My Walk with Bob

I’m walking with Bob Glück in Scotland. It is raining on and off, and we are meanwhile together, in a near-mythic garden: Little Sparta, the lifetime work of Ian Hamilton Finlay and his many collaborators. In the roaming gardens, time grows and reforms in cooperative cycles, a concert of creating between the living and dead, chance and weather. It survives its makers. Yet I’m reluctant to consider Little Sparta a monument, remembered by its stones and wooden posts; it’s too inclusive and capacious in its attention, its various passions compelled in plant life and in plays of language, the syntax overgrown with new intention, relations and histories entwined.

Our approach to Little Sparta is on foot via a dirt road, Stonypath, through meadows of grazing sheep and their lambs; these pastoral enclosures suggest a different economy from that of accumulation, a time when weather reigned. The day is covered in gray. 

What’s been forgotten or abandoned—unattached relics release flowers and time. We encounter initials and imperatives, commands inscribed to no one in particular: visiting birds, sheep, deer within the dwelling, whether migrating or permanent residents. Each area with its containing name (Julie’s Garden, Wild Garden, English Parkland) evokes bodily relation, gestures surprised in their tracks. 

The caretaker invites us to enter along the many footpaths. Bob and I understand tacitly our desires to wander alone, to allow for our own curiosity, moved along by different tempos—mine glacially slow, Bob’s his own. 

SEMPER FESTINA LENTE

Always make haste slowly

No birdsong midday. Its absence focuses me for the parsing of Latin and Greek texts sprung on and among monuments, stones, posts, trees. Lines from Virgil wind on the turf around the trunk of an elm tree. The encircled letters insist on circular reading while pacing in dactylic hexameter around the tree. How the silence of inscriptions attunes my attention, yet unknowing for what. Dear reader, kindly imagine these words circulating around the base of a tree, not as they are here, marching across the page:

ILLE ETIAM SERAS IN VERSUM DISTULIT ULMOS / EDURAMQUE PIRUM ET SPINOS IAM PRUNA FERENTIS / IAMQUE MINISTRANTEM PLATANUM POTANTIBUS UMBRAS 

That man even transplanted slow-growing elm trees in rows and blackthorns and pear trees, already bearing fruit, and a sycamore tree furnishing ready shade to those who take shelter to drink. 

These are from his fourth georgic, the one that gives advice on beekeeping. After several hundred lines of didactic verse on the stewardship of bees and their social mores mirroring those of Roman ideals, Virgil turns to sickness and the story of Aristaeus. His bees are dying. To heal them he searches for aid and answers along a perilous trail. At last he subdues Proteus in his watery cave, who reveals the reason for his ailing bees. Unwittingly Aristaeus was the cause of Eurydice’s death, and widowed Orpheus has to take his revenge. Then in one and the same rite, simultaneously the singer is appeased, and the beekeeper learns the secrets of bee auto-generation. 

Within the beekeeper’s tale, Virgil renders, in a series of vignettes, the aching final moments between Orpheus and Eurydice. Leading her from the infernal realms, he falters at the rim; almost safe, save for his need to see her, to see that she is there. Rather than mending, he ends it again. Both the beekeeper and the twice-bereft singer share in her doubled death. Meanwhile, these lines circling the elm form part of a praeteritio; that is, the story I am not going to tell but in mentioning what I won’t tell, end up telling it all, also known as the gossip’s ploy. The verses speak of a gardener, an old man from Corycus, who, like Finlay, has made much from a plot of unpromising land. My reading steps enact the relations between eras and elms, between these discrete yet congruous gardeners, in an aside that can’t be left unmentioned. 

Moving downhill toward the sound of a small brook, there’s an opened enclosure. For reasons hard to put into words, I stay outside, hesitating, a herd of one.