a play for John White, painter, circa 1585-93
A Brush With Infinity was first performed in the Burton Rooms at the Oxford Playhouse, in 1981
The part of John White was played by Brett Hannam
Dance by Maas Movers
Choreography by James Lammy
A Brush With Infinity is a tribute to the Elizabethan watercolourist, explorer and first Governor of Virginia, John White. It moves from a darkened loneliness into populated brightness whilst counter-moving from old age to the memories of youth. Dramatically, the work comprises five continuous sequences, which fall broadly into two parts: monologue with projections, paintings with ritual dance. Each of these two parts is of roughly equal duration on stage. There should be no interval as all sequences are transitional:
The set is bare with a series of six painted panels at rear. Each is six feet high and three feet wide, arranged as a semi-circular screen in groups of two, raised about a foot off the ground. They are covered by easily removed opaque white cloths, suitable for projections. The paintings depict tropical ocean and island subjects, the central panels being of a large white fairy tern with its wings spread wide against the sky.
Cast:
[For visual and historical references cf. The Roanoke Voyages ed. D B Quinn publ. Hakluyt Society and White's own paintings in the British Museum.]
1st Sequence
Night. A solitary figure, seated, as before a fire. No other light.
Outside the storms of winter snow or rain are raging. I, John White, Bede on my knee, read into the night, find the kaleidoscope of my years in this labour of my eyes. Pull the candle close, John, lean and hungry Ireland keep out tonight. Firelight, protect this old man! I - John White - painter, on coral sands lost, lost the lost Governor, the Colony of Virginia - I the man. Sleet blew over the lip of the dark well today. Mossy sides, too black to make out, fringed the windy march of clouds reflected in the pool, which has not frozen. A sparrow flew by. (reads) 'It seems to me, your Majesty, like a swift flight - a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting, at dinner on a winter's day - in the midst a comforting fire, outside the storms of winter snow are raging. A few moments of comfort and he vanishes from sight, into the wintry world from which he came. Thus man - comforted for a little while - but of what before or following - unaware.' Firelight catches at the claws of my chair and I know nothing of the crystal air behind. What may it hold while I don't look? Who'd guess the pictures in my head on a night like this? When I was born who would have guessed coral seas or Indians? (reads) 'Your Majesty, let us give careful consideration to this teaching; for frankly I admit that, in my experience, the religion that we have hitherto professed seems valueless and powerless'. How it turns against you now, Bede! The new teaching! Oh, Harriot, how you and I would argue about that on our travels. And how I was born on them, yes, born at the ice's edge off the coast of Greenland on a summer's night, narwhal under the bough, the low unsetting sun flinging its bronze around the rigging, casting rope shadows across topsails that arc'd against the bluest sky.
We had wintry storms alright in that year, and that was summer. I can feel the boat rolling, we in the darkness below, keeping close to the fire smoldering in the after cabin, clothes wet through. Light filtered down through the hole above, the canvas had been rolled back to let the smoke out, and around the edges of the smoky light, droplets of melting slush gleamed like pearls.
A call from outside and some people running! Settle appeared at the hatch above, blinking in the sleet. 'Master says to tell John White we've found him an iceberg.' I ran aloft, and the wind coming on our port quarter pushing us over on the starboard, I slipped down against the gunnels and saw the sea pass by scarce a head's depth below, the gun deck flooding with every wave. I leaned out, braced against the shrouds, I could see the huge grey form loom between the weather and the sea. 'Stay clear, John, the wind's going to blow us onto that thing,' Settle called to me from the poop, 'and I'm staying out of Master's way while he keeps us off it.' 'Is it moving too?' 'Yes, but with the current, even in this wind. She's a lot bigger underneath than she looks.' The squeal of blocks, heaving calls of the sailors, wind at our ears. Men ran past and brought the great lateen sail to bear, and - eventually - you could begin to feel the ship come round. It's like the memory of my first coral sea, the edge of that iceberg; we shaved so close by her. In the drear, cold, dangerous sea a turquoise band shone up from below, barely our own distance away, a kingfisher flash on that wintry day.
Overnight, calmer waters. Over chequers of ice, Greenland's coast with the dawn. That evening it came to me, what newness meant, the sun in the high rigging and the snows peach beneath a cerulean vault. I stayed on deck all night, and in the hour's dusk watched huge shoals of light fan out from the softly champing bow. We have bitten of the tree of ignorance, and there is a world beyond our wildest dreams beyond our wildest dreams. Its un-possessed immensity is myriad in virginity, a milky way where even the slaughtered whore and lecher's seed have lodged their dreams of beauty. In such icy purity it seems to me that guilt of earthiness is sheer stupidity. The watch crews move softly about, their tall woolen hats like so many phallic outlines against the reddening northern skyline. At dawn they launched the pinnace and rowed us ashore to take readings. You could have got drunk on the stillness of the land after rolling on the sea, the silence except for the scuff of our boots on the ice, the brightness and heat of the sun.
Instruments! Set up on the bright ice! Always the instruments! All points above - stars, masts - pass through a fulcrum of Love. And thus we know our place. Not in Harriot's mathematic: the divine grid on which we mark the spots and get our fix. If you shift the compass across the sun's face, and not your hearts, you know the location but not your place. Then rape, rape, rape is all you do! Surely Light is the universal key - and Light comes without body, from a brush with infinity, and gains its day's nature where, in an instant it comes to be. In such shining is all the truth of now, all the key to eternity. What, then, is Love but the Light a man has touched within? Such immediate encyclings - storm to sea glitter - wrap around the island forms of men the trade and trail of lunacy. So Love contains us, and few of us it. The Light abounds, indeed enhaloes us, but few the mirror halls within!
The bright ice could not but invade my dusty head that day, and burn the shadows from my mind, 'Like as when the sun
...as when the sun
At a bay-window peepeth in upon
A bole of water, his bright beam's aspect
With trembling lustre it doth far reflect
'Gainst the high ceiling of the lightsome hall'
The oars flickered and twisted below the surface, vivid green above the boulders far below which showed like giant curlew and black-bird eggs. 'Should be inside Frobisher's bay inside three days,' said Best, folding down the velvet around the brass cylinder of the cross-staff, and closing the wooden case. He flashed his dark eyes, momentarily banishing his perpetual frown, 'Indians for you there, John.' And they all fell to stories of the Indians, outdoing each other in telling me what to expect. Oh, I had seen de Heere's painting of the Eskimo, the one they had brought back the last time, and I had scrutinized every last detail until I knew it all. When we got there I mistook them for seals, I was looking so hard!
We came in close to the ship's side and clambered up .I sat for’ard to look from the bow-sprit across the icy bay. The same feeling for the ship touched every man who rowed ashore to an unknown land. The irrepressible urge to search out the new soon turned-tail to an instinct for the home which this awful creaking warren had become. For whole weeks in open ocean you might curse your captivity, the danger, ill-ease and bad company. An hour ashore, and you missed the squalid, pulsating humanity of it all. I remember Tucker asked me to find the surgeon for Mathews, who lay in the sun on the poop, weak with pleurisy. I went below into the dark passageways, and there in the surgeon's store was Mathew's only hope, bent over the back of one of the ship's boys! The worst of it was that after weeks at sea, it stirred me in the gut so strongly, I just stood there, watching. Mathews dying in the sun. Our medicine man ministering in the darkness to the lad who had too much life.
[JOHN WHITE rises and paces too and fro]
Two days later we reached Frobisher's bay, where my mind and heart first met. After a battle with the Eskimo's I awoke to find in my eye the first painting of that trip: [makes as if to paint image on screen behind] the olive green, scantly turfed hills rising from shingle shores around a wide bay glittering with pack ice. The distant ranges, heathery blue and the Eskimos in a pack on the distant water beyond their small encampment. We were out in the pinnaces, under the lee of a rocky hill's edge, where the water was dark, gaudy with our flag and two or three red-jackets among the motley of our clothes - acid colours against the tones of the Eskimos and their land. One Indian came between us in his kayak and we signaled him to our boat's side. We showed him the Dutchman's painting of the Eskimo who had been taken, complete with his boat and arms, the year before. He seemed surprised - not I think at the likeness, because they make good likenesses in bone , but at our having it.
I still like to think of them as more like intelligent seals. They were at home with their world, natural and innocent in their ways. Not us! Arrogant. Awkward. Small wonder they fired on us! To have stolen one of their kind at all - but to turn up with a picture of him! They were already too unsure when we let two of our men go over the next morning. What mistakes those two made, God knows, but they didn't come back and by the following day the Eskimos were sure we would go for them. We found them removed further into the sound, where they could flee in their kayaks across the bay. Some of our men surprised them and the Eskimos fled to their canoes and paddled down the bay. Headed off by the pinnaces and forced ashore, they started firing on us. Thin arrows with fine bone points. Two of the sailors were hit in the arms and Wright, the arquebusier, stood up in the other pinnace and fired at them.
I have tried to paint that absurdity. I remember the images, not the order - if there was any. The spiritless scraping at freezing earth for dubious stone, as the days grew colder and the water congealed. Frobisher's hatreds. The poetic justice of that arrow in his arse! All that confusion has wasted, leaving only the images. The natural geometry of these people, the fine, tensioned simplicity of them, the delicate birch strakes of their kayaks, tents and bows, stretched taught with skins. When we killed one of their men, his life, skin over small bones, did not lose grace; only we, in the smoke and noise, rocked off balance with the fierce recoil.
That was the scene of sodomy I really minded, because it was a rape, without consent or deserving. If I didn't know it in words then, and even if I didn't know it in words until I had played my own stupid hand in it, my brush knew it in the shape of that picture, that wise seal-man looking up a me, as we set-to beyond. He often comes to me, that man, and looks at me, and the clear waters still glitter from his paddle, and the breeze still shivers in the furs around his face.
[Exit]
2nd Sequence
Blackout. Music, as of falling snow, becoming faster as Slide 1 comes up on central screen at back. Fades slowly to Slide 2 .
3rd Sequence
Slide 2 fades into Slide 3 , music over. JOHN WHITE enters, stage left and does not cross in front of central screen. Slides 3 - 7 fade in sequence. In Slide 7 , which is a triple screen projection, he is enveloped in the image of the coral sea.
During these projections he speaks as follows:
Narcissi bow beneath the bluster at the well's edge, and reflected far down, dispel the winter's darkness with their fine white petals. In the windy twilight, they nod their white heads above the inky pit, flurrying like flocks of waders that rise and settle in a wild dawn. Slightly pink, the cusped moon's upper horn rides through the cloud edge and the clouds foam by, silver into charcoal, in the deepening lapis sky. I read Lucretius and Job today; the latter lies open on the gloomy floor. It is time to strike the tinder. 'For man is born into misery as the sparks fly upwards.' What sparks! With a Spring wind, which is a ship's wind, running beneath the stars. They threw off the clews and buntlines and the wind shook out the sail, and overhauling, the men swung down till the canvas stretched, luffed, backed and stretched again as they braced hard. Spring-squalls banished flowers as the season's marker, and we headed southwest into the Ocean-Sea! We lost sight of the others, five days out, but our ship, the Tiger, and the Elizabeth and the Lion, were above the usual fit - guilds, each man a special colonizing talent, and all ships packed to the brim with soldiers, arms and equipment.
It was good to have before my eyes the wild daffodils of de Morgues, and know he'd painted pictures of Virginia before. The old man, whom they called the monk, le Moyne de Morgues, gave me strength to let things touch me as they are, to talk about themselves through the brush. He was incredible, at the end of such a life to be refining his eye for detail, creating from past suffering his printemps d'immortelles couleurs. I will always remember the inspiration of those wild daffodils out there at sea. He, we, all for Raleigh! Six hundred of us, with our own charter, rules, buildings, food, a whole dismantled town, hanging over great deeps of the rolling ocean. For Raleigh! The wasted golden grasshopper, who so often flashed through our lives with the sun, and whose sincerity was touched by the queen and death. We there, caught on his dream. I soon, to be caught on a finer hook!
It was good to be paired with Harriot, the geographer. To forget the ornament of the painters-stainers guild, and learn navigation going over... so that Fernandez couldn't fool me later! Familiarity brings us a home in the midst of mysteries. Upon pre-traveled paths we travel as if knowing who we are, where we come from. Even the explorer claims each unknown yard for home. Far above, a star or sun plays out the triangular knot by which we know each new-gained spot. But what is a man? And where a place? Explain the star or sun, and what we found along our way, flying fish and alligator. Where did the Indian come from? There he was, as the Eskimo had been, suddenly, like deer amid the trees. The heavy dark trees in the hot damp air. Our new science is but fine pattern observing, an outrageous familiarity, revealing nothing that the wise man and the adventurer do not already know at heart. It was not lack of familiarity which ruined us out there; we did not have a large enough heart.
We spent our first wary nights ashore sweating by the safety of a fire, and were woken at dawn by the crashing downpour of rain, which stopped dead as the sun flooded up into the huge dripping leaves, flowers and birdcalls. Everything moved. It was as if the very soil was a snake. Between our first rising, Dominica, and the settlement at Virginia seven weeks north, we spent time on two large islands, and navigated the reefs of many more. I painted fruits, birds, insects and fish; and they brought me things, like the pelican's head. But best of all were the things I painted alive; the steady eye of the diamond-back terrapin looks at me to this day, its shadow moving beneath it in the hot sun.
Man, put down avarice and let the light pour in, resplendent in your empty hall; if your heart goes dark, open its shutters and compassion will rule. Do not look to words. Words! Chewed in the shadow of our own blind chemistry; which applaud the communicants' needs, floating our world on mental carpets; which are parentheses, smudgers, the creators of void. If in the beginning was the Word, God help us! Words: communicate and vanish.
Across the coral and crushed shell sands, terns glide back and forth, feathers pink to emerald as they cross the sea; a clock of light and sand and sea, three colours, million shifting shades, eternity. Bleached amid grains of white skeletal coral remains, floured pink shells roll even now in transparent waves. Blue tropical war-paint purples with white a lobster's feelers and two sharp horns; a cerulean glaze spreads around the eyes, mirror of shifting light, while fine thorns rise like cider-bubbles all about, and sand fills up the hollow forms. We are but hourglasses of matter's monotony, and Time is the beauty. Time's a passing wave, which has no being, save, in its substance an infinite variety.
4th Sequence
At the end of the 3rd sequence, the actor moves close to the right screen, and as lights change from projection to full stage light, he turns and begins removal of screen cloth from underlying painting. He continues until all paintings are revealed, then exits.
5th Sequence
After a long pause from the exit of the actor, the lights on the paintings off, leaving only vertical light on stage. At the finale of the dance which follows, when the dancers are prostrate, and co-incident with the impact of their darts, lights switch from stage to paintings. Hold. Then all lights up.
THE DANCE
The dance references a North Carolina Algonquian Indian tribal rite, as witnessed and painted by White.
There is no music, but the dancers must rehearse to music so that they are impelled by a rhythm which links them together, but to which the audience are outsiders. The falling of the dancers' feet will be the only audible markers of this beat.
The dance falls broadly into three sequences. In the first, the dancers move backwards and forwards on straight tracks in front of, and across, the pictures in a slow, occasionally halting, rhythm. Their posture will be based on White's painting. Reverence will be intermittently shown for the images behind them.
The second sequence brings the dancers into a circle, with the two girls in the centre, based directly on the White picture. With the tempo increasing, the dance reveals itself as an initiation rite for the young girls in the centre, surrounded by the warriors of the tribe. The girls are finally snatched, terrified, from the centre by two of the outer circle, who, taking them beyond the group, begin a sexual conquest of them.
At this, the third sequence follows with the dancers breaking circle with a frenzied increase in tempo, crisscrossing about the couples lying on the floor, and with increasing agitation, turning their attention to the paintings. Detaching red-feathered darts from their waists, in a climax of frenzy they hurl them at the central image of the bird, collapsing to the floor. As all other lights except those on the paintings go out, the image of the white bird is revealed, trailing blood -red plumes from the darts.
Throughout, irrespective of speed, the dancers' movements should be bold and clear.
END
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