Gray Palmer
FINGAL’S EAR
CARMEN: Open the door.
JACK: What, Carmen?
CARMEN: Get out.
JACK: I’ll tell you what my terms are.
CARMEN: No terms. You have the key. You have the key from everybody.
JACK: You have to give me a lease.
CARMEN: Yes! You hear that? You hear?
JACK: What?
CARMEN: The time that you’re here?
JACK: What?
CARMEN: You want the plumber to come when you’re here? Is that what you want? The plumber doesn’t give nobody but they have the key.
JACK: I don’t care about the plumber.
CARMEN: All right. You don’t care and you’re crazy and that’s all.
JACK: There are holes in the floor and the ceiling.
CARMEN: Yeah. I know, and you’re gonna get the ceiling---and whoosh---and I’m gonna get the construction and fix it all up and I’m gonna, they gonna, I’m gonna sign, and then you gonna go out of here. Quick.
JACK: You have to give me a lease.
CARMEN: No. No lease at all. For you? A lease for you?
JACK: Yeah.
CARMEN: Come on. Get dressed and take your skin off yourself.
JACK: I know what the law is.
CARMEN: No. If the law says what you want, the law says what I want. You got it the Inspector of the Building Department if you want me the truth. For Chrissake, I’m gonna break the windows and I’m gonna break the door! You’re gonna find out! If you’re not here they’ll break the door, break the window. You’re not supposed to be here. You don’t pay the rent for five months. And you get the hell out of here! You understand? I’m gonna get the policemen. When Mary is here, the policemen is gonna come. That’s all. You better get the hell out of here. The law is shit for you. Sure. He’s gonna get a beard now.
JACK: Carmen?
CARMEN: All getting out of this apartment because I’ll close this apartment, too.
JACK: What did you say about my beard?
CARMEN: I didn’t say nothing about your beard.
JACK: I thought you said something about my beard.
CARMEN: Get your beard house and you, you, you, you, you get more power.
JACK: What?
CARMEN: You’ll be more powerful if you have your beard on. If you’ve got the beard on my dog goes for beards.
JACK: The dog goes for beards?
CARMEN: Do you understand? You have to leave there because I didn’t sign, no sign with you to stay there at all.
JACK: But it’s illegal. You’re supposed to give me a lease.
CARMEN: I don’t give you a lease for nothing in the world! You’re crazy!
JACK: We’ll talk about it.
CARMEN: You come from a crazy house!
JACK: You’re calling me crazy?
CARMEN: I don’t want Mary there!
JACK: Now. I’m. I threw Mary out! Mary’s out! I threw her out.
CARMEN: Yeah, she’s there. I saw her coming in.
JACK: Yeah, but she’s gotta be out by the 7th of December.
CARMEN: Get the hell out of there! Get the hell out of there! Because I don’t want you there! I’m gonna get the gang of policemen and all my family here---
JACK: The 7th of December. That’s Pearl Harbor Day.
CARMEN: You get the hell out of here!
JACK: That’s Pearl Harbor Day.
CARMEN: Get the. Get the hell out of here! A lease to who? I’m gonna give no lease to a crazy people. To a crazy guy? Come on, now you get it. Come on, Jack. Come on. You get it. Don’t worry. You get the hell out of here! You get the hell out of here! Do you understand? You’re not gonna hit me because if you hit me I’m gonna cut your head off. Somebody will. And they’ll bang your guts out of your head. They’ll shoot you and you won’t be able to live. For the rest of your life.
DALTON: That was Carmen and Jack. I was present when this conversation took place. I was hiding down the hallway. Many of the other events in the diaries are even more confusing than this. But let’s get the theory part out of the way. Or perhaps a joke?
BENNY: First, apropos minimalism.
JACK: Minimalism?
BENNY: Shut up. An elephant steps on a thorn. Elephants, because of the jellies in their feet, are sensitive to low frequency sound sometimes transmitted over a great distance. Through the Earth. They can hear the movement of individual elephants far away, even draw a picture of intervening topography. Through sensitive feet.
JACK: All right.
BENNY: This elephant with the thorn meets a mouse. “Why so morose?” says the mouse. “The thorn in my foot has made me deaf. And I’m expecting a long-distance call from my mother,” says the elephant. The mouse says, “I’ll take out the thorn if you let me fuck you.” “Deal.” So, the elephant kneels down, the mouse pulls out the thorn and then climbs up to the elephant’s vagina and disappears inside.
JACK: It’s a female elephant.
BENNY: So, the elephant is waiting, waiting. After a while the elephant hears the mouse shout, “Take it all, baby!” The sound is muffled, of course. That’s what your music is.
DALTON: I’m not sure that’s how the joke went. But about the music not true. Benny couldn’t hear it. Listen.
CHORUS: Sinus Roris
Mare Nubium
Mare Frigoris
Mare Crisium
DALTON: Those are names of places on the moon. That bit was sung by Jack’s maenads. The Candleheads. The Moongirls. Very peculiar for a No Wave band in NY. It reminded me of Sospitati dedit mundum. 13th century... I’m a music teacher.
JACK: We’ve opened a mutagenic vent.
DALTON: The builder called it Fingal’s Ear. Efloredge Tenney, specialist in psychoacoustics, the socalled idiot brother of theorist and composer James Tenney, built the dome in Carmen’s house. And then he vanished... Now I quote Henry Cowell from New Musical Resources. “The existence of undertones was contested by scientists on the ground that a string or vibrating body could not vibrate at a length greater than its complete length, which gives the fundamental tone... No deeper tones in a series would be possible of formation on the string...” Turns out that’s wrong... When you consider the interdependence of instrument and environment... The affordance, we could say... Cowell, who was writing in 1934, refers to an instrument built by Nicolas Garbusov of the Moscow State Institute of Musicology. His instrument rendered at least the first nine undertones. How? “The original sounding body does not produce the undertones, but it is difficult to avoid them...” Some resonating chambers respond only to every other vibration of the sounding body. “That part of the resonator which responds to every other vibration is then vibrating at one-half the speed of the fundamental and produces a tone one octave lower. Under other circumstances a part of the resonator will vibrate at one third of the speed of the speed of the fundamental, thus producing a tone one octave and a fifth below that of the original sounding body... Although such underpartials are not apparently produced by the original sounding body, Garbusov shows that, under ordinary conditions of hearing sound in a room, undertones are often added to the original sound by the time it reaches the ear.” Harry Partch — oh, yes, the mad Harry Partch — developed his theory of Utonality after reading this section of Cowell’s book.
JACK: I unlocked the machine by playing a phrase on a baritone ukulele.
DALTON: It looked like an architectural feature. But the Ear was a portal. And we were like children shouting into a well, listening for the echo. We didn’t know what we were asking, but we received an answer. You could say, because of the portal and its... influence, ok... Jack’s apartment became “the Paris Commune of an alien speciation...” With a concluding Bloody Week.
MARY: All summer I had dreams of falling.
DALTON: The harmonic series was a carrier signal... We had a visitor... This sounds like a paranoid system, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought when Jack told me about the Little Man. But first there was the Gathering Subject. Mary.
JACK: Someone pretending to be her asked me out.
DALTON: A woman.
JACK: Yes, she sounded blonde.
DALTON: Someone, pretending to be her, arranged your first date on the phone.
JACK: Someone with an Afrikaans accent.
DALTON: It wasn’t her.
BENNY: I think she wanted you to commit suicide.
JACK: She had a suicide before me.
BENNY: I can’t believe you asked her to move in.
DALTON: She moved in a few days after you slept with her. While you were at work, she read your diaries.
JACK: Yes. Yes.
DALTON: She found evidence of the previous girlfriend.
BENNY: The recent girlfriend.
MARY: I found the Karin Hague Memorial Drawer.
BENNY: With a red shoe in a sweaty baggie.
DALTON: She’s developing her own relationship with Carmen. She got high with your percussionist and he missed a performance at the Babazou. Next she’s sleeping with your bass player.
BENNY: The philatelist.
DALTON: The philatelist moved into her room.
BENNY: The room with the Dome. My room.
DALTON: Then he went missing. Now you’re telling me about an imp.
BENNY: The Little Man.
DALTON: With a JiffyPop hat.
BENNY: He has several hats.
DALTON: Who comes through an occult machine in her room to take possession of her at night.
JACK: To take possession of anyone who sleeps in the room. Benny, too.
BENNY: Jack, I’ve always talked in my sleep. Ask my brother.
DALTON: And she would sleepwalk? In a trance she would say mysterious things in other voices?
JACK: Correct.
MARY: You must never tell anyone about our drowning. I’ll stab your picture with a knife. My shoulders were trembling when I said that. And you can’t see my buckteeth in this theatrical representation. I’ve been idealized. Which is so kind. I look like Jennewein’s Naiad. I look like the bronze decor at the entrance to the Brooklyn Branch. I was terrified to make the call to Jack. So I had my friend pretend to be me. And then I waited by the gate for him. With a gift my fashion chapbook, Party Dressing. All summer I had dreams of falling. When I went to Strand, I made myself up carefully. Once I wore a hat with a veil. Always I wore heels. He understands nothing about fashion. I told the Hungarians that I’d fallen in love with a graffiti artist in Brooklyn. I wanted to stay at Squat, but Eva didn’t like my influence on Eszter when she found out about my habit which was not severe. But Eszter was sixteen. Jack wrote lines for her, to be played sans vibrato on her threequarter violin. That fucking Bluebeard. I listened to Bluebeard’s Castle and designed costumes, clothing made of paper. I wanted tissue that would melt in warm water. Water colored by clay. I tested the effect in the bathtub with the assistance of two very shy twins. We took pictures. Jack rescued me from eviction at the Bowery. I moved in. First staying in his room. Then the room with the dome. Those are my shoes. Hell is not so bad. Why was I chosen? Was I chosen for my visual sense? For my collection of snakeskins, for my unusual warmth? Why did I receive this gift? I don’t like the idea of a demon inside me. But it’s not so bad. I have become a founding member of the Auxiliary of the Ear. We are the expeditionary force. I oversee preparation of the cooling headgear. In cases of garrulous possession, more and more frequent, my special duty is to transcribe... We sing as we work.
DALTON: I’ve seen this. Everyone was possessed by a dyskinesia. There was a bewildered motet inside each body. Was that the attempted speciation by the Hopeful Monster? According to the transcription, this is what they sang:
CARMEN: My body has two skins and one of them is outside.
MARY: Kiksakalu.
CARMEN: My phantom hand sends messages through the hole.
MARY: Why was I chosen?
CARMEN: My hand in the hole has found love with the disabled hand of Cervantes.
MARY: My shoes wait for the centipede.
CARMEN: My body belongs to all of Brooklyn.
MARY: I have seen the diaries of the Monster.
CARMEN: Very few Spaniards took part in the Commune and this makes me sad.
MARY: I have a key to the seventh door.
CARMEN: My body is the Hotel deVille.
MARY: Kiksakalu.
DALTON: Their heads were changing shape as they sang.
Gray Palmer is a Los Angeles-based theater worker, affiliated with Padua Playwrights. His theater reviews can be found online in the archive of Stage Raw. With his colleagues at Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance, he once surrounded City Hall with two hundred and fifty honking taxis.