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Johan Boemann Hansen - Sunday, 2. February
07-02-2025


   Sunday, 2. February. Victor, I have to update my will too now. Firstly, I want to note the form of the letter and this diary entry-letter. The form of Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature serves as a model for this text: I am writing to you in a diary, which is part of a text about gardens and cruising. A diary is (often) more open about its constructed situation and about the text we leave behind and its context. The same is the case with the letter and, in my reading, especially your letter about the garden we leave behind, the garden that outlasts us.

   I live close to the crematorium where my grandmother was cremated. Although her ashes are buried in another graveyard, I am certain that some of the vegetation, soil, and critters in the surrounding graveyard of the crematorium contain carbon atoms that once made her up. The vegetation, soil, and critters are the garden that remains of her and the countless others who have been cremated there. A graveyard – as I read you pointing us to in your letter – is a garden too and the site of our final becoming-else. This opaqueness, which is becoming-else as some carbon atoms are absorbed in leaves and then composted, makes me more attuned to the infrastructure that (this) ecology is. To me, it is a place entirely caught up in messianic time, while ‘aiming’ at a cariological experience-time.

   This requires a certain organisation of the surround and specific uses of bodies. The gardeners who attend to the place, or constructed situation, maintain a particular visuality that is readable as kept while allowing for wonderment regarding the extent of the garden's staging and ontology. For the attentiveness to the surround (i.e. the ecologies we are part of) in gardening and places for mourning, exclusion is constitutive of these particular forms and practices, which are otherwise precluded by other relations.[1] In the larger context which this text is a part of, I am trying to also develop what I think of as the ‘baroque garden complex’: as an aesthetic that informs the organisation of gardens at this place on earth, and which zero-degree point is the thinking of Eden. I do not have much more to say about this at the moment, as I am still reading a lot about this but it is tentative to, touched upon, or developed in the thinking of Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture by Carolyn Merchant, “The Planetary Garden” by Gilles Clement, The Kingdom and the Garden by Giorgio Agamben, and is what Francis Bacon’s Of Gardens is emblematic of. What I am thinking with these texts could be summed up as: The word for world is garden – the world that is these landscapes called Denmark. And so, I think of gardening as an ethically necessary response-ability to the anthropogenically altered ecologies here.

   Whether tangents or kinship, response-ability is decisive in our use of the earth and the consequences of these uses and former uses – and this necessary attentiveness to the surround is decisive in gardening, as well as in cruising: Use of the surround as a garden and the erotic impersonal common – “as a sense of incommensurability and an equality of in-equivalence that is shared”[2] – is edging the finitude of us as (part of) ecologies. Additionally, I see enlustment and the cariological of bottoming as being-opened or being-edged, as the edging of finitude and of the orgasmic: the edging of experience.

   Of course, the Edenic also haunts much of the thinking about cruising, but that is for another time. However, I will end the letter with the following text by John Paul Ricco: “The art of the consummate cruise is precisely that which is without completion or final satisfaction or achievement. Therein lies the faultless form of its purely unfinishable desire and pleasure. ‘Consummatum est’ (it is done), are believed to be the last words that Christ uttered while on the cross. However unlike the passion of the Christ, this non-sacrificial, erotic and unnamed passion is consummate to the extent that it remains unconsummated (undone). The art of the consummate cruise is that which is without end or that which exceeds any sense of an ending, but instead remains, in its anonymity, promiscuity, and the itinerancy of its departure and abandonment, always on the verge or edge of coming.”[3]

Johan Boemann

[1] See Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, (Duke University Press, 2019).

[2] John Paul Ricco, “The Art of the Consummate Cruise and the Essential Risk of the Common”, Feedback, (4. February 2016),

http://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/sexualities/the-consummate-cruise-1/.

[3] Ricco, “The Art of the Consummate Cruise and the Essential Risk of the Common”.

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Naja Zethner - Jeg har slettet en sætning
31-01-2025


Jeg har slettet en sætning,
jeg har slettet en til,

i lag,
i lav,
jeg kravler over dig med mine tusinde larvefødder,
tusinde vaklende linjer i haven, tusinde vaklende liljer i haven.

Hilsen Naja
 

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Victor Buch Bischoff Rasmussen - The garden I leave behind
24-01-2025


The garden I Leave behind

I began to think about the garden I will leave behind when I die after seeing a window display in the streets of Paris. A large, cold scene showcasing two granite tombstones surrounded by plastic flowers and artificial grass. It made sense - it was a sales exhibition, after all - but it also reminded me of how graveyards often look today. Flowers replaced seasonally, well-tended surfaces and an overall aesthetic that feels both unsustainable and detached from nature's own rhythms. The thought of ending up under a massive granite slab surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns made me sad.

The next day I came across Modern Nature by Derek Jarman, the visionary filmmaker and painter. Jarman not only left behind a series of stunning works - he also left behind a garden. On England's desolate, windswept Dungeness, where shingle, sea and sky collide, he created a garden as raw and poetic as his art. In the last years of his life, while living with HIV, he transformed the land around his spartan home, Prospect Cottage, into a personal oasis. The book documents these years - a biographical diary of struggle, fragility and the beauty found in the smallest of things.

Jarman's garden was more than plants in stone. For me, it is a reflection on the cycle of life and a testament to the idea that if we dare to be vulnerable and invest care and love in what we leave behind, it is likely to be cared for in the hands of others in the future. Many of us will one day be given a small piece of land as our final place in the world. But how can we make this more than a formality? How can we give it meaning?

Jarman's garden reminds us that even the smallest plot of land can become a stage for creation, a comfort for the living, and an ongoing story of who we were. Perhaps we should think of our last plot of land as a garden - a place where we can plant something beautiful, something that lasts beyond ourselves. Updating my will has now found its way onto my to-do list.

Victor,
second.garden

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