by Ann Wroe
Venus would cause a commotion in the café and a minor tsunami on the beach; but Jack and George are looking resolutely the other way, as though they have had enough of the wide, pale, winking sea. They are staring instead at a large wall-mounted photograph of the Birling Gap Ravilious knew. It shows a Scout camp of a dozen tents on the clifftop, a run of high, square cars on the road, and a different tea room on the edge. They struggle to remember it.
‘That’s not this bit of cliff,’ says Jack. ‘It doesn’t look right.’
George wonders. Cliffs crumble and fall very fast round here. The Devil’s Chimney went long ago; in a few weeks even this sun lounge will be gone, declared unsafe, together with the steps to the shore. But that is not what Jack means.
‘You know the place where the pulley was, with the sacks that went down to the beach? I don’t recognise it.’
It emerges that he means the sacks to haul up heavy contraband, or flotsam, or the dead bodies – shipwrecks or suicides – that are cast up here by weather and by cruel, tricking light. Some of those were the unknowns who lie at Friston, washed ashore among the white chalk, all along this coast. On a happier note there have been wrecks of timber; wrecks of mercury slowly silvering the rock pools; flotsam of velvets, lace and copper ore; wrecks of wine, caught from the leaking barrels in their shoes and caps by swiftly intoxicated sailors; and in 1790 a wreck, from the Two Brothers, of thousands of lemons, strewn on the beach like hard yellow drops of Mediterranean sun. The locals turned them into tarts, curd, cakes and lemonade. Had the wine and the lemons arrived together, they could have made primrose-pale syllabubs the whole length of the shore.
‘Maybe it’s the light,’ continues Jack, for the photograph really troubles him. ‘That’s a funny light. I think they must’ve took it in the morning.’
Maybe they did, and some passing shiver or shadow made the scene mysterious. Yet on that day the photographer must have hoped he had caught light exactly, glancing off the peaked tents and the boxy cars, spreading its wings on the rocks. Just as surely Ravilious, painting his own Beachy Head panorama a few years later, hoped he had seized the way light lay on grass, crept on chalk, netted the sea; he described being driven out there time and again by Tirzah ‘to see how the light looks’.2 But light had already been and gone, silky as Ginger Rogers – or as Venus diving back beneath the waves.
It proved elusive to scientists, too. Einstein at sixteen surmised that if he could run as fast as a beam of light in a vacuum he could draw up beside it, panting, and see it as ‘an electromagnetic field at rest, though spatially oscillating’: a wave frozen in motion. His second thought was that ‘There seems to be no such thing.’ He would never catch up with light, and might as well save energy. Where he gave up it would take a poet like Seamus Heaney, also by the sea in angel-filled Derry, to carry on:3
At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried
And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.
Later Einstein pinned down, at least in an equation, the velocity of light in free space where nothing could obstruct it: the only constant in his universe of relativity. He called it ‘c’, as in E = mc2. It was calculated – astonishingly – at 299,792,458 metres, or 186,282 miles, a second; and in 1983 the distance travelled by light in 1/299,792,458 of a second became the standard for the metre, as if the passing streak had left a solid mark behind, and those marks in succession – length, height, depth – mapped out everything.
By that minute fraction of the track of light the draper’s assistant deals out tape, stretching and bundling it in single movements of her plump, ring-glinting hand; the builder, crouching, stakes out with string the foundations of a house; the jogger guesses at a glance the wingspan of a crow above Hodcombe, and the distance of a hawk on a post; and I measure my stride over the brush-dry January grass at Beachy Head, from one grey-green daisy platt to the next, and between the powdery chalk stones. By two of those infinitesimal winks in time you may span the height of a man, and by two hundred the height of the cliffs at the lower lighthouse: ‘and you don’t want one of those bodies brought in,’ says Jack to George in the Birling Gap café, ‘on a Sunday afternoon at the station, especially when you’ve been on nights the night before.’
They nod together, contemplating their empty cups (‘Sure you won’t have another drink, Jack?’). And light, which by Newton’s calculation has taken seven or eight minutes to join their table from the sun, careers ever onwards, across the wide sea behind them that is pinkish over the shallows, green above the deeps, to the prairies and lakes behind the clouds. Or perhaps that particular ray started out from the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, to pick out one sparkle among many: 1,500 years of travel for light between that point and Jack’s eye, and for Jack a minute, because a friend who does upholstery in Eastbourne has taken a photograph of the Horsehead with his telescope, and Jack has a copy in his wallet. He shuffles it out from among the notes and cards. ‘The colours have gone a bit funny, reddish,’ he admits. But there it is, ‘a really nice thing’, with the farther stars glittering through the red haze round it. Somehow that light makes more sense and is more familiar than the flat, preserved sunshine from the 1930s at which they have been staring all afternoon.
‘Just like a rocking horse, isn’t it,’ he says.
‘And do you suppose,’ George asks, ‘it always looks like that?’
‘I doubt it,’ says Jack.
Grosseteste knew how to catch light. He set up mirrors, lenses and globes of water in his Oxford study, pursuing it as keenly as he sought heavenly grace. Newton could do it, too.4 Having induced light to negotiate a hole ‘in the Window-shut of a very dark Chamber’, he persuaded it through the crude, bubble-filled prism he had bought at Stourbridge Fair, to cast a coloured image on the opposite wall. By doing this, he wrote, he had done no violence to light – had not split or dilated or shattered it, merely turned the rays ‘more or less out of their Way’ – and he noted that the incident and emergent light, light going in and light coming out, was ‘of the same Kind and Nature’, unharmed by the experience. It might show better, he admitted, if the prism were ‘without those numberless Waves or Curles which usually arise from Sandholes a little smoothed in polishing with Putty’. He could snare even more light with bigger traps, such as his ‘prismatick Vessels made with pieces of broken Looking-glasses and filled with Rain Water’, or the polished glass plates he cemented together and filled with salt water or clear oil. His industry meant that where Grosseteste had merely begun to explain the rainbow, he completed the task.
The essential, he said, was to be quiet; to wait in silent contemplation for these effects, as for any truth. The more ‘nice and troublesome’ the effort to pin down light, the more circumspection was called for. Sometimes a racket couldn’t be avoided, as when he had to lean with all his strength to grind down the concave metal plates for his reflection experiments. (‘Then I put fresh Putty upon the Pitch, and ground it again till it had done making a noise, and afterwards ground the Object-Metal upon it as before.’) But having waited so long for light he would then swiftly snatch it, rippling and wriggling before him. ‘Are not the Rays of Light in passing by … Bodies, bent several times backwards and forwards, with a motion like that of an Eel?’ he asked. It certainly seemed so; but possibly light was ‘put into such fits at its first emission from luminous bodies, and continues in them … For these Fits are of a lasting nature.’ Moreover, ‘what kind of Action or Disposition this is, whether it consists in a circulating or a vibrating Motion of the Ray, or of the Medium, or something else, I do not here enquire’. He noted, however, that three eel-bendings seemed to produce the three rainbow fringes he saw round things, separated by thin lines of dark.
This was slippery stuff indeed. And his analogy was not as odd as a
ll that, since his contemporary Izaak Walton reported the belief that eels were bred ‘of a particular dew falling in the months of May or June’, which was then transformed into elvers by radiant solar heat.6 On the surface of one river, near Canterbury, young eels would lie glistening ‘as thick as motes are said to be in the sun’. Coleridge might have liked that image, for in his Ancient Mariner the eel-like water-snakes round the doomed ship gave off ‘elfish light’ and flashes of fire and were, in the Hebrew, seraphim, sun-flares that cleansed and burned.
An eel, Walton wrote, was most easily caught by snigling, or teasing a hook directly into the nest-hole underneath the bank. A warm summer day was best for it.
Snigling’s the way to take
an eel, they say; slithering hand and hook
down the slick bank, mud-slathered,
grass-sloughed (yourself prone,
breath-held), to underwater lair –
where, with nibbling finger
flickering, flicking, in and out among
a writhing squirm of tails, sleep-slippery
skins slipping past, with nicked nail or needle
you catch on something,
pull it up to sight –
line-jiggling, coil-wriggling bright –
and thus (so Newton said) he fished up light –7
He even devised something like a net for it, testing the distinctness of his refracted prism-images by ‘[lapping] several times a slender Thred of very black Silk’ round thin pasteboard which he had painted least-refrangible red and most-refrangible blue. (‘I might have drawn black Lines with a Pen, but the Threds were smaller and better defined.’) The finer mesh, naturally, the better. Clare was shown a similar grid of threads that was intended to simplify landscape drawing, but thought it not a patch on the ‘instantaneous sketches’ made by sunlight – not least when, crouching with wet trouser bottoms in the flooded meadow stream, Walton’s ‘delicious’ Angler in his pocket, he saw ‘a sizable gudgeon twinkle round the glossy pebbles or a fish leap after a flye’.
Turner, too, caught light by fishing, as well as by noticing less obvious places where it lurked. He would spend hours pondering and drawing stones, prodding them occasionally with his huge black umbrella. The time he devoted to such lowly objects astonished his friends. ‘That’s pretty,’ he would growl, of some mossy stone, and mark it down for a light-carrier in the foreground of a mountain scene. He would squat, too, on the silty flats of the Thames foreshore, a short unprepossessing figure in a tall black hat. Passers-by might suppose he was mudlarking for coins dropped out of boats, for he was said never to part with a ha’penny without looking at it twice. But he was marvelling instead at the parallel ripples made by wind, tide and light.
Sitting on a bank of the Thames, or floating in a boat, he would trap light with hook and line as it danced upon the surface or glided on the gravel bed, a trout. ‘There it is,’ he would remark, to no one in particular, as he began to fish. His edible catch he might draw later, flanked and filleted with yellow sun, or mottled with the fast-fading ‘rose-moles’ treasured by Hopkins, who fished too. His inedible catch he would paint from secret colour-scraps behind a locked door, constantly revising the tints and, if necessary, keeping them fresh by dunking his efforts in a bucket, or under the pump in the yard. The bread in his pocket (never to be mislaid, and sent back for if forgotten) was both bait for fish and a sponge to lift paint off paper, revealing the mistier half-lights. Blotting and scraping, some of it with a long black thumbnail like a hawk’s claw, might get light itself. Once caught, the shining scrap would be flung on the ground to dry beside the still-convulsing fish threaded on a grass.
For Palmer, etching and painting required the same level of solitude, silence and contemplation.8 He reached this understanding late. ‘Mad I mean to be, till I get more light,’ he cried in a letter – unconsciously echoing what Goethe had shouted at the end. Much of his working life was spent in hectic pursuit of something flickering before him, ever eluding him, and vanishing. ‘And wherever I find it,’ he went on, ‘I will turn to it like the sunflower … like a little child crying for food.’ Light, air and bread, he told his eldest son, though the commonest things, were also the best – and in that order. As a young man he tried to catch light in words as well as paint: his 1824 sketchbook contained a poem in which, in ten lines, he invoked ‘trembles’, ‘glimmers’, ‘twinkles’, pearled flowers, the pure white moon, silvered brightness and a ‘sweet visionary gleam’. Yet the passion calmed. He described himself in 1867, in late middle age, working with ‘sweet Tranquillity’ on a painting called The Haunted Stream, touching light on leaves and water in ‘a much-musing mood’. For there was no other path to success. Quietly, slowly, with dabbing brush, he would capture a sparkle or two in the ‘chasmal hollows’ he had made.
Writers who longed to waylay light sometimes followed it under water. Coleridge in nostalgic moments dreamed of being a fish, specifically a trout, ‘gliding down the rivulet of quiet Life’.9 Leaping – just occasionally, gracefully – in the sunshine, he would spread on the surface his own ‘concentric Circles of Light’. Thoreau, who could take fish calmly in his hands and pull them from the water, wished ‘to lurk in crystalline thought … under verdurous banks, where stray mankind should only see my bubble come to the surface’. Jefferies noted that while the shadows of trout darted on the river bed, their higher swimming bodies were invisible in light: light and fish lurked and rippled together, as he would do, once sun-life had invaded him. The contribution of Ravilious to this line of thinking was to engrave swimmers moving slowly, thoughtfully and half submerged, with dipping hands about to scoop up curls of sunlit cloud from the bottom of a pool.
It seemed that light might also reveal its animate nature, shadow-faint, against whiteness. White walls might betray it, or white paper, sometimes carried out deliberately into the glare of the sun. Newton saw two subsidiary streams of faint light, flicked from a knife-edge, shoot out from a sunbeam into the shadow, crossing a white paper ‘like the Tails of Comets’. Hopkins reported, on the wall of his room at Stonyhurst at sunset, a ‘fuming of the atmosphere marked like the shadow of smoke’ that might have been live light. Light coming through leaves, or ‘without a break from the brim of the fells’, had produced the same effect, ‘and this got less and less distinct on white paper which I moved towards the window’. Coleridge saw ‘coral-shaped’ shadows, though they were hard to disentangle from the long flowering of a teaspoonful of laudanum down the sides of an adjacent glass.10 He caught, too, the after-image of the moon, which slid down the white paper after his pencil in a yellow spot the size of a shilling; as well as the ‘Beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil point following it from the Candle – rather going before it & illuminating the word, I am writing.’ Light and word as one. It was, he added, eleven o’clock.
The presence of light on a white surface, though, could have a more frightening effect. Its sheer unmarked glare might make impossible demands, and also threaten mayhem once it was touched. One pen-dot or brushstroke would do it: a challenge, as small as a midge landing, to light’s own potential to create the world. Vincent van Gogh described the white canvas staring him in the face, saying ‘You can’t do a thing.’ He called it ‘paralysing’. Goethe felt the same, reaching instead for ‘grey old common paper’ on which to draw his trees, ‘as if my awkwardness feared the touchstone of a white ground’. Again that awe crept in, of light as truth. Even Turner, who certainly recommended ‘respect’ for blank white, preferred ‘blue’ paper – in fact, flecked grey – and used stacks of it, torn into smaller sheets as needed, when he was travelling. It was especially good, he found, for flattering light by emphasising the white he used for the crests of breaking waves.
Palmer wrote a note to himself, ‘Make friends of the white paper’, as if acknowledging his nerves in the face of light. He succeeded up to a point, but confessed that he would rather sketch on ‘brownish paper’, heightening with white chalk, or on ‘the l
ightest whitey-brown … or buff tint’: something with the warm tone of washed rags in it and not, on any account, smooth and bleached. Light was too hard then: so hard, shiny and brittle that Ravilious felt obliged to apologise when he used such sheets to print out his engravings.11 White paper turned Hopkins’s bluebells ‘steely’, and made ‘wretched’ the little bunch of first snowdrops he picked to send – but could not send, in the end – to his mother in the spring of 1871. His implacable, too-much-demanding God was in that paper: ‘God is light,’ as St John wrote in his first Epistle, ‘and in him is no darkness at all.’
Yet a white ground still seemed the best trap for light; white paper brushed with watercolour, so that the paper shone through the paint. Oil paint, in the minds of many artists, was too opaque to give that beautiful transparency. Turner managed it consummately, priming his canvases with lead white and chalk. But Ravilious, dealing as he often did with whole landscapes underlaid with light, thought oils were like ‘using toothpaste’. Blake loathed them. Oil paint, he remarked, became ‘a yellow mask’ over all it touched: ‘a fetter to genius, and a dungeon to art’. The best paintings, in his opinion, had historically been done on ‘Plaster or Whiting grounds’ and nothing else. Real gold and silver, he also complained – those medieval substitutes for light, with which he sometimes flecked the borders of his watercolours – could not be used with oils. The glow of fresco and tempera was what he was after, occasionally sparkled with shell gold; and ‘real fresco’, though in watercolour, was something he claimed to have revived, in an age when it was completely out of fashion.
Accordingly he primed his boards with a secret mixture, ‘Blake’s white’: fundamentally lead white and carpenter’s glue, the use of which St Joseph had revealed to him. That sticky ground laid down on copper or pasteboard, the pigments went straight on; and never more luminously and beautifully, perhaps, than in the little books of ‘Songs’ he produced ostensibly for children. Palmer, entrusted with the secret recipe, followed with his usual devotion.12 ‘WHITE in FULL POWER from the first,’ shouted a slip of cardboard pushed into his notebook, a slogan to live by. A dark ground, in oils especially, ‘puts out the light and then puts out the light’, he said, invoking Othello at the moment of murder. Another try at oil-painting, in 1852, called for an almost aggressive list of ‘necessities’, starting with ‘A brilliant white ground’ and ending with ‘a little copal, and spike oil, with very stiff white, painted freely and boldly with hog-tools, so as to get a permanent thread and texture’. Palmer switched from paper to white London board because ‘it reflects light through the pigments’, a vital point. When the new zinc white came out in the 1830s he laid his grounds for watercolour with that – producing, to his great satisfaction, a ground somewhere between white paper and the very fine ivory on which he had occasionally painted, heightening with shell gold, at Shoreham. The radiance of zinc white, he said, was like light through a stained-glass window.