Ogrody twórczości

Abstract

The first part of the book presents three main themes which, as a whole, are intended to be a framework for more specific descriptions in its second part. In the first chapter, entitled Real gardens against the myths, the author shows selected examples of landscape designs and discusses their utilitarian functions, their role in the religious cult, the mythical, symbolic and metaphorical contexts which have directly affected either programme assumptions of the gardens or a treatment of certain features of the landscape. The cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome are discussed in these respects. The author addresses the intellectual foundation of English and sentimental gardens to clarify their strong ties with the ancient understanding of the landscape, describing on this background meaningful features of Arcadia park near Nieborów. The chapter concludes with a discussion of selected solutions in Little Sparta — a garden founded by Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay near Edinburgh, Scotland. The second chapter, entitled Gardens of Imagination, discusses literary descriptions, abstracted from specific landscape implementations. Several examples of literature from different historical periods are invoked, with an emphasis on the role of sensuality. The author analyzes the fragments of the Egyptian Book of Gates, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. The third chapter, entitled The gardens of thought, raises general epistemological issues, first: in terms of the philosophical proposals for overcoming the fear of death, and second: in terms of theory of art viewed from the perspective of the twentieth-century crisis of the great narrations. The common theme of all the chapters is the Garden of Eden, whose main intentional “function” is to overcome the fear of death. This issue is discussed in the context of eschatological, agnostic, and nihilistic intuitions, organized according to their relationship with specific gardens (Chapter 1), with the literary themes (Chapter 2), and finally with the abstract contemplation on the condition of mankind and its representation in contemporary art (Chapter 3). Such a structure, inspired by Hegel’s description of the history of the Absolute, makes it easier to present the problems of gardens from various perspectives — specific relations with nature, aesthetic experience and thought of purely intellectual character. This approach, on the one hand, serves the clarity of argument by avoiding excessive complexity of description, and on the other, shows the complexity of the concept of “garden”, resulting from the build-up of different meanings over the millennia.