Feature
cap: Spalding Gray
ph credit: Paula Court
Gray MattersSpalding Gray discusses sex, death, existentialism and cocktail hour By Christopher Denny
You may recognize Spalding Gray from his appearances in such films as True Stories, Clara’s Heart, King of the Hill and Beaches, but Gray is first and foremost a storyteller. (It was his role as the ambassador’s aide in The Killing Fields that inspired his most famous monologue, Swimming to Cambodia.) Gray’s distinctive stories are characterized by his confessional style, his neurotic sense of humor, and his angst-ridden New England accent. Gray says his latest (and 16th) monologue, entitled Morning, Noon, and Night (which he will perform this week in Charlotte) is his Ulysses — it’s about a day-in-the-life with his family in Sag Harbor, New York. With the recreation of his family structure of two adults and three children, Gray feels he’s come full circle from his first monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14. He underscores this by prefacing his monologue with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
We spoke to Gray while he was performing in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. Following are excerpts from that interview.
Creative Loafing: Did you get a chance to do your yoga this morning?
Spalding Gray: Oh, yeah — never miss a morning.
I’ve always thought of yoga as a kind of meditation exercise that is supposed to empty out your mind.
Yeah. Mine doesn’t. I have the radio on.
In your latest monologue, when you’re doing yoga, it’s almost like you go different places.
Yeah. I’m doing a bad version of it. Listening to the news in the background.
Do you find that relaxing?
Um. Yeah. In a funny way. It’s a kind of negative way, but it’s kind of going, Oh my God! Look how lucky you are to be alive.(Laughs). You know, you hear the news of the world. Today, our local station here, an NPR affiliate, is fundraising so there was a lot of interruptions. But it also got me to pledge. But this morning’s report of Chernobyl was just — ah, my god — I’d just forgotten what a disaster that was.
Is that anxiety displacement?
I suppose it is. Yeah. I’m just, I’m kind of an anti-nuclear kind of guy and I’m trying to help shut down a power plant in Connecticut that is very close to our home. So when I heard this report about 4,000 clean-up workers that died from cleaning this thing up — that kind of story, to say that it’s relaxing (laughs), it’s funny, it’s almost like putting the negative energy outside of you. But this affects us all.
Your novel Impossible Vacation seems to fit in that category of thinly veiled autobiography: books like On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, the writings of Henry Miller or Truman Capote. . .
I’m honored. Oh, that’s how I work, and I was most influenced by those writers: Thomas Wolfe, well when I was in boarding school I read all of his huge novels and then Kerouac was next, and certainly Robert Lowell as a poet because all of his poetry was a kind of diary form in poetry, and Allen Ginsberg as well. They were chronicling their lives through their artform, and so, yeah, I’ve always been attracted to that and also influenced by it.
Do you plan to write another novel?
No, I don’t. That cured me. You know, it’s just like being on Broadway in The Best Man right now has cured me of ever doing another Broadway show. . .What I would like to do, I would like to write another book and I would like to work on that next instead of a new monologue. But they’re shorter outtakes, and they’re much more like autobiographical essays or little vignettes of, well, the potential title is Left Over Life to Live, but it’s like stuff that’s on the cutting room floor that I never used in a monologue but I wanted to write out in a more compressed way. I find that like trying to write fiction, and I know that my editor encouraged me to try to make a fictional through-line, which I did somewhat do in Impossible Vacation. I find it’s a struggle, and it doesn’t come naturally to me and it’s also not satisfying.
What have you read lately or listened to on tape? I know you listen to a lot of books on tape.
Yeah, I do. I just got through with Margaret Atwood’s most recent book Blind Assassins and before that (Philip Roth’s) The Human Stain. Both of those I recommend highly and both of them were unabridged on tape, and I’d listen to them at night. And now I’ve shifted over back to my college courses on tape. I have tons of those and I keep going back to the existentialists. One particular course that’s very well done from The Teaching Company is called Existentialism: No Excuses. So it’s lectures on the existentialists starting with Kierkegarrd and going up: Heidegger and Sartre and Nietzsche. And I find that fascinating, because I can listen to it over and over. Dense philosophy — I find that you’re always finding some new angle or line in it.
I read that the existentialists were your heroes because they took a life that they knew was meaningless and they made something of it, and essentially they created a moral structure voluntarily, one that wasn’t imposed upon them. Who are the existentialist philosophers you’ve been influenced by?
Sartre, most recently. Because I find that I’m both attracted to and repelled by it because of the idea of freedom of will and that there’s no unconscious and it’s rebellion against Freud. It really pushes my envelope. Because I, over the years, have so easily fallen into trying to pin my weaknesses of will on my past: on my mother, on my upbringing. And Sartre would say, Cut the garbage. Take responsibility for your life now, you are a free agent, you can make a choice without blaming it on your past. And so he approaches the radical free will stance. And then, I–but I keep bouncing between he and Freud, and so it creates a dialectic. But I’m drawn to Camus as a writer, because I think he was one of the existentialists who was able to make the philosophy and integrate it with his writing the way Walker Percy did. But what overwhelms me most of all, is this: riding my bike in Sag Harbor and seeing litter along the side of the road. That’s when I know we’re in a hopeless situation. It starts with that. It’s as simple as that. That someone could unconsciously throw beer cans and cigarette packages outside the window. That shows a disrespect for the earth, and it just depresses the hell out of me. So the hero is the one that in the face of meaninglessness and no visible god, makes a creative and good choice to better the place.
I’ve noticed meditation, karma and Eastern religion come up regularly in your work. Is there a particular Eastern religion that you have the greatest affinity with?
Well, I’m not a great fan of any organized religion. But I am interested in a very broad look at Buddhism. But particularly around Vipassana meditation which really isn’t cloaked in a lot of ritual. I find that Tibetan Buddhism, which is popular among artists in the downtown of New York now, and the Dalai Lama, I’ve had some encounters with and interviewed. I like him very much, but it’s a little bit ornate for me and based on primitive mysticism. I’m a Nietzschean in the sense that I feel — and a Zen person too — and I see the combination of Zen and existentialism I’m more interested in. If we had the courage to realize this is it. That there may not be any life after or no pie in the sky — that courage could go one of two ways: You could get very nihilistic and self-destructive and litter the planet, or you could say, Hey! Wow! We’re alone; it’s up to us to save this, and make this heaven. And that’s kind of what I lean toward — anyone that advocates that. It’s a very radical stance because it frightens the hell out of the Christian America. But Norman O. Brown is another writer that’s saying, Dare to be here now. Dare to just be in the moment. And so, I’m more interested in the philosophy of that than in organized religion. And I’ve always been bothered by critics, and they don’t harp on it, but they’ll go, And as usual, Mr. Gray starts talking about his fears of death in his monologue. Who ever thinks about death? they’re saying, and I’m saying, Who doesn’t — in their right mind? They’re repressing it. And it’s not always fear-centered with me, it’s an attempt to remind you, the way Buddhists do with graveyard meditation, that it’s there and present at anytime, and therefore it helps you not flatten your life out, and you don’t take it for granted. I mean, we live across the street from an old cemetery in Sag Harbor, and that’s a beautiful meditation.
In Impossible Vacation you find several ways to alleviate your anxieties: posing for art classes brings a stillness, acting saves you from the giant fear of death, sex stops time and wipes out death. . .
Good sex does, yeah.
(laughs) You qualify that — but of all your pastimes, it seems you reserve a special reverence for drinking.
Well, it is a spirit, you know.
You write in your novel: And that old welcome fuzzy feeling returned, that beery fuzz that clouded all thoughts of mortality and creeping time. And you give it an added religious dimension when you write, Buddhists everywhere say the essence of all reality is dukhka. When I drink liquor it seems to eliminate all the dukhka for a while. Could you share with us your ceremonial experience of cocktail hour?
I have it when I’m living in a regular bourgeois existence. Say, being out in Sag Harbor with my family. But here now, my whole life has changed doing this run on Broadway. You know, because I’m just at the theater all the time and there’s no dinner hour, and I’m not sitting down with my family. But the ritual, of when you’re having a family gathering. . .at home I’d get a fire going in the fireplace if I were to go home now, and be home on my day off. And so that’s the focus, because there’s no television, so it’s a wonderful focus for the children, and it’s also an elemental one — the wood and the flames, it’s very primitive and basic. Then it’s to mix, for me, a very ornate and complicated and healthy drink: my Bloody Mary. Before it would have to be a vodka martini or a straight scotch, but those days are over. I’ve eased down, so I find it’s the healthiest way to drink. And I’ll do it with bitters and some Worcestershire sauce and horseradish and mix up a real concoction so it’s a real ritual. And then sit there in front of the fire and sip it, and one of the things that I realize, that in Best Man, in the play, it takes place in a hotel and I’m making drinks for the various political pundits and politicians that come in. And just that ritual, I have the fake ice cubes, they’re plastic. And rattling it in the glass and pouring a little water and then a little bourbon. I suppose some people get into that with, you know, rolling a joint, and the right paper and all of that. But there’s nothing more beautiful to me than the liquor held up against the light, and the quality of it and the pouring and the splashing of it. That’s the element that I love. And people often say that it’s a return to the mother, that it’s the unconscious, it’s water. And that’s why I went back to the sea, back to the womb. I mean, I moved back to Long Island to be close to the sea. And also the liquidity of cocktail hour. The great drowning, you know, the great swim. But it’s a wonderful ritual, and I pretty much do it alone because no one out there — Kathy’s too busy cooking to sit down with me. It’s a centering time. I suppose if I wasn’t doing that I’d be out in my writer’s shed meditating and I always thought that would be the alternative, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet. As long as my liver holds out, I’ll be doing the cocktail.
Which of your monologues have you most enjoyed performing?
Oh, you know, everyone that I’m doing feels like the ultimate one. They’re all very, very enjoyable and I have a good time with them but I’d say that the classics. . .If someone asked, Which one would you bring back? — and, in fact, people are commissioning me to bring back Swimming to Cambodia and I think I’m going to next year and play it in four different theaters, because they’re paying me well enough to do it. But I would say that Sex and Death to the Age 14, Swimming to Cambodia, and Morning, Noon and Night are the three classic ones, they’re not about stuff that had just happened in my life. Sex and Death is classic because it’s everyone’s story. It’s one that we all share. It’s not me running off to some esoteric place, to Russia in my long underwear. It’s something everyone has done in white middle-class life. Then, Swimming to Cambodia, of course, is a classic because it’s a piece of history larger than me. It’s outside of me. It’s reporting on all of our history, so it’s shared. And Morning, Noon and Night is a kind of completion of the return to the home. It’s one day in the life, it’s like the calendar, the book of the days. It’s just a very simple report on one day. So I see those, for me, as the three revivible and classical pieces.
You said in Swimming to Cambodia that you’re essentially apolitical and that you’ve never voted.
That’s changed.
Really?
Oh, goodness, yes. I’m pretty active now. . .I’ve been voting, and I’m also on a board of directors for this Stand Up For Truth About Radiation, in the East End that Helen Caldicott started. We actually have helped to get one of the nuclear reactors shut down at Brookhaven. And we are working on Millstone, Connecticut. I tell you what I’m most interested in, and that’s environment. And I thought it was a very, very bad and sad thing that happened with the Republican coup, for me, just because if Al Gore even talks about solar energy and wind energy, it’s putting it into people’s consciousness that it’s important. And I’m just very discouraged for my children. Environmental and energy issues and also education — oh, I’m very changed. What I feel like now is that we’re in high school, that life is a giant high school, a dangerous high school, and that the damn football team has won and that the money from the school is going to go to buy larger outfits and bigger outfits and not pay for the arts. And that is the Pentagon. I am so over the Pentagon controlling our taxes and sucking us dry. So I am very outspoken about that, and I also vote regularly.
Several times in your work, you mention the experience of being empty. In Sex and Death to the Age 14, you write, I was sitting there meditating and everything all of a sudden just emptied out. I was only an outline. Just an outline, like a Matisse drawing. And your perfect moment in Swimming to Cambodia you describe as no fear, no more body, no outline.
It changes all the time but a lot of it has to do with what they would call in meditation of bare consciousness, of bare awareness, where you haven’t got anything mediating between you and the experience or you and the object, so there’s a oneness that is happening there, but it’s also — there’s a little awareness leftover. I have experienced an emptiness in which the mind is not narrating anymore, and there’s just a sense of unity and oneness. I’ve had that recently, since I’ve written about that with my skiing. And in the skiing there’s an emptying out and there’s a flow that happens where time stops. Time as we know it. T.S. Eliot says that in the Four Quartets: At the still point in the middle of the turning world. You know, Buddhism was always saying everything is change but the paradox is the still point in the middle of that change.
Spalding Gray will perform Morning, Noon and Night at Spirit Square Thursday, May 3, at 8pm. Tickets are $25-$30. Call 372-1000.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2001.
