I offer you a journey without destination
Yesterday, for Orthodox Christians, was Forgiveness Sunday, marking the start of Lent. On this day, the Church remembers Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and how through their disobedience, they and their descendants became heirs of death and corruption.
Recently, I finally got round to watching Derek Jarman’s The Garden. The garden he depicts is somewhat bleaker than the images usually evoked by the word, but, as it often is with Jarman, this is part of the point. The harsh, exposed, yet eerily beautiful landscape suggests a haunted paradise, explored in the film by his cast of biblical prophets, madonnas, and a gay couple, arguably, acting as the Edenic protanthropos. Long mocked conservative talking points aside, Jarman attempts to present what it might actually mean to populate a spiritual landscape with Adam and Steve.[1]
I almost described the landscape of the film as ‘strangely beautiful’, but this would only be a half truth; I know this kind of coastal scrub well from my childhood. I never went to Kent, let alone Jarman’s cottage in Dungeness, but my grandparents lived in Bramford, Suffolk, and we usually visited around once a year. My childhood memory is very hazy, but I remember shingles, tall grass, cold cold sky, and the wide expanse of the North Sea. I do not remember if I was aware of myself as gay or trans (I probably wasn’t); I do remember other children calling me gay. And I remember that already, young, precocious, I found some peace in these wet afternoons, sometimes even nights, out on Suffolk beaches.
‘Peace’ is perhaps not the first word you might come away with from Jarman’s Garden. His vision is a brutal one. There is very little speech, very little communication, but there is screaming. The young couple are mocked, beaten. A trans woman is chased along the beach, attacked by cis women, cameras flashing in her face as she breaks down. The musical score is constantly preparing you for some climactic crisis or disaster that never comes. All this would be enough even without the inevitable spectre of biography hanging over it, that this film is the product of a man dying of AIDS.
On Forgiveness Sunday, one by one, the believers prostrate themselves before the priest, and say “Forgive me, a sinner.” Each time, the priest replies “God forgives. Forgive me.” “God forgives.” In the parishes I have attended (I gather it may be done differently in different places), you then line up inside the nave, but before joining the line, you ask each person ahead of you to forgive you. In this way, you can make peace with your siblings in Christ before preparing your Lenten offering - that is, yourself (Matthew 5:23-24).
Or that is the idea anyway. I am not sure what parishes did this year. Apologies for the cliche, but I have not attended church in quite some time. I have spent a lot of time in the past year, wondering what to do with this faith, that I am alienated from yet still bound to, a faith which, in most parishes, I would not be allowed to practice.
That a religion responsible for so much violence would orient itself around forgiveness is another oft observed irony. This irony provides the space where Jarman intervenes. In one scene, a small boy in a school uniform stands on a table, writing on a chalkboard. He is surrounded by schoolmasters, rhythmically striking the table with canes, over and over again. This scene is repeated a few times, later, with pages from an old, yellowed Bible projected onto the background behind them. The pages turn; Leviticus, Numbers, Jeremiah.[2] I could once have recited many of these passages to you by heart. In another scene, three mall santas sing ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’ to the sleeping couple; later, we see the young couple tied up, being whipped by the santas until the blood runs.
This is the closest to memoir I am capable of, trawling up fragments and attempting to arrange them by association. Past that, it’s all a bit confused. Like many trans children, I suspect, I am expelled from my own childhood memories. But as Jules Gill-Peterson points out, the idyllic lost trans childhood is not universal, but a function of whiteness, the flipside of a spectaclised abjection of Black trans women and other trans women of colour. I was raised between a Church of England primary school, and a fundamentalist charismatic home life, where praying in tongues was a regular practice and we weren’t even sure if the Anglicans really counted as Christian. Looking back, in many ways, we were living on the seams of empire, between a characteristically British postcolonial melancholia, and the new found religions of the special relationship.
It would be easy to read The Garden as a denunciation of paradise, or of the Gods that expel one from them. Too easy, I think. You can’t picture that child on the table without the regular rapping of the canes, shaking the ground he stands on; he is formed by the rod without ever being struck. The pages still turn in the background, whether he likes it or not. A couple is beaten by mall santas; a salesperson implores you to “think pink” this season, against a backdrop of gay liberation marches.
Once again, I return to the biographical. The titular garden was not entirely fictional.
In 1986, diagnosed with HIV and pummelled by the paranoid public atmosphere that would culminate in the homophobic Section 28, film-maker Derek Jarman upped and left for the countryside.
While Jarman might have been seeking a kind of freedom, it would be inaccurate to call this move a retreat. The landscape he arrived in, a blown-out, field of rock opposite a power plant in Dungeness, possessed its own obvious hostility. And once there, Jarman didn’t rest, but set to work on the seemingly impossible task of growing a garden until his death in 1994. Jarman was not here to escape the relentless demands of existence, but to study them – to craft a poetics of survival within crisis.[3]
This poetics of survival is, at one level, a return to Paradise, even if a haunted one. An eden without valourisation, celebration, or even apology, but with a deep commitment to reworking the ground into a space where something else might grow, might live.
Forgive me, a sinner.
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[1] If you want an insight into my family life, my older brother once said “God made Adam and Eve, not” etc., in absolute sincerity.
[2] The citation of passages from the Hebrew Bible as particularly indicative of religious violence has anti-semitic resonances, originating in associations with ‘the Law’ or ‘the Old Testament’ as punitive in contrast with a forgiving ‘New Testament’. I have chosen not to pass judgement on whether Jarman falls foul of these resonances, or whether this fits within his wider ironisation of Christian rhetoric to which I have already referred.
[3] From this article in Tank Magazine.