Tom Griggs – A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants

There is a moment in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads (2021) where a middle-aged woman who was hospitalized in her youth after a psychotic episode suspects that her teenage son might suffer the same fate. In a poignant scene, she struggles to talk to him about her past and how anxious she feels about the possibility that her mental health issues are genetic. While confronting one’s deepest fears through art is courageous, especially when it involves addressing our family’s mental health, the pervasiveness of the subject in recent artistic production, now that it’s no longer taboo, makes it increasingly challenging to create something meaningful. The creative possibilities lie in how the topic is approached and not just in the artist’s good intentions, with a successful work being one that depicts the issues at hand with authenticity but without sentimentality.

Tom Griggs’ A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants is an original book that cautiously dissects his father’s depression without falling into the easy pitfalls of narcissism or abjection.

Tom Griggs’ A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants is an original book that cautiously dissects his father’s depression without falling into the easy pitfalls of narcissism or abjection. However, the book’s subject is not immediately apparent, and the decision to represent it abstractedly is a perfect strategy to avoid making it feel didactic. Combining his own photographs with images from his family archive, the visual narrative opens with pictures of a man in different domestic settings alongside brief, handwritten texts that address bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts (for instance, one of these reads: “The water started coming into my soul. The deep shut her mouth upon me. Will you reach down and take hold of me. Maybe as a dream?”). Part of the book’s appeal is that it’s unclear what the images mean, inviting us to figure out their underlying relations. However, the project’s open-ended nature works well because the archival pictures have a lot of charm and aesthetic qualities (it is unclear whether Griggs’ mother is the talented amateur who made them).

Family photographs can reveal aspects of our lives that far surpass their original purpose at the moment of exposure, turning a personal archive into a goldmine for latent cultural, psychological, or anecdotal markers.

The visual narrative gets intersected midway through by ten longer chapters that sketch the story of Griggs’ family: originally from Virginia, the father studies at Yale, becomes a minister after attending divinity school for his graduate studies, and then moves the family to Minnesota to work in a parish. Things go relatively well until he experiences a midlife crisis and then, years later, a psychotic episode that leads to his temporary institutionalization. The text concludes with the father contemplating the end of his life. Griggs makes his presence felt throughout as the narrator of these vignettes. The ambitions and scope of these texts are inseparable from the experience of the book, mainly because they create a narrative structure that hinges upon a metaphor that is key to understanding the pictures. Griggs opens each chapter by describing a different color fading away, eventually reaching black in the last one, in a gesture that echoes what happens when one submerges in water, but also how life gets drained of joy when one sinks into depression.

Although the personal register of A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants derives from Griggs’ effort to figure out his feelings towards his father’s condition, the latter’s social convictions are briefly intimated when we learn that he distanced himself from his racist family in Virginia, which lead to the development of his political consciousness. I find the mention of this episode intriguing as it suggests how a country’s politics intertwines with family values to produce or worsen a malaise that can be detrimental to one’s psyche in the long run.

Family photographs can reveal aspects of our lives that far surpass their original purpose at the moment of exposure, turning a personal archive into a goldmine for latent cultural, psychological, or anecdotal markers. Griggs uses these photographs to reevaluate the mythology of his family, although just because he judges them retrospectively doesn’t mean his approach is exempt from love. Griggs’ affect is evident, even if it’s hard to describe precisely how it takes shape. Perhaps one way of communicating this is that the book would look and feel very different if he didn’t love his father. Significantly, the book ends with an image of a young Griggs being held by his dad, both staring into the ocean, in a scene that underscores their shared genetics because light and time have faded its colors.

A Creature Obeys a Creature That Wants is an attractively printed book with production values that relate to the condition and consequences of depression in astute ways. For instance, the way the uncoated paper has absorbed the deep black ink accentuates the emotional dullness associated with the disorder, while the divided slipcase alludes to the assortment and splitting of one’s personality. The saturation in some of the photographs, such as in an image of Griggs’ father taken through a window, with his silhouetted body reflecting Christmas lights, evokes the metaphor on color mentioned above thanks to a tightly focused text that functions like a film that leaves out any detail that doesn’t advance the plot. While connecting images and texts so clearly may seem reductive or redundant, the book balances what we learn from each medium with skill and precision. As with any such pairing, the interstice between what is stated and implied allows for varied interpretations of a complex issue while offering no resolution regarding the main character’s future.





All Rights Reserved: Text © Arturo Soto
Images © Tom Griggs