Brown: The Last Discovery of America (7 page)

The human imagination has recently sustained a reversal. We have cleaned the ceiling. Michelangelo’s
Creation
and
Judgment,
the first and the last, and the pride of centuries—a vault over the imagination of the world—has been cleaned, has been restored; unhallowed; changed and called “original,” though no one has any idea what that might mean. (What was the light of day in 1540?) Nile greens and rose-petal pinks, tang ier oranges, and the martyred saints—what supernal beaver-shots. Well, we want them preserved, of course we do. And we are keen to see them as
they
saw them, the dead; as Michelan gelo painted them. The very Tree of Knowledge has been restored, each leaf rinsed and all the fruit polished, the fruit and the sin repolished. Having seen, we also want them back the way they were.

We want what Eve wanted. . . .
Just curious.

We had become accustomed to an averted eye, to seeing darkly, as old men see. It required many thousands of Q-Tips, many thousands of gallons of distilled water, which is to say, merely a couple of years, to wipe away the veil of tears, the glue from awakened eyes, to see born-again Adam touched by the less complicated hand of God. Now our distance from the representations, both alpha and omega, has been removed. And with it all credibility.

Blind John Milton—
brown all!
—dictating
Paradise Lost
to his aggrieved daughter in the dark, understood that what changes after Adam’s sin is not creation, but our human relationship to creation. (We cannot be content, even on a warm winter day in L.A., but we must always carp about a white Christmas.)

Maybe Milton, in his preoccupation with the Fall, was more an ancient swarthy Catholic than a true, ready Protestant. (Protestantism was also an attempt to clean the ceiling.) Those famous religious refugees from Restoration England were (like Milton) Puritans who believed they had entered a green time and were elected by God to be new Adams, new Eves (as old John Milton could not, with the scabs of Europe grown over his eyes, and painted tropes of angels plaguing his memory—
brown all, brown all
).

Let us speak of desire as green. In the Roman church green is the vestment of Ordinary Time, a prosaic pathway. For American Puritans, green was extraordinary. They supposed themselves remade by their perilous journey to a new world they were determined to call green, proclaiming by that term their own refreshment. They had entered a garden ungardened and felt themselves free of history, free to reenact the drama of creation.

Green became the founding flag of America; and so it would remain for generations of puritans to come, whatever our religion or lack. American optimism—our sense of ourselves as decent, naïve, primary people (compared to those violet, cynical races); our sense of ourselves as young, our sap rising, our salad days always before us; our belief that the eastern shore the Europeans “discovered” and the fruited plain beyond were, after all, “virgin”—all this would follow from an original belief in the efficacy of green.

Thus did the Dutch sailors in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Great Gatsby
spy the sheer cleft of an approaching “fresh green breast.” That same green breast is today the jaded tip of Long Island, summer home to New Amsterdam investment bankers and other rewarded visionaries who do not resemble their portraits. And the tragic hustler’s ghost:

We—I write in the early months of the twenty-first century—we are now persuaded by Marxist literary critics to goddamn any green light; to hack away at any green motif. Someone offstage has suffered and no good can come of it. We are a college of victims, we postmoderns; we are more disposed to notice Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailors were not alone upon the landscape (we easily pick out chameleon Indians hidden among the green tracery) than we are to wonder at the expanding, original iris: How the Indians must have marveled at those flaxen-haired Dutchmen.

Well, most likely the Indians were too terrified to morpholo gize or eroticize on the spot. What happens next? Watch, as the Indians did watch—with darker dread and puzzlement—what cargo these pale sailors unloaded. When: From below-deck emerged Africa in chains, the sun in thrall to the moon.

Thus, perceiving Europeans having only just arrived, the Indians already saw. Indians saw Original Sin. The dark ceiling. The stain spreading like oil spill. Rumor, too, must have spread like wildfire across the Americas—making green impossible from that moment, except as camouflage or tea.

Forgetting for the moment the journeys of others and the lateness of the hour; considering only the founding triad of our clandestine exhibit—Indian, European, African—we see (as well as the Founding Sin) the generation of the erotic motif of America. A brown complexity—complexity of narrative and of desire—can be foretold from the moment Dutch sailors and African slaves meet within the Indian eye.

I think I probably do. (Have brown thoughts.)

THE PRINCE AND I

THE SCREEN AT PALO ALTO’S VARSITY THEATER WASN’T AS wide as it should have been. There were those 180-degree screens in San Jose where, if you sat in the first row, you would appreciate that a motion picture is a series of still frames. Even at the Varsity Theater, though, when T. E. Lawrence crossed the desert, the desert rendered Lawrence’s person minuscule and his ambition gigantic. By force of will, T. E. Lawrence would claim the desert’s name for himself. “Lawrence of Arabia” was a hero’s name; an English schoolboy’s imagination of the world as a playing field. Clive of India, Kitchener of Khar toum, Lawrence of Arabia.

Such is the potency of David Lean’s film, I cannot conceive the man without the person of Peter O’Toole—white on white on white. His hair ostensibly bleached by the sun, his skin pale as sand; robes undulant as membranes of a sea anemone; his eyes madly blue.

The film’s most memorable sequence begins when Lawrence dons the robes of Araby. His first impulse is the schoolboy’s; he draws his pirate dagger. (The dagger becomes his looking glass.) His next impulse is to run, holding his diaphanous cape behind him to catch the wind—a delirious princess, a psalmist’s bride.

Understand: I was a bespectacled dark-skinned English major at Stanford University when Peter O’Toole tripped gi gantically, girlishly, across the screen of the Varsity Theater. Nevertheless, this vision of the hero as transvestite deeply pleased me and I privately issued a warrant—as a queen does to a marmalade company—to Lawrence of Arabia, for finding his eccentric place in the world of men.

Immediately I began reading
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
wherein photographs revealed an author of only slightly less heroic cast than Mr. O’Toole, and much less mascara.

Who would approve an opposite tale? It was one thing for a hipless Englishman to play the swarthy pirate. The reverse would have been impossible to praise or to admire. Much less to film. No British director would film, in Cinemascope:
Rodriguez of the Reading Room!

I was experimenting with impersonation. But why must I portray my ambition as impersonation? Not the Toffee who yearns to balance a cup and saucer on his knee, my ambition was to become conversant with American and British, mainly British, high literature—the best-known or best-said in a tongue I had determined to own.

I was experimenting with my body, trying to copy an ease and heedless appetite I recognized in books as youth, but which my puzzling bookish mind could only emulate with dogged endurance. It was assumed, by the two or three people at Stanford who assumed anything at all about me, that I was in the library. I was not in the library. I went to the Stanford Stadium daily, to run around the track, then to run up and down the stadium steps. I was maddened by this impulse, this mimicry of my studies. I would go to the stadium two, then three times a day.

I was studying Puritanism and that, too, interested me; not least for its prohibition of impersonation.

At about this time, Malcolm X, an American puritan, discouraged African-American adolescents from hair straighten ers and skin lighteners.

At about this time, ethnic studies departments were forming on some campuses. Such quorums would produce the great puritans of my age. The puritans would eventually form opinions about me, and I about them.

Americans are in the habit of dressing the noun, “puritan,” in the pejorative—puritan gray—meaning, in the main, sexual repression. I think America’s deeper puritanical strain is evident in our fear of the stage, of all things theatrical. The wicked stage.

In the America of my youth, there was real life and there was theater (the red-and-gold disease, as Cocteau called it). Theater was a rival to Creation, to the business of earning money and raising children and watering the lawn. Our parents warned us against “big ideas.” Big ideas were not good for us. The theater would give us big ideas that were inaccessible to us in our real lives.

In England, Puritans were famous for their objection to the confusion of the playhouse and to its seduction: The kettle-drums and face powders and the actors lewdly strutting—boys playing women, rabble playing at kingship, rabble wearing the raiment of kings and speaking the sentences of kings, sentences no king could bear the weight of. Some historians believe that Puritans of Shakespeare’s time were scandalized less by what transpired onstage than by the prostitutes and thieves, the sordid groundlings, who frequented the plays, conspired with kings.

“You are idle shallow things. I am not of your element,” Malvolio shrieks to the pit, to the beggars and molls in the pit, even—it must be—at the actor playing himself. Malvolio is shamed by a tricked vanity, so, so, so, but to be judged by these! Noisemakers of Cheapside alleys, barefoot urchins splashing plague from puddles. And at court, too, he is mocked. Her Majesty laughs, therefore must Malvolio’s original laugh at himself (Malvolio may have been a parody of Sir William Knollys).

Theatrics were an offshoot of liturgy—of the Mass, of the Passion and miracle plays and the lewd plays that preceded Lent. Puritans believed men were created to stand in pure relationship to God. Puritans ordained no intermediaries—no king or bishop or actor; no mother of God, no liturgy. Puritans had their day in England, in the seventeenth century. They severed the stalk of divine right. They dissolved all sham, dumb show, liturgy. Playhouses were shuttered and locked. And England kept a sober house.

But whirligig Time restores gaudy Aurora. After the Restoration, after the return of the anointed and the rouged, Puritans were once again persecuted in England. But before these great acts and their conclusions on the political stage of England, a small band of English Puritans set sail for America to pursue the freedom of an undivided relationship to God.

In early November, American grammar-school children used to be handed mimeographed drawings of Pilgrims to color. Pilgrims sailed over the horizon of November in sturdy brown ships, firing upon their antecedents—witches and pumpkins mostly. They came here to worship in their own way and to invent their isolation.

These Pilgrims were not the Canterbury kind, hiccuping and falling off their horses, devolving forever in their Prologue. The Canterbury pilgrims would be lucky to arrive before the twelfth grade. Grammar-school Pilgrims were an appealing, sober people with straight lines for mouths. They stood in the way of popish Christmas, but were themselves soon routed by snowflakes and candy canes and yellow Bethlehem stars.

Puritans composed a great American theme: One could become something new in America, something different from the cast-iron roles and faiths and the shackles that Europe imposed. But there was also something un-American about the Puritans’ insistence upon a deathless identity once here. For America would turn out to be a land of inventors and self-inventors, a land of imposture. The theatrical possibilities of America would extend to blackface and feathers. Insofar as America would become an anti-Puritan country, Americans would dream of becoming other than they were. Insofar as America would remain a Puritan country, theatricality would meet the accusation of “inauthenticity.” What is at stake in all this is the nature of authenticity, which is the Puritan dilemma.

From the first, there were Puritans and there were Indians and historical accidents—several parties converging upon the clearing in the woods. The exalted metaphor for that difference, for that convergence, was a turkey dinner. Indians came to the Thanksgiving feast dressed for Halloween. They had painted their faces and stuck feathers in their hair and they wore the skins of the animals of the forest. Birdcalls heralded their appearance in the clearing. Indians were theatricals impersonating Nature, portraying their place in Nature, which was also—and the Puritans saw it—their claim on the land.