Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman

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Other notable published works include film scripts ( Up in the Air, Blue, War Requiem, Caravaggio, Queer Edward II and Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film), a study of his garden at Dungeness Derek Jarman's Garden, and At Your Own Risk, a defiant celebration of gay sexuality. As the book progresses, there is less about plants and his childhood and more about illness as his temperature rises, his energy falls and he is bathed by constant sweats. He is finally diagnosed with TB in his stomach and later pneumonia and the diary ends abruptly with his appendix being removed. The French musician and composer Romain Frequency released his first album Research on a nameless colour [38] in 2020 as a tribute to Jarman's final collection of Essays “Chroma” released in 1994, the year he died and written while struggling with illness (facing the irony of an artist going blind). Peake, Tony. 1999. Derek Jarman: A Biography. New York: The Overlook Press/Little, Brown. pg. 312: listed as "Steve Hale's 'Touch the Radio, Dance!'"

Jarman moved to the Kent coast of England in 1987, following his HIV-positive diagnosis. With the money he received after his father's death, Jarman bought a former fisherman's cottage called Prospect Cottage, on Dungeness Beach. On its grounds, Jarman cultivated a garden that would come to be a lasting legacy. One wall of the cottage is painted with John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising." It begins: Busy old food, unruly Sun/Why dost thou thus/Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? The gardens spread out from around the cottage, a mixture of plants and sculptures that were mostly assembled from driftwood. It was "as much a metaphor for memory and hope as it was earth and plants," writes art critic Jennifer Higgie. As if defiant against his terminal diagnosis, Jarman selected "plants that could withstand the shingle and the fierce salty winds" of the English Channel. They bloomed beautifully, colorful and vibrant. In the first week of March, Jarman arrives at what may be the greatest reward of gardening, evocative of poet Ross Gay’s lovely sentiment that time spent gardening is “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.” He writes:

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His father was an RAF pilot, and the family moved often. As a child, Jarman had lived in sprawling splendour on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Italy, as well as in Pakistan and Rome. While the Jarmans were billeted in Somerset, a wall of the house gave way under a tidal wave of honey, made by wild bees that had congregated in the attic. On the last day of February, after planting lavender in a circle of stones he collected from the beach under the clear blue sky, he writes: There they are at the edge of the lakeside, standing to attention, making a splash — no blushing violets these, and not in ones or twos but hundreds, proud regiments marching in the summer, with clash of cymbals and rolling drums. Here comes June. Glorious, colourful June. Derek Jarman: Life as Art (2004): a film exploring Derek Jarman's life and films by 400Blows Productions/Andy Kimpton-Nye, featuring Tilda Swinton, Simon Fisher Turner, Chris Hobbs and narrated by John Quentin. Broadcast on Sky Arts and screened at film festivals around the world, including Buenos Aires, Cork, London, Leeds, Philadelphia and Turin.

Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden, and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, and his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. He had bought the cottage on a whim having inherited some money from his father. This book is a diary of the time he spent working in this garden, battling against the elements to try to create something beautiful and finding the plants that could survive. He collected some of the driftwood and other objects that he found on the beaches to decorate the garden with. The gardeners’ Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd stumbled across it one summer and it became much better known.

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For both Jarman and Klein, the color blue connotes spirituality, water, the sky, calmness, and escape. Jarman explained that "The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty." The blue screen is accompanied by music and voiceovers that discuss Jarman's disease and final years in a poetic, sometimes heart-wrenching tone. In addition to Jarman, his long-time collaborators Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and John Quentin also provided voiceovers. This book is a lament but also deeply life-affirming. A classic of queer nature writing in the way it interweaves politics, the personal, plants - and all their intersections. William Pencak (2002). "13. Blue: "Our Time Is the Passing of a Shadow" ". The films of Derek Jarman. McFarland. p.159. ISBN 9780786414307. To those familiar with his other films, Jarman reinforces his atheism and contempt for traditional Christianity, thereby re-emphasizing the point he just made – that "paradise" is "terrestrial" and is the fruit of human love. As the seasons turned and his flowers rose and the AIDS plague felled his friends one by one, Jarman mourned loss after loss, then grounded himself again and again in the irrepressible life of soil and sprout and bud and bloom. The garden, which his Victorian ancestors saw as a source of moral lessons, became his sanctuary of “extraordinary peacefulness” amid the deepest existential perturbations of death, his canvas for creation amid all the destruction. The contrast between his life in London and Dungeness enhances the appeal of the journal for me. His Dungeness garden will be descended upon by actors, cameramen et al, in the course of the journal, attempting to create the film “The Garden”. These sessions seem to echo the chaos which the natural elements inflict upon Jarman's little Dungeness Eden from time to time.

On 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive and discussed his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, in Kent, near the nuclear power station. In 1994, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London, [8] aged 52. He was an atheist. [9] He is buried in the graveyard at St Clement's Church, Old Romney, Kent. The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England told the death of a country, ravaged by its own internal decay and the economic restructuring of Thatcher's government. "Wrenchingly beautiful … the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80's – a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous", wrote a Village Voice critic. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Jarman first became known as a stage designer. His break in the film industry came as production designer for Ken Russell's The Devils (1971). [14] He made his mainstream narrative filmmaking debut with Sebastiane (1976), about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. This was one of the first British films to feature positive images of gay sexuality; [15] its dialogue was entirely in Latin.Glimpsed at last ... installation shots at Derek Jarman: My Garden’s Boundaries Are the Horizon. Photograph: Graham Westley Lacdao The terrible dearth of information, the fictionalisation of our experience, there is hardly any gay autobiography, just novels, but why novelise it when the best of it is in our lives?” (April 15, 1989) – not true of the three decades since! Modern Nature is Jarman’s chronicle of life in his remote cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness in the years after his HIV diagnosis. Facing an uncertain future, Jarman found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. Some perished beneath wind and sea-spray while others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.