40 bones: letters from Dungeness to Chicago
40 bones is a new monthly letters series tracking the correspondence between D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour. Two trans writers and artists trying to MAKE WORK IN THE HELLSCAPE. The letters are candid, humorous and cover a range of topics including medical transition, sex, gossip, money, shame, the act of writing, and the weirdness of being. Follow along as Mortimer and Jalilipour somehow!!!!!!!!! get through the day
By D Mortimer and Kasra Jalilipour
Ravenswood, Chicago, USA.
Dear Kasra,
I didn't keep the picture of someone's mum. I am superstitious about things like that.
It’s not surprising you have feelings around leaving! You are a groundskeeper of sorts while you are there, the keeper of the key as it were. And his memory. You have grown to know Jarman, being among all of his things, living where he lived and where he died. When you explained in your letter how you told those tourists who he was and what the garden meant to you, you felt like a guard dog to me in that moment.
Heartbreaking too, what you said about the hagstones and thinking for a moment that he might’ve found them all. Like, I dunno, this ancient magic left when he did. A hagstone is a little like a placebo isn't it? It is a round pill with nothing in the center. It protects us because we desire it to and because we have been told it does. I learned recently that the word placebo comes from the Latin ‘I shall please’. And apparently it was named after funeral crashers in the 5th century BC who would make out like they were kin of the dead to get a free meal. These swindlers were called ‘pleasers’ — like the stripper heels! A placebo isn’t what it says it is. I guess I am a placebo man.
I went to the municipal swimming pool again today five minutes from our flat. I was late getting there so I was walking extra fast. On my way there I passed a bunch of school kids. One of them copied the way I was walking and laughed. ‘Fuck you’ I said but… I mean… His performance was good. I got it right away; it was me. I can’t fault him for imagination. He gave it his all. He put a strong bounce in his step, gave good limp and cantered toward me. He laughed and looked me dead in the eye while he did it. I can’t deny it. The bully had panache. And panache — for good or evil, is still panache.
I find gaits really interesting; how people move, the way they walk. Do lesbians cruise gaits? Whenever I walk fast my limp is more pronounced. I thought about it on the way to the pool. Transness and disability are so linked for me. And the desire to pass is so understandable. In that moment, in front of the school kids, I failed to pass. Having someone mimic something dorkish or weak about your body, your personhood, is like having food perpetually stuck to your face. You don’t always get it rightaway, which makes you doubly clownish, slow on the uptake. You cant see the joke cos the joke is on you. ‘I’m saving it for later’ my grandad used to say when we’d point out some food in his moustache. I need to come up with a line like that for when ‘fuck you’ gets old.
As a kid it did cross my mind. I’d think up these ways they could potentially graft fat onto my right shin to make my feet and legs match each other. I’d heard that was something they could do…
This push for symmetry and order that seems to define the human race, my girlfriend thinks is primal. And the instinctual ick around spiders and crabs comes from an inbuilt horror of the unpredictable body. Snakes and crustaceans move in alien fashions, they walk funny, creep and crawl, slip and slide and we hate their chaos. “It disturbs our primal drive for order” she said by the sea in a blue wool balaclava that she has never worn again. She looked like an oracle if I’m honest, talking about scuttling crabs and the unconscious by the woodburner. Who was I not to listen?
Actually, you know what, screw that kid. I don't know why I am giving him the benefit of the doubt. It is my soft spot for teenage boys. Or the teenage boy I never was wants to believe in their fundamental goodness. The working body. The young. The unencumbered chest. Why do I see these things as better – good. The lure of the good body.
I had a dream last night that I broke 40 of my bones. I was still trying to walk around and do stuff tho. I had to collect a number of pizzas, like a whole pile of them and I was clicking and popping like crazy cos of these 40 broken bones.
I'm sorry I couldn't find the Kafka quote! It was in a library book so I took it back. It was from America and it was basically Joseph K saying that he finds himself in all these elaborate situations that cause him agony and he brings it on completely himself, it's like a compulsion of his to get in bigger and bigger fixes. I related to it. There is also another bit in that book when a woman comes onto the protagonist by saying something like “do you have any deformities?” – I related to that too.
The lifeguard at the pool was playing songs from the Men in Black soundtrack today and I spent my laps thinking up a letter for you.
Half an hour is a long time when you’re exercising. Splitting headache all day from the humidity. Not a day for getting shit done.
Espresso machine broken downstairs. We still have the plunger we stole from them. Loo’s still blocked. Karma I suppose. They haven’t mentioned it. The plunger. Guess it’s a bit embarrassing to advertise a missing plunger. I wore my cock today after a while without using it and it was nice. It is bright turquoise, fits into the swimming pool aesthetic nicely. Dildos are animals that move funny. I wonder how many straight people find them secretly repulsive.
Everything is falling apart in the flat, it’s time to leave. The curtain rail has lifted itself off the wall and one of the windows has come clean off its hinges. The curtains now fail to curtain. They are lying in a green heap on the floor. For days now, when dawn breaks it splashes over us, waking us both up. I noticed earlier how R reaches for her phone before she reaches for me. Has she always done this? She is asleep as I write this, snoring loudly and using one of my t shirts for an eye mask. My left leg has sunk into a decline in the mattress. Slat missing. It’s like the flat is saying, ok time for you to be on your way now. I can’t keep this facade up any longer.
House intimacy is funny. I feel like that's what you are getting from Prospect cottage. I bet you have even gotten used to the tourists peering through the windows by now. You have figured out the best time to roam naked in the sunroom. Play music, wank etc. Funny how we adapt to even the strangest circumstances and the bizarre morphs into the familiar with time. I was disgruntled by the lack of toaster here at first but now I have come to see bread dry fried in a pan as something of a delicacy. We brush our teeth in the kitchen sink because the bathroom sink is now blocked too. Oh well. We are out of here soon.
Wishing u working appliances (bodily and detached),
From Marlo
PS. here’s a letter I found crumpled up in the gym after my swim.
“This is to remind you when I have grown so tall,
that I was once I was quite little
and my hand was very small
Happy Mother’s Day”
Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. Kent, England.
Dear Marlo,
Have you ever watched ladybirds have sex? I say sex because what they do is beyond mating… I have been watching two go at it for the last 45 minutes in Derek Jarman’s garden! It’s crazy! They must be lesbians (hence the lady) and that’s why they’re taking so long.
I just read a little poem about lizards by Jarman in Derek Jarman’s garden, Lizzie the Lezzy he called them. Lizards you are bent not straight/Lizzy the lezzy is quite the best.
There are these specific species of lesbian lizards in Mexico who choose when they want to get pregnant, as in they can impregnate themselves. It’s very sci-fi and they basically only have sex with other female lizards for pleasure.
I want to be reincarnated as these lizards.
When I was a baby in Iran, a lizard got inside my bassinet as I was asleep. My mom said it looked poisonous, it was bright green with red streaks. Sometimes I’ve wondered if the lizard did poison me with its gayness. Like a good poison, if there is such thing.
I loved hearing about your beach finds, pls tell me you kept the passport photo of the person’s mom!
I am finally settled here at the cottage, and it’s already time to leave! I can’t believe it’s all happened so fast. I went to the sea and saw the tide come down for the first time. I think the sea is just super surreal and I can’t believe it sometimes. I find how big the sea is scary, same with the sky. If I think about it too much I get anxious.
After the beach, I walked back to the cottage and some tourists were wondering about and seemed eager to talk to me. The woman, who was American walked up to me and said “excuse me, is the artist here?” And I said “erm, no he died!” She was very confused and repeated that to herself, “he died”. Then I said “you mean Derek Jarman right? Yeah, he died in 1994." She looked very confused still and asked why there were signs that said “Artist in Residence?” She told me she didn’t know anything about art, and that she was a gardener and found the garden very confusing because of all the ‘modern art’, then she asked me if I could explain the ‘modern art’ to her, and I said I don’t think he was trying to make ‘modern art’ I think he was just having fun with beach finds. They asked me what I think of the garden and I said “I think it’s heartbreaking, because it’s full of life but it’s also full of death.”
I have been finding the art inside the house deeply sad. The canvases with mounts of paint on them… they give me a sense of him wanting to use up all the paints he had, before… They are full of rage and frustration. The bedroom paintings I think are more about making peace with death. These are my favourite.
I found it hard to engage with the garden until this week when I started to make a film in it. My girlfriend has been sending me daily images of what she’s been growing in our garden back home. I always feel a pressure to connect to nature. Again, I think it becomes about mortality. The same way as waking up early, to pay attention to the day; to not let it slip away. I have to make peace with the fact that I am not a morning person, no matter how hard I try. My day usually starts at 12 and ends at 12. I spend a lot of my 24 hours dreaming/day dreaming. I think my dreams are also where I live.
I’m sorry but I think Nirvana are overrated. I’m sorry, it’s just what I feel. I’m actually learning to play ‘Come as You Are’ on the guitar — I asked C to teach me the first song she learned. They’re one of those bands I always felt bad for not knowing and only listened to them properly these past couple months. C says I didn’t miss out. I guess I needed to be there. My fave bands as a teenager were Paparoach and System of a Down (who I still really like).
Write to me soon,
Kasra
PS. So far I have found five Hagstones! I’m putting them through a thread like Jarman has around the house and I am going to make a necklace out of them. He has so many! I was starting to think he had found them all…
PPS. The ladybirds are still going at it! It’s officially been an hour and half!
Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, writer based in the East Midlands. In their creative writing practice they use methods of speculative and auto-fiction. They are interested in the re-imagining of histories through a queer lens, in particular the erotics in depictions of intimacy and violence.
D Mortimer is a writer and artist from London. His first book Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. Speed Glum Hero, their monograph, came out with Sticky Fingers Publishing in 2024. They are currently working on their first novel.
