Spalding Gray

Grave Anatomy

And so, Spalding Gray is dead. He saw it coming, worried over it, knew it was possible, likely even, given his history, for his entire life. Add in the car wreck, the injuries, the stressors coming left and right….

His mother once asked him, “How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?”

She wound up doing that very thing when he was 26. He died when he was 62. He would have appreciated the symmetry.

To say Spalding poured his life into his art is to misspeak: his life was his art. His way of living, the way he found to keep going forward, provided the raw materials for his carefully constructed monologues. Spoken pieces that seemed so uncontrived because they were obsessively contrived over multiple performances. His instrument was his voice, his body, his hands, his face, painting pictures for his audience. Causing them to laugh with him and at him and feel stabs of regret with him and for him.

To miss him when he disappeared. To mourn him when his death was confirmed.

The question is raised every time a tortured artist dies: does it take a troubled soul to be a great artist? Can the happy person truly be an artist?

I’ve fallen on both sides of this issue over the years, and I don’t pretend to have an answer now. But if an artist is someone who expresses Something in a creative medium, might we not say that the discontented person by definition has more “Somethings” to express? Of course, this doesn’t mean the expression is worthwhile or original or artistic or any of the other measures by which we judge Art. Doesn’t have to be any of that. Just has to be yours.

Was Spalding Gray fated to die by his own hand? By all rights, the car crash, in which he was driving without a seatbelt, might well have done it for him. And three times after the accident and subsequent torturous physical and emotional recovery Gray attempted suicide, finally successful with a jump from a ferry into frozen waters. Are those things fate?

Isn’t fate only fate in retrospect?

Gray was at heart a writer, or at least a storyteller. He could weave a life out of thin air for his audience, just him on a stage with a notebook and a glass of water, a desk and a chair. I saw him perform once at UCLA, on the Slippery Slope tour. This was several years ago, before the accident, but after he had met his new wife and the mother of his children.

We had seats near the front of the auditorium. There was this moment where Spalding paused speaking and looked directly into my eyes. The slightest look came over his face for an instant, then he looked away and continued the monologue.

I’ve often thought of that moment, trying to decipher the look. I was reminded of it when I first heard he was missing back in January.

Now when I think of it, I almost wonder if he wasn’t surprised to find someone looking at him as he was lost in the moment of telling a story.

All of us have different reasons for writing, or painting, or playing music, or whatever it is we do. All of us have different Somethings with which to struggle. For some of us, those struggles become bigger than the art, than the expression can handle. For others, the struggles subsume everything and become the expression, as we turn outward for release.

Some of us will never find release.

Some of us will keep looking, realizing that in the pursuit there is salvation.

I did not know Spalding Gray. Even after reading all his books, hearing and watching his monologues, seeing his movies, I do not know him.

If his body of work was an exploration, trying to find out what it was all about, trying to do Something… well, then, I am a distance removed even from that. What insight can I offer?

Insight. Sight in. I can offer a look inside, to myself and others. Who knows? Maybe someone out there gets it. Maybe someone out there needs to get Something.

Maybe we all do.

(See also Dalai Lama interviewed by Spalding Gray.)