First produced at the Advocate, Harvard
Lights up, diffusely. The YOUNG PAINTER stands to the center right of the stage with his back to the audience. He is standing in front of a large canvas with a paintbrush and pallet. Behind the canvas is a backdrop of the sea that extends the entire length of the stage.
Enter the WOMAN BY THE SEA who stands on the YOUNG PAINTER’S side of the stage.
Enter the OLD PAINTER and DAUGHTER who stand to the center left of the stage.
All speech is addressed to audience like a Shakespearian aside.
YOUNG PAINTER
I have chosen a midday light. When the sun is free, without the intrusion of darkness.
DAUGHTER
We have come down the white path to the sea. He wishes to paint the sea at midday, as he has always done.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
Does he see me, like a seabird, quivering at the edge of the water?
OLD PAINTER
Will she still come here when I am dead?
DAUGHTER
The sound of the sea... The earliest slant of light in the morning, in the kitchen, while he makes tea and fries eggs and reads Shakespeare with his legs folded on top of the table... Without him I can only perceive the emptiness here. The beauty will be severed from me, as if behind a clear glass. The sea will be like light, passing, uncapturable, through my hands.
YOUNG PAINTER
That summer when I came here with my parents and I first saw her... in the moonlight, from my window, dashing in and out of the waves, and I came down to her, and whispered, “What is your name?” and she answered “My name is sea, my name is moon”–and the memory of her voice then, has always moved me–
WOMAN BY THE SEA
The sea-swallows merge together over the waves and break apart then suddenly, and does he not see me, too, breaking apart before him?
OLD PAINTER
But I will become the sea then, the light, the waves...
DAUGHTER
Last night I came down to the water by myself, and the stars were terrifying.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
I listen to the mournful music of the sea. Only he may understand my sadness.
OLD PAINTER
The WOMAN BY THE SEA, that afternoon so long ago–she too has become like light.
YOUNG PAINTER
And she is unspeakably beautiful now. But the image of her like sunlight, dissolves to the touch...
DAUGHTER
And love? We must give it up. It dies with us.
OLD PAINTER
I love the sound of the rain clattering rudely against the slats of the old shore-house, and how as a girl she would curl up in my arms, tell me she was afraid–
DAUGHTER
Somehow our memory, our love for this life, extends beyond our finger-tips, halo-like.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
But I am real! I cry. I laugh. I make love. I will kiss him. Give him life again.
DAUGHTER
He desires to capture the light perfectly as it gathers and rolls over the waves.
OLD PAINTER
We deepen with life, so relentlessly into death.
YOUNG PAINTER
I watch her walk along the water, the waves brushing gently against her slate blue skirt, and I know that only her love can save me–
DAUGHTER
But there is always death, like the sea, rushing over us, taking us away from ourselves.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
And if he should kiss me, pull me close to his breast...
YOUNG PAINTER
I would love her then and we could perish together in the sea.
OLD PAINTER
Life is full of the brutality of lost love.
DAUGHTER
This chord of life must be cut–
YOUNG PAINTER
Time is before me, bird-like, arising out of the water.
DAUGHTER
A series of alternating gasps of darkness and light–
WOMAN BY THE SEA
I am a sea flower. He will pluck me from the water and recoil at my pungency.
OLD PAINTER
I will never complete my painting of the sea. It is like a love that animates the fringes of my life but can never touch the core.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
It is only for love that I walk along the rain-softened sand and look at him over the black mudflats, my eyes full of light–
YOUNG PAINTER
This is all just a confusion of words, a mix-up in a dream.
OLD PAINTER
I feel my soul stretching out now from my body. It glides onto the open waves, playfully, like a child first introduced to the water and sand.
DAUGHTER
I am dying with him–I am returning to the random crush of matter in space, like the foaming of the waves, breaking at the seams.
OLD PAINTER
I grow weary and empty, but not sad–this life has been so incredibly beautiful.
DAUGHTER
It all flattens out and sinks in my brain.
OLD PAINTER
You must let an old man die knowing that his child is happy.
YOUNG PAINTER
And I look at her, like a cloud passing overhead, as she forms and dissipates like rain, like thunder, like lightning...I can never decide if this life is happy or sad–
WOMAN BY THE SEA
Does he feel the cool sea-breeze? It steals light from the skin, the ears, kicks sand in my eyes.
YOUNG PAINTER
The sun and the sea, these are my images–
WOMAN BY THE SEA
And the sea will weave itself around us, gather us gently into ourselves...
OLD PAINTER
She is a thread of color slipped through time–
DAUGHTER
The dead are stillborn within me.
YOUNG PAINTER
And I cannot approach her–she is unreal, like a bird which plummets over the water and disappears.
OLD PAINTER
Soon the water will rush over my head, and I will drown forever.
YOUNG PAINTER
In the evening I will walk past the unpainted beaches along the white path, past the dunes, and the sea will rise over everything in the darkness.
OLD PAINTER
I feel myself break away from my old life, suddenly, into the sea’s vast cycles of snow and rain… And the measured breaths of it, like my heart, which has always beat out the steady cadence of life.
DAUGHTER
After he is gone, there will still be the sea, unconsciously gathering and ungathering itself, forever–
OLD PAINTER
I have lost something now, a word that could describe everything. Life, death. It’s gone now... I will simply subside, and will I be able then to hear the sea? Or just the rattle of my own teeth against one another. Will I carry on as a memory? Is that any kind of life? This fragment of left-over light–
DAUGHTER
We must cleave away from our being and become inanimate, like a rock out at sea. Without heat, without vision, without taste–
OLD PAINTER
Even a rock has life.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
The night will descend like a silver net over the shoreline, and I will change forms again, unloved as I am.
DAUGHTER
How can a rock have life? Life is movement, perception, awareness. A rock is still, without recognition of the constant wearing away of itself by the sea. The slow steady loss of minerals and mass.
OLD PAINTER
How do we know that the world is not looking in on us as we look out on it?
DAUGHTER
What is around us is huge, cold, and terrifying.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
O! Light is many-folded with bright beauty. You must undo it, lay it flat.
OLD PAINTER
That is life itself–
DAUGHTER
No... No... It is this slow process of dying. I can feel it even now.
YOUNG PAINTER
But I see the image as it must be...
OLD PAINTER
The stars will split. The sea will dry up. Space will rip apart. But there will be a renewal. I will survive through my art. Not through the paintings themselves, but through the process that I have begun in them. Not a process of death, but of a living imagination, which, like charged lightning, hurls itself against the rock of darkness.
DAUGHTER
And is swallowed up–
OLD PAINTER
And breaks apart into illuminations of living light.
YOUNG PAINTER
When I am old, she will be gone from me. A young man’s gift is creation. An old man’s is death.
DAUGHTER
My poor Oedipus, ruined and blind... My childhoods were spent here with you, reading books and picking flowers. But you were afraid of the darkness in me because of the darkness in you. I am invisible to what I am.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
And life. Life! Like a ring of oxslips and daisies will crown my head.
YOUNG PAINTER
And she, who is so beautiful and strange. It is she who is always putting my nose to nature, as if the rank oder could shock me suddenly out of this dream-life into the glittering world of her.
OLD PAINTER
The world within me–this world of creative love...If not for death, I would simply lay here and listen to the sea.
DAUGHTER
My love for him is desperate. I am full of such tangled chords of music. Half-finished nocturnes and sad ballades for the middle of the night. They are strangled each day in me.
YOUNG PAINTER
I’m malnourished by time. Winter berries and spring-water only.
DAUGHTER
He paints a study of the sea. He tells me stories of the mother who died, but I do not believe him, there is only him–this white haired, unmagical old man.
OLD PAINTER
I live with the burden of real feeling. I hear and taste and see and feel with such exquisite sensuality, but I cannot contain it in a single image. I have been living with a beauty unutterable... She is my only tether to this solid world of death.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
Men and women are as ancient as the sun and as fresh as a leaf just now receiving light.
DAUGHTER
I must watch him be snapped up, disfigured by death, and stripped from this odd dream of life. He is like moonshine that I must wipe away from the windowpane.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
I think I am asleep, yet I will return here tomorrow, to wait for him again.
YOUNG PAINTER
I am a projection of myself.
DAUGHTER
I tell him that I see nothing out beyond the curve of the sea but an overwhelming rush of water.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
Bars of yellow and green light fall on the shore, and they gild the ribs of a hollowed out boat and the sea-holly, and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel, and now I feel myself breaking apart, becoming a part of the sea itself–
DAUGHTER
I am always struggling out of the death of him, larva-like, so that I may become myself.
OLD PAINTER
All declines and swoops around me in hoops of light, hammered out in the sun. This picture must be finished soon, or the light of the sun will change forever, and the opportunity will be lost.
YOUNG PAINTER
When I am old, there will still be sea and stars, the first image, the first memory of the womb. Pinion points of sky-raised ideas, gentle, coaxing, life giving.
DAUGHTER
As a girl I would come down to the water and curse the darkness.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
This is the present moment, it loops back upon itself and encloses us in its transience.
DAUGHTER
I have been ravished always by the glimmering sealight.
OLD PAINTER
My body is a worn shell. My soul is worn, living within the spiral of the arch.
DAUGHTER
I cannot see through myself to him.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
We’ll tell bedtime stories to one another, stories from when the womb of nature rocked us to sleep. We’ll sleep then, amongst the dream-fed stars.
DAUGHTER
Everything is full of light. But the light only reveals the emptiness of the shoreline– the bleached white sand, the gaping of the sea-mouth. The despair is at our roots. There is so much sadness in him, and I cannot bear it.
OLD PAINTER
My doubts are about about smallish things, the consistency of the sand, the color of the saltwater under the curve of a wave.
YOUNG PAINTER
I will die.
OLD PAINTER
For there to be an end there must be a beginning, and I cannot remember having begun. There is no first memory, no bursting into life. I know only myself as I have been.
DAUGHTER
All children long for the death of their parents, if only so that the terrible anticipation of their death is over. I am alone and will soon grow lonelier. I hold myself to the wrack of this world only for him. Because he cannot hear himself, as if he changes, as if the bruised body of him rots and gives way to nothing. He talks to the empty air, draws mirages in the sand.
OLD PAINTER
The sea wraps itself around my broken spine, snuffs the fire of my life at its core.
YOUNG PAINTER
Our lives empty out of us forever, pulling us towards some distant obstacle. Our breastbones are severed, the soul pulled down out of us. And this is art, this opening of the soul and its pouring out of us, like a liquid darkness–
OLD PAINTER
And we are apart from what we create–the children who emerge from the womb that we keep in the space of ourselves, the love which is always turning us back from death in the world.
DAUGHTER
He is a kind of tottering old king to me, enthroned upon his own imagination. But he is like a child who has ignored the world in favor of his dreams.
OLD PAINTER
And then the voices come up out of the deep–my wife who died, the painting that I shall never finish–
WOMAN BY THE SEA
I am real only in dreams or the songs of mermaids. Now I sing, I turn to water. I rush back with the tide.
YOUNG PAINTER
Why do we punish ourselves with words? Why can we not suffer this rupture silently? The world rips at us with its teeth, secretes its terror–
OLD PAINTER
To create I need only open my eyes, fluttering, to the sea, and it is like a child, so innocent, gaping back. It is so innocent and cruel.
YOUNG PAINTER
Our bodies desire to be enclosed by love.
OLD PAINTER
I used to live for the sight of the young women, with black hair and white skin, who would stand at the end of the beach, and who I would chase after, but who would never wait for me. Now I am cold to the touch, sustained only by her.
YOUNG PAINTER
Life is a beautiful impulse–but it streams away from use. We must weave it into images before it is gone.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
Fallen stars, imprisoned in a glass–
OLD PAINTER
The body fades piecemeal into its own endless wreck. The light in us handed off–
DAUGHTER
He lives for me, but he does not see the spark of life I have. He is like a child who cranes his hands up before his eyes and cannot believe that one day, he will not see them anymore–
OLD PAINTER
How can we die and be gone forever?
DAUGHTER
The present moment is enough for me. The moments that bring us to tears–
OLD PAINTER
I create the waves; they are nothing in themselves.
WOMAN BY THE SEA
They create and uncreate themselves–but I am always myself.
OLD PAINTER
I confront the clattering of my dreams against me, like the sea-rain itself... I have lived my whole life with a grief for what is yet to come.
YOUNG PAINTER
It is the woman who looks at us from a distance, who we follow, but disappears–the woman who each day we are always trying to recover.
DAUGHTER
Love is simple–the love between a father and a DAUGHTER. The father celebrates the life he must shelter. The DAUGHTER loves him as a mortal loves a god. To watch him die then, would be to watch a god become man.
(The End)