First, I should probably tell you that it’s been one of those years, a year in which you can’t believe a year has passed. And time did not fly because you had fun, instead the days were built of doing what must be done to get by and get through. These years have happened before of course, but have never gone by so thoroughly artless. And I don’t want to tell you what’s happened, what sort of life has followed the two years I spent consumed by the soul driven night and day, the terrible/beautiful agony and ecstasy of writing, at work on a book- length poem for an MFA. And yes, I got the MFA, but what I was really doing was buying myself time; two years to engage destiny rather than fate, and if it weren’t for the evidence of my dream life this last year, I might believe I had turned the course wholly back to fate.

What I want to tell you is just in case you encounter a year such as this, or even a month, if circumstances ever seem to make it impossible to engage your creative self at all, or if maybe your creative self is all spent on how to survive, and in the course of just surviving the you you had known seems to die. And maybe the you you have known has died many times but she never went down without a pencil, but if she ever goes down without a pencil, I want to tell you this—this which is about not writing, this which is about losing your head, and finally this which is about your Art hunting you down.

Inside each of us dwells a Bluebeard*, a negative animus whose wish it is to have our heads. Maybe he says you have done the wrong thing, or you’re not good enough, or there is no time for you and your most sacred work. And in life, like in the myth of Bluebeard, the woman must call all her allies when she is threatened, and she and her allies must kill him together instead. But this murder is not enough. Once dead, Bluebeard must be buried in the convent, so that the nuns can keep watch and make certain he does not come back to life, which is to say the holiest part of us, perhaps the Heart, has to keep a constant eye on the possibility of his presence returning, so as to distinguish his voice from our own. And he’s sharp and he’s charming and cunning—he will make his voice sound so much like your own.

And although this year my dreams have been full of images of dismemberment, dark dreams of death and predators—in alchemical terms, the mortificatio—I could not have known how thoroughly Bluebeard had gotten ahold of me until a friend, much like the mythical ally, dreamt a dream that was my dream: she said—you came down the stairs with a knife and asked to be cut. Then inside that dream I dreamt there was a shimmery place where your head would be and you were laughing, headless.

So I thought of beheading and then thought of Bluebeard. I thought of all the Bluebeard things I had said to myself this last year about not having time, not really being a writer any- way, being too tired and busy to do anything that did not have to be done, and how my work lies in kitchens again and its fine—it’s fine just to parent and work and pay the rent—and how I had my time and that time has passed… I said all these things with the head alone, disembod- ied and dismembered, but dreams, like the body, do not lie—it was not fine.

This dream was different than the other dark dreams. In this dream I was asking for my head to be cut off, not fighting against it, and, once headless, was laughing. Was there some part of me that wanted to be without my head? Maybe it would be easier to go on like an automaton, to disconnect entirely from any creative impulse, from the desire for art-making—that long- ing, that pull. I imagined a life like that, in my mind I could almost give in to it, but then I saw before me a series of encaustic paintings, each with a line from my long poem. I wanted so badly to make the paintings. Then I wanted to not want to make the paintings. And there it was in waking life, the dream-self, wanting to be headless.

But the psyche kept at me like the psyche tends to do: I dreamt a killer came up the basement stairs to find me in the kitchen and asked me how I wanted to die. I armed myself with a kitchen knife and he pulled back his sleeve to reveal an arm that was not an arm, but a blow- torch. Then he set me on fire with his blowtorch arm.

It was a horrifying dream. It was a magic dream. It’s no accident that the arm was a blow- torch, making encaustic paintings requires constant use of one. The artist of me had been pushed so far underground, it had to ascend to find me mid-world, to find me in the kitchen, at work, to threaten the life of the resigned part of me, to transform me by fire.

What I mean to say is this: you can listen to Bluebeard, but it’s best not to, and even if you lis- ten to the Bluebeard of you and enter the mortificatio—the darkest dark—the artist of you will go to any lengths to find you, will scare you awake, because your most sacred work does not belong only to you. Your calling is your offering.

*for more on the myth of Bluebeard see Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

bevin is a poet and a mixed-media artist. She recently graduated from Goddard’s MFA—Creative Writing program, in which she spent two years at work on a modern epic poem. Originally from Chattanooga, TN, she now lives in Seattle, WA, where her life is made of kitchens.