Activity 3 Little Sparta If you have worked though the activities in order, you will have now considered how the word literature might reach into other art forms such as music, and how it creates distinctions even within the art form of writing and reading. The question we will explore in this third activity, finally, is less focused on the word literature, and more on the kinds of objects literature is made up of. That might sound relatively simple. Novels and poems are printed in books, or possibly on other kinds of paper or posters. Plays are performed in theatres or sometimes get made into films. In all these cases, different kinds of objects are involved, but only for the sake of transmission or staging, not as the main event. The saying never judge a book by its cover is evidence of the strict separation people usually maintain between the idea of the book and the clumsy, physical thing you actually read. Literature is often and in a way, rightly thought to be concerned with something higher than mere material things. One place where this separation breaks down, however, is Little Sparta. Little Sparta is a garden. It covers a few acres in the Pentland Hills in Scotland, twenty miles south of Edinburgh. If you ever get a chance to visit it, go. It is open to the public from June to September each year. Admission costs 7.50 for students, and in August there s often a minibus that leaves from Edinburgh city centre. Full details are here: http://www.littlesparta.org.uk/visits.htm. Now, all this might seem like a lot of trouble to go to just to see a garden, but Little Sparta is not just any garden. It was constructed over the course of 40 years by the poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, from 1966 to his death in 2006, in collaboration with his wife and a range of other craftspeople. In it, among the plants, open to the Scottish weather and the surrounding hills, there are the sculptures he created at the same time as growing and pruning the garden, built into the landscape and the vegetation. Each of these statues is unique, some looking almost like normal garden furniture, others imitating ancient Greek statues. Some are made from stone, some wood, some metal. But as well as these raw materials, Hamilton Finlay worked with words. All around the garden, you come across object after object inscribed with short phrases, ranging in length from one word to a few lines, either written by Hamilton Finlay himself or drawn from some historical source. Together, these inscriptions might make up one continuous text woven through the whole garden, or alternatively each could stand alone. The point is, Little Sparta is gardening
and art and literature all rolled into one. The distinctions hardly matter. Hamilton Finlay s wife Sue Finlay used to talk about tending the poems, like tending the plants. Task 1 At the north edge of Little Sparta, looking out over the farmers fields and hills past the fence, there are six sections of dry stone wall, each marked with an inscription. Together, the six segments read: LITTLE FIELDS LITTLE FIELDS LONG HORIZONS LONG LONG HORIZONS FOR HORIZONS FOR LITTLE FIELDS Notice how by simply rearranging the four or five words, three different meanings are produced. The word long goes from being an adjective, in long horizons, to a verb, in horizons long for little fields. On Hamilton Finlay s walls, the words are quite literally set in stone, but the grammar seems to shift and change, just like the outdoors environment all around. How else do you think Hamilton Finlay s choice of words might be responding to his materials and surroundings? How is the experience they create for a visitor different to the experience of just reading the words on a page? Of course, Ian Hamilton Finlay is not the only writer to have blurred the boundaries between writing and making things, or between literature and the objects around it. Hamilton Finlay
was influenced by a tradition known as concrete poetry. This experimental form, developed by a group of Brazilian poets in the 1950s and 60s, is based on arranging words on the page so that, as well as being readable, they have a particular visual effect too, forming an overall shape or pattern. There is a famous example by Hamilton Finlay s friend Edwin Morgan, called Chaffinch Map of Scotland (1965), below. In this poem, all the names for a chaffinch in different parts of the country are simply laid out in the shape of Scotland, with each word in the location it comes from. You could argue that Morgan was already thinking about bringing together geographical place with space on the page, as Hamilton Finlay would continue to at Little Sparta. Chaffinch Map of Scotland is a poem but also a map. It makes you think about space and shape in a way you might not expect to when reading a poem. Meanwhile, there a plenty of
artists who have approached the border between words and objects from the other direction, using language in new ways in their artworks. For example, Jenny Holzer is an American artist who specialises in creating huge billboards or light projections in public places that simply contain a short but challenging message: EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID projected on the side of an Italian church, or RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY on the sign outside an American cinema. Are these messages literature? Perhaps not. Holzer would certainly say she s more a visual artist than a writer. But they make you think about how words are always part of the environment we live in, on almost every street and inside almost every building. Literature is just one way of using words, and inevitably, it gets mixed up with others. Task 2 Back when it was a common form of punishment in schools for teachers to hit their students, the sticks used for this were usually made from a tree called birch. Because of this, the punishment became known as birching or the birch, and people who like to complain about lack of discipline in schools might grumble, bring back the birch. At Little Sparta, Hamilton Finlay makes a joke of this, with an inscription that reads bring back the birch among an actual copse of birch trees. There is a contrast between the repressive, old-fashioned reference to school punishment, and the freedom and timelessness of nature. Here is Hamilton Finlay s inscription, along with two other signs, one by Jenny Holzer on a huge building in the middle of New York, the other a common street sign. One thing these signs have in common is that they are all written in what is called the imperative mood. That is, they are all instructions, like bring me that or sit down. In
a different context, bring back the birch could similarly be a literal order. But anyone seeing the three phrases here would probably take them in very different ways. Why is this? And how might you take each of these three instructions, if not as an order? We ve seen that many writers and artists have brought words out of books and presented them in unexpected ways and places. But there is a difference between putting a sign on a street, like Holzer, and putting words in a garden, like Hamilton Finlay did at Little Sparta. On the street, we are used to seeing words, whether as signs, adverts or graffiti. But a garden is traditionally a more quiet and reflective place, where you might expect language not to intrude so much. Having said that, there are a number of examples from throughout history of poetry and gardening, and also farming, coming together. One of the most famous poems from Roman times is called the Georgics, by Virgil, which is basically a list of instructions for farmers. In the eighteenth century, one of the earliest gardeners to develop a particular English landscape garden style was also a poet, William Shenstone (and one of Hamilton Finlay s sculptures at Little Sparta, the Shenstone Monument, is dedicated to him). And the great American poet Emily Dickinson, though she kept most of her poetry secret in her lifetime, was celebrated as a gardener. You can see the inspiration in many of her poems, like the one below (only published in 1896, after Dickinson died): To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. Dickinson s poem could almost be simply a piece of advice for gardeners. But of course, it is not literal advice. Literally speaking, revery alone daydreaming would not get you very far if you were trying to grow a garden. On the other hand, the poem itself is like a reverie (as the word is now spelled) in the way it goes lazily from longer lines to shorter lines, moved by the rhyme as if moved by the breeze. It is almost like the poem is a kind of metaphor for the garden, or vice versa. Visiting Little Sparta, you might feel the same way. One of the defining things about a garden is that, for all the gardener tries to keep control, in the end it all depends on the plants growing by themselves. Maybe literature is similar. No matter how you might try to define it or classify it, pruning it back or planting new seeds, what matters is that it grows by itself. Sometimes, like at Little Sparta, it puts up shoots in odd places.
Task 3 The most famous sculpture at Little Sparta is probably the one in the picture below. The words read THE PRESENT ORDER IS THE DISORDER OF THE FUTURE. SAINT-JUST (Saint-Just was one of the major figure in the French Revolution of 1789. He never actually said this, but Hamilton Finlay makes it looks like a quotation from him. He liked to play around with history.) How might this statement apply to gardens? How about literature?