Last week I reread "In the Cemetary Where Al Jolson is Buried." I love this story in a primal sort of way. I love it the way I love the ocean--that same awful, mammoth mass that lies beyond the sunbathing teenagers in "Cemetary," lying in wait to swallow them one by one in their oblivious, "aggressive health."
I love this story for what isn't on the page. I love the empty spaces, the holes between paragraphs, sentences, images, the craters left gaping for the reader to climb into. I love it's remoteness, second-handedness. I love that I despise the protagonist. Isn't she a coward? Who, no really, who doesn't stay by their best friend's side as they are dying? Who is such a stranger to loss? Who hides behind the most trivial of the most questionable, bizarre trivia ("Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out" wtf??)? Who moves further into this twilight zone of trivia the closer she gets to the actual truth, until she finally arrives at the heartbreaking chimp grotesque. "Baby, drink milk," signs the chimp to its dead baby. Who is this?
Oh.
I learn so much from this story each time I read it. Today, I've learned probably the most important reason why "Madame Curie's Got Tits" is truly a shitty, shitty first draft. As Hempel shows us, the unutterable is just that. We need a truly masterful craft to flesh out the true experiences that our minds try to protect us from, the pain and the horror that cannot be contained in the tin can of language.
