Hemingway's GraveSometimes nothing but a new life will do.
I moved to Wyoming. And then I remembered that Hemingway was buried somewhere out there. I had always remembered his burial place, Idaho: It seemed so dull when you knew how the man lived. I arrived in Ketchum on a rainy summer day, having passed so many barren lands and remote cities I will never hear of again. It had been cool and gray outside, but the sun was just beginning to light the far side of the green hills. The cemetery was empty. No people. Those who directed me said his grave would be easy to find: under trees, near the back. Graves are small finite spaces. They are reminders that we have to move, and live. So many people build their own grave tight and comfy, and they climb in long before they die. Rest in Peace is what a working stiff does for two out of seven days. Hemingway reposes beneath two pines that heave into the sky like plumes of green smoke. It is an image straight out of For Whom the Bell Tolls. His was a flat, casket-sized marble slab covered with pennies and notes. I read some of them, these kindred spirits of mine. Had they also driven for hours just to glimpse the grave? I discovered a tiny, necker-sized bottle of Dewar’s scotch which I drank with reverence. I told myself Hemingway was treating me to a drink. The walk through the tiny thoroughfares of Ketchum was confusing and lonely. I ended up calling someone I had vowed to never speak with again. I wanted to miss my home. I had never been as alone as I was when I visited Hemingway. My pain and confusion were pure, unmitigated. Travel frees you from the theatre of pain, when your life has become a collection of painful scenes and props in a role you no longer want. Yet away from home there is a different edge to solitude, longing. The desire to figure out Who controls time and life goes away: instead there is only the question of what the Hell is going to happen now, what is meant to happen next. No matter what I tried I was not skilled enough to palliate these feelings. In peaceful times a man may fancy he can handle the pain of uncertainty coming out of love’s cruelest atrocities, so long as he is still walking and working. He can always redirect his attention from indignity and loss. Heartache a man brings on himself, and chooses to feel it so his soul will punish his body. Yet it is not just heartache: it is staring into the whole of one’s crippled life and finding no escape from the thoughts that cloud over all work, that numb every muscle used for smiling, that dull every flavor and weigh heavy on the appetite. The conduit for all positive sensation is simply busted for a very long time. And then toughness becomes irrelevant. Hemingway was tough, but he still needed to hold himself upright with worldly things. Idaho is beautiful in a very secret way. “You would never know it...” All the places people do not tend to go have a beauty about them. See the reverse in the Where’s Waldo books: would you like to be dropped into one of those vacation-themed panoramas which inspire the agoraphobic horrors of Bosch? Why did I go? What did it matter if I sat by the grave, shared in the silence and drank an ounce of scotch, rather than staying home, studying a photo of the grave and saving a good amount of borrowed money? I have believed Plato’s analogy of genius for a long time: genius is the great magnet and we are all shavings. No one is pulled alone. When one shaving goes up, others can be taken along; and the stronger the pull on that one, the more will go along in the wake of this powerful invisible energy. I hoped proximity to Hemingway’s corpse would do that for me. His dead silence would become the word I wanted to write. |