Staring out to Sea

At a party over the holiday i met some good, kind, clever people who live on Romney Marsh. I sensed they are a bit sniffy about Derek Jarman's gravestone in their local church.

Derek manages to be an uncomfortable presence even in death!

I worked very closely with Derek on his book Modern Nature, mostly at his cottage at Dungeness, interweaving the story of his illness with episodes from his own life. We became quite close, with great admiration on my side, though on one occasion he rang up, in pain and wanting to talk, I sensed, and I was in a hurry to get off the line and do I can't remember what. One of those episodes that come back to haunt you, like when I carried my son, then a toddler, up to a hermit's cell, perched on a rock in Roche in Cornwall. He could have died. Times when you fail as a human being.

Last week i saw a dvd of Derek's film The Garden in the music shop at the bottom of St Martin's Lane, but his films are not much watched these days. Modern Nature is still a wonderful, beautiful book - a top ten bestseller then, something almost unimaginable today when the trade is led by the nose by supermarkets. The garden at Dungeness has also been exceptionally influential. Like Peter Cook, Derek Jarman scattered seeds that changed consciousness. Peter scattered jokes, Derek... seeds.

It's really his aesthetic that has been the great agent of change. The landscape at Dungeness is in many different ways a part of all our mental landscape, a no-man's land, a lawless borderland lying on the edge of waking consciousness, lit up from time to time, as Derek told me, by crackles and flashes from the crumbling nuclear power station. It's a place where he found new beauty in litter and garbage, in wood, metal and plastic washed up on the shore. Art is made out of scrap there and so too are houses!  This landscape looks out over the sea, and is on the border between the material world and whatever lies beyond.

In my book i talk about how in Botticelli's famous painting of Venus we see the ancient belief that shells were precipitated out of the sea, and how this was taken as a symbol of matter precipitated out of the cosmic mind. There is something of this in Derek's driftwood - and driftmetal and driftplastic - sculpture.

Derek had difficulties with the Church - a bit of a worry, as he used to say - because of the Church's traditional attitudes to his sexuality. But he was fascinated by religion and the great questions of life and death. His art - films, paintings, books, garden - addresses the great question that  now confronts us all: How do we get through this great looming materialism that threatens to extinguish the human spirit altogether?

I didn't spot it at the time, because I had not read the occult philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa, but i now see that Derek's writings are larded with quotes from CA. Which confirms me in my suspicion that all the most intelligent people check out esoteric philosophy at some time in their lives.  It's the greatest repository of thinking on the great questions of life and death.

Comments

[James Marcus Tucker]

Hello Jonathan

Thanks for this lovely post.

If you like, check out and join our forum www.slowmotionangel.com

would be lovely to hear some more of your reminiscences of Derek. James

[Mark Booth]

Ok, thanks, James, I will. You knew him?

Jonathan

[James Marcus Tucker]

No I didn't know him. Just love his work! :)