I am perhaps the only one who get associations to “the other shore” from this Twinings ad. But that is not what I will write about today.

A friend of mine luckily mentioned this advertisement from Twinings, and provided a handy link. This is a YouTube video, so it may not be suitable for all workplaces even though there is no objectionable content. But it has moving pictures. It has also a song, which in my opinion can be skipped without great loss. It is not inappropriate or ugly, but it does not resonate strongly enough with the animation to be crucial.

\”Twinings gets you back to you\”

For those who cannot see it, this is a short animated video with a slightly watercolor style, especially of the character. A young woman is rowing a small boat alone in the middle of a sea with high waves. She loses one oar and fails to catch it. The waves increase to frightening proportions that would by rights overturn or fill the boat, but strangely instead the waves and the storm conspire to push the boat ever more rapidly forward until it is flying on the top of the waves, and the storm-tossed foam takes the shape vaguely of seagulls flying overhead without losing its character as foam. As the boat lands again, the water rapidly becomes calm and the sky clears up, the boat continuing by its momentum toward a beautiful shore. At the shore someone is waiting. The young woman jumps out of the boat as it stops on the sandy bottom, and wades ashore there to meet her identical twin in a loving embrace. Then as the two line up side by side they seem to fade into one person drinking tea, and the message “Twinings gets you back to you”.

In real life, I would say that under such adverse conditions it would take rather more than tea to bring us back to us. But that is not my message today, gentle reader.

***

Rather, after watching the video clip a few times, I had my own inner vision (albeit dimly) of a potential story for this year’s NaNoWriMo, one appropriately symbolic while detached enough from reality to riff upon, as you say in English.

The story would be about a young man who has a fateful encounter with himself – but not his current self. Rather, a godlike being (in the classical, idiomatic sense, not in the monotheist sense) who may be him from the future, or from an alternate timeline, or a higher reality, or two or more of the above. Basically, his ultimate potential.

Over the last few years I have repeatedly begun writing about a young man meeting a woman from a higher reality – a goddess in the classical sense – who for some reason has decided to seek him out and live with him, although usually others cannot see her at all (and certainly not for who she is). This is basically the Jungian approach, since the Anima is usually the first experience of the numinous for a man, not counting religion as such. Rather, the goddess-complex is normally projected on some woman of his own generation, and it is with this projected ideal woman he falls in love, rather than with the actual person. In real life, amazing women are very rare (I have only really known one offline, outside my own clan) and goddesses are rarer than hen’s teeth.

The upside and downside of the goddess approach is the erotic tension in their living together, which I circumvent in various ways. I like to think that most normal readers will not see a great deal of erotic tension in a person meeting his higher self: Most autoeroticism is pretty far from “higher” in any way I can think of. The downside is that it is probably a larger leap of imagination for the reader, if any. (The “if any” part makes it ideal for NaNoWriMo, which used to have the slogan “quantity over quality”. Not my favorite slogan but somewhat comforting for a write-a-ton.)

***

Being rather far from typical, at least now in my later years, I remember an amusing episode brought about by the voices in my head (which, need I remind you, are not actual hallucinations in my case, but rather streams of thought with some level of independence: People who are unfamiliar with introspection would probably assume they were thinking these thoughts themselves, which is in a certain sense true). The “voices” or muses can sing, however, and do so much of the time, enticing me to sing along. Conversely, they tend to sing along when I play songs I like. This also happened one day while I was listening to a love song by Chris de Burgh, for many years one of my absolute favorite artists (and composer and songwriter).

The song was, appropriately, By My Side, from the album Power of Ten, the first album of his that I bought (although he had been active for a long time by then).

When everything has gone,
you help me carry on;
you lift me up,you make me strong,
you give love to see me through…
Oo-oo-oo what would I do
without you
by my side?

But my voices took a slightly different route: They sang, without me by my side?

Which is kind of appropriate now, I guess. Thanks to Twinings…