The Temporality of Dirt: Queer Materiality in Jarman’s Modern Nature

Abstract

In his memoir Modern Nature, British filmmaker, artist, and activist Derek Jarman uses occasion of making a garden on wind-swept shingle at Dungeness as grounds for a series of reflections: on his experience of being hiv positive, on disappointments of his film career, and on his experience making film The Garden. As is usual with Jarman, personal history is interwoven with other histories of various kinds: recent gay history and particularly history of queer activism, history of gardening and of plants and botanical lore, history of English landscape and its ongoing alteration and destruction. Reflections on various worlds he inhabits lead to reflections on different experiences of temporality, a sophisticated meditation on queer that pre-dates what has been called temporal turn in queer theory (Dean, Bareback 79). One recurring thought, which is at first glance unremarkable, is Jarman's claim that the gardener digs in another time (30). This comment reflects commonplace observation of difference between of man and of nature, as well as perhaps a variation on Zen notion that you cannot step into same river twice. But saying that a gardener digs into time, rather than into soil, can also lead to question that I want to reflect on here, of temporality of dirt. The temporality of dirt would seem to be on a continuum with temporality of nature, a temporality that we commonly place in opposition to human time; it comes close to of matter and of universal time. This is that our bodies return to when we die, when we rejoin or are dispersed back into world of matter. Universal is more or less indifferent to human time. The most famous literary reflection on difference comes from Hamlet, who in his suicidal musing dreams of his flesh melting back into indifferent world of atoms. Hamlet, as various critics have observed, displays an Epicurean or Lucretian understanding of universe, an understanding that was introduced to Renaissance by rediscovery of Lucretius's poem, On Nature of Things. In work classical philosopher and follower of Epicurus posited that world was made up of an infinite number of indestructible atoms, that everything in creation was made of same atoms, and that formation of bodies and being itself depended upon atom's propensity to swerve and collide with other atoms. Man is, in Hamlet's words, this quintessence of (2.2.278). We see Lucretian understanding at work when Hamlet explains how a king may go a progress through guts of a beggar (4.3.30-1), or when he observes, Why may not imagination trace noble dust of Alexander, till 'a find it stopping a bung-hole? (5.1.188-9), or, in a similar vein, Imperial Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep wind away (5.1.196-7). This is apparently a lesson in human finitude, when we read of fate of Alexander and of Caesar. In clash between human and universal time, we are all humbled, and even mighty can be reduced to an ignominious instrumentality. There remains nonetheless in imagining an anthropocentric bias toward individual survival, however microscopic. We still think of as Caesar's clay, as dust that Alexander now is, that Alexander is now helping to stop bunghole, as Caesar helps to stop a draft. That is, even with most materialist of reflections, we cannot help thinking that, in spite of our deaths and to paraphrase Celine Dion, our dirt will go on. It makes more sense, however humbling, to think of reverse: we are a temporary formation, an assemblage of matter that is itself infinitely old, and which will carry no trace of having been a part of us after we return to dirt. Or more accurately: after we leave dirt, and dirt that was temporarily us continues its progress through universe. …