Text of Blue 《蓝》的文案
这是加曼最后创作的一部电影。没有画面，只是蓝色。
《蓝色》是加曼去医院治病的经过，描述了他与艾滋病共存的最后岁月，是不同寻常的对病情的艺术性解释。
《蓝色》是对恐惧和绝望的拒绝，是在死亡的利齿之间那种公然不服从的自由之态。
德里克·加曼(DerekJarman)死了，死于爱滋病，死在英国众议院投票决定同性恋合法年龄的前两天，没能再与朋友们共聚在泰晤士河畔的寒风中，那凛冽初春之夜的朵朵烛光，是同性恋者们对平等的合法年龄的期待，是对投票结果的愤怒(在英国，异性恋合法年龄是十六岁，同性恋合法年龄原本是二十一岁，这次投票的结果是降低到十八岁，但许多人认为问题的关键不在于年龄是多少，而在于平等不平等)，也成了为加曼送葬的挽歌。
德里克·加曼，画家，诗人，电影导演，独立制片人，同性恋权利活动家，向来坦率、直言，极有艺术情趣和创造力，又独立于世，桀骜不驯。特别是他发现自己携带爱滋病毒后，更以其真诚、勇毅、智慧，为同性恋者寻求正义和公理，成为先锋艺术家们和年轻的同性恋者们的偶像、精神支柱和行动楷模，却也因此成为这个传统保守国度中许多人的眼中钉、肉中刺。他是主动要求医生对他停止用药的，他的双目已完全失明，皮肤、肌肉都在脱落，然而他却死得极有尊严，表现出超人的耐心、毅力和勇气。虽有人说他死得活该，但更多的人，包括同性恋反对者，却为他一掬钦佩感动之泪。不论如何，他的死，无疑是英国电影界的极大损失。
加曼是英国人，加曼是同性恋，这是他生活中最重要的两个事实，也是始终纠缠在他的艺术中的两个主题。他出生于一九四二年，父亲是皇家空军的官员，加曼从小在意大利和印度的空军基地上长大。他与父亲的关系并不甚好，而母亲早染癌症，全靠加曼和妹妹照顾。加曼自幼钟爱画画，但父亲却规定他去伦敦大学国王学院学历史和英文，加曼遵从父命于一九六三年完成学业，旋即进入Slade艺术学院中学习绘画，加入六十年代自由放任的狂欢宴会。他的同学中有当代英国艺术家霍克尼(David Hockney)，普洛克特(Patrick Procktor)和克拉克(Ossie C1arke)，在波微广场霍克尼的家中，在德瑞街的艺术实验室中，在圆房子的生活剧场中，他们的衣服越来越鲜亮了，他们的音乐越来越狂野了。霍克尼的满头金发在舞场中飞动，加曼仿佛第一次 “从很高的跳台跳水下去”，骤然发现“颓废是才智的第一表现”，“每个我认识的人都认识其他人，我们生活在一起，像是整整一代人生活在一起”。在此期间，加曼作为一个艺术家小有成功，他参加一九六七年塔特画廊的青年艺术家画展，一九六八年在利森画廊举行第一次个人画展，同时，他也写诗，从事舞台设计。到了七十年代，英国导演罗素(Ken Russell)请他设计电影《野蛮的救世主》(The Savage Mes－siah)和《魔鬼》 (TheDavil)，加曼才发现了最能表现他的思想的艺术形式：摄影机能制造出联系过去和现在的意象，这种意象既表达现实，也能伸展到历史和神话中去。对历史的浓厚的兴趣，使加曼和其他的先锋艺术家们大有不同，由绘画而进入电影，更使他有别于传统的电影导演们。电影的形式自二十年代后就没有变过，加曼二十年来许多独出心裁的实验给电影界带来一阵清风，让不少人欣喜，却也让很多人心惊。
加曼拍片一直用最简陋最原始的摄影机，背景常布置在画室或伦敦一些废弃的大仓库中，一方面自然是因为作为独立制片人，经费向来是问题，另一方面也因为在加曼看来，电影最重要的不是情节、故事，不是场面是否大，而是电影所要表达的导演的思想。他的电影都很个性化，作为一位抽象派的画家，他摄影机下那些如梦如幻的意境，也都很抽象。
一九七五年，加曼拍摄了第一部公开放映的电影《塞巴斯蒂安》(sebastine)，这部电影结构松散，叙述了基督教早期圣徒塞巴斯蒂安的一生，他所受的折磨和他的献身精神。三年后，他又拍了《庆典》(Jubilee)，把历史引入现实，表现了女王伊利莎白一世在她的魔术师的陪同下共游七十年代朋克 (Punk)的伦敦城，真实地纪录了那个时代颓废疯狂的亚文化(subculture)。这两部新奇的电影让人耳目一新，然而毁誉并至，《塞巴斯蒂安》中，加曼让他的人物都讲拉丁语，配以英文字幕，而且还有许多男子的裸体以及男子同性恋的性爱场面；《庆典》中的伦敦是毁坏、衰败的，女王也成了后现代主义的形象；这很让一些自认“身心纯洁”的人受不了，斥之为“腐败、恶劣、肮脏”。一九七九年，加曼拍摄了根据莎士比亚剧作改编的《暴风雨》，同样是现实、神话与历史的交融。同时，他也开始酝酿拍摄《卡拉瓦乔》(Caravag－gio)，然而经费和计划落实，却要在七年以后。
一六一 ○年七月，西西里Porto Ercole的海滩慵懒地伸展在热气中，米凯莱·卡拉瓦乔奄奄一息。自从四年前那场在罗马的斗殴之后，他流浪在那波里，在马耳他，在西西里。终于，听到了教皇赦免他的传令，于是，“他收拾了仅有的几样东西，租了条小船打算回罗马，然而在海滩上，他却又无辜被抓了起来，两天后从监狱里出来，他的船已不在那里。在愤怒和绝望中，他在七月酷暑的烈日下沿着沙滩奔跑，希望能看见那条船”，然而他倒下了，牧人们把他抬到山顶，他发着高烧，几天后，他死了。这一年，他三十九岁。
卡拉瓦乔，意大利文艺复兴后期的最重要的一位画家，黑头发、黑眼睛、深色的皮肤。他的形象是他画笔下的许多画面，他的颜色是他的画面的主调。他粗犷、好斗，总是在寻找机会或是伤害自己，或是伤害他人。他爱女人，更爱男人，最爱的还是那把从不离身的短剑。他作画不守传统路数，许多后代人受他的影响，却也有人认为他破坏了绘画艺术。从这位自我陶醉、满身不服从、充满勇气和破坏性的卡拉瓦乔身上，加曼仿佛看到了自己。《卡拉瓦乔》，是他最珍爱的题材。于是，他在伦敦一间大仓库中重构文艺复兴后的罗马：白门白墙，酒肆草垛的街景；精力过盛，热情暴躁的意大利人。他更在重构卡拉瓦乔的画室和他的一幅幅画面；巨大的画布，石臼中刚磨出的鲜艳的赭红色，阴沉的黑色；手捧水果篮的男孩，被蝎子螫了手的少年，“年轻人的音乐会”上四位乐手娇润的面颊和颤动的琴弦；还有罗诺其，那位卡拉瓦乔所爱着的最终又被他用短剑刺死的罗诺其，健美、粗俗、贪婪，身披红丝绒扮演着圣马修，扮演施洗约翰。卡拉瓦乔的一幅幅杰作在加曼的摄影机下被重新画过，画面上的人物成了围绕卡拉瓦乔的故事，虽少情节，却惊心动魄。水果鲜花、男人的躯体都透着欲滴的诱惑和欲望，美杜莎头上乱蛇飞舞，颈断处鲜血淋漓，张开的嘴哭号出最后一声恐惧，那形象却显然又是卡拉瓦乔自己。在短剑的寒光中，卡拉瓦乔的画面充满杀气。
《卡拉瓦乔》终于拍完了，在柏林电影节上获得很大成功。这七年中所遇到的阻力，舆论界所施与的种种压力，让加曼对同性恋文化和同性恋权力有了更深刻的认识，他成了头脑最清醒的同性恋权利的支持者、争取者。一九八六年圣诞节前夕，《卡拉瓦乔》公映之后，加曼去医院做了爱滋病毒检查，结果不出他所料，是阳性。一个月后，他公开宣布了他的病情。八年之前，很少有人有勇气公开承认自己是同性恋者，更少有人有勇气承认自己得了爱滋病，加曼似乎成了第一个公开站出来道出真相的人。以后，有人问他为何当初要这样做，他说：“我这样做是为我自己，为我的自尊。我一生都在力争活得坦白、明了、被人接受，有时，竟发现自己周围的人都那么恐惧、不幸福，他们害怕告诉别人他们生活的真相。所以，我这样做是为我自己，并不是为别人，如果我的做法无意中帮助了一些人，那我会很高兴。”“我不是一个代言人，我只谈我自己。”
于是，死亡每时每刻都会降临，加曼的时间紧迫起来，病情在恶化，但他的创作却进入了旺盛时期。一九八七年《最后的英格兰》(The Last of England)，一九八八年《战地挽歌》(War Requiem)，一九九○年《花园》(The Garden)，一九九一年《爱德华二世》(EdwardⅡ)，一九九三年《维特根斯坦》(Wittgenstein)，直到最后一部影片，他去世前不久拍摄的《蓝色》(Blue)。在拍摄电影的同时，他也不断地有书出版，自传，日记，电影脚本兼拍摄札记，都是些流畅的散文，笔调很有诗意，也很干净。同时，他又提起画笔作画，在曼城，在伦敦，在日本都举行过画展。
不间断地工作的同时，加曼的生活也有了变化，十几年来，他一直住在伦敦西区(West End)的一间窄小的居室中，西区是多彩多姿的世界，聚集了大大小小的影院剧院酒吧书店，也有索霍(Soho)区形形色色的色情商店，各种各样的人过往，加曼喜欢这大都市活泼多样。八十年代末，他的父亲去世了，他便用父亲留下的钱在海边买了一栋渔民的小屋，于是，作为英国人的爱田园、爱园艺的痴性迸发，小屋虽在核电站边，然而它毕竟面临大海，加曼命名之为“希望之屋”，每日锄地拔草，竟将荒土旧屋变成了最美丽的花园。他又去海边采集了无数大大小小的石子、石块，精心布置，加曼的花园便不仅是花草，而且也是独具匠心的现代雕塑馆了。如此的乐观，如此的雅兴，很难想象到他是位面对死亡的人，在这个花园中，他不仅制作了电影《花园》，而且出版了厚厚一本一九八九、一九九○两年间日记，题为《现代自然》 (Modern Nature)。“园艺原本就该是我生活的中心，也许我根本不该闯入电影世界。”花园拂平了他心中的许多骚动，加曼以一种乐观而博大的胸怀面对死亡，“坐在帆布椅上，看着太阳落下，又看着灯塔后晚霞中一轮满月升起，花园中的石头反射着月光，他们能听到我在厨房中轻声歌唱。”(一九八九年八月十五日)《现代自然》不仅是他这两年生活的记录，还有他对过去岁月的审视，自己的艺术、电影，自己的经历、爱情，见过的人，做过的事，这些都不是过眼烟云。自己曾活过，曾爱过，加曼无恨无悔，他曾说过，“性如海一般宽广，异性恋并不是‘正常’，而只是‘普通’罢了”，他的心也如海一般宽广。他晚期的电影已不像《塞巴斯蒂安》或《卡拉瓦乔》那样暴躁，富有进攻性，而是多了一层哲理和柔情。
整个银幕上是一片蓝色，只有音乐和一群声音：噪杂的医院声，喧嚣的海水声，主人公的陈述声。有时是荒诞感中的幽默，“我在一家鞋店前停下，但还是打消了买鞋的念头，脚上这双鞋已足够让我走进死亡了”；有时是对已因爱滋病去世的挚友的怀念，不断重复着那些名字，“大卫，霍华德，格雷厄姆，特瑞，保尔……”，“我已没有朋友了，他们不是已经死去就是正在死去”；有时是对虚伪社会的愤怒，“虽然有‘与爱滋共存’的口号，但在与爱滋的战斗中，我却不会赢。健康人只是利用病毒，而病人必须生存在爱滋中，人们对爱滋的知觉提高了，但有些东西却遗失了。现实感被戏剧化埋没，思想失明，变成盲人”。
这是加曼的《蓝色》，没有画面，只是蓝色。《蓝色》是加曼去医院治病的经过，描述了他与爱滋病共存的最后的岁月，是不同寻常的对病情的艺术性解释。拍摄这部电影时，加曼几乎已完全失明，他自知，这将是他的最后一部电影，他要“给人们一种感觉，最起码让人们感觉到死亡是怎么回事。”同时，这也是他在艺术上的最后一次创新，他拒绝表现物象、景致和人体，把电影的形式推到极致。蓝色，是裹尸布的颜色，是沉默、受难的颜色，却也是天空、大海和飞燕草的颜色。“爱琴海中的珍珠鱼，深深的海水，冲洗着死亡之岛……在轻柔的风中，丢失的男孩子，永远睡熟了，深深的拥抱，咸咸的嘴唇相吻……我们的名字将被忘记，没有人再会记住……在你的墓上，我放下一株飞燕草，一片蓝色。”
《蓝色》，是对恐惧和绝望的拒绝，是在死亡的利齿之间那种公然不服从的自由之态。“我献给你们这宇宙的蓝色，蓝色，是通往灵魂的一扇门，无尽的可能将变为现实。”
在最后一本书《自承风险》(At Your OwnRisk)中，加曼这样为自己写下了墓志铭：“今晚，我累极了，我的目光无法集中，我的身体逐渐消沉。同性恋的朋友们，在我离你们而去的时候，我会唱着歌离开。作为见证人，我必须写这个时代的悲伤，但并不是要拂去你们的笑容。请读一读我在字里行间所写的这个世界的关怀爱心，然后，把书合上，去爱吧！希望你们有更好的未来，无忧无虑地去爱。也请记住我们也曾爱过。夜幕逐渐掩下，星光便会露出。”
“我活在爱中！”
BLUE : Text of a film by Derek Jarman (1942-1994)
You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out. Saying
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in
I am sitting with some friends in this cafe drinking coffee served by young refugees from Bosnia. The war rages across the newspapers and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo.
Tania said 'Your clothes are on back to front and inside out". Since there were only two of us there I took them off and put them right then and there. I am always here before the doors open.
What need of so much news from abroad while all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within me.
I step off the kerb and a cyclist nearly knocks me down. Flying in from the dark he nearly parted my hair.
I step into a blue funk.
The doctor in St. Bartholomew's Hospital thought he could detect lesions in my retina - the pupils dilated with belladonna - the torch shone into them with a terrible blinding light.
Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right
Blue flashes in my eyes.
Blue Bottle buzzing
Lazy days
The sky blue butterfly
Sways on the 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.
I'm walking along the beach in a howling gale -
Another year is passing
In the roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My hearts memory turns to you
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul....
But what if this present
Were the world's last night
In the setting sun your love fades
Dies in the moonlight
Fails to rise
Thrice denied by cock crow
In the dawn's first light
Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right
The camera flash
Atomic bright
Photos
The CMV - a green moon then the world turns magenta
My retina
Is a distant planet
A red Mars
From a Boy's Own comic
With yellow infection
Bubbling at the corner
I said this looks like a planet
The doctor says - "Oh, I think
It looks like a pizza"
The worst of the illness is uncertainty. I've played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years.
Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.
I am home with the blinds drawn
H.B. is back from Newcastle
But gone out - the washing
Machine is roaring away
And the fridge is defrosting
These are his favourite sounds
I've been given the option of being an in-patient at the hospital or to coming in twice a day to be hooked to a drip. My vision will never come back.
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.
If I loose my sight will my vision be halved?
The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest.
It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancer spread across their faces - as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered their lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled - sweat poured through hair matter like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred - and then were lost forever. My pen chased this story across the page tossed this way and that in the storm.
The blood of sensibility is blue
I consecrate myself
To find its most perfect expression
My sight failed a little more in the night
H.B. offers me his blood
It will kill everything he says
The drip of DHPG
Trills like a canary
I am accompanied by a shadow into which H.B. appears and disappears. I have lost the sight on the periphery of my right eye.
I hold out my hands before me and slowly part them. At a certain moment they disappear out of the corner of my eyes. This is how I used to see. Now if I repeat the motion this is all I see.
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 AIDS while 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.
In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights to find a vein in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint if someone stuck a needle into your arm? I've got used to it - but I still shut my eyes.
The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.
Fate is the strongest
Fate Fated Fatal
I resign myself to Fate
Blind Fate
The drip stings
A lump swells up in my arm
Out comes the drip
An electric shock sparks up my arm
How can I walk away with a drip attached to me?
How am I going to walk away from this?
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 fill 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.
There is a photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leaving Bosnia. They look out of time. Peasant women with scarves and black dresses stepped from the pages of an older Europe. One of them has lost her three children.
Lightning flickers through the hospital window - at the door an elderly woman stands waiting for the rain to clear. I ask her if I can give her a lift, I've hailed a taxi. "Can you take me to Holborn tube?" On the way she breaks down in tears. She has come from Edinburgh. Her son is in the ward - he has meningitis and has lost the use of his legs - I'm helpless as the tears flow. I can't see her. Just the sound of her sobbing.
One know the whole world
Without stirring abroad
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven
The further one goes
The less one knows
In the pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal Blue
Blue an open door to soul
An infinite possibility
Becoming tangible
Here I am again in the waiting room. Hell on Earth is a waiting room. Here you know you are not in control of yourself, waiting for your name to be called: "712213". Here you have no name, confidentiality is nameless. Where is 666? Am I sitting opposite him/her? Maybe 666 is the demented woman switching the channels on the TV.
What do I see
Past the gates of conscience
Activists invading Sunday Mass
In the cathedral
An epic Czar Ivan denouncing the
Patriarch of Moscow
A moon-faced boy who spits and repeatedly
Crosses himself - as he genuflects
Will the pearly gates slam shut in
The faces of the devout
The demented woman is discussing needles - there is always a discussion here. She has a line put into her neck.
How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the most part we are invisible.
If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.
The dog barks, the caravan passes.
Marco Polo stumbles across the Blue Mountain.
Marco Polo stops and sits on a lapis throne by the River Oxus while he is ministered to by the descendants of Alexander the Great. The caravan approaches, blue canvasses fluttering in the wind. Blue people from over the sea - ultramarine - have come to collect the lapis with its flecks of gold.
The road to the city of Aqua Vitae is protected by a labyrinth built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight cause terrible blindness. The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them and drive you into madness.
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.
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
As a teenager I used to work for the Royal National Institute for the Blind on their Christmas appeal for radios, with dear miss Punch, seventy years old, who used to arrive each morning on her Harley Davidson.
She kept us on our toes. Her job as a gardener gave her time to spare in January. Miss Punch Leather Woman was the first out dyke I ever met. Closeted and frightened by my sexuality she was my hope. "Climb on, let's go for a ride." She looked like Edith Piaf, a sparrow, and wore a cock-eyed beret at a saucy angle. She bossed all the other old girls who came back year after year for her company.
In the paper today. Three quarters of the AIDS organisations are not providing safer sex information. One district said they had no queers in their community, but you might try district X - they have a theatre.
My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart - a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we are not talking about it. But I know the silence might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, "Help, Sister! Help Nurse!" followed by the sound of feet rushing along the corridor. Then silence.
Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Over the mountains is the shrine to Rita, where all at the end of the line call. Rita is the Saint of the Lost Cause. The saint of all who are at their wit's end, who are hedged in and trapped by the facts of the world. These facts, detached from cause, trapped the Blue Eyed Boy in a system of unreality. Would all these blurred facts that deceive dissolve in his last breath? For accustomed to believing in image, an absolute idea of value, his world had forgotten the command of essence: Thou Shall Not Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world.
I have walked behind the sky.
For what are you seeking?
The fathomless blue of Bliss.
To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance.
Remember,
To be going and to have are not eternal - fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle and the end.
For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.
How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
David ran home panicked on the train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears. Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Bearded Reaper, parched as the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to stone, petrified day by day, his mind imprisoned in a concrete fortress until all we could hear were his groans on the telephone circling the globe.
Mad Vincent sits on his yellow chair clasping his knees to his chest - Bananas. The sunflowers wilt in the empty pot, bone dry, skeletal, the black seeds picked into the staring face of a Halloween pumpkin. He is unaware of Blue standing in the corner. Fevered eyes glare at the jaundiced corn, caw of the jet-black crows spiralling in the yellow. The lemon goblin stares from the unwanted canvasses thrown in a corner. Sourpuss suicide screams with evil - clasping cowardly Yellowbelly, slit eyed.
Blue fights diseased Yellowbelly whose fetid breath scorches the trees yellow with ague. Betrayal is the oxygen of his devilry. He'll stab you in the back. Yellowbelly places a jaundiced kiss in the air, the stink of pubs blinds Blue's eyes. Evil swims in the yellow bile. Yellowbelly's snake eyes poison. He crawls over Eve's rotting apple wasp-like. Quick as a flash he stings Blue in the mouth - "AAAUGH!" - his hellish legion buzz and chuckle in the mustard gas. They'll piss all over you. Sharp nicotine-stained fangs bared. Blue transformed into an insectocutor, his Blue aura frying the foes.
We all contemplated suicide
We hoped for euthanasia
We were lulled into believing
Morphine dispelled pain
Rather than making it tangible
Like a mad Disney cartoon
Transforming itself into
Every conceivable nightmare
Karl killed himself - how did he do it? I never asked. It seemed incidental. What did it matter if he swigged prussic acid or shot himself in the eye. Maybe he dived into the streets from high up in the cloud lapped skyscrapers.
The nurse explains the implant. You mix the drugs and drip yourself once a day. The drugs are kept in a small fridge they give you. Can you imagine travelling around with that? The metal implant will set the bomb detector off in airports, and I can just see myself travelling to Berlin with a fridge under my arm.
Impatient youths of the sun
Burning with many colours
Flick combs through hair
In bathroom mirrors
F**King with fusion and fashion
Dance in the beams of emerald lasers
Mating on suburban duvets
Cum splattered nuclear breeders
What a time that was.
The drip ticks out the seconds, the source of a stream along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea of years and the timeless ocean.
The side effects of DHPG, the drug for which I have to come into hospital to be dripped twice a day, are: Low white blood cell count, increased risk of infection, low platelet count which may increase the risk of bleeding, low red blood cell count (anaemia), fever, rush, abnormal liver function, chills, swelling of the body (oedema), infections, malaise, irregular heart beat, high blood pressure (hypertension), low blood pressure (hypotension), abnormal thoughts or dreams, loss of balance (ataxia), come, confusion, dizziness, headache, nervousness, damage to nerves (peristhecia), psychosis, sleepiness (somnolence), shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite (anorexia), diarrhoea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal haemorrhage), abdominal pain, increased number of one type of white blood cell, low blood sugar, shortness of breath, hair loss (alopecia), itching (pruritus), hives, blood in the urine, abnormal kidney functions, increased blood urea, redness (inflammation), pain or irritation (phlebitis).
Retinal detachments have been observed in patients both before and after initiation of therapy. The drug has caused decreased sperm production in animals and may cause infertility in humans, and birth defects in animals. Although there is no information in human studies, it should be considered a potential carcinogen since it causes tumours in animals.
If you are concerned about any of the above side-effects or if you would like any further information, please ask your doctor.
In order to be put on the drug you have to sign a piece of paper stating you understand that all these illnesses are a possibility.
I really can't see what I am to do. I am going to sign it.
The darkness comes in with the tide
The year slips on the calendar
Your kiss flares
A match struck in the night
Flares and dies
My slumber broken
Kiss me again
Kiss me
Kiss me again
And again
Never enough
Greedy lips
Speedwell eyes
Blue skies
A man sits in his wheelchair, his awry, munching through a packet of dry biscuits, slow and deliberate as a praying mantis. He speaks enthusiastically but sometimes incoherently of the hospice. he says, "You can't be too careful who you mix with there, there's no way of telling the visitors, patients or staff apart. The staff have nothing to identify them except they are all in leather. The place is like an S&M club". This hospice has been built by charity, the names of the donors displayed for all to see.
Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care and is terrible for those dependent on it. It has become big business as the government shirks its responsibilities in these uncaring times. We go along with this, so the rich and powerful who F**Ked us over once F**K us over again and get it both ways. We have always been mistreated, so if anyone gives us the slightest sympathy we overreact with our thanks.
I am a mannish
Muff diving
Size queen
With bad attitude
An arse licking
Psychofag
Molesting the flies of privacy
Balling lesbian boys
A perverted heterodemon
Crossing purpose with death
I am a cock sucking
Straight acting
Lesbian man
With ball crushing bad manners
Laddish nymphomaniac politics
Spunky sexist desires
of incestuous inversion and
Incorrect terminology
I am a Not Gay
H.B. is in the kitchen
Greasing his hair
He guards the space
Against me
He calls it his office
At nine we leave for the hospital
H.B. comes back from the eye dept
Where all my notes are muddled
He says
It's like Romania in there
Two light bulbs
Grimly illuminate
The flaking walls
There is a box of dolls
In the corner
Indescribably grim
The doctor says
Well of course
The kids don't see them
There are no resources
To brighten the place up
My eyes sting from the drops
The infection has halted
The flash leaves
Scarlet after image
Of the blood vessels in my eye
Teeth chattering February
Cold as death
Pushes at the bedsheets
An aching cold
Interminable as marble
My mind
Frosted with drugs ices up
A drift of empty snowflakes
Whiting out memory
A blinkered twister
Circling in spirals
Cross-eyed meddlesome consciousness
Shall I? Will I?
Doodling death watch
Mind how you go
Oral DHPG is consumed by the liver, so they have tweaked a molecule to fool the system. What risk is there? If I had to live forty years blind, I might think twice. Treat my illness like the dodgems: music, bright lights, bumps and throw yourself into life again.
The pills are the most difficult, some taste bitter, others are too large. I'm taking about thirty a day, a walking chemical laboratory. I gag on them as I swallow them and they come up half dissolved in the coughing and the spluttering.
My skins sits on me like the shirt of Nessus. My face irritates, as do my back and legs at night. I toss and turn, scratching, unable to sleep. I get up, turn on the light. Stagger to the bathroom. If I become so tired, maybe I'll sleep. Films chase through my mind. Once in a while I dream a dream as magnificent as the Taj Mahal. I cross southern India with a young spirit guide - India the land of my dreaming childhood. The souvenirs in Moslem's peach and grey living room. Granny called Moselle, called 'Girly', called May. An orphan who lost her name, which was Ruben. jade, monkeys, ivory miniatures, mah-jongg. The winds and bamboos of China.
All the old taboos of
Blood lines and blood banks
Blue blood and bad blood
Our blood and your blood
I sit here - you sit there
As I slept a jet slammed into a tower block. The jet was almost empty but two hundred people were fried in their sleep.
The earth is dying and we do not notice it.
A young man frail as Belsen
Walks slowly down the corridor
His pale green hospital pyjamas
Hanging off him
It's very quiet
Just the distant coughing
My jugs eye blots out the
Young man who has just walked past
My field of vision
This illness knocks you for six
Just as you start to forget it
A bullet in the back of my head
Might be easier
You know, you can take longer than
The second world war to get to the grave.
Ages and Aeons quit the room
Exploding into timelessness
No entrances or exits now
No need for obituaries or final judgements
We knew that time would end
After tomorrow at sunrise
We scrubbed the floors
And did the washing up
It would not catch us unawares
The white flashes you are experiencing in your eyes are common when the retina is damaged.
The damaged retina has started to peel away leaving the innumerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings around in the twilight.
I am back at St Mary's to have my eyes looked at by the specialist. The place is the same, but there is new staff. How relieved I am not to have the operation this morning to have a tap put into my chest. I must try and cheer up H.B. as he has had a hell of a fortnight. In the waiting room a little grey man over the way is fretting as he has to get to Sussex. He says, "I am going blind, I cannot read any longer".
A little later he picks up a newspaper, struggles with it for a moment and throws it back on the table. My stinging eye-drops have stopped me reading, so I write this in a haze of belladonna. The little grey man's face has fallen into tragedy. He looks like Jean Cocteau without the poet's refined arrogance. The room is full of men and women squinting into the dark in different states of illness. Some barely able to walk, distress and anger on every face and then a terrible resignation.
Jean Cocteau takes off his glasses, he looks about him with an undescribable meanness. He has black slip-on shoes, blue socks, grey trousers, a Fairisle sweater and a herringbone jacket. The posters that plaster the walls above him have endless question marks, HIV/AIDS?, AIDS?, HIV?, ARE YOU INFECTED BY HIV/AIDS?,ARC?, HIV? This is a hard wait. The shattering bright light of the eye specialist's camera leaves that empty sky blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colours change to pink and the light turns to orange. The process is a torture, but the result, stable eyesight, worth the price and the twelve pills I have to take a day. Sometimes looking at them I fell nauseous and want to skip them. It must be my association with H.B., lover of the computer and king of the keyboard that brought my luck on the computer which chose my name for this drug trial. I nearly forgot as I left St Mary's I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile back.
I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. I thought of going in and buying a pair, but stopped myself. The shoes I am wearing at the moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life.
Pearl fishers
In azure seas
Deep waters
Washing the isle of the dead
In coral harbours
Amphora
Spill
Gold
Across the still seabed
We lie there
Fanned by the billowing
Sails of forgotten ships
Tossed by the mournful winds
Of the deep
Lost Boys
Sleep forever
In a dear embrace
Salt lips touching
In submarine gardens
Cool marble fingers
Touch an antique smile
Shell sounds
Whisper
Deep love drifting on the tide forever
The smell of him
Dead good looking
In beauty's summer
His blue jeans
Around his ankles
Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
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
《蓝色》是加曼去医院治病的经过，描述了他与艾滋病共存的最后岁月，是不同寻常的对病情的艺术性解释。
《蓝色》是对恐惧和绝望的拒绝，是在死亡的利齿之间那种公然不服从的自由之态。
德里克·加曼(DerekJarman)死了，死于爱滋病，死在英国众议院投票决定同性恋合法年龄的前两天，没能再与朋友们共聚在泰晤士河畔的寒风中，那凛冽初春之夜的朵朵烛光，是同性恋者们对平等的合法年龄的期待，是对投票结果的愤怒(在英国，异性恋合法年龄是十六岁，同性恋合法年龄原本是二十一岁，这次投票的结果是降低到十八岁，但许多人认为问题的关键不在于年龄是多少，而在于平等不平等)，也成了为加曼送葬的挽歌。
德里克·加曼，画家，诗人，电影导演，独立制片人，同性恋权利活动家，向来坦率、直言，极有艺术情趣和创造力，又独立于世，桀骜不驯。特别是他发现自己携带爱滋病毒后，更以其真诚、勇毅、智慧，为同性恋者寻求正义和公理，成为先锋艺术家们和年轻的同性恋者们的偶像、精神支柱和行动楷模，却也因此成为这个传统保守国度中许多人的眼中钉、肉中刺。他是主动要求医生对他停止用药的，他的双目已完全失明，皮肤、肌肉都在脱落，然而他却死得极有尊严，表现出超人的耐心、毅力和勇气。虽有人说他死得活该，但更多的人，包括同性恋反对者，却为他一掬钦佩感动之泪。不论如何，他的死，无疑是英国电影界的极大损失。
加曼是英国人，加曼是同性恋，这是他生活中最重要的两个事实，也是始终纠缠在他的艺术中的两个主题。他出生于一九四二年，父亲是皇家空军的官员，加曼从小在意大利和印度的空军基地上长大。他与父亲的关系并不甚好，而母亲早染癌症，全靠加曼和妹妹照顾。加曼自幼钟爱画画，但父亲却规定他去伦敦大学国王学院学历史和英文，加曼遵从父命于一九六三年完成学业，旋即进入Slade艺术学院中学习绘画，加入六十年代自由放任的狂欢宴会。他的同学中有当代英国艺术家霍克尼(David Hockney)，普洛克特(Patrick Procktor)和克拉克(Ossie C1arke)，在波微广场霍克尼的家中，在德瑞街的艺术实验室中，在圆房子的生活剧场中，他们的衣服越来越鲜亮了，他们的音乐越来越狂野了。霍克尼的满头金发在舞场中飞动，加曼仿佛第一次 “从很高的跳台跳水下去”，骤然发现“颓废是才智的第一表现”，“每个我认识的人都认识其他人，我们生活在一起，像是整整一代人生活在一起”。在此期间，加曼作为一个艺术家小有成功，他参加一九六七年塔特画廊的青年艺术家画展，一九六八年在利森画廊举行第一次个人画展，同时，他也写诗，从事舞台设计。到了七十年代，英国导演罗素(Ken Russell)请他设计电影《野蛮的救世主》(The Savage Mes－siah)和《魔鬼》 (TheDavil)，加曼才发现了最能表现他的思想的艺术形式：摄影机能制造出联系过去和现在的意象，这种意象既表达现实，也能伸展到历史和神话中去。对历史的浓厚的兴趣，使加曼和其他的先锋艺术家们大有不同，由绘画而进入电影，更使他有别于传统的电影导演们。电影的形式自二十年代后就没有变过，加曼二十年来许多独出心裁的实验给电影界带来一阵清风，让不少人欣喜，却也让很多人心惊。
加曼拍片一直用最简陋最原始的摄影机，背景常布置在画室或伦敦一些废弃的大仓库中，一方面自然是因为作为独立制片人，经费向来是问题，另一方面也因为在加曼看来，电影最重要的不是情节、故事，不是场面是否大，而是电影所要表达的导演的思想。他的电影都很个性化，作为一位抽象派的画家，他摄影机下那些如梦如幻的意境，也都很抽象。
一九七五年，加曼拍摄了第一部公开放映的电影《塞巴斯蒂安》(sebastine)，这部电影结构松散，叙述了基督教早期圣徒塞巴斯蒂安的一生，他所受的折磨和他的献身精神。三年后，他又拍了《庆典》(Jubilee)，把历史引入现实，表现了女王伊利莎白一世在她的魔术师的陪同下共游七十年代朋克 (Punk)的伦敦城，真实地纪录了那个时代颓废疯狂的亚文化(subculture)。这两部新奇的电影让人耳目一新，然而毁誉并至，《塞巴斯蒂安》中，加曼让他的人物都讲拉丁语，配以英文字幕，而且还有许多男子的裸体以及男子同性恋的性爱场面；《庆典》中的伦敦是毁坏、衰败的，女王也成了后现代主义的形象；这很让一些自认“身心纯洁”的人受不了，斥之为“腐败、恶劣、肮脏”。一九七九年，加曼拍摄了根据莎士比亚剧作改编的《暴风雨》，同样是现实、神话与历史的交融。同时，他也开始酝酿拍摄《卡拉瓦乔》(Caravag－gio)，然而经费和计划落实，却要在七年以后。
一六一 ○年七月，西西里Porto Ercole的海滩慵懒地伸展在热气中，米凯莱·卡拉瓦乔奄奄一息。自从四年前那场在罗马的斗殴之后，他流浪在那波里，在马耳他，在西西里。终于，听到了教皇赦免他的传令，于是，“他收拾了仅有的几样东西，租了条小船打算回罗马，然而在海滩上，他却又无辜被抓了起来，两天后从监狱里出来，他的船已不在那里。在愤怒和绝望中，他在七月酷暑的烈日下沿着沙滩奔跑，希望能看见那条船”，然而他倒下了，牧人们把他抬到山顶，他发着高烧，几天后，他死了。这一年，他三十九岁。
卡拉瓦乔，意大利文艺复兴后期的最重要的一位画家，黑头发、黑眼睛、深色的皮肤。他的形象是他画笔下的许多画面，他的颜色是他的画面的主调。他粗犷、好斗，总是在寻找机会或是伤害自己，或是伤害他人。他爱女人，更爱男人，最爱的还是那把从不离身的短剑。他作画不守传统路数，许多后代人受他的影响，却也有人认为他破坏了绘画艺术。从这位自我陶醉、满身不服从、充满勇气和破坏性的卡拉瓦乔身上，加曼仿佛看到了自己。《卡拉瓦乔》，是他最珍爱的题材。于是，他在伦敦一间大仓库中重构文艺复兴后的罗马：白门白墙，酒肆草垛的街景；精力过盛，热情暴躁的意大利人。他更在重构卡拉瓦乔的画室和他的一幅幅画面；巨大的画布，石臼中刚磨出的鲜艳的赭红色，阴沉的黑色；手捧水果篮的男孩，被蝎子螫了手的少年，“年轻人的音乐会”上四位乐手娇润的面颊和颤动的琴弦；还有罗诺其，那位卡拉瓦乔所爱着的最终又被他用短剑刺死的罗诺其，健美、粗俗、贪婪，身披红丝绒扮演着圣马修，扮演施洗约翰。卡拉瓦乔的一幅幅杰作在加曼的摄影机下被重新画过，画面上的人物成了围绕卡拉瓦乔的故事，虽少情节，却惊心动魄。水果鲜花、男人的躯体都透着欲滴的诱惑和欲望，美杜莎头上乱蛇飞舞，颈断处鲜血淋漓，张开的嘴哭号出最后一声恐惧，那形象却显然又是卡拉瓦乔自己。在短剑的寒光中，卡拉瓦乔的画面充满杀气。
《卡拉瓦乔》终于拍完了，在柏林电影节上获得很大成功。这七年中所遇到的阻力，舆论界所施与的种种压力，让加曼对同性恋文化和同性恋权力有了更深刻的认识，他成了头脑最清醒的同性恋权利的支持者、争取者。一九八六年圣诞节前夕，《卡拉瓦乔》公映之后，加曼去医院做了爱滋病毒检查，结果不出他所料，是阳性。一个月后，他公开宣布了他的病情。八年之前，很少有人有勇气公开承认自己是同性恋者，更少有人有勇气承认自己得了爱滋病，加曼似乎成了第一个公开站出来道出真相的人。以后，有人问他为何当初要这样做，他说：“我这样做是为我自己，为我的自尊。我一生都在力争活得坦白、明了、被人接受，有时，竟发现自己周围的人都那么恐惧、不幸福，他们害怕告诉别人他们生活的真相。所以，我这样做是为我自己，并不是为别人，如果我的做法无意中帮助了一些人，那我会很高兴。”“我不是一个代言人，我只谈我自己。”
于是，死亡每时每刻都会降临，加曼的时间紧迫起来，病情在恶化，但他的创作却进入了旺盛时期。一九八七年《最后的英格兰》(The Last of England)，一九八八年《战地挽歌》(War Requiem)，一九九○年《花园》(The Garden)，一九九一年《爱德华二世》(EdwardⅡ)，一九九三年《维特根斯坦》(Wittgenstein)，直到最后一部影片，他去世前不久拍摄的《蓝色》(Blue)。在拍摄电影的同时，他也不断地有书出版，自传，日记，电影脚本兼拍摄札记，都是些流畅的散文，笔调很有诗意，也很干净。同时，他又提起画笔作画，在曼城，在伦敦，在日本都举行过画展。
不间断地工作的同时，加曼的生活也有了变化，十几年来，他一直住在伦敦西区(West End)的一间窄小的居室中，西区是多彩多姿的世界，聚集了大大小小的影院剧院酒吧书店，也有索霍(Soho)区形形色色的色情商店，各种各样的人过往，加曼喜欢这大都市活泼多样。八十年代末，他的父亲去世了，他便用父亲留下的钱在海边买了一栋渔民的小屋，于是，作为英国人的爱田园、爱园艺的痴性迸发，小屋虽在核电站边，然而它毕竟面临大海，加曼命名之为“希望之屋”，每日锄地拔草，竟将荒土旧屋变成了最美丽的花园。他又去海边采集了无数大大小小的石子、石块，精心布置，加曼的花园便不仅是花草，而且也是独具匠心的现代雕塑馆了。如此的乐观，如此的雅兴，很难想象到他是位面对死亡的人，在这个花园中，他不仅制作了电影《花园》，而且出版了厚厚一本一九八九、一九九○两年间日记，题为《现代自然》 (Modern Nature)。“园艺原本就该是我生活的中心，也许我根本不该闯入电影世界。”花园拂平了他心中的许多骚动，加曼以一种乐观而博大的胸怀面对死亡，“坐在帆布椅上，看着太阳落下，又看着灯塔后晚霞中一轮满月升起，花园中的石头反射着月光，他们能听到我在厨房中轻声歌唱。”(一九八九年八月十五日)《现代自然》不仅是他这两年生活的记录，还有他对过去岁月的审视，自己的艺术、电影，自己的经历、爱情，见过的人，做过的事，这些都不是过眼烟云。自己曾活过，曾爱过，加曼无恨无悔，他曾说过，“性如海一般宽广，异性恋并不是‘正常’，而只是‘普通’罢了”，他的心也如海一般宽广。他晚期的电影已不像《塞巴斯蒂安》或《卡拉瓦乔》那样暴躁，富有进攻性，而是多了一层哲理和柔情。
整个银幕上是一片蓝色，只有音乐和一群声音：噪杂的医院声，喧嚣的海水声，主人公的陈述声。有时是荒诞感中的幽默，“我在一家鞋店前停下，但还是打消了买鞋的念头，脚上这双鞋已足够让我走进死亡了”；有时是对已因爱滋病去世的挚友的怀念，不断重复着那些名字，“大卫，霍华德，格雷厄姆，特瑞，保尔……”，“我已没有朋友了，他们不是已经死去就是正在死去”；有时是对虚伪社会的愤怒，“虽然有‘与爱滋共存’的口号，但在与爱滋的战斗中，我却不会赢。健康人只是利用病毒，而病人必须生存在爱滋中，人们对爱滋的知觉提高了，但有些东西却遗失了。现实感被戏剧化埋没，思想失明，变成盲人”。
这是加曼的《蓝色》，没有画面，只是蓝色。《蓝色》是加曼去医院治病的经过，描述了他与爱滋病共存的最后的岁月，是不同寻常的对病情的艺术性解释。拍摄这部电影时，加曼几乎已完全失明，他自知，这将是他的最后一部电影，他要“给人们一种感觉，最起码让人们感觉到死亡是怎么回事。”同时，这也是他在艺术上的最后一次创新，他拒绝表现物象、景致和人体，把电影的形式推到极致。蓝色，是裹尸布的颜色，是沉默、受难的颜色，却也是天空、大海和飞燕草的颜色。“爱琴海中的珍珠鱼，深深的海水，冲洗着死亡之岛……在轻柔的风中，丢失的男孩子，永远睡熟了，深深的拥抱，咸咸的嘴唇相吻……我们的名字将被忘记，没有人再会记住……在你的墓上，我放下一株飞燕草，一片蓝色。”
《蓝色》，是对恐惧和绝望的拒绝，是在死亡的利齿之间那种公然不服从的自由之态。“我献给你们这宇宙的蓝色，蓝色，是通往灵魂的一扇门，无尽的可能将变为现实。”
在最后一本书《自承风险》(At Your OwnRisk)中，加曼这样为自己写下了墓志铭：“今晚，我累极了，我的目光无法集中，我的身体逐渐消沉。同性恋的朋友们，在我离你们而去的时候，我会唱着歌离开。作为见证人，我必须写这个时代的悲伤，但并不是要拂去你们的笑容。请读一读我在字里行间所写的这个世界的关怀爱心，然后，把书合上，去爱吧！希望你们有更好的未来，无忧无虑地去爱。也请记住我们也曾爱过。夜幕逐渐掩下，星光便会露出。”
“我活在爱中！”
BLUE : Text of a film by Derek Jarman (1942-1994)
You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out. Saying
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in
I am sitting with some friends in this cafe drinking coffee served by young refugees from Bosnia. The war rages across the newspapers and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo.
Tania said 'Your clothes are on back to front and inside out". Since there were only two of us there I took them off and put them right then and there. I am always here before the doors open.
What need of so much news from abroad while all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within me.
I step off the kerb and a cyclist nearly knocks me down. Flying in from the dark he nearly parted my hair.
I step into a blue funk.
The doctor in St. Bartholomew's Hospital thought he could detect lesions in my retina - the pupils dilated with belladonna - the torch shone into them with a terrible blinding light.
Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right
Blue flashes in my eyes.
Blue Bottle buzzing
Lazy days
The sky blue butterfly
Sways on the 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.
I'm walking along the beach in a howling gale -
Another year is passing
In the roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My hearts memory turns to you
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul....
But what if this present
Were the world's last night
In the setting sun your love fades
Dies in the moonlight
Fails to rise
Thrice denied by cock crow
In the dawn's first light
Look left
Look down
Look up
Look right
The camera flash
Atomic bright
Photos
The CMV - a green moon then the world turns magenta
My retina
Is a distant planet
A red Mars
From a Boy's Own comic
With yellow infection
Bubbling at the corner
I said this looks like a planet
The doctor says - "Oh, I think
It looks like a pizza"
The worst of the illness is uncertainty. I've played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years.
Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.
I am home with the blinds drawn
H.B. is back from Newcastle
But gone out - the washing
Machine is roaring away
And the fridge is defrosting
These are his favourite sounds
I've been given the option of being an in-patient at the hospital or to coming in twice a day to be hooked to a drip. My vision will never come back.
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.
If I loose my sight will my vision be halved?
The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest.
It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancer spread across their faces - as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered their lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled - sweat poured through hair matter like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred - and then were lost forever. My pen chased this story across the page tossed this way and that in the storm.
The blood of sensibility is blue
I consecrate myself
To find its most perfect expression
My sight failed a little more in the night
H.B. offers me his blood
It will kill everything he says
The drip of DHPG
Trills like a canary
I am accompanied by a shadow into which H.B. appears and disappears. I have lost the sight on the periphery of my right eye.
I hold out my hands before me and slowly part them. At a certain moment they disappear out of the corner of my eyes. This is how I used to see. Now if I repeat the motion this is all I see.
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 AIDS while 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.
In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights to find a vein in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint if someone stuck a needle into your arm? I've got used to it - but I still shut my eyes.
The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.
Fate is the strongest
Fate Fated Fatal
I resign myself to Fate
Blind Fate
The drip stings
A lump swells up in my arm
Out comes the drip
An electric shock sparks up my arm
How can I walk away with a drip attached to me?
How am I going to walk away from this?
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 fill 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.
There is a photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leaving Bosnia. They look out of time. Peasant women with scarves and black dresses stepped from the pages of an older Europe. One of them has lost her three children.
Lightning flickers through the hospital window - at the door an elderly woman stands waiting for the rain to clear. I ask her if I can give her a lift, I've hailed a taxi. "Can you take me to Holborn tube?" On the way she breaks down in tears. She has come from Edinburgh. Her son is in the ward - he has meningitis and has lost the use of his legs - I'm helpless as the tears flow. I can't see her. Just the sound of her sobbing.
One know the whole world
Without stirring abroad
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven
The further one goes
The less one knows
In the pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal Blue
Blue an open door to soul
An infinite possibility
Becoming tangible
Here I am again in the waiting room. Hell on Earth is a waiting room. Here you know you are not in control of yourself, waiting for your name to be called: "712213". Here you have no name, confidentiality is nameless. Where is 666? Am I sitting opposite him/her? Maybe 666 is the demented woman switching the channels on the TV.
What do I see
Past the gates of conscience
Activists invading Sunday Mass
In the cathedral
An epic Czar Ivan denouncing the
Patriarch of Moscow
A moon-faced boy who spits and repeatedly
Crosses himself - as he genuflects
Will the pearly gates slam shut in
The faces of the devout
The demented woman is discussing needles - there is always a discussion here. She has a line put into her neck.
How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the most part we are invisible.
If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.
The dog barks, the caravan passes.
Marco Polo stumbles across the Blue Mountain.
Marco Polo stops and sits on a lapis throne by the River Oxus while he is ministered to by the descendants of Alexander the Great. The caravan approaches, blue canvasses fluttering in the wind. Blue people from over the sea - ultramarine - have come to collect the lapis with its flecks of gold.
The road to the city of Aqua Vitae is protected by a labyrinth built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight cause terrible blindness. The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them and drive you into madness.
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.
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
As a teenager I used to work for the Royal National Institute for the Blind on their Christmas appeal for radios, with dear miss Punch, seventy years old, who used to arrive each morning on her Harley Davidson.
She kept us on our toes. Her job as a gardener gave her time to spare in January. Miss Punch Leather Woman was the first out dyke I ever met. Closeted and frightened by my sexuality she was my hope. "Climb on, let's go for a ride." She looked like Edith Piaf, a sparrow, and wore a cock-eyed beret at a saucy angle. She bossed all the other old girls who came back year after year for her company.
In the paper today. Three quarters of the AIDS organisations are not providing safer sex information. One district said they had no queers in their community, but you might try district X - they have a theatre.
My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart - a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we are not talking about it. But I know the silence might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, "Help, Sister! Help Nurse!" followed by the sound of feet rushing along the corridor. Then silence.
Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is darkness made visible
Over the mountains is the shrine to Rita, where all at the end of the line call. Rita is the Saint of the Lost Cause. The saint of all who are at their wit's end, who are hedged in and trapped by the facts of the world. These facts, detached from cause, trapped the Blue Eyed Boy in a system of unreality. Would all these blurred facts that deceive dissolve in his last breath? For accustomed to believing in image, an absolute idea of value, his world had forgotten the command of essence: Thou Shall Not Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from image.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world.
I have walked behind the sky.
For what are you seeking?
The fathomless blue of Bliss.
To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance.
Remember,
To be going and to have are not eternal - fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle and the end.
For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.
How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
David ran home panicked on the train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears. Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Bearded Reaper, parched as the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to stone, petrified day by day, his mind imprisoned in a concrete fortress until all we could hear were his groans on the telephone circling the globe.
Mad Vincent sits on his yellow chair clasping his knees to his chest - Bananas. The sunflowers wilt in the empty pot, bone dry, skeletal, the black seeds picked into the staring face of a Halloween pumpkin. He is unaware of Blue standing in the corner. Fevered eyes glare at the jaundiced corn, caw of the jet-black crows spiralling in the yellow. The lemon goblin stares from the unwanted canvasses thrown in a corner. Sourpuss suicide screams with evil - clasping cowardly Yellowbelly, slit eyed.
Blue fights diseased Yellowbelly whose fetid breath scorches the trees yellow with ague. Betrayal is the oxygen of his devilry. He'll stab you in the back. Yellowbelly places a jaundiced kiss in the air, the stink of pubs blinds Blue's eyes. Evil swims in the yellow bile. Yellowbelly's snake eyes poison. He crawls over Eve's rotting apple wasp-like. Quick as a flash he stings Blue in the mouth - "AAAUGH!" - his hellish legion buzz and chuckle in the mustard gas. They'll piss all over you. Sharp nicotine-stained fangs bared. Blue transformed into an insectocutor, his Blue aura frying the foes.
We all contemplated suicide
We hoped for euthanasia
We were lulled into believing
Morphine dispelled pain
Rather than making it tangible
Like a mad Disney cartoon
Transforming itself into
Every conceivable nightmare
Karl killed himself - how did he do it? I never asked. It seemed incidental. What did it matter if he swigged prussic acid or shot himself in the eye. Maybe he dived into the streets from high up in the cloud lapped skyscrapers.
The nurse explains the implant. You mix the drugs and drip yourself once a day. The drugs are kept in a small fridge they give you. Can you imagine travelling around with that? The metal implant will set the bomb detector off in airports, and I can just see myself travelling to Berlin with a fridge under my arm.
Impatient youths of the sun
Burning with many colours
Flick combs through hair
In bathroom mirrors
F**King with fusion and fashion
Dance in the beams of emerald lasers
Mating on suburban duvets
Cum splattered nuclear breeders
What a time that was.
The drip ticks out the seconds, the source of a stream along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea of years and the timeless ocean.
The side effects of DHPG, the drug for which I have to come into hospital to be dripped twice a day, are: Low white blood cell count, increased risk of infection, low platelet count which may increase the risk of bleeding, low red blood cell count (anaemia), fever, rush, abnormal liver function, chills, swelling of the body (oedema), infections, malaise, irregular heart beat, high blood pressure (hypertension), low blood pressure (hypotension), abnormal thoughts or dreams, loss of balance (ataxia), come, confusion, dizziness, headache, nervousness, damage to nerves (peristhecia), psychosis, sleepiness (somnolence), shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite (anorexia), diarrhoea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal haemorrhage), abdominal pain, increased number of one type of white blood cell, low blood sugar, shortness of breath, hair loss (alopecia), itching (pruritus), hives, blood in the urine, abnormal kidney functions, increased blood urea, redness (inflammation), pain or irritation (phlebitis).
Retinal detachments have been observed in patients both before and after initiation of therapy. The drug has caused decreased sperm production in animals and may cause infertility in humans, and birth defects in animals. Although there is no information in human studies, it should be considered a potential carcinogen since it causes tumours in animals.
If you are concerned about any of the above side-effects or if you would like any further information, please ask your doctor.
In order to be put on the drug you have to sign a piece of paper stating you understand that all these illnesses are a possibility.
I really can't see what I am to do. I am going to sign it.
The darkness comes in with the tide
The year slips on the calendar
Your kiss flares
A match struck in the night
Flares and dies
My slumber broken
Kiss me again
Kiss me
Kiss me again
And again
Never enough
Greedy lips
Speedwell eyes
Blue skies
A man sits in his wheelchair, his awry, munching through a packet of dry biscuits, slow and deliberate as a praying mantis. He speaks enthusiastically but sometimes incoherently of the hospice. he says, "You can't be too careful who you mix with there, there's no way of telling the visitors, patients or staff apart. The staff have nothing to identify them except they are all in leather. The place is like an S&M club". This hospice has been built by charity, the names of the donors displayed for all to see.
Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care and is terrible for those dependent on it. It has become big business as the government shirks its responsibilities in these uncaring times. We go along with this, so the rich and powerful who F**Ked us over once F**K us over again and get it both ways. We have always been mistreated, so if anyone gives us the slightest sympathy we overreact with our thanks.
I am a mannish
Muff diving
Size queen
With bad attitude
An arse licking
Psychofag
Molesting the flies of privacy
Balling lesbian boys
A perverted heterodemon
Crossing purpose with death
I am a cock sucking
Straight acting
Lesbian man
With ball crushing bad manners
Laddish nymphomaniac politics
Spunky sexist desires
of incestuous inversion and
Incorrect terminology
I am a Not Gay
H.B. is in the kitchen
Greasing his hair
He guards the space
Against me
He calls it his office
At nine we leave for the hospital
H.B. comes back from the eye dept
Where all my notes are muddled
He says
It's like Romania in there
Two light bulbs
Grimly illuminate
The flaking walls
There is a box of dolls
In the corner
Indescribably grim
The doctor says
Well of course
The kids don't see them
There are no resources
To brighten the place up
My eyes sting from the drops
The infection has halted
The flash leaves
Scarlet after image
Of the blood vessels in my eye
Teeth chattering February
Cold as death
Pushes at the bedsheets
An aching cold
Interminable as marble
My mind
Frosted with drugs ices up
A drift of empty snowflakes
Whiting out memory
A blinkered twister
Circling in spirals
Cross-eyed meddlesome consciousness
Shall I? Will I?
Doodling death watch
Mind how you go
Oral DHPG is consumed by the liver, so they have tweaked a molecule to fool the system. What risk is there? If I had to live forty years blind, I might think twice. Treat my illness like the dodgems: music, bright lights, bumps and throw yourself into life again.
The pills are the most difficult, some taste bitter, others are too large. I'm taking about thirty a day, a walking chemical laboratory. I gag on them as I swallow them and they come up half dissolved in the coughing and the spluttering.
My skins sits on me like the shirt of Nessus. My face irritates, as do my back and legs at night. I toss and turn, scratching, unable to sleep. I get up, turn on the light. Stagger to the bathroom. If I become so tired, maybe I'll sleep. Films chase through my mind. Once in a while I dream a dream as magnificent as the Taj Mahal. I cross southern India with a young spirit guide - India the land of my dreaming childhood. The souvenirs in Moslem's peach and grey living room. Granny called Moselle, called 'Girly', called May. An orphan who lost her name, which was Ruben. jade, monkeys, ivory miniatures, mah-jongg. The winds and bamboos of China.
All the old taboos of
Blood lines and blood banks
Blue blood and bad blood
Our blood and your blood
I sit here - you sit there
As I slept a jet slammed into a tower block. The jet was almost empty but two hundred people were fried in their sleep.
The earth is dying and we do not notice it.
A young man frail as Belsen
Walks slowly down the corridor
His pale green hospital pyjamas
Hanging off him
It's very quiet
Just the distant coughing
My jugs eye blots out the
Young man who has just walked past
My field of vision
This illness knocks you for six
Just as you start to forget it
A bullet in the back of my head
Might be easier
You know, you can take longer than
The second world war to get to the grave.
Ages and Aeons quit the room
Exploding into timelessness
No entrances or exits now
No need for obituaries or final judgements
We knew that time would end
After tomorrow at sunrise
We scrubbed the floors
And did the washing up
It would not catch us unawares
The white flashes you are experiencing in your eyes are common when the retina is damaged.
The damaged retina has started to peel away leaving the innumerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings around in the twilight.
I am back at St Mary's to have my eyes looked at by the specialist. The place is the same, but there is new staff. How relieved I am not to have the operation this morning to have a tap put into my chest. I must try and cheer up H.B. as he has had a hell of a fortnight. In the waiting room a little grey man over the way is fretting as he has to get to Sussex. He says, "I am going blind, I cannot read any longer".
A little later he picks up a newspaper, struggles with it for a moment and throws it back on the table. My stinging eye-drops have stopped me reading, so I write this in a haze of belladonna. The little grey man's face has fallen into tragedy. He looks like Jean Cocteau without the poet's refined arrogance. The room is full of men and women squinting into the dark in different states of illness. Some barely able to walk, distress and anger on every face and then a terrible resignation.
Jean Cocteau takes off his glasses, he looks about him with an undescribable meanness. He has black slip-on shoes, blue socks, grey trousers, a Fairisle sweater and a herringbone jacket. The posters that plaster the walls above him have endless question marks, HIV/AIDS?, AIDS?, HIV?, ARE YOU INFECTED BY HIV/AIDS?,ARC?, HIV? This is a hard wait. The shattering bright light of the eye specialist's camera leaves that empty sky blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colours change to pink and the light turns to orange. The process is a torture, but the result, stable eyesight, worth the price and the twelve pills I have to take a day. Sometimes looking at them I fell nauseous and want to skip them. It must be my association with H.B., lover of the computer and king of the keyboard that brought my luck on the computer which chose my name for this drug trial. I nearly forgot as I left St Mary's I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile back.
I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. I thought of going in and buying a pair, but stopped myself. The shoes I am wearing at the moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life.
Pearl fishers
In azure seas
Deep waters
Washing the isle of the dead
In coral harbours
Amphora
Spill
Gold
Across the still seabed
We lie there
Fanned by the billowing
Sails of forgotten ships
Tossed by the mournful winds
Of the deep
Lost Boys
Sleep forever
In a dear embrace
Salt lips touching
In submarine gardens
Cool marble fingers
Touch an antique smile
Shell sounds
Whisper
Deep love drifting on the tide forever
The smell of him
Dead good looking
In beauty's summer
His blue jeans
Around his ankles
Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
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
