Having spent most of the last year in London, trying to navigate chaos, I returned to Newcastle for a three-week stint at the start of July in order to do a nervous-system reset and make some moves to jumpstart life’s momentum forwards.
One of the first things I wanted to do was renew my driver’s license, which expired two years ago. After doing so, a shiny new card in my possession, I proceeded to plan an anniversary trip for Juno and I, renting a car for the day so we could travel to Dungeness together. It felt like a way to bring us full circle after all that has happened since this time last year. It was an anniversary date, but also a second first date; a way to start over, whilst continuing to cherish all that has come before.
For two years, I have been promising this trip to Juno. When visiting me in Newcastle during the early days of our relationship, they had asked for a copy of my book Narcissus in Bloom. Before they boarded a coach back to London, I presented them with a copy, which had an affectionate message left inside the front cover, directing their attention to a page towards the end of the book.
The epilogue to Narcissus features an excerpt from John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising. It is about two lovers who shun the sun to stay in their bed, vowing to live in accordance with non-heliocentric temporalities. It may well be my favourite poem ever, taking on a personal resonance, but one nonetheless borrowed from Derek Jarman, who installed part of it on the outside of his home: Prospect Cottage in Dungeness.
The epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom sometimes feels like the last thing I wrote. I’ve written plenty since, but that concluding essay is more than just a line drawn under a book project; it was a line drawn under a period of life that had come before. I’ve said many times since how it was a veiled coming-out, but as a result, much of the writing that has come afterwards has felt like new juvenilia, as I figure out a new sense of self.
For that reason, I periodically return to the epilogue of Narcissus as a comforting piece of writing. It was written by someone casting off into a new world, as if it was in Dungeness in 2018 where I found a glimmer of something new, setting sail from its shores into a vast unknown. It may well be the one essay I do not cringe at when reading it back to myself. Years later, it encapsulates a transitory moment in my life, and in such a way that it truly feels like something written by someone else. A gesture of farewell that I continue to find heartening.
Returning to the barren shoreline at Dungeness so many years later was wonderful. It is three years since I last thought about Dungeness; seven years since I last set foot on its shingle. It was especially wonderful returning there with someone who means so much to me.
We change. We adapt. We are traumatised. We walk onwards. We overcome. The balancing act that Narcissus in Bloom left me contemplating was a desire for a sense of rhythm in an unstable world. Change is the only constant — that much is true. But I treasure the opportunity to engage in a dance amidst it all. Everything changes constantly, in the world and in ourselves, but that does not mean that journeys in parallel are impossible. I’ve found it is the only dance that makes the effort required to navigate the chaos feel worthwhile.
Dungeness is a sort of monument to that feeling in my mind. It is the edge of the world, where what matters come into focus anew.
The pictures below were taken on 19th July 2026. What follows them is the epilogue to Narcissus in Bloom, written in spring 2023. It contains various references to a few figures discussed earlier in the book, shorn of their context, but it still works on its own. As such, it also feels about time to jailbreak it from the covers of that book written under an old name and let it stand on its own somewhere new.
It is a piece of writing that enacted such a jailbreak for its author, after all…
Epilogue
On Thursday 23 February 1989, Derek Jarman walked out into his garden. Completely surrounding his home at Prospect House, he had spent years carefully coaxing a wide array of plants from the otherwise barren shingle beach that engulfs Dungeness, a small and declining fishing village jutting out from England’s most south-easterly point. “Brilliant sunshine”, he later wrote in his journal, recording the weather that day, with “skies so clear your vision is stretched to the horizon”. Spring was in full bloom, and so were Jarman’s daffodils.
Dungeness was a little-known wilderness until Jarman made his home there. The barren nature of the headland has popularised a myth, repeated by almost all tourist brochures and travel guides, that it is technically a desert — England’s only one.
This is not true, but even if it were, like so many deceptively barren landscapes, Dungeness is far from lifeless. It is instead an area of great ecological significance, with the beach home to a variety of shrubs, succulents and other forms of life that are seldom found elsewhere in the UK. It would prove to be a fitting home for Jarman, who was something of a rare creature himself: a queer punk and polymath of international renown.
Still, further surrounded by eerily flat plains, military installations, the rot of old industry and a decommissioned nuclear power station, the atmosphere at the hamlet today is nonetheless that of a world-without-us. It is a village that time forgot, a hamlet at the end of the world, where the regimens of normal life have run aground, leaving you to trip and fall over the tentacles of capitalism’s flailing grasp.
That being said, though it may feel like nowhere else within the British Isles, Dungeness is still prone to quintessential turns in the English weather. Jarman’s day may have started with brilliant sunshine, but this was later overshadowed by hail. “My poor daffodils”, Jarman lamented, “are now beaten to the ground”.
The battering of Jarman’s daffodils leaves him anxious. It feels like a bad omen. Struggling with declining health and an AIDS diagnosis, the fate of his flowers seems oddly tied to his own. Looking for something to soothe him, he calls his friend, the photographer Matthew Lewis, to
ask him if he would take a photo of a young man holding a daffodil. Last year he took a beautiful portrait of a handsome Italian, stripped to the waist, holding a lemon, the juice of which he used to dissolve heroin to fill his syringe. Narcissus, narcotics, self-absorption: benumbed retreat into self.
A few weeks earlier, Jarman had first noticed his daffodils beginning to appear. “I counted well over 50 buds on the daffodils I planted last year”, he writes on 7 February. He was enthralled by their seasonal nature. “Daffodils ‘come before the swallows dare and take the winds of March with beauty’”, he writes, quoting Shakespeare.
However, Jarman also mourns their artificial cultivation by some horticulturalists. “One of the joys our technological civilisation has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with the precious moment of their arrival”. Jarman was not some kind of anarcho-primitivist, however, bemoaning humanity’s agricultural development. He greatly appreciated the abundance brought by modernity. Mushrooms, for instance, “once a luxury, are ladled out by the pound … But the daffodil, if only the daffodil could come with spring again”.
What Jarman feared most, perhaps, was a silent spring, when the rhythms of life on this planet would be reduced to a consumerist homogeneity, like so much else today. He despised capitalism’s impact on the natural world and its biorhythms in this regard. In a journal entry from 1982, penned whilst visiting California, he writes with disgust of Los Angeles’ artificial sprawl, a city where the “sweet dream of capitalism curdles — where the seasons are scrambled”. There, time is out of joint, and different flora flourish incongruously alongside each other, regardless of the season. “Palm trees and daffodils”.
Many have argued, over the decades, that capitalism’s intrusion on nature’s circadian rhythms disturbs and corrupts the very thing necessary to our self-overcoming: time. Maurice Blanchot, for instance, in a defence of communism, which he enigmatically defines as our “material search for communication”, argues that a new sense of time is essential if we are to fully comprehend the enormity of the task at hand — a task that should now be familiar to us:
The immensity of the effort that must be made, the necessity of again putting into question all of the values to which we are attached, of returning to a new barbarity in order to break with the polite and camouflaged barbarity that serves as our civilisation, the unknown toward which we direct ourselves — for we absolutely do not know what man could be — the terrible violence that the inequality in the satisfaction of needs provokes, the enslavement to things, the governance of things, as well as the dialectic proper to technology, the inertia, finally, the fatigue: everything would contribute to putting off the realization of such a movement to the time of reckoning of a dream (or of blood), if the pressure of needs did not represent a force, a reserve of great duration. One could say that the speed of the movement’s progression is surprising, but in any case, time is required for it…
Though we might wonder what relevance communism has to all that we have discussed so far (besides being yet another term dogged by negative connotations for so many today), it is arguably only one more name for the event-horizon we have been striving towards. Indeed, it is a political theory relevant to everything discussed thus far, from our entrapment within a Protestant-capitalist individualism to our dreams of a new and unrestricted kind of social relation, which far exceeds the bounds of our communicative-capitalist enclosures.
For Blanchot specifically, his vision of communism is principally focused on a new communality, on a new collective subjectivity, on radical friendships and infinite conversations, on subjective relations that escape the bounds of capitalist utilitarianism, that escape an understanding of life now reduced to a source of energy to be plugged directly into the impersonal machinations of capitalist production. Communism, then, is a name for a political project that demands more of the luxuries and intimacies that capitalism insists we do not have time for. To deny ourselves these things — the activities we confine to our “free time” — is to limit our potentials most brutally.
This is the violence inherent to all capitalist capture, felt most palpably when a person accepts their thingness, their toolness, their usefulness for the system of which they are a part, when the individual “not only breaks off communication with one who is similar or dissimilar to him but breaks off communication with himself ”, having little sense of the self that they are, at least outside the restrictive context of economic relations. It is this interpersonal sense of alienation, most fundamentally, that communism, as the material search for communication, must first seek to remedy today.
It is for this reason that Blanchot is so hostile towards capitalist time. What interests him instead is time in itself, in its “metaphysical nudity” — the peculiarity of a life-time; “not only the time that shows itself to human consciousness but the time that is the basis of all consciousness, not time that is expressed in history but time in which history is made”. It is a sense of time that questions how much agency we have as capitalist subjects — that which, today, we all are by default. It is a sense of time that asks: what sorts of projects, which might produce a radically new subjectivity, do we really have time for?
Art and philosophy have produced myriad responses to this contemporary dilemma, but the popular understanding of our ordeal often leads to pessimistic appraisals of our various crises, as if the only response to this suggestion that we take time is to act slowly and see what happens, to be patient, when time is clearly running out. In fact, the reality is far more nuanced.
What Blanchot emphases is the innately tempo-ethical dimension of communism. He suggests that we must take time in the sense that we must seize time as that mechanism which capitalism reduces and uses to administrate the day-today, but also, in a more radical sense, time as the ground of all creation. We must seize anew the temporality — the speed, the time-signature — of our present moment.
But to what extent is our seizing of time even possible today? Put another way, how is a politics of time possible at all? At the very least, what we need most of all is an ethics of time, through which we might broaden the political scope of our philosophies and our self-images. Trapped within the enclosures of capitalist time — wherein time = money — we must reorient ourselves to understand time itself differently — that is, anti-capitalistically.
This is something that Jarman (just like Guibert) actualises through both his green-thumbed activities and a new awareness of what little time he has left. Indeed, after spending any amount of time with his journals, documenting life, death and gardening, it becomes clear that spring was the time of year he treasured most: it allowed him to once again commune with himself, his place in time, his hopes and dreams, his creative endeavours. The arrival of spring flowers, as a harsh coastal winter draws to a close, announces this time to him, with the presence of daffodils in particular being so ubiquitous throughout his life.
Not only were spring flowers Jarman’s “first memory”, daffodils also reminded him of his parents and their love for one another. A compulsive self-mythologiser, the story of his parents’ wedding is retold time and time again throughout his journals. Though stray details change here and there, their wedding photograph is always present, crisp and clear, like a flash of lightning through memory’s haze. On 30 March, 1989, he marks their wartime wedding anniversary:
On this day nearly 50 years ago my parents posed for their wedding photo under a daffodil bell hanging in the lych gate of Holy Trinity, Northwood. The photo, with my father in his RAF uniform and my mother holding a bouquet of carnations, her veil caught in the March breeze — captured the imagination of the press. It appeared in the national newspapers — hope at a time of encroaching darkness.
Year on year, daffodils bring hope to Jarman’s encroaching darkness too. His journals, though primarily about his art and garden, are haunted by his seropositivity. As the seasons repeat their cycle, his health deteriorates. But daffodils linger regardless, in vases, in childhood memories and in his garden. Their annual reappearance marks another year survived, but also encourages him to keep going too, if only to see the next year’s crop.
“The sun came out and I crept along the traffic-jammed streets to St Mary’s, glimpses of daffodils in parks and squares”, he writes one day. “For a moment I decided to fight back, push the exhausted depression that has clung like the February mist”. But on years when spring is late, his impatience is palpable. In 1993, a year before Jarman’s death, the entry from 30 February begins: “I’m holding my breath, like the weather, for the first daffodil”. Each and every year, they “flare into life to illuminate the spring”, as well as Jarman himself.
We would be remiss not to mention Jarman here before this book comes to a close. In many ways, he warrants far more attention than we are to give him here. But what Jarman’s example offers us, perhaps even more explicitly than those we have considered thus far, is a narcissism that understands itself not through a self-limiting insularity but rather as a form of eccentric speculation that takes place in a time beyond that restricted by capitalist life. It is a narcissism that emerges from within the depths of things, allowing us to see not just ourselves but all that flows through, with and around us, even as he grows more aware that the full actualisation of this narcissistic process takes a time that he is to be ultimately denied. It takes the time that writing and photography can only gesture towards, that capitalism can only administrate, but which the self can feel more intuitively, and in a manner prone to creative disorientation, given the right conditions.
Though we might assume Jarman only discovered an appreciation for narcissism at the moment he came face-to-face with his mortality, much like Guibert, it is in fact one of the defining concerns of his whole career. Prior to making his 1986 film Caravaggio, for instance, Jarman writes in his journal of his intentions:
The film will dig and excavate and make no attempt to hold the mirror up to reality. When Caravaggio paints the reflection of Narcissus it is no true reflection but a comment on all vanity and our film should treat his life in a similar way, penetrate the surface.
Here, narcissism once again becomes a tool of the self’s undoing. A few years earlier, writing about his plans for his 1981 film, In the Shadow of the Sun, we find a similar sentiment: “A third and final image of Narcissus, a mirror which flashes the sun into the camera so that the image explodes and reinvents itself in a most mysterious way”.
In a study of Jarman’s work, Steven Dillon emphasises further how Narcissus is a near-constant preoccupation in his life and films. He does not find, in the self ’s encounter with itself as other, the quicksand of self-love and its emotional molasses, but rather an apocalyptic explosion that destroys worlds. It is for this reason, Dillon writes, that “Jarman reproduces the image of Narcissus throughout his cinematic career, from Sebastiane to Edward II”, but Jarman is nonetheless “wary of the negative reading of Narcissus from the very beginning — that the desire for the same is flawed, egotistical, a kind of self-absorption”. Jarman, however, attacks any suggestion that same-sex love provides a stable and conservative homogeneity. He injects back into Paul Näcke’s initially homophobic narcissism a vibrant political volatility, emphasising the apparent dangers that queerness poses to the actually existing stasis of heteronormative society.
This is no more true than in Jarman’s love of his garden, where the return of his daffodils, those same flowers year on year, does not signify the return of the same but nature’s capacity for rebirth and self-renewal. Though they are so instantly recognisable, so familiar, these daffodils are not the same daffodils he has encountered before. They are always simply this year’s daffodils, which must eventually fade away, only to be reincarnated the following spring. The travesty of capitalism, in its capture of humanity and nature, is that it hopes to perpetuate a kind of “natural” stasis quite to the contrary. Capitalism wants daffodils all year round. It wants to exacerbate stasis by obscuring time’s advance. But we cannot live in a perpetual spring, caught in a short and oppressive loop. Flowers must die so that they can bloom again, just like our very selves.
Derek Jarman’s garden at the end of the world has thus become a beautiful site of pilgrimage to people everywhere. His former home remains, long after his death, a testament to another way of life, cultivated both in collaboration with and against the natural and capitalist worlds that surround it.
It is fitting, then, that on the outer walls of Jarman’s former home, which he shared with his partner Keith Collins, we find the final lines of a 1633 poem by John Donne. The poem, in an irregular meter, expresses two lovers’ defiance under the gaze of the rising sun, which hopes to coax them from their bed.
“Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?” the poem begins. “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” The narcissism of “they look at each other” soon comes to override all other worldly expectations.
It is a strange poem for a gardener to immortalise in a space so dependent on the sun for life, but against the heliocentricity of our world, the poem insists that other lives are capable of being lived under its glare regardless. Here the sun’s gaze comes to signify more than the personification of nature, but the normative gazes of society at large, which love must always overcome. Why not orient oneself and one’s life to a bed shared with a lover, rather than the administrated rhythms of night and day? The poem ends as defiantly as it began:
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Love, like time, is eternal. It far exceeds the bounds that capitalist time calcifies in order to contain us. The beauty of flowers, too, lies in their blooming and fading; as much in their promised return and transformation as in their first appearing.
Jarman died on 19 February 1994, likely less than a fortnight before his daffodils were scheduled to bloom once again. Though he may have passed away, missing the rebirth of spring, his flowers outlived him and continue to. His garden may have been one of the last “projects” he embarked on before his death, but his house and garden are still actively maintained today, still strewn with his plants and various sculptures. Long after his death, it is fitting that it has become a memorial so full of life. The narcissism of “they looked at each other” — of lovers, of nature itself — prevails over the singularity of one man’s gaze, of society’s heteronormativity and its increased hostility to other forms of life. The narcissism of Narcissus cannot be thwarted or moralised away, no matter how we may try to restrict its loving rhythms. Time is not abolished by its denouncement but rather inherited in its affirmation.
I first visited Jarman’s garden in 2018, then once again in 2019. The first time I was there, my girlfriend and her family in tow, I was embarrassed to be struck down by a panic attack, as the eerie landscape felt all the more barren and disconcerting then, relative to the constant activity against which we steeled ourselves in our south-east London home.
The silence of the place removed all habitual defences, shunted between world and self. I found it a disturbing place, to say the least. But once this momentary existential crisis had subsided, Jarman’s garden soon became one of my favourite places in the world.
Memories of the garden returned to me again and again as I began to write down my inchoate thoughts on narcissism a few years later, whilst living in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, during the spring of 2021. At that time, I had already written a book on community and grief, which was published just one week before the UK reluctantly implemented quarantine protocols to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. That, too, was a disorientating experience, which played havoc with my mental health. Having garnered some media attention, I felt overly sensitive to any and all criticisms that the book may have received, even in otherwise positive reviews. Stuck inside for months on end, to have this book on community appraised during a period of intense isolation was deeply troubling. Narcissus was in bloom that spring, in more ways than one.
This book was eventually finished at the start of spring in 2023, in Newcastle upon Tyne, one year after first moving to a new city after the end of that long-term relationship. As I moved further and further north, I often thought and felt sad about the fact that Jarman’s garden was increasingly out of reach to me. But his journals nonetheless encouraged a new enthusiasm, as I tracked the emergence of each year’s daffodils wherever I lay my head.
Though the writing of this book has been repeatedly delayed, coming out long after I thought it would, it feels nonetheless apt to write these final words, after a tumultuous year, when spring is on the cusp of coming again. Time was so necessary to its gestation, and for so much more besides. Indeed, when I first arrived in the north-east of England, I felt torn about my situation and the crossroads at which I found myself. I was as excited to start my life over as I was bereft following the failure of a love for another. I was quite unwell for a number of months that followed, suffering again through a far more acute mental health crisis than I had ever experienced previously, which was less a direct product of the end of my relationship than it was of the more general ways in which life felt totally detached from its habitual moorings.
Throughout it all, this book lingered on the desktop of my laptop, onto which I had uploaded a photograph of some daffodils taken at night, close to my new home, in nearby Iris Brickfield Park. The book changed a great deal then, and though I have done all I can, up until this point, to remove any reference to the self that I am, writing it has been a healing process, and I am left, at the final hurdle, wanting to acknowledge the ways in which it has given me permission to rebirth myself.
As we emerge from the pandemic, with the virus nonetheless still circulating as we return to our communities and a depressingly familiar sense of capitalist normality, I have found myself newly attuned to and reactivated by each new spring. It is only through an awareness of these seasonal transformations that I have been able to throw off the self I was and affirm something new — new modes of expression, new selves, new worlds.
A narcissistic self-concern persists here, nonetheless, but I am all the more aware now of how such a concern cannot rest upon itself. Narcissism does not and cannot stop at its own apparent impasses, but must necessarily push onwards into something greater than itself. And we will all, at one time or another, become overly preoccupied with ourselves in this regard, as we consider how best to move on with our lives, in good times and bad, building new ways of living that are less defined by the poor time of capitalist drudgery that bites persistently at our heels.
But narcissism is not an end in itself, as we so often think. It is only a means. It is a process, defined by the blooming and wilting of selves, which we should not mourn or moralise, just as any gardener, like Jarman himself, must learn that you should never mourn flowers or berate them for their fleeting lifespans. Though we may cut them, dry them, decorate our lives with them, hoping to hold onto the affectations of spring, anything cleft from its roots will surely fade. But we must remember that spring will always come again.