Editorial, January 2026

We begin with the idea that the self is never singular. We inherit our contours from others and spend our lives trying to understand how those foreign shapes became our own. When I first encountered the work of Céline Nieszawer and of her double, Pupa Neumann, I felt something shift. The doubles, the masks, the staged repetitions: all whispered the same truth. Identity is a sequence of metaphors borrowed from those who touched us, raised us, frightened us, mirrored us, and vanished from our lives long before we knew what their absence meant.

Philip Larkin wrote that to know oneself one must walk the length of one's mind, yet even that long journey leads only to a fleeting recognition of the blind impress all our behavings bear. This issue begins where that recognition falters, and with the strange beauty that rises from the impossibility of ever fully arriving.

In the poem I kept returning to while shaping this issue, Larkin imagines someone who has tried to see his whole life laid out like a lading list. He has walked the length of his mind. He has named what he can command. Everything that doesn't fit that inventory is ruled out of existence. The reward for such clarity is thin. In time, Larkin says, we half identify the blind impress our acts have carried. We may even trace it home. Yet when death begins, this knowledge applies only to one person once, and that person is already dying. The poem measures the pathos of a life that arrives at self-knowledge only when selfhood is almost over.

This is where philosophy and poetry collide. The poem exposes the poverty of the dream of total self-knowledge. To say "I" is already to speak from inside a language we didn't invent. To confess fear of extinction is meaningless until we specify what will vanish. A voice. A way of ordering the world. A peculiar lading list of what counted as possible and important. What Larkin fears losing is not life in general, but his particular way of carving meaning from contingency.

Romantic thought called such a person a strong poet. Someone who doesn't accept inherited maps of importance, but tries to draw a new one. Nietzsche and Harold Bloom took that figure as a model for the human being who refuses to be a replica. For them, the task is not to discover an essence, but to create a singular pattern out of accidents, to say of a contingent past, thus I willed it. In that vision, self-knowledge is not a mirror: it is a work of invention.

Freud arrived at the same insight through a different path. He taught us that every human life, if it has the time and the language for it, becomes a kind of poem. Each of us, through fantasy and repetition, builds a private vocabulary of meaning. Certain scenes, gestures, and objects emerge as symbols, charged with an intensity that can't be explained by universal laws. The mind becomes a maker of figures, not a recorder of essences. In this sense, everyone carries a double life. The life others see, and the life woven from internal images only half visible to consciousness.

Then we have Borges, who understood the double not as a threat but as the natural condition of anyone who lives inside language. In "Borges y yo", he doesn't simply divide himself into a public writer and a private man. He reveals a multitude of selves that gather under a single name. Some are formed by literature, by Stevenson's shadowed stories and the echo of plots that shaped his imagination. Some are formed by tastes, the small rituals of reading and coffee that give texture to a day. Others arise from geography, from childhood streets and distant maps that taught him how space can become memory. Others still come from philosophy, from the chosen lineage of Spinoza with his calm and severe clarity. And some come from time, the hourglass that moves without pity and changes the one who watches it. For Borges, the self is not a unity but an archive. It contains preferences, influences, accidents, and inventions. These selves borrow from one another, contradict one another, persist long after the conscious mind claims order. The self becomes a collaboration between voices that can't be reduced to a single origin. It is a moving constellation rather than a fixed core.

Céline Nieszawer enters this long conversation with an image from childhood. She finds a photograph of herself at four, standing beside her older sister, both dressed in identical clothes. The shock is not only visual. It is metaphysical. The picture reveals how deeply her early identity was marked by another body, another presence. It also explains her fascination with Diane Arbus's twins and with the ghostly girls in Kubrick's film. The figure of the double had been there from the beginning, at once loved and refused. From that discovery, her series Doppelgänger emerged, not as an illustration of theory, but as a way of working through the fact that we are often, in her words, our own evil twin.

What moves me in Céline's account is that the sisters open onto something larger. The double, for her, is the self cut in two. The self and its other. Harmony and disorder at once. In her process, as she chooses models who don't necessarily resemble each other, dresses them with symbolic names, poses them in mirrored stances and then erases their faces, she stages the instability of identity. These figures are anonymous, yet heavy with projections. Every viewer, she says, must meet the image with his or her own ambiguity. The work invites us to confront the double who inhabits us, damages us, and sustains us.

From this origin, the figure of Pupa Neumann appears. Pupa is both Céline and someone else. She is another name, another face, another set of visual strategies. A second artist who lives inside the first. Under this name, Neumann moves freely through digital fabrication, staged photography, drawing, and text. She stretches and fractures the female body. She rewrites the lives of daughters and wives. She invents speculative portraits of Madeleine Gide, no longer a supporting character in someone else's book, but an unstable subject in her own visual grammar. Through Pupa, Céline invents a space where she can work on the question of the other with fewer constraints, where her own I can become more porous.

Under both names, Nieszawer has built a body of work that circles the same questions from different angles. The series gathered in this issue trace this question across different territories. In Daydream, figures multiply in open fields, half fairy tale, half coded critique. In Doppelgänger, the self sits across from itself, equal and unequal. In Fille de, a face becomes altar and wound, daughterhood turns into experiment. In La Madeleine de Gide, history is disturbed and rewritten. In Misfits, bodies shrink inside blank spaces that erase their context. In Punch, couples inhabit domestic sets where intimacy is choreographed as combat. In Waiting Room, men sit inside immaculate rooms, held by color and architecture more than by time. Each body of work opens another room. The house of the double.

Around these rooms, the other contributors to this January 2026 issue gather. Ally Zlatar, Antonio Muñiz, Catherine Eaton Skinner, James Woodson, Kathleen Frank, and Bette Ridgeway bring the language of paint into this conversation, each exploring how form responds to the pressures of memory and perception. Heather Evans Smith and Natalie Christensen work through the camera to expose the tensions between presence and absence. Joyce Melander and Mark Yale Harris shape material into inquiries about embodiment. Marjorie Maddox and Karen Elias join poem and image to show how two imaginations can inhabit the same question.

Their works meet at a shared set of questions. How is the self shaped by its others. How do race, gender, class, and culture carve the visible and invisible borders of the I. How does language give us a voice and at the same time undo it. How do we live inside several identities at once, and how do those identities live inside us. Where does the alter ego end and the mask begin. What are the political costs of being seen as one thing only, when one's internal sense of self is plural.

The theme of this issue is not alterity as abstraction. It is the other as the medium of the self. The I that Rimbaud declared to be another is not an isolated figure. It is a collage of inherited gestures, parental echoes, historical injuries, private fantasies, racial codes, cultural mirrors, and unexpected encounters. To become an individual in this sense is not to escape influence. It is to redirect it, to recognize what shaped us and decide how to live with what we find.

There is no final victory in this process. No mind whose length can match the universe. No inventory that can capture the meaning of a life. Even the strongest poet depends on languages and forms that others made before. Even the most original artist can only bend inherited tools into new shapes. Each of us moves between the wish to say something that applies to all, and the knowledge that what we can truly confess applies only to one person once. To live inside that tension is part of what it means to be human.

This issue of The Pasticheur doesn't resolve the quarrel between poetry and philosophy. It doesn't claim to know whether universality or contingency should have the last word. Instead, it lingers in the space where that quarrel remains alive. It offers a series of works that treat identity as a practice, not a fact. A set of attempts to make something honest and luminous out of the contingencies that shaped us.

To walk the length of one's mind, as Larkin says, is to see that the path is not straight. It bends through other people. Other voices. Other bodies. Other rooms. This New Year, I invite you to walk part of that distance in the company of the artists and writers gathered here. Their works remind us that we never become ourselves alone. We become through the others we carry, and through the others who will one day carry traces of us.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor-in-Chief