It was not until my bus pulled into view of the sea somewhere past Sandgate that I realized how long it had been since I’d seen the ocean. After so many years, the sight still gave me a homeward pull in my heart, though this stretch of coast was strange to me. For if the character of the water here was undoubtedly different to that of the waters where I come from—placid, pale, unmuddled—the two remain in a larger sense the same, and as sea embraces sea so we can say that to step into a different ocean is also to step into the same ocean twice.
In the coastal villages of southern Kent, the breeze off the water is said to cause things to age quickly: iron to rust, brass to discolor, lichen to cover roofs like the scales of a lizard. It was strong enough, at any rate, to put the taste of salt in my mouth when I got off the bus at Lydd and began my southward journey. The road from Lydd to the beach of Dungeness is lined with houses, yet as I walked that nearly two-mile stretch down the headland I saw not the slightest hint of movement from within, nor did I ever meet another person on the way. It was as though these homes had been abandoned just before my arrival, the dishes still expectant on the tables, the lightbulbs still warm to the touch. Though not technically a desert—Dungeness, like all other places on the Isle of Britain, gets plentiful rainfall, so much so that it was several months before I could find a day I was able to come that would not be miserable—it seems absurd, in the face of such overwhelming desolation, to deny that stretch of coast’s essentially desert nature.
The terrain there is composed not of rolling dunes but of mile after undifferentiated mile of stone, with only the occasional tar paper or wood-plank path cutting across to offer relief to the traveler. Walking Dungeness is difficult—the shingle offers less resistance than snow, wears on the feet more than sand. The shallow-rooted plants that eke out an existence there are not enough to stabilize the ground be-neath; as a result, walking down the strand, one has the impression of pitching and heaving as though one were on a fishing boat in a storm. All around are jagged bits of machinery oxidized by the sea breeze—what I could only surmise had once been the inner parts of the ships whose carcasses one encounters up and down the beach.
It is perhaps because of its natural inhospitability that Dungeness has played host to human environments of a decidedly crueller kind. A large stretch of the beach serves as a firing range, which beachcombers cross at their own risk; operating hours are posted, and an orange flag is hung to warn them away when there is shooting that day. A hulking nuclear power station looms in the distance like a premonition from another world. Strangest of all are the so-called Sound Mirrors, massive concrete curves erected by the military during the Second World War as a way of channeling the sound of approaching planes for early air raid detection. Never effective, the mirrors now sit at the center of a marsh surrounded by a caravan park. (This too was empty when I walked through it, with no signs of life except for the dogs who barked at me as I approached, as though unused to the company of humans.)
With little support from the niceties required for the flourishing of tenderer creatures—shade from the sun, shelter from the wind and rain, soft earth to walk on comfortably or to dig down into—those lifeforms that make their home on the vast shingle beach of Dungeness have learned to cultivate a deep inner hardiness. Rare breeds of spiders scrabble among the rocks, ensnaring passing sand fleas for their meals. Rough witch grass grows in patchy lines, and here and there a poppy flashes red against the dull stones. Elsewhere one sees scallop-leafed sea kale, bluish tongues of viper’s bugloss, brilliant combs of red valerian. Many of the flowers hug low to the ground, avoiding the scrapes of wind that whip across the exposed beach, particularly in winter. The few houses built on the shingle itself seem to come from another century, resembling, with their diminutive size and their wood bodies and their lines of wind-tossed laundry hung to dry, the homesteader cabins on the American prairie. It seems it is the custom here to side houses in pitch-black clapboard, giving them the appearance of newly tarred ship hulls. Such is the case for Prospect Cottage, the home once owned by Derek Jarman and the object of my day’s humble pilgrimage down that strange stretch of coast.
Jarman was already ill by the time he moved to Dungeness in 1986. It was the year his film Caravaggio was released, and also the year that he was officially diagnosed with HIV. At Prospect Cottage, far from the crush and noise of London, he immersed himself in medieval herbals and enchanters’ books. The garden that he would eventually bring out of the earth there—the product of years of labor gathering local plants, untold trips down the beach in search of cuttings and seeds, small pebbles and bits of metal hoarded for a larger purpose—was the fruit of these arcane studies. The stone formations he composed have the appearance of Neolithic cairns; the assemblages of iron scraps seem like offerings for a rite I do not understand. Walking through his garden, with its beds delineated by rusted anchor chains and planks of driftwood, I see again the plants that I had passed on my walk down the beach, the sempervivum, the devil’s bit. Only here, through the prism of Jarman’s artistic logic, the harsh moonscape of Dungeness has been honed to a point and perfected, as an alchemist understands that the most base and unpromising of elements may yield a golden essence to a knowledgeable hand.
Prospect Cottage and its grounds would serve as not merely the setting but in many ways the animating spirit of Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden, which recasts Jesus’s passion as an AIDS parable unfolding in Jarman’s ersatz Gethsemane. Much of the film’s symbolism is not so easily unknotted: a burning chair, one candle lighting another, the meting out of food. Even this abstraction seems somehow wedded to the landscape. As images float and combine for the viewer, we are made to experience the process of interpretation and reinterpretation like the ebb and flow of the tides. Amidst all of this, it is the garden that appears to one of the film’s characters in a dream, the garden in which homosex-ual desire is reinscribed as a state of Edenic innocence. But just as life is braided with death along the harsh expanse of the Dungeness headland—just as Jarman himself, nursing flowers and herbs believed by fourteenth-century monks to be cure-alls, knew that none could save him—so the concept of the garden in the film is tempered by melancholy. “My gilliflower roses, violets blue, sweet garden of vanished pleasures,” intones a voice-over towards the end of the film, “please come back next year.” The film is a powerful assertion of the value of tenderness amidst cruelty, whether in the form of romance or more domestic sweetnesses; but it is not so sentimental as to imagine that these things might completely negate the reality of the world around us. Jarman shows us the crucifixion of the film’s two lover-Christs, but we are not given a resurrection.
Though the immaculate grounds of Prospect Cottage are doubtless the product of great devotion and care, there was no sign of a gardener anywhere on the premises as I walked around. The door of the house was locked and alarmed, and the windows were blocked by lace-edged curtains. Like all the other houses I had encountered in the course of my walk, it appeared to have been given up in a sacrifice, perhaps to whatever cruel or uncaring god had wasted the ships marooned on the landscape around me.
Turning at last to go, I thought of what the future might bring to Dungeness. Though many coastal parts of Britain are falling slowly into the sea, in this part of southern Kent the opposite is true. The nearby town of Rye, originally a seaside village, is now two miles from the shore, separated from the water by a long expanse of brackish marsh formed as the shingle piled up and piled up. As the reverse erosion continued its inexorable progression, everything once near became far, everything familiar strange, and the streets that would once have carried the bustle of fisherman and fishwives and fishmarkets were bled slowly, the trade that had sustained them drying up and moving elsewhere with the ever-receding coastline. In a parallel process, the few plants that now survive there are slowly grinding down the stones with their roots and their rhizoids, pioneers for the generations to come. Decades from now, will the shingle have turned to soil, will the wastes give way to the gilliflower roses and violets of The Garden’s imagining?
Mine is an apocalyptic mind: the nuclear power station looms somewhere in the corner of my sight as I imagine the waters rising to reclaim their stranded boats. This too, I think, would have been encompassed in Jarman’s vision, in his understanding that a garden is not merely a place to be surrounded by life, by the happy blooms of springtime, but also a place which asks us to contemplate illness, frailty, even death. “I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty, and no sweet conclusion,” The Garden’s narrator tells us at the beginning of the film, an epigraph to the dreamy imagery that follows. I was a long while making my way back to Lydd, and a long while waiting for the bus to take me home.
Erica X Eisen’s work has appeared in The Harvard Review, n+1, The Baffler, and other periodicals. She currently lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
