Things with Feathers (or Facing Fear)
My two-year-old fell from the top of a ladder when we were on holiday in Devon last week. There were several hours of terror as the doctors did tests to rule out spinal and brain injury. That morning I’d been reading film-maker, artist and gay activist Derek Jarman’s last diary, a record of the experience of facing down his fear of his coming death, and I kept thinking about it while I waited.In 1986, aged forty-four, Jarman was diagnosed HIV-positive. It was the middle of the AIDS crisis: ten years during which there was no cure or reliable treatment for the condition and the gay community was decimated. ‘AIDS to the left of me,’ wrote Jarman. ‘AIDS to the right, into the valley of death.’ In his diary he chronicles his gradual descent into sweats and chills, loss of appetite, incontinence, dwindling sight. ‘Nothing quite as frightening as losing your breath in an attack of coughing. Clasped by the velvet wings of the bats’.
Jarman managed his fear, stopped it destroying the possible pleasures of the present – this is what I kept returning to while I sat by my daughter’s hospital bed. After weeks of extreme night sweats, ‘The bed is awash but I have decided to enjoy them rather than fear them. It’s like deciding to enjoy the rain rather than scurrying into a shelter.’ He kept writing and painting and making films. Kept laughing at the love of his life, Keith Collins, eating cereal in the bath. Kept creating a new home in a fisherman’s cottage on the shingle beach of Dungeness, and shaping a garden there – a unique, beautiful, salvaged garden that can be visited, which he bravely, and somewhat madly, given the pebbly ground and arid climate and salt wash from the sea, planted at the end of his life. In the photo above Jarman is there, wearing his favourite ‘brick-dust pink’ boiler suit.
My daughter is alright – she had fractured her jaw. Painful, but a basically relieving outcome. It should knit together in a month or so and she is already back playing. The series Things with Feathers (or Facing Fear) – the other three paintings are below – came out of her accident, and the fear around it, and thinking about how we cope with fear.
I'll leave you with a painting I wasn't sure about, which my five-year-old son rescued from the recycling and transformed – I think his is such a brilliantly joyful vision.
Anna x