Spalding Gray

I’m again at the root of a willow tree aslant a lake, the sort of power spot I look for and favor in whatever city I happen to be living. This willow and this lake are particularly good examples of both, and yet it’s only lately that I’ve put the luxury of mobility together with this spot to equal freedom from the cave of my apartment. As the weather turns and the boughs swell with blossoms, as the great Goddess glows in coitus, I’m finding more and more that there is a particular problem at the center of my being, one that I’ve touched upon or alluded to or spoken directly about several times. This is going to be another of those postings, and it might end up being the last of that ilk.

I was listening to an interview with Spalding Gray, the well-known monologist and actor who after a tragic frontal lobe brain injury, spiraled downward in depression and took his own life earlier this year. I only knew the man through his performances, and then only bits and pieces of those, but I’ve always somewhat identified with him. I’ve been writing what could be called literary monologues for almost seven years, long before blogs were in vogue, right as online journaling hit the scene. These days, it’s somewhat commonplace to wrench open your heart and share the intimate, stark details of your fears, desires, neurosis and shadow. Back then, however, it wasn’t widespread. So naturally, I cast around for like-minded people, mentors and community and happened upon Spalding.

I don’t pretend to have known Spalding Gray or the state of his psychology and I don’t presume at all to explain him or his life through me and mine, but listening to him discuss his work eerily impacted me. Here was a man talking about observation, that kind of detached, super-focused observation of your own life that makes of you a vulture of creativity. As you that vulture experiences something, only one piece of you actually experiences it while a much larger piece is busy processing the experience in terms of how you plan to write or speak about it later. What kind of story should I use to illustrate this adventure, you think as the spear plunges into your foot. Is this an interesting metaphor about the general state of living or loving or death? Can I somehow work the yellow mailbox into the general thread?

In his interviews, Spalding described looking for a moment of living life rather than living it and observing the living of it for inclusion in some future monologue. He never found it. Instead there was a freak car accident abroad that left him with a frontal lobe injury, which intensified his churn and the depth of his observation and enhanced and magnified his neuroses and psychoses. In his last days, according to one of his friends (also interviewed) he discussed how he was no longer sleeping, how he couldn’t shut off the internal monologue, how all of it had become an excruciating, maddening hell. He took his life on the Staten Island ferry, stepped off the deck sometime at night. His body washed ashore a few months later.

I don’t even begin to have this level of neurosis or psychological turmoil, nor was I or have I ever been as medicated or therapy-involved as he was, nor certainly do I have that horrible injury. But we have two things in common. The first is that I empathize with his search for a moment that exists outside of the observation of it. The second is that when I have been suicidal in the past, my favorite phant’sied methods have been drowning (usually from a ferry) or falling (jumping) from a great height.

In my loneliness moments, trying to struggle through an understanding of life or trying to come to terms with creation, I honestly feel like I’m going mad from the sheer level of thinking going on or from the need to establish some structure with it all. Neil Young was asked lately whether he maintained a routine of writing every day. His response was, paraphrased, “That’s no way to do it. You write when you feel like writing and you don’t write when you don’t. It’s not up to you anyway. It comes from somewhere else. You just have to always be ready for it.”

I think in my life I’ve been looking for easy-to-follow, structured solutions to any number of problems. But I think now that’s the real problem. Opening the gateway to creativity, spirituality, etc at 3pm every day assumes you are in control and that you can say to the world, it’s 3pm, what do you have for me? Saying today I am going to write and tomorrow I am not going to write, or that I’m going to shamanically journey next Wednesday evening or that I’m going to work on music Saturday from 2:30 to 4:30 is the same thing. And maybe that works for some people, but what I’m finding is not that it can’t work for me, but that I cannot go about it that way and remain healthy.

The reason is Spalding’s described observational life. As I reflect on his path, his words (which ring now as cautionary tale and advice), and his art, I must in necessity seek out the things that make me different from him, or rather the things about me that would prevent this kind of suffering. At night, alone sometimes, I feel the pressure of the internal monologue and minute dissection, which churns up all manner of validity issues, guilt issues, abandonment issues, and fear. Without that internal monologue, those specific issues are met, sat with, understood and given their place. It’s only when the observational mind goes into high function and the great eye of Sauron falls upon me that the catalyst is sparked.

Coming from the fairy-infused trip to Ventura, and after some of the most recent postings, what initially rings out to me as a saving grace is my spiritually, or rather my Belief. In my best moments, I sit happily and silently in a stream of synchronicity, trying to read it, ride it, immerse myself in it, walk with it. I hold strongly to the kami, the spirits that exist in all living beings. And I have some experience with certain older, hidden, secret things as well. What that all speaks to me of is intuition, flow, magick. Applying structure, schedule, routine to that which gives me such joy when they are flowing is, therefore, cross-purposed. It’s negating the possibility of spontaneity by scheduling windows of spontaneity and timelines to things that don’t care much for the passing of time, or have their own ideas of what time is all about. It’s also encouraging that part of me that likes to make lists and check them again, that likes to project manage my progress and output to continue doing so.

Sure, the Wild Mind exists in those openings, but they are shepherded by the task-maker and the time-keeper, who even if told to sit back and not disrupt, are still sitting back by agreement. It’s like telling a child to play and not to notice the fact that they are being watched. You can’t not know that somebody else is in the room, even if they are quiet and non-involved in what you are doing. Even if somebody leaves the room and says they’ll be back to pick you up in a hour, you still know there is a beginning and an end, and you know that this is your only chance to be alone, regardless of whether you want to be or not, or whether you’d rather be later.

Where is this all going? The Shiftless Seattlite tour is in-between stops right now, and Spalding Gray was ironically killed by the same thing that drove him onward. That’s not going to happen to me. Instead, I think now is the time for those two disparate parts of me to stop being married and living together, and instead to become best friends and have their own apartments. It’s time to completely shut down the partnership and invest instead in the individual fulfillment of each half. Throw away the writing session schedule, tear up the checklists, erase the chalk-height measurements on the wall. Stop being the parent. Stop being the child. You do when you do and you don’t when you don’t, and that’s all there needs to be, every day. That’s all now that there can be for me.

Farewell, Spalding. Thank You for the gift of your life.