Bonfire of the vanities.
[No. 42]
WHY DO YOU THINK SO MANY CREATIVES ARE SO TORTURED WITHIN THEIR HUMANITY?
A guest post by screenwriter & curator Gabi Grossman
I am standing on Avenue A at 4 am. In four hours my friend and I have to be uptown for our graduation from film school, and he’s refusing to get into a cab idling beside him because he’s admonishing me: “Why do you write like such a fucking old soul?”
He’s referring to a screenplay I’d just finished. It’s set during the California gold rush: the son of a Massachusetts preacher steals his father’s savings to follow a missionary who’s gone rogue and started a cult in the forests of Northern California. Freed from the gaze of his family, he embraces an escalating appetite for sado-masochism, culminating with an ecstatic and liberating choice for submission: he castrates himself.
Etel Adnan, Illustration from Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986)
I had arrived to class drunk, steeling myself with unearned arrogance. The professor had told me: “you have an uncanny ability to make me care for such an unlikeable, erratic character.”
A friend agreed: “I hate him, but he makes me feel something deeply—but I don’t know what.”
A former lover answered them, “You know how to make us want what it is that you desire.” I blushed. I wanted to be seen with revulsion. And I was ashamed to have been caught.
My professor passed me a shot of Jose Cuervo: “Clean this up—and hide yourself from it.” When I started that class, I told them why I hated outlining, and what writing meant for me: “Writing is a process of discovery—a story must discover itself, and sometimes that hurts.”
So I am surprised by the decision I make before I leave New York to burn my journals. They date back eight years to 2012. I want to sever a connection to the past, and to destroy a certain vision of the future. As I watch them burn, I panic: I fear all my memories will disappear with them. But as I walk upstairs, I feel a momentary freedom: less to rid myself of the past I wrote for myself than to rid myself of a voice. I am ashamed of that voice I was—that I had not developed, or found something new, or made myself myth. And I am ashamed of this vanity.
I want to resist the urge to turn this into a piece about my transition timeline and its parallel with my writing. But in that resistance there is a fearful question: has my voice actually changed? I long to believe that before transitioning my writing was an exercise in masking my desire for womanhood and its sexualities behind shame and vanity; that post-transition my writing is work: tedious, necessary, and sometimes full of purpose. But that, too, is vanity: a clean arc to reassure myself that through the humiliations of sex change and Hollywood I had changed.
I know I haven’t answered the question—because I reject the premise. I am not particularly tortured, at least not more than anyone else. What I am is vain. Or maybe just self-aware, or infantile. Whatever I am, I just like to talk about it a little louder than most—and maybe you do, too (especially you artists). Because I think it would be the mark of a bad artist who thinks himself so tortured that he isolates himself rather than seeks communion with his work. Or maybe not “bad,” maybe just cowardly—maybe just a man too afraid to consider himself anything but an exception. I would know: I used to be one.
Love this, Gabi! Thank you for showing up so wholly in this space with us. x
I feel as you do. I am grateful to live, breathe, “wear on my sleeve” my art and all its swirling contemplations. As an artist, I feel as if part of the gift [or the calling] is to embrace feeling deeply, talk about it, commune with others in the conversation, be in motion. I would say I relate to my creativity as a perpetual driver for growth and change. The fire within me that keeps me honest. x