Ghosts, objects and Kathy Acker's Gaultier dress.
Kathy’s Gaultier dress (that now) sits atop my dresser. A tiny stretchy dress that must have pulled tightly across her body, a body sloughing skin, oozing perspiration. Her body. Will Kathy’s stuff change me, will it work some spell on my life? I walk through my days vigilant for evidence.
- Dodie Bellamy, 'Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff, 2015.
In a dilapidated graveyard, in the middle of a turnip field about an hour’s drive from Glasgow, I picked up a small letter A from the grass. The A was no more than a couple of centimetres of dull metal in a now-stylish, early-twentieth-century font. I made a tight fist around it and debated keeping it as a cool accessory to dangle Judy Blame-esque from my neck or ear but something stopped me, a latent fear born out of watching too many late night Channel 4 movies as a child. The A was an inlay fallen from the headstone of a wealthy woman, the last into the family plot. I loosened my grip around the letter and let it fall back into the grass. It was January 1st and I couldn’t start the New Year in possession of a haunted object.
I often take things that aren’t mine. I once worked in a junk shop where I would slip trinkets of little or no value into my pockets as I fished around for things to list on eBay. Miniature replicas of famous monuments I’d never visited, colorful candle stubs too small to burn, ancient passport photos or mini-Instax prints of strangers posing in their underwear. Forgotten talismans from other people’s lives that I hoped would bring intrigue into mine but instead clogged up my house with the makings of both a voyeur and a hoarder.
(Jean Paul Gaultier dress from the series 'Kathy Acker's Clothes' photographed by Kaucyila Brooke)
In her essay ‘Digging Through Kathy Acker’s Stuff’, Dodie Bellamy comes into possession of a ring, a set of keys and a Jean Paul Gaultier dress that once belonged to Kathy Acker. Freed from their nine years of storage after her death, the objects begin to hold court on their own, awakening and redirecting the energy of their previous owner in their inanimate stubbornness.
Sometimes I get all left-brain and I tell myself to stop being so superstitious, so woo woo mystical about all of this. “These effects of Kathy’s,” my left brain says to me, “these trinkets of wool and silver, are just objects, mere dumb objects.” But no matter how I try to rationalize them, they will not stop pointing beyond their thingness listen to me listen to me.
Dodie’s attempts to harness any residual energy of Acker’s dress lead her into a labyrinth of scattered memory and coincidences. How stupid of me to try to push Kathy’s dress into some clever “Meaning” rather than allowing it to speak on its own terms. This dogged right-brain imbuing of objects with other-worldly woo-woo is reminiscent of a section in Joan Didion’s 2014 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking in which a recently bereaved Didion puts off sorting through any of her husband’s wardrobe, halted by the delusion that he might rise from the dead and need them. The weight of the domestic horror of death is too great for any living body to bear and so naturally we transfer pieces of it into objects to lighten the load. I neglect to unfollow the Instagram accounts of friends who are no longer living and leave them hanging like ghosts in my follow list. Somewhere between disbelief and magical thinking, the material trail of the dead pixelates.
A couple of years ago I was sent a copy of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School to write about for an online arts magazine. I read the book in one eight-hour stint sitting on an itchy chair in the library and an hour after I returned home I was suddenly struck down with a violent stomach bug. In the library I had thought that my swelling nausea was a symptom of Kathy’s pulsating visceral writing. Weaving in and out of intelligibility with crude drawings and stolen passages, the grossness of the language, blood, cum and feces making the room spin slightly despite my usual high tolerance for corporeal effluvia. The book fascinated me but I packed it into a charity shop bag soon after the piece was published, terrified that if I ever opened it again its weird buggy presence would possess me and I would instantly vomit.
Late-capitalist society encourages us to rip through objects so fervently and with so little regard for their impact beyond our fleeting illusion of ownership that honouring them with agency and respect feels radical. Though sometimes it can be impossible to tell if the draw is from the object itself or the desire to consume. I too have a Jean Paul Gaultier dress, not mine in any conventional sense but sitting in stasis in an Etsy shopping basket in a tab on my desktop that I haven’t closed since December. I’m convinced that its transference onto my body will make me a better writer, that if I just dig the hole in my overdraft and buy it I will ooze confidence from a newly stiffened spine that will set my world straight in ways I can only imagine. In 2006 Bellamy curated an exhibition of Acker’s unwashed wardrobe called Kathy Forest in which the Gaultier dress hung; a food stained, wool and velvet ghoul. Photographs of Kathy Forest show the garments dangling like ghosts around the room, transient and distilled versions of Kathy whose absence is felt keenly in their presence. Like the prose of other writers lifted and manipulated in her work, Kathy’s designer clothes with their pit-stains and skin cells were merely vehicles through which a body whose energy could not be contained passed through. When ownership is a mere detail then nothing is sacred, although it may be treated like it is.