Index Cards

Moyra Davey

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781913097264
• eBook ISBN: 9781913097271
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Literature

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

153

BURN THE DIARIES

BLANKNESS

In a volume of interviews, Jean Genet constructs the story of his life. The narrative differs in his various retellings, swayed by discrepancies of memory and the desire for an ever more perfect story. An editor has scrupulously corrected and reordered everything in endnotes, so that we have both versions: Genet freely spins his tales, and we possess the true record.

The white of the paper is an artifice that’s replaced the translucency of parchment and the ochre surface of clay tablets; but the ochre and the translucency and the whiteness may all possess more reality than the signs that mar them.1

The murkiness and ambiguities of a life take on weight and authority by virtue of the published document. Perhaps this is what Genet meant when he said there is more truth in the whiteness surrounding all those black characters than in the meticulously transcribed words themselves.

SNOW

Asked about the defining moment in which he knew he’d be a writer, Genet told of buying a postcard in prison to send to a German friend:

The side I was supposed to write on had a sort of white, grainy texture, a little like snow, and it was this surface that led me to speak of a snow that was of course absent from prison, to speak of Christmas, and instead of writing 154 just anything, I wrote to her about the quality of that thick paper. That was it, the trigger that allowed me to write. 2

DREAM

I am about to give a talk on Douglas Crimp before a large audience, but my pages have become lost in a pile of recycled paper. I shuffle through the stack without success. Eventually I try to quickly recall some of the ideas and grab a little silver pen to record them, but it’s out of ink. I scratch out a few barely legible words.

Keeping an eye on the fanned-out sheaf of papers in the hand of a boring speaker, I watch its volume diminish and wait for the last page to turn.

MUSIC

I am hooked by accident, drawn in by my friend Pradeep quoting Genet at a public event. The record shows that this is what Pradeep said:

A part of me … wants to see … writing or reading, as personal and private and pleasurable without activating it in a strategic way…. Not everything we do is for art-making, not everything we write is for public consumption. I think back to an interview I heard with Jean Genet where he says that to deepen your practice, it’s not by just studying writing, that it’s actually the other bits—the music, the theater, the film, and other things that all interlock and move you up a notch or two.3

155My take on P.’s comment is that we tend to cannibalize experience and that we should consider spending more time just listening to music, for instance, for its own sake, “taking the time to live,” as Baghdadi put it in Room 666.4

P.’s critique of the drive to commodify lures me in and steers me to Genet, and eventually I will find myself reproducing the problem in the midst of soft green hills and the uninterrupted birdsong of rural Wyoming in a studio on a cattle ranch. At least I will have the doors wide-open.

I was amazed when I realized that my life … was nothing but a blank sheet of paper which I’d managed to fold into something different.5

PAPER

Christopher Hitchens was brave in death (as was Dennis Potter) and said he had no regrets about the drinking and smoking that caused his illness: writing was the most important thing to him, and the late nights and the talk were part of it. Genet, Potter, Hervé Guibert, Hitchens, and David Rakoff wrote prolifically through terminal illness. Writing was all they cared about.

I had to work [time] almost in a blaze, and almost day and night.6

On the endpapers of a notebook from 1988, a year before he died of AIDS complications, Mark Morrisroe wrote a litany of fuck-yous to all his friends, including Pat Hearn.

156 Still another thing: I don’t have any more paper…. Would you try to procure some (preferably a very thick school exercise book, because I write on my knees since there’s no table).7

CHILDHOOD

To create is always to speak about childhood. It’s always nostalgic.8

The need to make things is directly related to childhood. Swimming in the chaos of a too-big family, this is how I strove to extricate myself. Everything compensated for my having been a monster-child.

Desultory day, but thinking I could make my own diary an object of study. Or simply begin with “burn the diaries.”

A turnkey entered the cell, noticed the manuscript, took it away, and burned it…. Why? For whom? … Nothing in the world mattered to him except those sheets of brown paper which a match could reduce to ashes.9

It was on that brown paper that I wrote the beginning of Our Lady of the Flowers.10

AWAKE

M.’s dog Shadow is fucking another small animal. When he stops, his large, erect penis is detached from his body. Soon I realize that a huge chunk of his lower torso is also detached.

157I associate this dream with a conversation I had the night before, when I introduced two former students: “Anus, meet Anus.” One had made a video called Colon Karaoke; the other had based a performance on Georges Bataille’s “Solar Anus.”

155^th STREET

Pee behind a parked car on 155th Street and wonder why we can’t just piss in the park like the doggies or on the rocks by the Hudson, where I squat and think of Roni Horn. Read NYT article about sex offender Jerry Sandusky that mentions “rhythmic slapping sounds” coming from the shower. Begin to feel better and not care that I can’t write anything. Enjoy the river. Wash the sheets. Eat grapefruits.

Under [H.’s] skirts, under the fur-edged coats … the bodies are performing their functions.11

FAIRGROUND

On the way to the airport, blue of dawn, groggy. ...

Table of contents

• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• FIFTY MINUTES
• TRANSIT OF VENUS
• NOTES ON PHOTOGRAPHY & ACCIDENT
• INDEX CARDS
• EMPTIES
• LES GODDESSES
• ONE YEAR
• RW, JG
• CARYATIDS & PROMISCUITY
• BURN THE DIARIES
• HEMLOCK FOREST
• OPPOSITE OF LOW-HANGING FRUIT
• WEDDING LOOP
• THE PROBLEM OF READING
• I CONFESS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT