I like life! Not a coffin. And ultimately, that’s a coffin. A book is a coffin. It’s an object. It’s reductive…So I’m a man that sits down at a table and talks. Not just about myself. But I would be hurt if my epitaph read: “Deceased at 88, Spalding Gray found a niche making a living talking about himself.” That would be very painful for me. I would like my epitaph to be, ”Here lies an American original, who found a niche talking about himself and the ones he loved and shared his life with.”

Spalding Gray

In January of 2004, Spalding Gray abandoned his story-telling practices for good. After a life-changing accident, that had taken place three years ago in the Irish countryside and left the actor/writer fractured, broken beyond repair, Gray no longer felt the need or the want to talk and share his life with the public. Sadly, the accident and everything it spiraled into motion (countless bouts of depression, numerous attempts at ending his life, inability to talk as always, fluently and almost carelessly), came at a time when Gray had finally managed to find peace and a sense of belonging in his personal life, with wife Kathy and his three young children. In Morning, Noon and Night (1999), a monologue piece relating a day’s events surrounding his children and their needs, wants, wishes, Gray the narrator seemed strangely out-of-place: he was happy, almost content with the banality of his new found role, a husband, a father, a stepfather, a nanny, a chauffeur, someone else’s helper. The night he disappeared off the shores of his island, last seen taking the Staten Island Ferry ride to, hopefully some relief, thousands of fans, friends, and acquaintances posted their responses on-line. All hoped that sooner or later, Gray as we have come to know him, would emerge, victorious, conquering his momentary depression with another great public revelation. At the beginning of March 2004, Gray’s body was recovered from the East River and all hope, by close ones, far and further away, was abandoned.

The number of postings on the web tripled over night: each person who had been heretofore asking himself or herself, in a tone sometimes bordering on the vulgar (whether Gray ‘was finally swimming to Cambodia’), of the writer’s welfare, felt the need to explain what Gray’s final self-act meant to them, as they came to re-examine his life’s work in the light of this choice for his life’s demise. Mostly they concluded how little we had all known Spalding Gray, the private citizen. We seemed to know a great deal about him, for his chosen vessel of ‘art-full play’ demanded that he ‘reveal it all’. Or so it seemed at the time we saw him perform his stage-narrating self. I was in the process of writing and re-writing this piece when the news of Gray’s disappearance, and subsequent death by drowning, reached me on my email. I was neither shocked nor surprised, giving into account the many times Gray had talked about his many phobias, one of them being the inability to ‘use his voice fully’. However, I felt saddened, for his family, and for all the stories that he didn’t have a chance to guide us through, as we live out the post 9/11 present circumstances.

As I was rounding off the chapters of my MA thesis, I realized that I had been talking both about Gray and his work through the contemporaneous universality of the present tense. Somehow it may have crossed my mind that great story-telling rarely comes to us in the ephemeral present tense (or for that matter, a life lived on stage seldom manifests itself through the vicarious present), but going over the words on the page, I decided to leave in the ‘is(es)’ and ‘has(es)’. Perhaps, this choice is due to my admiration for Gray, as an artist and a human being. Then again, what I understand to be the ‘appropriate’ or ‘soothing’ tense for my own wrestling with Gray’s work in the Swimming to Cambodia monologue, surfaces in the writer’s own relationship to recounted ‘time’: every time Spalding Gray spoke, on and off the page, he did it in the present; time and discourse unfolded before his audiences as if for the first time, then and there, bound to remain in that moment of now. His narrating stories, although told in a tradition not too dissimilar from that of Herodotus or Monetesquieu’s Persian, are actively situated, and at the same time, actively situate their audiences, among shifting systems of meaning. Telling small, insignificant tales a man, a story-teller by the name of Spalding Gray came across (entirely by chance), will stand to mark Gray’s ‘poor man’s theatre’.

A story, a man, and an audience: what more can an auto/ethnographer ask for? What more can an audience seek?

Unfortunately, when the voice is no longer available, what endures is the unwillingly offered transcript, and a handful of tapes. Reading the lines of the Swimming to Cambodia monologue, watching Gray’s three minute performance in The Killing Fields, renting out Jonathan Demme’s filmed version of the piece, inform acts of story-sharing, about our history as peoples, and the need for partaking in on its making with nothing less than total honesty and bountiful determination. There is no need for epitaphs in such a world: learning of the past in the emerging present is the only needed re-memberance of life stories that come to us, quietly and with great resonance.