“Remembrance itself is a type of hoarding, a clutching at love or trauma - those ‘others’ that make us fully human - and all of us are these futile Humpty Dumpties trying to put our shards back together,” so writes Dodie Bellamy in Bee Reaved, a collection of essays touching on life after the death of her husband and collaborator Kevin Killian. I picked up a copy around the same time I picked up another job, traveling three hours each day cumulatively to be a caregiver for a woman who had a rod in her spine and little to no company. We went on long walks at a promenade connecting three isles of the city and named after a former Secretary of the Interior. It seemed then the perfect backdrop for talking of how the body might deteriorate but the mind remains vivid, favoring remembrance, what could soothe or prick at a wound.
For the both of us the very act of conjuring did not always ease a sense of dislocation but gained momentum towards an ocean. Our excess of words stretched beyond known topographies until evaporation. We organized her life’s work in this season: unfinished manuscripts, film editing dailies, business cards, bistro napkins, insurance claims, photobooks filled with actors and playwrights, landlines and cameras that could assuage grief if only they were serviced; there was a system for this organization, one I could not divine and came to understand as delicate. I learned to nod and post-it note piles when little made sense. If we were not to throw anything out, if we were salvaging everything, what was the end goal? For some forgetting is the antidote and for others it is the greatest betrayal. Bellamy is a writer who concerns herself most with remembering, lumbering through the day to day, amassing more and more until it becomes so untenable it can only be committed to steno pad. A writer’s intentions are liable for misinterpretation, but if she is of Bellamy’s kind she says the profane is sacred. All the missives we are told are not fit to print, let alone display or utter to another soul, is her rallying cry against the austere or sanctimonious. It is not just courage that is Bellamy’s signature theme but a deep reverence for the humility of personhood, collaging form across poetry, blog posts, novels, and altering existing works by other writers for further conversation. There is an indulgence here but it collectivizes through interpretation of everyday practices, what could be so banal you might miss it or think was utterly significant to you alone. In the first essay of Bee Reaved Bellamy prepares her and Killian’s ephemera for donation to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “You feel embarrassment and guilt over your manic accrual. The best writing embarrasses the author – at least a teeny bit – emerging from compulsion to flaunt what any sane person would camouflage. Work where the writer - or workshop committee- is totally in control fails because its libidinal pressure has been critiqued away. The resultant piece is so polished, so correct, so flat you could bounce a dime off of it.” Bellamy’s work is coarse. It has the veins of not-so-well-kept ways. Her virtue is that it all protrudes crimson and studded, what is unmistakably bardic. You could wear it or hawk it. She leaves that up to your discretion.
-Katie Calderon