Apparently, Ian Hamilton Finlay fashioned this Grecian-Apollonian bust after the image of Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just. Saint-Just was a youthful but fairly vicious leader of the French Revolution, and subsequent Reign of Terror. Finlay was certainly, like many poets (visual or otherwise), being willfully arcane in this heap of visual allusions. However, a simple description of the v
isual events might help us to congeal what is not apparent. One comes upon an oversized, brazen, golden head in an unkempt woody area of a garden. The bust, seemingly of Apollo, is squarely confrontational but like all classicism it is cursed to ponderous immortality. It is eerily fierce and has a certain air of the symbol or sentinel of the green anarchy around it. It is discovered that the bust intentionally bears the likeness of an idealistic but savage youth of the French revolution. The bust has the words "Apollon Terroriste" stamped across
his brow...
As further texture, it is certainly likely that Finlay had come in contact with Robert Frost's poem,
Nothing Gold Can Stay. Stating an overt connection with the intention of the sculpture would, of course, be foolish. However it is still congruent if only an adjunct:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Brutality, change and perpituity... The sculpture, "Apollon Terroriste" is installed at Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden "Little Sparta", in Scotland.
What does it matter that someone confesses his worthiness or that he serves some useful purpose? What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance, it’s banal; in the second it’s incomprehensible. By writing what I feel, I can cool this febrile sensitivity of mine. What I confess is unimportant, because nothing is important. I compose landscapes out of what I feel. I compose carnivals of sensations. I completely understand women who embroider out of grief or knit because life exists. My old aunt used to play solitaire during the course of infinite family gatherings. These confessions of feeling are my solitaires. I don’t read them, the way people read cards to know the future. I don’t put a stethoscope to them, because in solitaire the cards don’t really have any value. I unravel like a multicolored skein, or I make yarn figures out of myself that are like the ones braided by tense hands and passed from one child to another. I just take care that my thumb doesn’t miss making the final knot. Later I turn my hand over and the image changes. And I start over.
Since life is essentially a mental state, and everything we do or think is valid for us to the degree we think it valid, its validity depends entirely on us. The dreamer is one who sends notes, and the notes he sends course through the city of his spirit in the same way notes do in reality. What does it matter to me that the paper money of my soul can never be converted into gold, when there is never any gold in the factitious alchemy of life? After us, the flood, but only after all of us. Better and happier are those who recognize the fiction in everything and construct their novel before someone else does it for them, and, like Machiavelli, put on their finest garments when they sit down in secret to write.
-both quotes from
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, circa 1900
It would be hard to overstate the joy received and subsequent influence, the above table has caused/had on the furniture concocted at Al Que Quiere. The legs oh the legs! Blunt, sort-of truncated neo-classicism. The table was from the inventory of Svenska Möbler (now sold).
