Et in Arcadia Ego: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future (Saint-Just) Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta

 Apollon Terroriste: Ian Hamilton Finlay, in Little Sparta Sculpture Garden, Dunsyre, Pentland Hills, Lanarkshire: photo by onceawildchild, 31 May 2009

It is not true
that the blade was terrible:
it was Terrible.

_________


In the first chapters
of the Revolution
when the ribbons
were still on the haycocks...

_________


You cannot step
into the same Revolution
twice.

_________


"Who are these men
who have no streets
named after them?"

-- French person of 1987, on
The Committee of Public Safety, 1794.

_______


The French Revolution
was something other
than the French nation
on the psychoanalyst's couch.

________


Three Parties
in The Convention:
The Mountain, The Plain,
The Ravine.

_______


In the Picturesque landscape
of the Revolution
the wildest of the banditti
were all ex-lawyers.

_______


For the best of the Jacobins
the Revolution was intended
as a pastoral whose
Virgil was Rousseau.

_______


Revolutions conceived in the fields
are very different from
Revolutions conceived in the cellar.


Ian Hamilton Finlay: texts from Revolutionary Pursuits (1987)