Jacob and Esau, the Olsen sisters, Jedward, Tegan and Sara, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National, and Gayle and Gillian Blakeney who played the Alessi sisters in Neighbours. All twins. As are many of my friends' children - Isaac, Joe, Grace, Izzie, Peter, and Poppy. That's three separate pairs of twins, by the way - not sextuplets.
That's a lot of twins and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Twins, it seems, are all around us but, it also seems, very little thought has really gone into what that means - if anything! For the twins' relationship to each other - but also to how they relate to everyone else in the world via the prism of their twindom - or, in fact, if they do. For many, surely all, twins being a twin is merely a fact of life. To ask one what it's like being a twin is the same as a twin asking you what it's like not being one.
You don't know. Because you never have been one and never will. Twins have never not been twins. So, in a way, it's quite a tricky thing to get a grip on and, just maybe, that's why last night's online (though a small number were in residence at Conway Hall for the first time since the pandemic began) London Fortean Society talk, Twins - Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments with William Viney (a researcher in the Department of Anthropology of Goldsmiths in London), was slightly unsatisfying and more than a little piecemeal.
The tech gremlins that bedevilled the talk (and my attendance of it - thanks to both Adam and Scott for sorting that out) didn't help and seemed to knock Viney's confidence a bit but, more than that, the talk lacked any sense of over reaching narrative, any real thrust or, even, point. It was merely a clever man stood behind a laptop reading out, rather academically, some observations he'd made about twins over his career.
They weren't all dull (how could a drawing of a woman pregnant with twenty-eight foetuses or a callback to an ancient belief that the sexual desire of women was so powerful its only equal was the libido of a horse be so?) but they did rather lack coherent structure. Much, I suppose, like life itself. When I finally joined the talk, Viney was talking about the sense of uncertainty ("so - which one are you?") which comes as part and parcel of the twin experience but he soon moved on to how twins can exploit their similarities and cited examples of twins travelling on each other's passports and getting up to all kinds of other mischievous shenanigans by fooling people into thinking they were each other.
There was even suggestions of sleeping with each other's partners but that was a subject touched on rather than explored. Perhaps for the best considering how many twins were in the audience. The truth of the matter, though, was that many twins don't find the experience to be at all magical. Or at least no more magical than anyone else's life. For many twins, being a twin is simply a fact, even a mundane fact, of their existence.
So, already Viney's speech was in trouble. As his intended mission, to consider twins as a 'category' and to suggest theories that provoke conversations, was a little doomed from the start. In times gone by, he may have had more joy. Twins in myth have often been used to tell stories about the past (or the present) and to provide some kind of moral framework for the future. In Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux - who somehow manage to be both celestial in spirit AND some kind of horsemen - provide some supposedly useful information about the stars, the moon, and the sun but such was the fragmented nature of the talk I couldn't work out what exactly.
I gathered they'd been mentioned as early as the 8th century BC in the works of Homer (before they were even Gods, although they were 'intrepid' at the time) and that they were unusual twins in that they had different fathers though the same mother - Leda. The Spartan queen.
One of their fathers was more unusual than the other, it's fair to say. While Castor was produced from Leda's union with her husband, the king Tyndareus, Pollux was the result of Leda being raped by a swan. Not just any old common or garden swan rapist either. But Zeus, the king of the Gods of Mount Olympus. Zeus apologists would have it that he seduced Leda rather than raped her but I would contend that disguising yourself as a large and graceful aquatic bird to gain sexual favours is duplicitous at best.
Perhaps this is why twins were held in such low esteem in ancient Greece. Even celebrated thinkers like Aristotle considered twins to be 'monstrosities' while others, in the old times, held twins to be 'abnormal', 'deformed', and, this one stings, 'human kinds made by physical excess'.
Moving forward to the medieval period in Europe and our knowledge of science was equally unenlightened. Twins were seen as signs of adultery, disease, and general poor health and women who gave birth to twins were deemed to be having too much sex - and with too many people. Sometimes at the same time.
The social stigma - and, one imagines, the financial burden - of having twins was such that many twins, either both or one of them, were simply abandoned. Fortunately, modern medicine means giving birth to twins is no longer anywhere near as dangerous and, in fact, in the last decade birth rates for twins have nearly doubled both in the UK and the US.
It wasn't that long ago, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, that twins were still seen as an anomaly. Something funny, creepy, or even dangerous. Take a look at a list of films that feature twins and disagree. There's The Shining, Dead Ringers, The Boys From Brazil (featuring Gregory Peck as the famous twin 'fan' and Nazi Dr Josef Mengele), Star Wars, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as unlikely twins in, er, Twins.
These days we're not being told to be scared of twins, to laugh at them, or to worry about them getting it on. There are 'twinfluencers' on Instagram and TikTok and Viney listed a few of them. I'd not heard of any of them (I am far too old for TikTok and it looks shit anyway) but apparently the Dolan Twins, Ethan and Grayson from New Jersey, have ten and a half million followers on YouTube.
Doing what it is unclear. While this was interesting enough it didn't really tell me anything about twins. There are loads of people doing boring and moronic things on YouTube and Instagram and making lots of money from it, unwrapping presents anyone?, commentating on old music videos?, and the Dolan Twins don't seem any different to them except there's two of them.
I wasn't really sure how this was even relevant to the subject in anything but the most tangential way. Far more interesting was a rather touching film we were treated to at the end in which various twins, sometimes both of them, sometimes just one, spoke about what it's like to be a twin. While some stories were profoundly moving (death, claustrophobia, the myth of 'twintuition', and a sense of abandonment featured but a general sense of sibling affection shone through clearly) and others were quite amusing (one set of twins claimed they couldn't be more different, one liked pasta, the other lasagna) the most pertinent piece was perhaps the twins who railed against being allocated roles (good twin, bad twin, handsome twin, ugly win, clever twin, stupid twin) at an early age.
That's because, like everyone else, twins contains multitudes and concepts of good and bad, ugly and handsome, clever and stupid are neither binary nor are they fixed in the mind of even individual observers let alone wider society as a whole. My guess, and it's an uneducated one but I think I'm on to to something with it, is that's because twins and their experiences, ultimately, are just as unique as the rest of us. Double trouble? Don't wish that on them. Life's tough enough as it is.
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