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Plural

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Workman 1

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Mackenzie

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Review

Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer and film curator based in Toronto and New Delhi.

Of the several mind-numbing effects of hallucinogens, tunnel vision is a common one. At once episodic and habitual, the loss of peripheral sight seemingly colours Moyra Davey’s sedating feature-length work _Horse Opera_ (2022). In isolated close-ups, Davey constructs a visual journal of her pandemic isolation: stacks of books and records; artefacts and paraphernalia littering living quarters; hilly, wintry, pastoral outdoors; a black mastiff lazily trudging through snow; and birds pecking at feeders hanging from tree branches. Reminiscent of iris shots from early silent cinema, Davey’s gaze imitates tunnel vision with indulgent candour, particularly lensing the physicality of horses. 

Portrayed with gratuitous, matter-of-fact _tendresse_, circular frames capture equine genitalia—peeing, pulsating—mostly vaginal. Scoring this fixation is a parallel fictional account. In Davey’s signature torpid drawl, she recites her writings on Elle, the protagonist of her diaristic text. Narrated in third person throughout the course of her film, Davey juxtaposes her own ailing solitude with the character’s experiences of raving sociality. 

Elle seems attuned to her own tunnel vision. She is described by Davey as a single mother who self-medicates and frequents loft parties in New York City. “Elle is happy when her head is ripped,” Davey narrates, “but by the end of the night when the lights come on and they stand around chatting, she can’t bear it.” Using psychoactives like LSD, cocaine, and crystal, she keenly observes the sartorial choreographies and comportments of party guests. When alone, Elle reads the writings of essayists like Hilton Als, Anne Boyer, and Elizabeth Hardwick. She registers her ageing body, with its insomnia and medicinal dependencies. “Thinking about the infusion that would soon be administered to her, Elle is hit with a surge of guilt for submitting to such experiences,” Davey writes of the character waiting at the doctor’s office, seemingly familiar with the dual sensations of drug use—ecstasy and dissatisfaction—both in undergoing treatment and as recreational habit. 

The artist sutures Elle’s narcotized stream of consciousness with documentarian, candid shots of foals, mares, and surrounding fauna, evoking the trippy circularity and telescopic inertia of Virginia Woolf’s “tunnelling process.” In a diary entry from August 30, 1923, Woolf—who Davey recalls Als referring to as “suicide bitch” in the latter’s collection of essays _White Girls_ (2013)—writes: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” 

Music, punctuating in interludes, appears to be Davey’s tunnel, activating the inner lives of _Horse Opera_. Entwining Elle’s liquor-laced delirium against the artist’s own agrarian remove in the country, beloved radio and vinyl tunes consistently cascade in and out of her hour-long, autofictional cinema. From Leon “Ndugu” Chancler’s underheard, disco-hued R&B cover of Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” to The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ecstatic version of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” tracks from Davey’s personal collection inflect her narration of Elle’s inebriated, dissociated interiority. 

An orchestra of the outdoors also apostrophizes these narrative threads. While walking her dog late one evening, Elle is “surprised to hear how many birds sing after dusk.” Music similarly pairs with the ambient chorus of daily life that surrounds Davey— neighing ponies and stallions, pouring rain clouds, or hands rummaging through kitchen items and barn supplies. In a few instances, moody ballads, LSD-inspired rhythms, and dance hits anticipate detailed captures of horse privates. The artist’s care for the barn creature crescendos in such iris shots of its cavernous mouth, trotting hoof, and languid flank. In a memorable sequence, the symphonic motions of her hands clean a saddle before carefully wrapping red cloth around a horse’s front leg. 

One then wonders: how entangled are Davey’s horses with her imaginary Elle, and with Davey herself? Pronounced by the artist’s fish-eyed attention to animalia, this query echoes throughout the multispectral universe of _Horse Opera_. At one point, Davey is seen lying supine like a corpse, covered by a blanket that reads “prochaine station,” inside what appears to be a basement. For the first time in the film, a body assumes the state of complete, staged stillness—not pacing, nor tending to domestic tasks or farm chores. Not prancing, not chewing, nor yawning, nor urinating, as in the case of her horses. Revealing the falsity of a singular protagonist, her brief enactment of death, with its liveable likeness and campy stagnation, oddly grounds the artist’s biodiverse autofictions. Maybe this is the elegiac, primal state that Davey’s zooted, infirm bibliophile Elle has only ever felt in fragments, but perhaps longs for in perpetuity. 


Writer

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

A woman is looking at herself in in multiple mirrors while speaking into corded headphones.

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_Horse Opera_ — Moyra Davey

Fan Wu is a semi-oceanic species of octopus jumping up and down. He works in performance, poetry, and the ecstasies of collective action. You can read his work in _Feeld, The Flaherty Film Seminar, The Vermin,_ and _C Magazine_. 

“I write endlessly in the register of prayer.” 

>I’m supposed to “review” your book, Emanations. How do I do this when pertinence only appears as a stain? I half-heartedly resist the temptation to take this line, on endless prayer, to be the key to your book—not without reference to where it appeared last, in Sisyphus’s Music Box, where you said it was a prayer with neither subject kneeling nor object knelt for, but a prayer suspended in the “hidden remains I intuit.” So I don’t take the first person personally, even when it taunts at the existence of a human self: 

“I am bound because ignorance makes me sick 
I am bound because ignorance makes me sick 
I am bound because ignorance makes me sick” 

>Ignorance is sickening because it’s still bound to a paradigm of knowledge; it appears only relative to knowledge as its failure. But non-knowledge is a third term that baffles the paradigm, that steps away from the binary, that sits outside the duality of enlightenment and ignorance; the self that would draw that distinction is an illusory inheritance of Western metaphysics. Deliciously, yours is a lyric poetry where the speaker’s throne has always already been vacated. In that empty space there’s a shard of life that stutters itself into a tentative form, barely discernible from the formless: in the tired whirr of repetition, Beckett’s bouquet’s wilted. Good riddance to the bad subject—make room for the withdrawn, the retreated, the renunciatory trace: 

“Near, like amber, a voice that is put away shackles itself to a figment.” 

>Distance is sexy, if sex is the parabolic intensification of nearness until you almost believe that _touch_ has transpired. All the more sexy when it suggests warmth, whether in the colour of amber or in the rub of voice. Any voice will do, so long as it’s draped in the honey of having lost itself. Distance is not to be mistaken for abstraction: there’s flesh here, wreathed in restraint and half-light; the body that only flickers piecemeal into view is nonetheless undeparted. I relish the echo of who I imagine is your forebear: “On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx / Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness.” But yet also, Mallarmé could never. 

“In a room I am where you are not thinking.” 

>Prathna, do you feel society, or at least its undercurrents, pivoting toward the unknowable? We fumble for the divine, turn our own pockets out for mysticism’s last dregs. As a child of scientists, I thought rationalist empiricism had secured its place at the end of history and didn’t think twice. Then suddenly I felt droves of people abandoning the edifice of science, which promised truth—or at least freedom from illusion. If our moment in time calls for a restitution of cosmology’s importance, your poetics is the shadow side of a planet going retrograde. Yet the energy that drives your book from line to line is not mystical: it does not claim a first-hand experience of the divine. The last strains of intuition do not disclose meaning, but necessity: 

“the price of pleasure
I sold and gained stillness 
so I could live” 

> With what’s left of ourselves a staircase of tatters, we preserve our lives. We shuffle our drives to prioritize _vital nourishment_. You show us how the marketplace of renunciation is full of paradoxes: that we must sell in order to get back a sliver of life—enough to count for survival. I can’t shake the Zhuangzi line where he proclaims with deadly simplicity, “Knowledge is infinite. Life is finite. If we use our finite life to chase infinite knowledge, we run ourselves around until we run aground”: 

“They say many things about the body 
Once it has exited
The room or returns
Unoccupied by thinking” 

>Reading _Emanations_ is an exercise in the suspension of thinking, if thinking is the kind that reaches for understanding and so fills the room with its tireless seeking. I feel like so much of your language is at the threshold of Attachment, like every sentence has already packed its bags, like it has the determination to leave home and a sense of closure behind. Speaking in divergences, I have to show everyone this stanza because I love it and it makes me crave: 

“It does not matter if 
I am flattened out 
for the wanton
but not willing 
to be sold as allegory
I am disorganized life 
the mending
sear of reason grasping for the breach” 

> Though pleasure as we know it has paid a heavy price, still it works itself through the cracks— through the subtlety of language, of sounds bouncing off each other, _reason to breach, wanton to willing_, of the contradictions of cauterization that know well the pains of healing. Since ancient times _emanationism_ is the belief that from a primal Godhead radiates the energy of existence outward into the world we know as such. The human layer is at a far remove from that core of emanation: so fallen, we receive only the faintest rays. What does an emanation do when the classical image of God the hierarch is no longer at the head? When instead the source of power that makes waves for us to live by is the hard-won, hard-fought sense of wonderment at the world—and for re-enchantment to breach the surfaces of exhaustion? 

“How often do I speak to you
In a voice of what you call God or wonderments 
What will it take for you to know that it’s enough 
To wander into marvels” 
