“Tell me a horror story, Daddy”.

“. . . Look around you, son.  . . . What do you see?”

There is the abyss, the empty secret that life is ultimately meaningless, that none of us really matter.  It is that existential horror of being.  We could dwell on it, but that would make it very hard for us to live.  Life is tragic, it is full of loss, it ends in death, it can be unspeakably cruel.  Yet most of us seem to rather easily avoid focusing on this.  Somehow, we can keep good cheer, be optimistic, and have a conviction that horrible things won’t happen to us, only to others.

Some people simply can’t ignore this horror of being. When these people are also exceptionally perceptive and insightful, they often live with a deep and puzzling loneliness of being different, and a gnawing sense of being unable to have validation.  They often try, sometimes in charming and creative ways, to reach ‘normal’ people, but they can fail and have despair.

Spalding Gray comes to mind.  He gave us lively, theatrical expositions of this mental being.  Over and over in his stories he portrays deep experience, combined with a sense of some kind of missing attachment, some kind of inability to feel comfortable the way everyone else seems to feel comfortable, some kind of inability to move forward successfully.  He recounts life episodes of failing to act in his own best interests.  He is not sure why he is who he is.  He can’t bring himself to be on the Johnny Carson show.  “Why don’t I have children?   Was it a decision I made or did it just happen?” He is a stranger to himself, and he feels lost.

At the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, we are treated with a retrospective of his work, Spalding Gray:  Stories to Tell.   Actors read poignantly from his journal notes.  He is delightfully animated with wonder, doubt, and chagrin.  We learn that he was annoyed, indeed obsessed, by his step daughter’s repetitive playing of the bouncy song “I get knocked down, but I get up again da da da da da da da da da”. Spalding mocks this.  He derides it.  It is funny, but he is emphatic. He wants us to know about it.  He wants us to get him, his sense of difference.  He simply can’t feel optimistic.  Having children is an element of reprieve for him, but ultimately he can’t go on.

At the end of the program, we get jolted by a large screen photo of Spalding.  In full view he is there, with his puzzled, glint-eyed, emphatic, dramatic, funny, bemused facial expression, and we feel a powerful connection.  We get him, after all, and we are very grateful.  We feel for him, knowing he could never be sure anyone would.