Why did the prompt word DOUBLE send me diving for Anne Carson? I wanted to find Decreation, her opera on forgery. And in particular I must have remembered the duet of Simone Weil and her Papa where Simone mechanically denies the questions with a formula of language to arrive at an impossible sum that her father cannot penetrate finishing with
“Bulbs are not a question.
To accept a void in oneself is a question.
The energy has to come from somewhere else.”
So my double jotting is homage to Anne Carson’s operatic dramatisation of patterning and repetition in the trials of life. I called it My Double. Fitting on the day that my Papa comes to live with us for a while. Genetics must be on my mind!
Double are not the helix
Double are not the decker
Double are not the bind
Double can be the trouble
Double are not the blooms
Double are not the whiskeys
Double are not the question,
To accept the double in oneself is a question,
The pattern has to come from somewhere.
another kind of happiness 