Apocalypse Beach

By Megan O'Neil

May you of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. As the shadows closed in, the stars came out. — Derek Jarman, 'At Your Own Risk'

In September of last year two friends and I visited Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, home of polymath artist and activist Derek Jarman from 1986, the year of his diagnosis with HIV, until his death in February, 1994. After a national campaign to prevent the house and its garden from being taken into private ownership, UK-based charity Art Fund successfully gained custodianship in 2020, allowing it to be maintained as a national monument. For the three of us, the trip constituted a pilgrimage, as it does for many people who visit the place where Jarman chose to spend the last years of his life.

In 1991, Jarman was canonised as Saint Derek of the Celluloid Knights of Dungeness by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an American drag activist troupe – a fact which undergirded our sense of pilgrimage and its religious overtones. To many, he is more than an artist, writer, filmmaker, activist, and gardener. He stands as an example of bold iconoclasm in a country which was often hostile towards his work and his sexuality, maintaining his artistic integrity and great personal dignity in the face of adversity, and a relentless optimism throughout the deterioration of his health, which led, among other things, to the loss of his sight in one eye. The vultures were circling from every direction, but as Jarman’s biographer Tony Peake put it: ‘He kept flying through the flak’.

Nowadays, HIV is no longer a death sentence, as medical developments such as PrEP mean that those living with HIV can lead normal and importantly, long lives. But, in the late eighties, the illness was a dark forest of uncertainty, often bringing with it loneliness and tragedy. The stigma around the disease was rife. The gay community as a collective would suffer it for many years. As Jarman wrote presciently in his 1987 memoir Kicking the Pricks, ‘It’s going to be a cold hard decade for some of us, we will be treated as the virus in the body politic’.

Jarman expressed this anger in one of his final outputs, a series which began in 1984 and was completed in 1991. The ‘Black Paintings’—a reference to Goya’s series of the same name— is a sequence of mixed media assemblages tarred with an oblivion of black. A quiver of skeletal driftwood is bound tightly together, a broken lightbulb is affixed to the canvas, and on one of them, between two plastic figurines sits a small bust of Lenin. Some of them constitute tableaux, as model ships rise from the painting’s surface, erupting from the picture plane into four-dimensional space, shattering the window through which the viewer looks. Their raging beauty is transfixing, moving, and sometimes irreverent. In one of his final paintings, a Cy Twombly-esque tantrum of black is scored over with the words: FUCK ME BLIND, a reference to the cytomegalovirus which caused the deterioration of his sight. Using monochrome was a recurring technique in Jarman’s work. Arguably, his most famous film is that hypnotic sound-pool of Blue, which features a single, unchanging Klein Blue field sonically overlaid with a musical soundtrack and a spoken-word voiceover featuring extracts from his diaries and other texts, documenting his experience of dying from AIDs, the solidarity of his friends, and the staggering degree of loss felt by him and the community at large. Its form points directly towards being in thrall to another artist—Yves Klein, whose International Klein Blue is the chosen, unbroken shade—and to bodily disintegration, placing the viewer in a visual field wherein they must contemplate blindness, and the tragic case of an artist losing his sight. However, the void of Blue also offers an escape from the grossly sensuous experience of being in the body, which Jarman was finding increasingly painful. It transports the viewer to a meditative, restoring, disembodied wash of blue, a colour Jarman considered above all others to have a holy quality: “Blue is the universal love in which man bathes—it is the terrestrial paradise”.

Jarman maintained his sense of humour and open-armed embrace of life until the end. In his 1989 diary, published as the memoir Modern Nature, he wrote: ‘As I sweat it out in the early hours, a ‘guilty victim’ of the scourge, I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don’t regret a single step or encounter I made at that time’. As the days progressed, a growing number of his friends were lost, and his own health worsened, but he continued to take note of the beauty around him and the daily accomplishments of keeping his garden alive in such a challenging environment, in resemblance to his own attitude toward keeping himself alive despite the slow approaching wave, somewhere in the distance, of death. He accepted his situation, but without bitterness or panic. ‘I refuse to believe in my mortality, or the statistics which hedge the modern world about, like the briar that walled in the sleeping princess. I have conducted my whole life without fitting in, so why should I panic now and fit into statistics?’

When the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light... what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking ourselves to be in the presence of the angels and the harpers.

When writing this, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill. Woolf questions why ‘Illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.’ Woolf certainly meant fiction, but nevertheless, Jarman’s memoirs serve as a riposte. His framing is not illness as terror, but in living as fully as possible through adversity, through agony, through fear. Woolf writes that the source behind this lack of a literature of illness—‘Epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia’—is timidity. That to come down from ‘ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret’, ‘to look these things squarely in the face’ requires ‘the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy’. Jarman demonstrates that perhaps the courage needed is not so ostentatious or forceful as a lion tamer’s, but something restorative and reparative, not seeking to destroy but to tend. I think of the definitions of tend. Tend can an inclination; it is also a verb. I tend to, I tend this garden, this wound.

Standing there at the beach that day, wind whistling overhead, ocean sprawling into the horizon, I felt humbled and emotional at the intrepid quality of this man, so brave in the face of tragedy, so prolific— working and painting and writing until the end, still such a steadfast friend to all who knew him, and a particular friend to his patch of the Earth: tending to it, making it beautiful, helping it to be hardy amid hostile conditions.

I live in borrowed time, therefore I see no reason in the world why my heart grows not dark. A cold wind blows tonight over this desolate island.

I felt that I was standing in that desert of the soul Woolf described. Dungeness is a very strange place, out-of-world, apocalyptic. The cottage was recognisable instantly: painted entirely in black, except for the borders of the windows, which are painted a canary-yellow. On the side of the cottage, Jarman affixed an installation of John Donne’s 'The Sun Rising'. Its environs are vast. The whole place is gnawed clean to its stem by wind, leaving only the most rugged of plant life struggling up through the gorse and the stone. That day, the clouds were thin and sparse, disaggregated across the sky’s gigantic cinema, and so the world took on an unearthly gleam: the beach was illuminated in this still, piercing light, uninterrupted by movement. The impression was of a place stopped dead at the end of time, sky blown wide. I was struck by the sense of being on another planet, or in the distant future; far away. The strength of the brightness was striking. Reading the diaries back when I got home, Jarman had remarked upon it: ‘The sun is too bright here, too bright for human eyes’. Down on the beach itself, lichen sprawls across blanched stone, and coral bleached in sunlight dries to an ash-weed; almost white. The shoreline is flat and wide and vast. Only one enormous steamer ship, hulking along in the distance, breaks the horizon.

Dungeness induces a feeling of a blasted, post-apocalyptic world, but one in which a small society has erected itself in the stones, and is living humbly and peacefully off the land. It is strikingly unpeopled. There are only two types of dwelling intermittently dotting the coastline: small, vernacular wooden cottages like Jarman’s, or Brutalist oblongs which are mostly artist studios. One of these bungalows is a sharp rectangular hut of concrete with beautiful, angular church windows. I found myself imagining a strange version of Christianity emerging in this ravaged future world. The beach stretches on for miles, overlooked by the stark, gleaming monoliths of the decommissioned power station. Now, even they have been removed from the grid. The effect is hypnotic and religious. The power station is now an enormous, vestigial, arcane ruin, its powers disappeared, overlooking this vast stretch of desert-like coastline and its stone beach, a futuristic relic.

The only buildings beside the power station of any considerable height are the twin lighthouses. They stand like two gigantic chess pieces: one black, one white. The black tower of the defunct lighthouse breaks the alien blue of the blown-open sky, or as William Gass

puts it: ‘The constant increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germanssay), consequently the color of everything that’s empty.’ Then we climbed. It has five levels and a dizzying, spiralling staircase with a metal handrail. The final ascent to the viewing platform is a thick, rusted ladder. There is a small, square opening in the wall painted rigidly in yellow which an adult must bend at the waist to step through. Standing at the top, my feet buzzed with what felt like radio static. From there we could see that perching in the sand at a crazy a angle, as though it had warped through a wormhole in time and space and landed randomly in the desert, is a set of white terraced houses. I immediately thought of Strange town from The Sims, or its loopy version of Area 51. It has the same slightly surreal quality— ambivalently abandoned by an unseen creator to govern itself. Looking out to the lighthouse’s twin, its more modern, bridal white equivalent, and the greenhouse domes sitting in the gardens of the few houses below, it’s remarkable how eco-futurist this place is. It seems an unlikely location for a gardener to choose to live given the hostility to plant life of Dungeness, but if anything, this endeared Jarman to the place.

‘Kissing is out of season when gorse is out of bloom.' No-one need worry - here it is always in flower’... ‘The gorse is a blaze of golden flowers forced by the wind into an agony of weird shapes, twisted branches wrung out like washing. It's the only winter flower on the Ness; some of the bushes are six feet high, crowned with tight bunches of spines which creak in the wind.

Significant to our pilgrimage was that we were in the near-wild. Technology was largely rudimentary: fishing nets, small huts, lighthouses. We ate our breakfast at a small wooden shack serving up fresh lobster rolls, which we considered a spectacular victory. One long stretch of flat road runs along the Ness. Frequently, bikers bomb past in their leathers. The roaring of motorcycles felt like a quotidian element of this post-apocalyptic, but serene, world. During our breakfast, I overheard two men talking about Jarman. They were clearly bikers too, and with the backdrop of the harsh landscape, had something of the astronaut about them. They are here to visit Jarman’s grave, a sleek block of black slate in St Clement’s Church, Romney Marsh. Visitors leave small stones as offerings to him.

Living in the city, one cannot escape being advertised to, cannot step outside the forces which compel you to participate in the ever-widening, schizophrenic image universe. In other words, just two days spent in the wild tangle of nature reminded me of the importance of siloing oneself off from its cognitive capture. As Roxana Perez Mende and Mario Marzan identify in their essay ‘Pilgrimage as a Tool for Perception and a Form of Counter- Cartography’, ‘We must not forget that nature in its wildest form is corrective. Much like a forest fire in its destruction of what we claim as our own, the wild in nature is a vital part of natural rhythms and renewal that shows us a better path. Their use of the term ‘corrective’ can be applied more broadly to illustrate nature’s capacity to provide cathartic detachment, and serves as a reminder not to think of the Earth as simply the stage for the private dramas of our inner lives to play out, but as a symbiotic system of its own which binds us all together. In this way, nature’s corrective quality is pedagogical: it teaches us routes to the good life.

Despite standing merely feet from it among the spiral stones of the garden at Prospect Cottage, I felt a deep sense of longing for Derek Jarman’s world: one of care, collaboration, and not just creation but conservation. Keeping things for good. I imagined a world where this robust philosophy was more widely embraced. I thanked him for his example. He probably knew that the garden would go on without him. Inspecting its intricate architecture, I was deeply moved that it has been so well looked after for thirty-two years. More than anything, it is probably a testament to good friends. Jarman remained undeterred from embracing life as he always had until the end, facing the mounting challenges with humour, courage, grace. In the face of death, he showed us how to live. In On Being Ill, Woolf writes that: ‘After all, nature is at no pains to conceal - that she in the end will conquer; the heat will leave the world... the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn.’ I hope that this garden through which the undaunted crocus rises is Derek’s.

Illustrated by Emily Lawson-Todd @emilysdrawingagain