memory and can still be found in the margins of some of my old books and papers.
I became obsessed with theater at a young age, after acting at first and later writing and/or producing at least a dozen plays in Wisconsin up into the 1980s. In high school, Steve also appeared on stage, and in later years he helped me with the sets of a number of shows, in one show creating a forest out of cardboard that was half Disney, half Canadian landscape—the latter drawn from his fondness for painting landscapes in the style of Canada’s famous “Group of Seven.”
It occurs to me that one of the things that has helped me to talk to artists and work with them in multi-disciplinary media projects over the years is that a piece of me knows where they are coming from. They always know what they need from me, but they cannot always put it in words. I know that I have to work with them to create a “tonescape,” a place where the facts and the feelings of what we are doing can be comfortable together. Often, with an incredibly complex piece, I discover that I have to feel rather than think my way through it. I think of color, texture, form, balance. When the sensibility is right, the facts fall rapidly into place like the cards at the end of a game of solitaire. You win! The whole pack vibrates in victory!
I am incapable of imagining words outside of a context. Some fellow writers seem to view language as the abstract fountain of meaning to which art provides merely window decoration. They will, for example, begin to write without a clear idea of the media form or forms in which their words will eventually appear. Idea first, applications later. For some fine writers, some of them my good friends, this seems to work—but not for me. For me language has to have a tangible context or contexts. Media forms and audiences must to some extent be pre-imagined. Language is not a neutral carrier of data; it has hue, history, flavor and feeling. It unfolds in visual and sensory space. It means nothing at all unless it touches our context, our universe, the place where everything we think and do happens. Meaning can be tenuous. It can be inaccessible, elusive. Its ectoplastic umbilicals can extend into weird and infinitely fantastic realms, but it is not remote. It hums around us with wondrous and terrible energy, closer than our breath. What is real and unreal are like two sides of the same maple leaf.
Steve and I sprout from the same tree, but we are not biological twins. In fact, many people find it hard to believe we are brothers until you hear us speak. As we get older our voices get similar. Here is the same storytelling voice: gravelly, boastful and opinionated, that has echoed out of generations of granite-nosed Scots and whimsical Hungarians. I tell most of the stories, he does most of the coloring. Between us we shape a universe. Over a few beers we can transform the past into something I truly wish it had been. Have we been competitive? In a sense yes, in a sense no. In some ways our competition was reflected in vehement efforts to be different from one another. Words were mine, pictures were his—but we were never beyond poaching from each other. He turns a good advertising phrase now and then. I carve pumpkins that are the wonder of the neighborhood. Competition was diminished in part, because of course, I am above such things. Right? Little wonder that when I argue or collaborate with a designer or an artist, I have the same sense of struggle and sharing. Here is the whole. This is mine. This is yours. This is what we do together. Tug! Tug! Tautness…resolution.
It is, of course, hard to be objective or fair in these matters, because in a sense, Steve and I are anti-twins—a sort of Yin Yang combination, infinitely different, and infinitely similar. But who is Yin and who is Yang? Needless to say we have always differed on this and many other matters. Each of us believes he is constantly offering brilliant advice which the other never follows. “Face reality!” he demands. “Look beneath the surface!“ I bellow in reply. Steve is dead wrong about this, as in other particulars—but I try to be tolerant. In fact, in addition to being more objective, and less competitive than my brother, I am more consistently more tolerant than he is. Isn’t this obvious? Also, of course, as a writer of fiction I possess a higher understanding that the truth is sometimes elastic. Modesty aside, in concluding, I think there is a vital point to be made here. The artist is the enemy. Steve is the evil twin. This being an entirely verbal context—I’d just like to make that clear.
© 2000 Steven Clark