Services for the Little Hours
By Dale Going
Charles Olson wrote, "You can work on the life, or you can work on the work;
you can't do both." How can we separate the two? Why would we want to?
Denise Newman
Elsewhere as internal. A journal a journey. Not geographical, conquering or colonizing.
One is always outside. Even this is a distance. The enclosure is temporary, temporal, a noticing.
A space interior, represented by room or book. Diurnal — a journal. Small volume
containing the services for the little, or day, hours. An exquisite butterfly,
as distinguished from a moth. Day after day extinguished and preserved.
Distance measured in days, ending in death, or when the book is full.
Her notebooks. I want to tell you about this. (You?)
To listen secretly
to what is said.
"The men's tongues are jewels.”
The women's ears are jewels.
Her husband is described in sovereign terms. Her primary role is hostess.
Going out into the world is a matter
what is the matter
of ominous glimpses
No indicators, distinctions of time, in this over and over.
The antistrophe is the catastrophe.
Route in day.
In a given day, whatever is done.
From one place to another,
whether distant or near. A passage
through life, a passage written, epic
remains in a room, the female tribe questing.
The self-reflections, abruptions, eruptions, the thinking going only so far as it will,
ending in midair —
or much further than it needs to
Travel, because it reveals? Ravels? Ravel itself ambiguous,
to ravel and unravel the same and sharing opposite meanings —
"to let fall into a tangled mass; to separate or undo
the texture of." Tangled and separate.
"Hence to entangle, make intricate, involve;
Hence to disentangle, make plain."
Traveling one sees connection and mystery. One sees?
Sightings/sitings. As though there's a hope
one could situate, identify, locate.
Claim. The first to sight land.
If you see it, it is yours.
Her slides
and the scribbled notes on her typed accompaniment —
which accompanied which?
(The notion of forefronting she attempts to subvert.)
Small chapters, various and repetitive (cumulative, cyclical, consequential, or in-).
Typography gives way.
The "central" fiction is perhaps hers, yet is continually disrupted.
(This word whose connotations I don’t entirely or exclusively intend or negate.)
The intimate distance of telephoto lens —
The attempt at both. Objectivity without imposing pattern.
She "eavesdropping" (a hearing and house word) on her neighbors.
Slides of a wounded man, windowed woman.
They were without narrative, yet we imposed narrative.
We couldn't stay distanced or objective watching — was this a failure —
wanting to see what would happen.
The new earrings
(which otherwise seem an anomaly, not connecting as the other slides connect
private with public) —
But what more intimate than the jeweled ear,
what more public —
The point of connection—
We hear. The ornamented ear. Up close, a whisper.
A construct more complex and inclusive.
"Evidence," noticings, of equal value.
There is a large painting behind her projector, someone else's artwork —
it mirrors the images in her slides — a scarred man, the musical staves of telephone lines
traversing empty skies, a house with a vacant window (the woman has left
to answer the phone, hoping it is the man, that he is safe).
When this painting is pointed out (I point it out) she says, "That's the way life is."
The repetitions — not even realizing they’re the same revelations.
Accretions and accumulations, if one learns at all it is “eventually.”
Journal entries as openings. Misspelling: “entires.”
Begin to read The New York Times again — thus the world enters.
I did start reading the paper. Manic, middle of the night, on chemo.
Moon face, legs that would no longer hold me, fingers that could not
cut or turn or grasp. I read. Obsessed
with news of a world I was not in.
My doctor said, "Give it an hour a day. Limit it." But the prednesone
hallucination in my brain, every time I closed my eyes, looked like an explosion,
an atom bomb, repeating, ceaselessly. My atoms.
I read about Chernobyl. I ate the words. The poisoned milk, the vegetables.
My skin was scarred, burned from the inside, red on the surface from treatment
that charred my cells. Doctors from my hospital flew there, trying to save lives.
Half my head was bald, overnight. Toxic, waste. Waist-length hair covered the bald spot
for awhile, till it too fell out in handfuls. My face a moon. My hair no halo. My face a plate.
White and pasty, red from exertion which was nothing at all, red from staying awake. Red
from burning. Red from sweats, leaning forward and watching it rain on the newspapers . . .
The short and the long of it.
Containing and erasing all history in this present moment.
Every sentence could be threaded together, shuffled direct connections.
Integration without the abyss?
The world's madness and disintegration do not cause madness and disintegration
The blurring disregard of boundaries
The water which falls in drops from the eaves of a house. To stand under the eaves,
as to listen and learn
what is said within doors:
"It is beautiful and we are just beginning to recover from it."
Copyright Credit: Dale Going, "Services for the Little Hours" from The View They Arrange. Copyright © 1994 by Dale Going. Reprinted by permission of Kelsey St. Press.
Source: Kelsey St. Press (The View They Arrange, 1994)