Haiku:
Lightning on a clear sky
written and translated to English by Carlos
Fleitas
Uruguay, South America
Haiku is a poetical form and genre originated in Japan in the XVI
century. Consisting of three lines of 5-7-5 beats, a total of 17,
its structure corresponds to a microform. Its subjects, extracted
from everyday life, include mainly nature, events and occasionally
human characters, expressed by the poet through descriptions,
comments, or reflections without the aid of rhetorical resources
such as metaphor or other regular forms of symbolizing.
Ephemeral and vanishing poetics, haiku does not say any more
beyond itself. It is the sudden scream of the bird in the static
silence of the mountain, or perhaps the static silence of the
mountain itself without any purpose. And this is the substance
haiku acquires in its bath within the cradle of Zen Buddhism,
which has sharpened it as a koan -- less sharp perhaps, but so
subtle and paradoxical as a koan itself.
Haiku as a poeticising of koan: A challenge to the mind and its
fatal and conservative inertia. Electrical wake up from any
solipsist daydream. Sudden shift of the stream of our ideas,
dislocating its monotony opposite to a fluency without obstacles.
Breaking-off the self centred attention to show us what is beyond
the ego.
Dissolving the contents of the mind, that is thinking, the poet of
the haiku vanishes as to direct our attention toward what is
beyond the ego. And haiku looks there to extract its essence,
meaning and connection as a witness of what is small, exiling all
forms of worship of the grandiose. How different haiku is from
Western portraits where the human being overrules everything,
expanding its own being, and denying the cosmic processes that
exceed and determine him at the same time, even though he is
systematically unaware of them. And this denial and unawareness
generates in him the ripening separativenss that is current in
contemporary societies.
Two lines that frame a description of a cosmic event; Suddenly as
a spark, the content of haiku changes, introducing a third issue
unveiling that which, in the inertia of the our thoughts, stays
unattended by us. In this way, a mechanism similar to humour
occurs, bringing disconcertion to our minds and leading us into
another plane of action -- not to bring up a concealed meaning,
but rather an unexpected shift which brings us back again to the
beginning.
Without making concessions, yet with a gentle and elegant
brusqueness, a haiku exiles us from the impressions we picture
through its first lines as if to tell us that whatever the
direction or path we may choose, we will always be making an
arbitrary selection which bears the seal of unknowing and not of
wisdom -- because wisdom can not be achieved by means of
perseverance or even coherence, not even by reason as ratio, that
is, measure and proportion.
In this way haiku teaches us that any integrated and fertile look
into life, cosmos and society is not based on the accumulation of
experiences or knowledge, that is, filling our minds with them. On
the contrary, the fruitful look implies an exemplary emptiness,
making possible the continuous renewal of our being in the world,
not in the frame of knowledge, but in wisdom and receptiveness. So
one need pay attention to everything that stays at the side of any
system of ideas, for every system will always be partial and will
ignore all that that can be the thread by which truth (as what it
is by itself) starts to open out its song.
But haiku knows nothing about this. It is a brief, ephemeral poem
dealing with nature and its environment. Haiku is the art of
speaking without rhetorical resources, formulated in a sensory and
receptive plastic. It sets itself only in the present, without
appealing to permanence and without trying to bring up a causal
connection between those events it deals with. Therefore looking
beyond its ephemeral blooming could lead us to get lost in the
labyrinths of thought...
Read
This Essay in Spanish: Haiku: Un
relámpago en el cielo claro
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