This case is to decide whether underneath your friendly and lovable exterior there is a darker side lurking.
- Sasha Wass QC
… such animals often move in a disoriented and dizzy fashion, with the brains ‘arguing’ with each other. Some simply zig-zag without getting anywhere. Heads may attack and even attempt to swallow each other.
- Prof Georgina Lake (UCLA), private correspondence
1. Craniopagus parasiticus
and what of the mirror that sits
inside the body, intersecting the self?
it produces fatal abnormalities
het kint with 2 of everything - two minds two faces
het kint
who does not make it beyond childhood, who dies on that black slab
a mirrored sword - the guillotine of england
which makes of a man a beast of two backs
or - depending on where you stand
(perhaps you cut the rope?)
the doubleheader called craniopagus parasiticus
by medical science: the parasitic twin
the 2nd palm is black
handshake like an inkcap
it is the mark -
2. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
There is a precedent for such dark duplications in art history. In Rembrandt’s turgid lamplit The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, a man named Adriaen het Kint lies on the slab (supposedly). Het Kint: the Kid. He was a thief. His right hand had been chopped off before he was hanged. Rembrandt initially painted the corpse like this but later changed his mind. This added hand is dark and discoloured and disproportionate. Meanwhile (as noted by Sebald and many others), his left hand is not actually a left hand at all but some chimera: the visible tendons of it, which according to the location of the thumb should correspond to the palm of the left hand, are in fact the tendons of the back of a right hand. In this room there is one right hand too many. With two right hands you cannot pray.
3. Tryst
In the late 90s, Harris’ daughter Bindi (now Ava Reeves) learned of her father’s ‘tryst’ with her childhood best friend, which began when she (the friend) was 13 and continued into her adulthood3. In her anger, Reeves reportedly ‘smashed up Harris’ paintings’.
4. Rolf on Art (2002, BBC)
For Rolf on Art: Rodin, Harris made a sculpture of Reeves’ right hand, ‘… first modelling the hand in clay and then casting it. To my amazement I was told that Rodin used exactly the same single hand sculpture. If you look closely it is definitely NOT a pair of hands, it is a repeat casting of the same [right] hand, but placed in a slightly different position, at a different angle. I’d like to thank the people at the casting foundry who nursed me through the whole process.’ Many were made. Now purchasable from several online galleries for a few hundred quid - nearly worth it for the smelted price.