Interim

diary entries, Index Cards by Moyra Davey, plus reading & film list.

Dear Diary,

Forgive me for not writing sooner. I passed through February in a daze filled with summer rain, blistering sun, waterfalls and ocean spray. March fell through my fingers and I am trying to grasp onto time but nothing has gone according to plan. The mornings are cool and the night falls early and as the leaves change their colour and begin to fall I wonder how I passed through summer, or how summer passed through me.

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28th March, 2024.

Sleepy-eyed in the studio/balcony/sun-room space we refer to as the ‘canopy’ and plan to fill with plants. The enclosed balcony overlooks asphalt, cement, concrete and other apartment blocks. The river slices in from the distance and I anchor myself to the slither of blue in the horizon. We have been living in this apartment for about nine months now, it is darker than our previous apartment and I am still adjusting. We moved the dining table into the canopy so I, along with the plants, can soak up as much sunlight as possible. I sip on bone broth and nibble on chocolate for breakfast. I am restless. I had a dream that someone serenaded me over the phone, ‘baby I just miss you’. I pressed the phone against my ear while holding my body against something that looked like an art installation, a huge cube made out of cardboard cylinders suspended along the edge of a room. My body squished in the crevice between the cardboard and the wall.

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I recently read Index Cards by artist Moyra Davey, which explores ideas on writing and photography, failure and accident, keeping a diary, and the tensions between the personal and the private. In these essays, Davey stretches ordinary daily encounters with musings on literature, art and theory - drawing upon Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and many others - to dwell upon, layer and pry into the relationship between reading and writing, art and life. Davey writes, almost as a confession: ‘I realise that I write about being deformed and re-made by the things that I read. And I am trying to write in the form of the things that I read: diaries, fragments, lists’. Indeed, these essays are held together as fragments, diary entries, revived cuts and floating quotes, a patchwork of words that arrive to the reader like images. Writing in fragments, I feel, captures how the form of thinking takes shape: erratic, lucid, hazy, quick, meandering, tangled with loose ends, exhilarating and exhausting and exquisite.

Davey includes a quote from Pradeep Dalal, taken from a talk delivered at the symposium Writing as Practice: Peripheral Continuity held in 2011 at the International Center of Photography. Here, Dalal says that: ‘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.’ This quote sticks to me and I welcome the reminder that not everything we do/write/make is for public consumption.

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Reading list

Index Cards by Moyra Davey.

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (DNF’d for now).

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

Film list

The Dreamers (2003) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci.

Admittedly I haven’t watched a lot of films lately. Instead I have been rewatching old TV shows from the 90s/00s, such as Monk and Sex And The City, as well as comfort cartoons from my childhood such as Babar, Franklin, The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter’s tales of Peter Rabbit. My heart yearns to be surrounded by nature and woodland creatures.