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Authors interviewing characters: Coco Picard

September 28, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Madame Blavatsky Interview

An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky sits on the ledge of a window in the Wellness Center outside of Munich, Germany in my debut novel, THE HEALING CIRCLE. The plant is ordinary, easily overlooked, particularly in this far wing of a hospital dedicated to rest and relaxation. She observes all kinds of things from this potted place, especially bodies in transition: bodies coming and going in and out of hospital. Or, on the other side, through the window, bodies passing through trees on wings or on foot over the ground, and sometimes a landing helicopter.

The plant’s namesake is a real-life spiritualist, H.P. Blavastky (1831-1891), a notorious occultist who is considered to be the godmother of the New Age movement. Born in Ukraine, she relocated to the U.S. in 1873. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and wrote at length about esoteric concerns. But she has continued to thrive in this new plant form—she has fifteen arms now! They are fat at the base, green as a Pantone 802C color chip and octopus-like, pressing against the glass of the window to pry it open and escape.

I move a plastic chair to face the plant, feeling the clock above the door ticking behind my back. It is six-thirty on a late summer evening. The modest room is otherwise empty and smells like antiseptic. I think of the other resident, Ursula, the one described in THE HEALING CIRCLE. Blavatsky is Ursula’s main companion in that book. Ursula, who ran away from her family in search of a miracle cure, arrived here, of all places. Madame Blavatsky might feel the same way. Her place of origin has been confounded by centuries of human trade routes for which her medicinal properties were prized. A piece of plastic stuck in her earth says she was born in the suburb of Giesing, purchased for ten euros and attributed, originally, to the Arabian peninsula.

I’ve never interviewed a plant before. My tools feel clumsy—a pendulum, a tuning fork, and an electronic box. The box will supposedly capture the electromagnetic field of the plant and translate it into musical notes. A friend told me that plants emit low frequencies when calm and high frequencies when alarmed or distressed. The tools seem feeble and childish now. I hope Madame Blavatsky isn’t offended. Maybe our conversation will encourage future techno-linguistic innovations that streamline interspecies communication.

Coco Picard: Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. (Hits the tuning fork on a knee, resting its base on the table in front of HPB. Hums audibly.) Can we start? (Fixes four round electrode patches on different parts of the plant and patches them into the small black electronic box. Adjusts the volume. Digital numbers flash across a small nondescript screen. The box emits a secondary drone and self-tunes to the tuning fork.) I think it’s working! (Smiles, holds the pendulum over the table, so that it hovers and oscillates just in front of the plant. Looks up.) OK. So. How do you categorize yourself? (Appears shy. Nervous. Clears throat then resumes stillness and speaks softly.) Are you a human spirit living inside of a plant? Or do you consider yourself a plant with an interest in human concerns?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: (Lights flicker in time with a soft pulse from the electromagnetic box. Atmosphere of the room softens, as though a cloud passes over the sun. Tuning fork stills. HPB droops, suggesting disappointment. Pendulum moves slowly North/South (yes). HPB stirs. It could be the fan overhead; someone might have adjusted the setting in some other part of the hospital. Whatever the cause, the plant emits an inner glow, resolved now, to answer in good faith. She appears to shift her gaze to the interviewer. Tuning fork intensifies. Pendulum resumes clockwise oscillation. No sound is heard but the following words become apparent.) How far can we be assured of the identity of any spirit…?…There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of…materialized spirits.

CP: (Confused but determined. Watches electromagnetic reading. Numbers rise and fall rhythmically around 900 MHz. Music drones in low tones. Hair on arms raised as the reality of this conversation becomes present. Thinks, I am talking to a plant? Watches HPB with a soft three-quarter gaze.) I can ask another way—do you identify your spirit as more-human or more-plant?

HPB: (Energy around the plant has static that carries through on the electronic device. It sounds like someone is searching for a station on a radio. HPB laughs without sound, again answers without inaudibly) …on the testimony of ancients…the voice of…spirits is not and cannot be articulated…(Pendulum moves erratically North/South (yes) then East/West (no) repeatedly: yes-no-yes-yes-no-yes. Radio static intensifies.)

CP: (Wants to ask about Ursula, where is she, for instance. Presumably her absence from the room means that Ursula has already died. Or maybe Ursula hasn’t arrived yet. Being in the same time frame as the plant might preclude Ursula’s arrival in this room.) I want to understand the relationship between mind and body…for you. (Shakes head, tries to focus on this most urgent philosophical question, perhaps to compensate for asking a plant about the afterlife.) Does that mean you are both plant and human? Like some combination. If I gather your meaning, the idea is that the human perspective—let’s call it an interest in written language and letters—coexists with your vegetal nature. And merge together, yes? You sympathize with both.

HPB: (Says without saying, Ursula is dead and has not yet arrived.) Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely?

(A patient passes slowly by the open hospital room door pushing a heart monitor ahead of them. The heart monitor beeps. Pendulum continues to swing through yes and no patterns.)

CP: But this means you transcend life, or one lifetime. Is that because you have become a plant? Or is it the case for all of us, that we are more than the bounds of our bodies?

(Pendulum flings itself against the window impossibly hard. Window splits. Electromagnetic box clears static and settles on an Enya track. Tuning fork topples over with a disproportionately loud clang.)

CP: (Startled, convinced that having died and not having arrived are one and the same state.) You’re going back to the question of a spirit’s intelligence—meaning the spirits that communicate with the human world, you think spirits…the ones that talk to us…are stupid. (Appears embarrassed, maybe because of the word stupid or because the real question has to do with mortality and where one goes after life, if one goes anywhere at all.)

HPB: (A curious tilt to the plant’s light asks why CP continues to ask these questions out loud when clearly something else is at stake. Sunlight falls through the room with a last gasp of brightness, casting long shadows, the golden hour.) There are mediums [who] have called out…hundreds of…“human” forms. And yet we do not recollect…[any] one [of them] expressing anything but the most commonplace ideas.

CP: (Feels the plant asking about the difference between personal history and narrative composition. How does THE HEALING CIRCLE correspond with your life? What does it feel like to be back in this room?) Hmmm… (Stubborn. Resists answering the plant. Instead hits the tuning fork. The buzz is low this time, almost impossible to hear.) Why? I could imagine linguistic thought might weaken once a person has died…as though language and material can’t actually be separated. (Silence suggests the plant waits for a proper reply.) Fine. I’ll be honest. The older I get the stranger it is to find myself attached to sites of grief. I feel better having written—someone else said that, but me too.

HPB: (Pendulum falls from the window, glass cracks further. Electromagnetic box sounds recede into an ocean soundtrack with calm lapping waves. Plant continues to make the following words available without sound.) How much there is in the above of fiction and how much of truth, it is for others to decide; but it certainly bears more the evidence of sincerity and fact on its face, then the fables concocted by the fathers to answer their end.

CP: Does that answer satisfy you, as a plant?

HPB: (Room is suddenly quiet. Only sound comes from birds outside.) We all live under the powerful dominion of fantasy. Alone the highest and invisible originals emanated from the thought of the Unknown are real and permanent blinds, forms, and ideas; on earth, we see but their reflections; more or less correct, and ever depended on the physical and mental organization of the person who begets them.

(Night Nurse, Frea, enters with a small canister of water, observes the cracked window and shakes her head with a knowing tsk-ing sound, barely acknowledges interviewer but leans into the plant fondly with small whispers, What a naughty little fern you are, she says, pinching the arms affectionately like they belong to a toddler. The plant appears to enjoy the attention, brightens again, this time skewing jade. The sun has almost entirely set and the window has become a mirror. Nurse shakes her head again, finally looks at the interviewer.)

Nurse Frea: This one, ach. We can’t put her in anyone’s room. She makes trouble. I think she is in mourning. So sad about her friend. (Tone shifts to one of admonishment.) Ok. Enough games time to pack up. Go home. Visiting hours have ended.

CP: (To Nurse) One more question? (Nurse shrugs, rolls her eyes. Exit nurse.) Where do you rank yourself? And what can you say of the afterlife that isn’t “commonplace”?

(Night Nurse leaves the room.)

HPB: It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and—if it has begotten abuse—of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by the death of the astral body…which alone confers…individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystæ; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the afterlife. (Electromagnetic patches fall off, suggesting the interview has ended.)

**all of HPB’s answers come from H.P. Blavatsky’s two volume book, Isis Unveiled, Theosophical University Press, 1960.

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COCO PICARD is a writer, cartoonist, and curator. She is the author of THE HEALING CIRCLE (August 16, 2022; Red Hen Press), which won the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, as well as two graphic novels, Meowsers (2022) and The Chronicles of Fortune (2017), which was nominated for a DiNKy Award. Art criticism and comics have otherwise appeared under the name Caroline Picard in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Paris Review, and Seven Stories Press, among others. She founded the Green Lantern Press in 2005, earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and was a Bookends Fellow at Stony Brook University. You can visit her online at cocopicard.com.

THE HEALING CIRCLE

A mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died. Bedridden with a terminal diagnosis, memories, nurses, immoral doctors, foreign television broadcasts, and phone calls from children intrude upon her consciousness. An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is her primary companion.