Dust and Light: On Moyra Davey’s "Index Cards"
Moyra Davey | Index Cards: Selected Essays | New Directions | May 2020 | 192 Pages
In Hemlock Forest, a video project from 2017, the artist Moyra Davey paces back and forth a few feet before the camera. She moves in profile, entering and exiting the frame with an air of absorbed distraction, slightly out of focus. The background, visible through a loft window, presents a postcard urban tableau. From an upstairs apartment, the camera looks out on a winter scene. There are spare, calligraphic trees; a row of apartment buildings, each topped by a weathered-looking water tank, stretches away into the distance.
As she circulates, Davey reads aloud from a voiceover script. Common to many of her works, these scripts, typically dense and allusive amalgams of theory, anecdote, and Davey’s own personal experience, tend to provide a digressive analysis of her emotional and artistic process. At the same time, these monologues function to hold their own explanatory powers in check—while the scripts seem to offer clues to latent meanings in Davey’s works, they also function as crystallizations of Davey’s essential doubt in her influences and experiences. In Davey’s work, reflexivity, self-reference, and a radical openness combine to produce films held together by nothing so much as their desire to disappear, to be dissolved.
Part of Davey’s monologue in Hemlock Forest is given over to describing a series of shots from Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, an experimental documentary in which the French filmmaker reads letters from her mother over long takes of 1970s New York City. In News From Home, a meditative pace and gorgeously composed shots of depopulated city streets create an echo chamber of sorts, which catches and multiplies the emotional pleas of Akerman’s mother. Davey borrows this ecstatic tedium but adds a twist—in Hemlock Forest, temporal elaboration serves as a canvas for obsessive annotation.
Throughout Davey’s performance, her voice is a sound-image of dissociation; a headphone dangles from her ear, adding to the impression she’s rehearsing the stilted and grammatically overcareful phrases of an introductory language class. But for all its dispassion, Davey’s voice also functions as a tool of association. Like much of her work, Hemlock Forest is cryptically personal; in the fragile jetstream of metadiscursivity, an image of Davey’s glassy, discontinuous sense of self is struggling to appear. The labor is delicate, seems to require a soft approach, and so the struggle is staged inside of a visual grammar of decorous opacity and a tableau of confessional domesticity—her films often capture Davey ensconced in her apartment, surrounded by bookshelves and haphazard impastoes of notes, with dishes in the sink.
Recurrent in Davey’s work are certain intellectual hobbyhorses—the writings of Jean Genet and Walter Benjamin, the films of Chantal Akerman and Eric Rohmer, the self-analyzing documentaries of Louis Malle, and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. French ideas, mostly, they form a set of idées fixes for Davey, appearing in various contexts within the collection, arising as anecdotes, quotes, opaque references, and so on, drifting about and settling down like motes of dust. The instability of Davey’s works—her intention that they never feel finalized or rigidly sequential—means that whenever these ideas do return, it often feels as though they’re being deployed for the first time.
Instead of progression, Davey’s works are driven by deferral. As a structural conceit, this tendency towards postponement (borrowed, in part, from the French discourse that animates her thought) is central to the experiments with chance-based composition that Davey employs in her writing, and which are largely meant to frustrate the ego’s drive to completion—to prevent the work from killing itself off. Like a pile of loose index cards, Davey’s essays exist in a purgatorial state of extended organization, refusing to assume a final form or a conclusive arrangement of thoughts.
Part of this desire to defer completion stems from the personal nature of Davey’s most affecting work. Her video project Les Goddesses, for instance, revisits a series of photos she took of her bohemian-minded sisters in the 1980s, which she returned to when one of her nieces overdosed on opiates. Throughout the text, Davey weaves connections between her family life and the lives and stories of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters, a similarly free-spirited group of women. We learn, for example, that Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter Fanny also died of an overdose at the age of twenty-two, “though in her case,” as Davey notes, “it was deliberate.” Similarly, in the text for Hemlock Forest, Davey connects Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, “about a housewife who lives alone with her son, imprisoned by her home and the routine of its maintenance,” to her own relationship with her son as he prepares to leave home.
The ability to revisit projects and texts, updating them as the need arises, requires a certain looseness of structure, which Davey exercises in Index Cards, her memoiristic collection of essays, lectures, and voiceovers released by New Directions in May. In these collected writings, Davey’s presence is frosty and elliptical, a deictic phantom hiding behind block quotes and coolly academic prose.
The essays themselves are fragmentary, their paragraphs joined together by intimative leaps. In many ways Index Cards feels like another entry in the growing canon of fragmentary, mosaic lit, comprised of works like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, or more recently Jenny Offill’s Weather and Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. Though Davey’s text bears a subtle but important difference from these polestars. Whereas works like Weather seem to suggest, in their modularity, that the continuity of consciousness is impossible in our digitally-mediated and crisis-laden moment, Davey’s writings gracefully sidestep the issue, suggesting instead that a multiplicity of continuities is always possible. Like the ephemeral scrips that lend the collection their name, Index Cards bears an aura of impermanence. Internally, its texts are endlessly and intrinsically shuffle-able, bleeding into one another and overlapping.
Index Cards is best envisioned as a meta-discourse of lost things. “I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives,” Davey writes, “as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead.” Reflexivity makes absence generative, sows the abyss with language, but it also lends a certain fleetness to Davey’s prose. Her recollections of her life in New York City, for instance, are imagistic and oblique in a way that recalls the mnemonic function of index cards. Memory, for Davey, is about a certain on-the-cusp-ness; it is a flirtation, a generative aperçu:
“As I write and think about this abstraction, nostalgia, a particular landscape always presents itself. It involves a summer day, a park in Montreal, ’60s-era architecture, my mother, and a scene from an Antonioni film. But I can’t say more than that. To do so would be to kill off the memory and all the generative power it holds in my imagination. I keep it perpetually in reserve, with the fantasy that someday I may land there, in what is by now a fictional mirage of time and place.”
Like words, digital cameras are also memory-killers. When Davey laments, in “Notes on Photography and Accident,” the loss of the “phenomenon of latency” inherent in analog photography, she’s eulogizing the surrealistic gap between the image we wanted to produce and the image that eventually appears. It is this gap, for Davey, that prevents us from morphing into image-making automatons. Where the previsualization offered by digital photography eliminates chance and deferral, the latency of analog photography allows for forgetting—for the reappearance of an image divested of the mental acts that brought it into being.
Unsurprisingly, Davey’s practice as a photographer informs her writing in more ways than this. In the same essay, she describes her texts as attempts to approximate “the inherently surrealist, contingent, ‘found’ quality of the vernacular photograph.” Composition relies on discovery, on a peripatetic approach to reading derived from the French Situationist Guy Debord’s concept of the dériveand a philosophy of collecting cribbed in part from Benjamin. “There is a flânerie of reading that can be linked to the flânerie of a certain kind of photographing,” Davey writes. “Both involve drift, but also purpose, when they become enterprises of absorption and collecting.” Given the principles of bricolage underlying her compositions, desire is displaced, creating not the thing itself—the artwork orécrit— but the collection of quotes and anecdotes out of which it’s woven.
If authorial absence is a key touchstone for Davey, blankness has a role to play as well. Throughout the collection, Davey circles back to an anecdote about Jean Genet and his discovery of writing that illuminates how she positions blankness and reflexivity at the heart of artistic production. An imprisoned Genet, as the story goes, had set down to compose a postcard to a friend and found himself unable to write. Stalled out and grasping for words, Genet began to contemplate the “white, grainy texture” of the postcard, found that it reminded him of snow, and discovered he was able to write by describing the feel and quality of the paper and the wintry associations it evoked.
Images of blankness permeate Index Cards, signaling not so much erasure as the endless potential of starting over. Late in the book, Davey recalls a train journey in New York City. She trundles along, staring about the car, and when “the 1 train goes elevated at 125th Street,” she notes, “sunlight from the east lights up an open book.” Briefly, “it is nearly impossible to look directly at the pages; its surface is made blindingly white and radiant, all characters are blown out, erased.” Like Genet’s postcard, the book—imbued with an almost votive luminosity—is returned to page one.
What Davey’s essays ultimately offer is a counter-strategem of sorts, a shrewd circumvention of oblivion. They undercut blankness by absorbing and rerouting it, positing it as simply another chance to reconstitute the self. Davey’s description of her train journey, we learn, dovetails with a shot from Akerman’s News from Home. “A third of the way into the film, there’s a subway shot aimed straight down the 1 train,” Davey recounts. “The camera is uncannily still, most indifferent, taking in the movements of passengers, some curious, most indifferent.” What fascinates Davey about the shot, beyond its strictly documentary nature, is its pristine stability, which allows the point of perception (the camera; the woman behind it) to disappear. The extinction of the artist, like the immolation of the text, is an instance of serenity, a negative epiphany—a vision of blankness as pure potentiality. Cradled in the train, a shuddersome light enters you, fills you, erases you.