Author: Jim McGhee

In Blavatsky a woman in her fifties enters as we hear a cuckoo clock make its sound thirteen times.  She says she has carried the clock all over the world and it’s never worked right.  She says she has always been able to feel the unseen world around her and hear voices.  She tells us that the day she was baptized her sister set the priest on fire.  When the dead whispered in her head she talked back and made friends.  Her family thought she was possessed by the Devil, but she says she has a volcano in her brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain.  She says she has known since childhood that everything is alive and that invisible people talk to her.  When her father tried to force her to go to a ball, she stuck her bare foot in a pan of boiling water.  And when he told her no man would ever want her, she hypnotized Blavatsky into marrying her.  When she was 54 years old she announced to the world that she was a virgin, although she’d had two husbands and had given birth.  She describes her trips around the world, lying about places she’d never been.  Life, she says, is a story.  Let others figure out what the truth was when you’re dead.  She says she misses Russia, wherever she is, and realized when she returned that she could live a life full of excitement and wonders if she had the courage to use the magic lantern of her imagination.  She got pregnant—by her husband, or Count Meyendorff, or an opera singer—and gave birth in a forest to a hunchback who later died.  She tells us that a cargo ship she was on blew up and she washed up in Cairo with her cuckoo clock and began to conduct séances.  She says that to believe other peoples’ lies is the source of religion and government.  To believe our own lies is the source of human love.  Reality is somehow connected to our power to imagine and create.  She invites us to begin the séance.  The cuckoo clock cuckoos three times and she looks at her watch and says, “It’s one o’clock.  Close enough.”  It cuckoos twice more as the light fades out on her.

Tramp on Tightrope with Monkeys begins in darkness as we hear a clarinet and a harmonium playing “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.”  Then lights come up on Charlie (Chaplin) and a sofa with a coffee table in front of it, a desk and a chair.  Charlie talks about realizing that you know what happens next,,as if you have seen the movie before and know when you come in.  He says he doesn’t understand time but that movies are like time travel.  He says he often dreams of falling, attacked by monkeys.  He want to call for help but remembers the Tramp has no voice and to give him a voice would kill what’s universal in him.  He says sound killed the movies but that eventually the Tramp sings.  And yet, he says, here he is, speaking.  He says the only way to keep your identity is to be silent.  He says he loves women but doesn’t like them because they compulsively betray.  He says it is terrifying when everybody thinks they love you because the person they love doesn’t exist and when they find that out, they hate you.  But inside you know you’re nobody at all.  He tells the audience to throw away old loves when they’re no more use to them and never get trapped in someone else’s movie.  He speaks of devotion to one’s craft and the importance of control in movies and relationships.  He says he gets into trouble when he talks and that he is a spiritual anarchist communicating from an intense and impenetrable isolation.  He speaks of identity and playing roles, of mirrors and fictions.  He says the trick is not to remember that you’re somebody else.  He says he is the Tramp and Charlie, too.  When one looks in the mirror he sees the other looking back at him.  The price of being one is always that of also being the other.  God and the Devil.  It’s a double feature.

 In The Ghost Fragments, Naomi thinks there are ghosts in her house, a place from which all passion must be removed.  She says that someone is moving her furniture during the night.  She misses a “him,” a lover in whose office she would change out of her dance clothes into a dress.  “Today,” she says, he arrived in New Haven.  She says that when she comes back to the house at night there is a light on in the closet, a light she never turns on.  She wakes in the middle of the night, hearing voices, and discovers that the tv is on although she turned it off before she went to bed.  She thinks ghosts are the residue of unsatisfied desires and, thinking her house haunted, researches old newspapers in the library and discovers that a family was murdered in the house, the father coming home to discover the butchery but finding his youngest daughter hiding in the upstairs closet. She thinks of “him” typing in a small room used by generations of graduate students.  She says that the ghost house follows her wherever she goes.  She says that, when he was leaving her to go to New Haven, he kissed her and she couldn’t let him go.  They made love and, in the morning, she smashed his head again and again with a heavy old clock on the bedstand.  She never opens the closet and when the telephone rings she never answers it because she knows who it is.