Re: (TV) Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

[Ty Burr <tyburr@mindspring.com>]

Apropos of nothing and of this, my wife and I have just come from a 
memorial evening for Spalding Gray at Emerson College, where he was a 
student in the early 60s, and where the theater department read from 
his collected works and showed film and video spanning his creative 
life. For those of you who don't know, the playwright/actor/monologuist 
killed himself in January by stepping off the Staten Island Ferry, 
pushed (I guess) by chronic back pain from a recent accident and also 
by a lifelong unhappiness that he'd been able to ameliorate with art 
until that accident.

Long story short, at the end of the evening, the students presented a 
memory book of Spalding's years at the college to his widow and 
six-year-old son, who were there, the latter alert and normal and 
attentive. Seeing him, I immediately thought that you would have to be 
seriously, intensely depressed -- so overwhelmed that selfishness and 
cruelty no longer mattered -- to leave behind a child so young with all 
his questions hanging in the air.

There was a piece that ran in the New York Times a month or two ago, 
written by a man who saw Spalding that last night on the ferry and only 
thought he'd had a celebrity sighting , not suspecting the agony the 
man must have been in. He wondered, as did I, what might have changed 
if he'd engaged the man in conversation -- could he have got him past 
that 90-day danger zone within half an hour? Can we stop someone who 
wants to die with all his heart if we keep him busy long enough? It's 
flattering to think so -- to think that someone could have rung Bob 
Quine's bell that day and he'd be still alive. The issue is pain 
management, suicide being one response and living (or medicating) past 
the worst part being another. Obviously the latter carries more options 
and the former none. Perhaps that's the attraction.

T.
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