Index Cards by Moyra Davey

Author:Moyra Davey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2020-04-30T00:38:05+00:00

August 18, 2013

One year has passed since Y. came to dinner and stayed four hours talking about himself.

(2014)

RW, JG

‘The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to bottom with tiny black characters — letters, words, commas, exclamation marks . . .’

—Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

Robert Walser obviously had a thing for paper. We know he loved his pen, and when it began to cramp his hand and his style, he learned to value pencils. About the tiny, filigreed hieroglyphs known as “microscripts,” he said, “with the aid of my pencil I was better able to play, to write.”

But he clearly was also a paper fetishist, and the recycled fragments — calendar pages, stained envelopes, brown postal wrappers, business cards, and on at least one occasion, “white paper used for art prints” — must have appealed to him for their graphics and textures, their odd shapes and sizes, their tactile qualities.

I couldn’t quite fathom The Assistant — I kept thinking of Kafka and how the modernist style never persuasively seeped into my veins. I read a hundred pages expecting I’d stop there, but then I kept on reading, mostly in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, waiting for pills to kick in. I’d been thinking of this novel as a bourgeois satire but then began to be struck by its interludes of escape into the beauty and the “authenticity” of nature.

I could never find a pencil near the bed and shamelessly dog-eared pages from a library copy in order to remember certain passages, delirious accounts of protagonist Joseph’s forays into the countryside, especially the enchanted, golden vale in the forest where his mother sits and for a rare moment is happy and at peace, thereby granting her children, normally guarded and attuned to her shifting moods, the giddy freedom to frolic in the paradisiacal, wooded playground, a fairy-tale space they’ve come upon by chance. The Assistant, for all its strangeness and alienation, is rich in long, drawn-out passages of delirious, intoxicated reveling in the loveliness of nature.

There is a deep gratification to projects — this essay, and the Subway Writers — connected to the experience of books read in the night. With their oneiric quality of improbability, of peculiar and inexplicable behaviors, Walser’s novels seemed the perfect books to be reading when I was not far from dreams myself.

Reading Jakob von Gunten at 6 AM, again waiting for sleep, and thinking, Why, as per Genet (who finds his way in here by happenstance as will soon be explained), does everything need to be instrumentalized: read or looked at, consumed with a view as to how it might be made into something else? Even as I scribble this note at 6:15 AM. I feel the satisfaction/relief of productivity.

Jakob’s abjection at the Benjamenta Institute (a boys’ school for servants) reminds me of Genet’s incarceration at the Mettray Penal Colony (ostensibly a school for sailors). My friend the artist Pradeep Dalal cited Genet at a public

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