A Deeper Dive into Celeste

Make your reader carry the horror

Note: For any of this to make sense, please read the short story Celeste that I posted last week. Thank you.

Celeste is not the story it started as…

The original idea was to depict a married couple with no children. They’d be filming themselves in bed. You know, making a sex tape. Afterward, as they watched the recording, one partner would notice a vague shape present on the screen, near the bed. They’d speculate, but soon would have sex again in order to capture a better image of their “visitor.”

God forbid, but I almost called the story Voyeur.

Even this set-up seems a bit thin, so I explored the idea that the couple would make such a sex tape each year on their anniversary. In fact, they’d play the previous year’s tape on a monitor behind them. And as each tape included them having sex from previous years, this would create a receding, telescoping effect. The current them would be humping in the foreground, with the year-younger them partially hidden behind them, and the two-years-younger them even farther in the distance. All of these earlier thems would terminate in the youngest them, having sex for the first time.

Ironically, the only two versions of them actually looking at each other would be the youngest two. All subsequent versions to date would always be transfixed by their younger selves on various screens. The entire ritual was their art project, similar to family photos composed the same way year to year until all members are dead.

This original version carried irony and a bittersweet sense of aging and loss. And this was ultimately too cumbersome and boring, and relied too much on the narrator being too self aware.

No, this story needed to be fast-in, fast-out. So why not use the assembly line of fake intimacy: A porn studio?

The cultural precedent

Spirit photography has been around as long as photography. Arthur Conan Doyle was an advocate, and as wars such as the American Civil War and WWI led to the violent death of so many, people seeking closure turned to psychics and spirit photographers to find solace.

More recently, the so-called “game camera” has become the means for accidentally documenting a ghost. These are cameras strapped to trees in the forest, and they purportedly snap pictures of maniacs and monsters that roam only at night.

Since the cultural precedent of ghosts and monsters being captured on film already exists… why not use the most carnal, low-culture form of photography? Why not juxtapose the rutting, physical, capitalist world with the ethereal, spiritual one?

The impossible detail

Of course, this story is just a reinvention of “the impossible detail.” It’s the detail that can’t exist—yet it does. It’s the cold spot in Hill House. It’s the fact that the house in House of Leaves is slightly larger on the inside than on the outside. As always, the impossible detail sets the plot in motion. It must be resolved.

The inexplicable figure in the background of the orgy is the impossible detail.

The discovery process

Let’s note here that Celeste was written to be read aloud in a public place. The Hindsight Tap Room. As such, it would have to compete with some noise and motion and smells. It couldn’t risk going too long, and it had to physically pull the audience into the story. Sex does that. It also had to sidestep sounding preachy or redemptive.

In the original discovery process the married couple would take the video to various experts. A priest would see only that the two were using contraception, and engaging in non-procreative acts. A scientist would say, “Damn, your wife has a great rack!” A politician would fixate on the fact that the couple was mixed race. In short, every “expert” would see only their own prejudice in the video, and they would all overlook proof of the divine.

In a way it would’ve been the blind men examining the elephant, but using various political viewpoints. How high brow! How boring.

For a better, funnier example of this tunnel vision, check out the book Obscene Interiors. In it, an interior decorator remarks on photos of badly decorated rooms. Each photo contains the (censored) figure of a nude man posed to solicit online sex. Instead of reacting to the obvious, the decorator/narrator points out the shortcomings in the room’s decor.

In this original version of Celeste the failure to recognize the divine might seem preachy and obvious (prejudice is bad). Nobody in a bar in Southeast Portland is there to get preached at.

So, the humor had to be more broad. The social message, muted or nixed. Okay?

The disconnect for humor

Instead of a disconnect between the trivial (what people notice) and the profound (the proof of the afterlife), I opted for a disconnect between the reasonable demands of Celeste (no pissing in my mouth, please) and how the narrator sees such boundaries as petty and silly. This piggish failure to recognize basic human dignity occurs as swinish, but funny.

Thus when Celeste arrives as a monstrous ghost even that fails to do more than annoy the narrator. The narrator’s complete lack of empathy allows me to depict the horrible physical details of AIDS. But since the narrator fails to emotionally engage with the horror, the story forces the reader to carry the burden of the accumulating awfulness.

It’s a choice whether to make the disconnect about petty vs. profound (my original plan), or to make it about a misappropriate social response to another’s pain. That’s the basis of pratfall humor: Someone else gets hurt. Anthropologists claim that such humor arises from the ancient glee humans felt when they were running as prey animals in a herd and someone else tripped and was eaten by the lion.

For example, in the W. Somerset Maugham novel Theater (filmed under the title Being Julia), the female lead breaks down near the end. To her doting husband, she confesses to being a bitch and a liar and a cheat and many other unflattering things.

In response, rather than politely negate such claims, her husband replies, “Nevertheless…” His failure to assuage her pain gets a big laugh.

And as a story written to be read in a bar, a big laugh beats a preachy wistful laugh every time.

The escalation

Simple. It would’ve been more difficult and abstract to escalate the frustration of the married couple. However, with a porn studio it’s a more cut-and-dried matter of the company going bankrupt.

In a porn studio even the most intimate activities are systematized. They can be repeated as part of a scientific method. With a married couple, such repetition would’ve bogged down the story.

The resolution

It’s the same in each case. Reincarnation.

In the original concept, the spirit would be recognized as the long-lost great-grandmother who had bequeathed the house to the couple. Sweet, but lame. The great-grandmother will be reborn. Yawn. If the Lifetime Network can do the story, I don’t want to do it.

But with my version I can turn Celeste into a “cycle” story, to suggest this will become an on-going dynamic as future porn stars die. I prefer this big explosion of possibility to the smaller, peaceful resolution of the couple finally having a child.

In closing

Since it’s to be read aloud, I needed to keep Celeste big and coarse and confronting. A story read in a bar has little time or space to do its job. Noise competes. You want your audience to strain to hear each word. Celeste herself needs to be sympathetic, yet constantly slighted. Think of the character Chloe near the beginning of Fight Club. Chloe is dying, yet she still craves physical intimacy. Her desperation and availability combined with her sad physical condition creates the disconnect of pathos.

My choices are based on that: create the disconnect that creates humor, then escalate to the disconnect that creates pathos. As Tom Spanbauer would say, “Make them laugh, and only then break their hearts.” And do it all very quickly!

Such was my goal in Celeste.

Note: As you read this I will be in Spain. By Oct. 2nd I will be coming home. Don’t look for me to interact in Comments until next week.

And I did read this story at Hindsight. I’ll post the video asap.