The Tower of the Nets

How many Swansea people, when they stroll along the sea wall past the Observatory (the Tower of the Ecliptic) in the Maritime Quarter stop to look closely at the diminutive building that sits on its own on the other side of the path?  (I say ‘Observatory’, but that building ceased to be the home of the Swansea Astronomical Society in 2010 and lost its huge telescope; it now houses a restaurant and café.)

This small brick building is officially called the Tower of the Nets, though some people refer to it as the ‘Hexagonal Hut’.  It was built as part of the redevelopment of the Maritime Quarter in the 1980s.  Much of the land in the area was designated for housing, mainly flats.  But Robin Campbell, the architect who, as Swansea Council’s urban designer, was responsible for steering the programme, won agreement that part of the budget should be reserved for cultural buildings and public artworks.  The two Towers, along with over seventy monuments, sculptures and panels, were part of that initiative through the second half of the 1980s.

The Tower of the Nets was commissioned in 1986 from the remarkable Scottish writer, artist and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006).  He’s best known today for Little Sparta, his five acre ‘sculpture garden’ in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, but he’s well remembered too as a poet (especially for his concrete poems of the 1960s), a short story writer and publisher.  Anyone who’s visited Little Sparta will quickly come to appreciate Finlay’s unique mix of qualities: his pugnacious defence of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, his strange obsession with violence and war, his devotion to the ancient world and its literature, art and philosophy, his urge to reconcile nature and craft, his interest in philosophy, his wit, and his gift for expressing the lyrical in word and stone.

It was Finlay who decided on the theme and design of the Tower, in cooperation with the architect Mark Stewart, and he who selected the carved quotations that adorn its sides.  As far as I know, it’s his only work located in Wales. He was already aware of art in Swansea: in 1980 Sally Moss, exhibitions officer at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, had met him at Little Sparta at the time he lent works to a ‘ships and boats’ exhibition at the Gallery.

The Tower has a hexagonal shape, with a brick and stone base, a stone cornice, and a stepped pyramidal brick roof.  Three stone mouldings weave their way around the building: the lower one, a cable, snakes up and across the door, which faces seawards, while the middle one features a repeated wave motif.  Five stone-framed ‘windows’ are filled with slate plaques carrying Finlay’s ‘net’ quotations.

Where did the ‘net’ idea come from?  To begin with I wondered whether the building was a recreation of a previous fishermen’s net hut, somewhere along the shoreline, like the ‘net shops’ to be seen today on the shore at Hastings.  But the Hastings examples were quite different, being wooden, tall and gabled.  Robin Campbell is sure that the model Finlay had in mind was a classical one: the Tower of the Winds, the first century BCE octagonal ‘horologium’ or clocktower that still stands in the Roman Agora in Athens.  He was also familiar with the neoclassical imitation of the Tower of the Winds designed in 1765 by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart at Thomas Anson’s Shugborough estate in Staffordshire.

Rather than repeat the winds theme, Finlay adopted the fertile idea of the net.  The net was not a new preoccupation of his.  In 1968 he wrote a poem, ‘Ring Net Dove’ (the letters were later inscribed on marble, in a work of 1976), and about the same time he’d created works called Net/Net and Cork/Net, their words being reproduced on etched glass.  A version of the St Matthew quotation below appeared in a print of 1977.

In place of the figured relief frieze on the Tower of the Winds he used the more austere medium of lettering (incised words always played a prominent role in his visual work).  The letters were expertly cut by Keith Bailey, in the classical style usually favoured by Finlay.  Bailey had worked with Finlay for many years on letterings at Little Sparta.

The quotations riff on some of the many connotations of the noun ‘net’.  Finlay labelled each of the quotes with a different ‘emblem’: two pairs of contrasting themes – neritic snare and land snare (‘neritic’ means ‘belonging to shallow waters near land’); poverty and plenitude – and a fifth, ‘An Intelligible Articulation’, which is more abstract and mathematical.

Starting from the door and moving anticlockwise, the quotation on the first plaque is from The Enneads of Plotinus. Plotinus was a Platonist of the third century CE.  His central metaphysical principles were ‘The One’, a transcendent entity and the origin of all things, and the Soul, which encompassed nature as well as individual human souls.  The vivid simile in the quote, from Book 3 of The Enneads, uses the net to refer to the cosmic body, tossed about within the world Soul, and carried to all parts of it.

NET. n. AN EMBLEM OF PLENITUDE.  The cosmos is like a NET which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water; it is at the mercy of the sea which spreads out, taking the NET with it just so far as it will go, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place.

PLOTINUS, Enneads

Next comes a quotation from one of the Idylls of Theocritus, a Hellenistic Greek poet who lived in the third century BCE and who seems to have invented the genre of pastoral verse.  The Idylls (‘little poems’), though some have urban settings, typically feature shepherds and other rural characters in conversation about life, love and unhappiness.  Idyll 21, possibly not by Theocritus himself, concerns two poor fishermen who lie awake at night in their cabin.  One of them dreams of catching a golden fish and becoming rich, but his companion insists that only hard work will stave off penury.  The poem begins by describing the equipment of their trade, including their ‘weedy nets’.

(A ‘weel’ is a dialect word meaning a wicker trap or snare for fish, especially eels; a ‘cobble’ or ‘coble’ is a Scots word for a short, flat-bottomed rowing boat used for salmon-fishing in rivers and estuaries.)

NET. n. AN EMBLEM OF POVERTY.  Beside them were laid the instruments of their calling: their creels, their rods, their hooks, their weedy NETS and lines, their weels and rush-woven lobster-pots, some NET-ropes, a pair of oars, and upon its props an aged cobble.

THEOCRITUS, Idylls

The third quote comes from the first chapter of Book Two of the Discourses of the first century philosopher Epictetus.  Here he uses nets as a metaphor for the dangerous illusions we create for ourselves when we give way to fear.  Epictetus was a Stoic, so his recipe for overcoming both fear and illusion was simple: take courage. 

(Coloured ‘feathers’ were used by hunters like a scarecrow to frighten animals into running towards nets.)

NET. n. A LAND SNARE.  However, we act like deer when the hinds are frightened by the feathers and run away from them.  Where do they run and to what do they fly for refuge as a safe retreat?  Why, to the NETS.

EPICTETUS, Discourses

The quotation on the fourth plaque, from the King James version of Matthew’s Gospel, begins with perhaps the most literal of nets:

NET. n. A NERITIC SNARE.  And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother casting a NET into the sea: for they were fishers.

Matthew 4

Fishing and the fisherman-disciples, though, soon developed a symbolic iconography in early Christian culture.  ‘Fishers of men’ was a phrase used by Christ to refer to bringing people, including Simon Peter and Andrew, to faith in him, and the ichthus or fish symbol was commonly used as a Christian badge from the second century.

The final quotation is a mere hundred years old. Ludwig Wittgenstein was disappointed that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the only book he published in his lifetime, seemed to have found no reader, other than perhaps Frank Ramsay, who could understand what it contained.  When he wrote it (he changed his mind later) he believed that he’d cleared away all the mistakes of previous philosophers and stated everything that could be said – there was much that could not be said – about the world, thought, logic and language.

In Proposition 6.341 of the Tractatus, from which this quotation is taken, Wittgenstein says how Newtonian mechanics goes about describing any given set of points existing within the world, by laying down a network or grid by means of which they can be plotted.  Any sort of grid would do, including a triangular or hexagonal net.  (Mention of ‘hexagonal’ prompts the thought: is the Tower of the Nets itself a grid of this kind, a key to understanding the positioning of things?)

Finlay’s label, ‘an intelligible articulation’ is an interesting choice.  In the Tractatus Wittgenstein used the term articulation as shorthand for saying that propositions are not a ‘blend of words’, but are made up of different parts logically connected, in the same way as an articulated lorry contains several interlocking elements.

It’s more than likely that Finlay was aware that Wittgenstein had spent several periods living in Swansea between 1942 and 1947, and that he was therefore a fitting choice for the final plaque.  (Wittgenstein’s association with Swansea and his continuing intellectual imprint on the city are explored in an excellent new collection of esssays edited by Alan Sandry, Wittgenstein in Swansea.)

NET. n. AN INTELLIGIBLE ARTICULATION.  The form is optional, since I could have achieved the same result by using a NET with a triangular or hexagonal mesh.

WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Two years after the Tower of the Nets commission, in time for Christmas 1988, Finlay reproduced all five of the Tower texts in a small pamphlet of 250 copies published through his own Wild Hawthorn Press entitled A concise classical dictionary.

With more surfaces at his disposal Finlay could have added to the ‘net citations’, almost to infinity.  But the ones he did select stand as a kind of toolbox for different ways of thinking about a net, something that seems at first sight a simple enough object: as an enabler of nourishment, as a deadly trap for animals, as a catcher of human souls, as the fate of the fearful, as a badge of poverty and subsistence living, as a metaphor for the extensibility and flexibility of the cosmos, and as a frame for fixing objects in their place in the world.

Finlay opens up thoughts like these.  No doubt he had many others in his own mind, and each passer-by will bring his or her own thoughts.  It’s true that he makes few concessions to the reader.  He admitted that the plaque quotations are ‘unashamedly edifying’.  More than that, they’re undeniably obscure, and they contain some words only found in the full version of the Oxford English dictionary.  But why should public art always be effortless and see-through?  Why assume that everyone has the attention span of a gnat?  Yes, the Tower of the Nets is a challenge, but for anyone with curiosity and a bit of spare time it repays attention.  For such a small structure it holds worlds of meaning.

Today the Tower is showing its age.  Weeds grow from the roof, salt winds have eroded some of the mouldings, the base is chipped, the brickwork needs attention, and a few details seem to be missing.  The door has been blocked up with an ugly board.  When I was last there the board carried a poster for a jazz club.  (I wondered what, if anything, the original door led to inside.  Were there nets in there?) 

So far, says Robin Campbell, efforts to find funds to restore the building have been unsuccessful.  It would be a pity if one of Swansea’s most eccentric and enigmatic monuments were to decline further, especially since in October we’ll be celebrating the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s birth.

I’m grateful to Robin Campbell for his help with information in the preparation of this piece, to Alan Sandry for first drawing my attention to the Wittgenstein quote on the Tower of the Nets, and to Sally Moss for her recollections of meeting Ian Hamilton Finlay.