Modern Nature

“You may have seen this image somewhere: a small austere house, rectangular and low, black, with two windows staring yellow, set in a field of gravel improbably tufted with flowers. Depending on the angle, a power station appears in the background. This is Prospect Cottage, the Dungeness home of the artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman. He bought it as a rundown Victorian fisherman’s hut after he was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1986, and spent most of the rest of his life there, hauling in buckets of dirt to sink into the shingle, planting poppies and sea kale and bugloss and borage and roses that somehow survived in this stony, salty place. He filled the house and garden with art from friends and things he found on the beach; part of John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” runs along the house’s exterior cladding. This book is a chronicle of his time there and work in the garden, as well as his life before it; it is extraordinary. First, because it is a document of his mind. Jarman had the sort of brutally deep education in Western classics that more or less vanished somewhere in the middle of the 20th century and a relentless appetite for culture, learning, and thinking, and this suffuses every line he writes. It is like standing in a sea wind: bracing, challenging, energizing. Second, because it captures time in two dimensions, both Jarman’s own shifting feelings and experiences, as he lives in the uncertainty and doom that was an H.I.V. diagnosis in the 1980s, when so much was still unknown and fear was running riot, but also the broader time, the TV programs and the politics and simply the habits of being. All books are products of their time but they are often sloppy vessels; this is not. Maybe because Jarman was very aware that his time was limited and precarious; throughout the book, friends and acquaintances die. No one really knows what to expect. But he hauls dirt to the garden. He tries new varieties of rose. He gets aggravated by idiocy and ignorance and petty annoying things. He reads and walks on the beach. His friends are there for him (Tilda Swinton shows up for him again and again, and then there is the astonishing devotion of Keith Collins, Jarman’s great platonic love.) And Jarman keeps dreaming. "Dreamt last night I held a bowl of the rarest jade, the colour of honey with a sage green iridescence. The bowl of precious stones was threatened by a thief. I preserved it through terrible trials, assailed by the demon thug intent on stealing it. He curled round me ceaselessly, like a crab, with switchblade claws; then suddenly it was over. He deflated like a balloon, disappeared like a little Michelin man with a gasp of rushing air."”

“When you can rest.”