Swaths of Blue: Remembering Derek Jarman on His Birthday

Still from Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

“I saw Blue in its opening week in New York, in 1993. There was a big sign outside the movie theatre that read, ‘Warning: this film is only the colour blue’. Talk about a marketing nightmare! People had flipped out and wanted their money back. Blue is as beautiful as a minimalist art piece. It’s hypnotising. You feel like you’re tripping after a while. Derek Jarman was going blind as he made it, and Blue was a beautiful, radical way to deal with dying from AIDS. Half of my friends died of AIDS in the 80s so it’s a tearjerker – but it’s not self-pitying. It’s smart, angry and very, very sad. Minimalist cinema is a small genre, but this would be the Rosebud of minimalist cinema. It’s extreme, and it completely defied the movie business. I felt Derek was a kindred spirit. We made very different movies, but I saw all of his. Tilda Swinton was his Divine, right?” -John Waters, quoted from Hannah Lack, "John Waters on Derek Jarman's Blue," AnOther, September 11, 2015. Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is demanded to all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days as rain and wind destroy the finds. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

It's January 31, 2025. It should be the 83rd birthday of film maker, poet, gay rights and AIDS activist, and life-long gardener Derek Jarman. But he died in 1994. Exactly a month before I was born. Derek Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986. He was not silent about his illness. He continued to make six more films, including his most famous: 1991's contemporary-gay-lib-era retelling of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. AIDS would eventually affect his vision until he could only see in shades of blue. In 1993, a few months before his death, he released Blue. For 79 minutes, the viewer saw what Jarman saw: blue. Just blue. And the words and soundscapes that accompany the color, including the voice talents of John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, and Jarman himself, recounted the mythical story of Blue, a character and a hue, interspersed with diary-like reflections from Jarman about day-to-day life with his illness, about the death of his beloveds, about the Bosnian war that was going on at the same time. Jarman included daydreams and philosophical musings and a general wondering about how long he would have to live. It is an experimental film. It can be a challenging film to sit through, as it should be. And it is also an easy film to fall into. Lyrical, honest, comforting, sad.

Blue Bottle buzzing Lazy days The sky blue butterf1y Sways on a cornflower Lost in the warmth Of the blue heat haze Singing the blues Quiet and slowly Blue of my heart Blue of my dreams Slow blue love Of delphinium days Blue is the universal love in which man bathes―it is the terrestrial paradise. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

This story is almost rote in my mind: In high school, Jarman's films were a lifeline f, almost singlehandedly. They weened me off my self-hatred, from my belief that I inherited no past and would therefore be denied a future. The only viable gay life I had seen looked very different from me. Thin, materialistic, bitchy; simultaneously promiscuous and sexless; the supporting character, victim of, or antagonist for straight people—never someone whose life could be its own center.

Still from Derek Jarman, Caravaggio, 1986.

Jarman showed me queer life, that there had been, was currently, and could someday be a community that I could belong in. I would not have come out of the closet without Jarman. I sometimes wonder if I would even still be alive if I never partook of his vision.

The retina is destroyed, though when the bleeding stops what is left of my sight might improve. I have to come to terms with sightlessness. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1977), The Tempest (1979), Caravaggio (1986), War Requiem (1989), and Wittgenstein (1993) were...are... my favorites. In these films, I saw that to be gay was more than an identity or a class but an expanse of approaches to the universe and the universal. The identarian and social meaning of "gay" and of "queer" are not unimportant, but no human is the sociological body only: we are also the cosmic body. Jarman articulated that with his imagery, with his words, with his friends in motion on the screen. Gay meant more than who we fucked and where we lived and how we dressed. It was as if he gave me permission to partake in the great questions of religion, of history, of literature, of visual art, of war and its opposition, of philosophy and the mysteries of language. Until, at last, I realized I had never needed permission. Full participation in the society of beasts and gods alike is all of our birthright.

I fill this room with the echo of many voices Who passed time here Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint The sun comes and floods this empty room I call it my room My room has welcomed many summers Embraced laughter and tears Can it fÏll itself with your laughter Each word a sunbeam Glancing in the light This is the song of My Room Blue stretches, yawns and is awake. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

Jarman sniffed out gays from the homosocial and homoerotic in a vast array of historical sources. He presented his findings, gloriously, on the screen. In a similar way to historian John Boswell, whose works included Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994), Jarman was a gay historian. Boswell's incredible research, in which he characterized a continuous thread of gay identity and community from the ancient to the modern, meant something very important to a gay public spurred by the Church and the state. Its readership involved many who otherwise would not have picked such scholarly publications. At the same time, Boswell's work was rampantly anachronistic, open to a lot of very fair criticism from straight and queer scholars, for the personal/political perspective he projected on his sources. Still, Boswell remains a hero of mine: yet another mind who paved the way for my personal and professional life. Boswell died from AIDS related illness ten months after Jarman. He and I breathed the same air for only nine months.

I shall not win the battle against the virus ― in spite of the slogans like 'Living with AIDS.' The virus was appropriated by the well ― so we have to live with AIDSwhile they spread the quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark sea. Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost. A sense of reality drowned in theatre. Thinking blind, becoming blind. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

Unlike Boswell, who was a professional in a particular academic discipline, with methods and conclusions about a gay past that could be gently critiqued or brutally eviscerated by his peers, Jarman's historicism was that of the amateur. I do not mean to say that his professional work was uninvolved with his historical research: far from it. I do mean that he was acting from the very impulse at the root of the word "amateur," that is amor: "love." In her 2012 book How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Carolyn Dinshaw writes

amateurs have something to teach the experts: namely, that the present moment is more temporally heterogeneous than academically disciplined, historically minded scholars tend to let on, and that some kind of desire for the past motivates all our work, regardless of how sharp-edged our researches eventually become: love and knowledge are as inextricable as the links in chain mail. - Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. xiv.

It is not the quality of Jarman's work that defines his amateurism but his open defiance for a disciplinarian separation between the production of knowledge and his amorous impulse. He was in love with his historical, legendary, literary figures and wanted us to love them, even make love to them, too. And if we can do it with someone across the expanses of time and beyond the limits of a given reality, than surely we can learn to love ourselves, and one another, here and now.

Still from Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein, 1993

Last week, when President Donald Trump ordered a halt to all federal funding, one of the casualties was funding for research and (global) distribution of medications for preventing and treating HIV. As those receiving treatment and health advocates know, a pause in anti-viral treatments can result in potentially lethal setbacks in a patient's journey and for the community at large. The reality of HIV cases in Africa, that is to say in Trump's so-called "shithole countries" is there for equivalent reason, in his mind, to the high percentage of HIV cases among LGBT people: AIDS is just a fact of life for those he sees as subhumans, if not a deserved fate.

The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

As a teen, a kid, the first person I dared to say "I might be gay" to was my pediatrician. I was terrified to utter those words, and his response multiplied the terror. He immediately responded with the dangers of AIDS and other diseases, implied that my life would be hard, and said that I needed to get tested. Even though, I later realized, the only sexual activities I had participated in by that point could not have transmitted the virus. Now, my doctor was a funny, nice man. But he also spoke with the authority of a world hardened against us. His response taught my still-forming mind that to express my desire was to admit, even accept, an inevitable death sentence. Years later, I still pray for more sensitive responses from doctors caring for the young who speak up. Three years later, I was out to a few more trusted individuals (and perhaps to a larger more anonymous public, as I had published and presented a public reading of my play about homosexual love between a musician and the mythic poet Orpheus). I was 18, and I sat down to watch Blue. It was an electric shock. So much sadness and pain, knowledge and joy and feeling swept over me. I share with John Waters the sense that the blue was hypnotic. I was literally entranced. When I snapped back to my bedroom, as the film ended, I knew I had witnessed something of incredible importance, even if I couldn't yet articulate what that was. I think what I saw was a glimpse, with a dying man, of the world of the dead and how very alive that world could be. The life of the dead, a contradiction of depleting and astounding energies, would become a north star for my own artistic wanderings.

But what if this present Were the world's last night In the setting sun your love fades Dies in the moonlight - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

In my senior year of college, I received two awards for my poem "Fag Hammadi" which was subsequently published online by the American Academy of Poets. The first draft was written in 2015. Ten years ago. It described the tangibility of absence for those of us coming to queerness in the shadow of the AIDS Crisis.

"FAG HAMMADI Isaiah sang of vineyards, wild and overgrown. Pausing for effect, he took a fist of grapes, and pressed real hard. “When you further knowledge, you further sorrow” muttered a harrowed Ecclesiast, eyeing the singer from across the bar, the queen he’d chased for years hoping to hold those red-­stained hands. I lay my tongue in wrinkled thighs—­­ I, Isaiah, taste that bitter fruit, while my chickenhawk plants kisses—­­gullet quivering­­— on my barely­-a­-man’s chest, wrist... fingers. Thus they signed a pact, abandoned us and burnt their books. We’ve tried to breach that expanse of forgotten wisdom, but we fail­­—children midwifed with Jarman’s Blue in 1994. A generation died when we were born. - Max Brumberg-Kraus, American Academy of Poets, 2016

Life is different now, but continuous with the stones that were being laid back then. The world seems harsher as political authorities scapegoat transgender and drag communities, seek to commute our freedom of speech and participation in public spheres, and attempt to repeal what strides gay and lesbian activism has made in the last decades. There is the pandemic and social isolation. The wars in Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan. The reckonings of racial injustice in America and the crushing authoritarian response to any strides to make our country a little more just. The rotten seeds have grown to trees, now bear their poisonous fruits.

Still from Derek Jarman, The Garden, 1990

But beside the cruelties, the garden also blooms with delicious flowers. Allison, my housemate in college, is now my partner, best friend, artistic collaborator, spiritual companion, HIV information and health advocate, a textile genius and an artist in her own right. We share a home with another dear friend from college, another magnificent queer artist. Ours is a very creative life, a life where we can talk about socio-political catastrophes, spiritual revelations, the quality of oil paints, and Eric Cartman within the same conversation. I work in a dynamic Twin Cities arts scene that has faced and survived many hits. And I have had more romantic and sexual encounters with men since college, evolving in my own understanding of my nonbinary gender and multifaceted, unboxable desires. But I still feel the weight of the loss, the imprint of absence into presence, that I described in my poem. That palpable loss was crystalized with Blue, the arrow Jarman leased within his final days.

Our name will be forgotten In time No one will remember our work Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud And be scattered like Mist that is chased by the Rays of the sun For our time is the passing of a shadow And our lives will run like Sparks through the stubble I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave. - Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993.

I conclude with a letter: Dear Derek, I want to thank you for the kiss of life, for the keys you left me to unlock our past. I find great comfort in your caress through time, and your continued instruction for how I might live with compassion and integrity. Wherever you are, do you swim in a monochrome where blue waves crash on blue sand shores? Or did the rainbow return when you gave up the ghost? I hope you're gardening still. I hope you like my poems. Life is scary these days. But it's always been scary. It's always been many things. You know this better than most. Each of us is many things refracted in a glass, shifting between many colors by the angle of the light. You're a great teacher. Lover. Friend. Happy birthday, and thank you for everything. - Max.