 |
Liveliness in
Japanese
and American Haiku
Dr. Bruce Ross
Orono, Maine, USA |
The World Haiku Festival 2002
Yuwa-town, Akita 20-22 September
In the preface to the early anthology of
Japanese poetry Kokinshu (905) we learn that sometime after the first
attempts at tanka by the gods people began to compose their own poetry
when they were moved by blossoms, birds, the haze, or evaporating dew. Such
"flowers and birds" inspiration was received through kokoro,
the heart or spirit, and expressed through kotoba, the poetic forms. The Kokinshu
preface's first paragraph puts it more succinctly: " If we hear the singing
of a mountain thrush in the blossoms or the call of a frog in the water, we know
that every living thing has a song."1 This talk will consider the
persistence of Japanese haiku's fascination with the songs of "flowers and
birds," their liveliness so to speak, as such songs touch the heart. It
will also explore the carry over of this fascination into American haiku.
In one section of Basho's classic travel
journal Oku no Hosomichi ("Narrow Road to the Interior") the
author finds himself staying for several days in some very basic lodgings. He
expresses the situation this way:
nomi
shirami
uma no shito suru
makuramoto |
fleas,
lice-
a horse urinating
next to my pillow!(2) |
Hopefully those of us who have just followed in
Basho's footsteps along his famous journey hadn't found ourselves anywhere near
such accommodations. But wait. Is Basho only expressing his exasperation or even
disgust over his situation? He doesn't comment on his situation other than in
this haiku. In fact, although Basho's aesthetic of sabi, which was
consolidated perhaps during this journey, encompasses an almost naturalistic
view of nature, he was also very much responsive to the vitality of all natural
things as a subject for his haiku. He is exasperated with his fellow nonhuman
bedmates, but at the same time there is an obvious, almost Zen humor in his
detached observation of the circumstances he finds himself in. In his haiku the
fleas, lice, and horse are given their due as beings in their own right.
The humor to be found in domesticated or wild
non-human beings, once our anthropocentrism is put in check, is a frequent
subject of American haiku. Our pets have an amusing way of continually
subverting our expectations of them. Arizona Zipper describes such a situation:
Right in the middle
... of the cat's yawn-
........a pink tongue(3)
Anyone who lives with or observes pet cats will
recognize that vividly pink tongue emerging from between such sharp teeth as
something equally silly, harmless, and endearing. There is surprisingly a
childlike energetic spontaneity also in wild non-human creatures. I have seen
this quality, a childlike inquisitiveness really, directed at me in the faces of
young deer, bears, and foxes. Sometimes, however, such animals are as dismissive
of us as we are of them. John Wills captures an instance of this with perfect
humor:
unless you have fish
the pelican has no use
for you
What is it about these creatures that move
us? Here are three Japanese haiku spanning three centuries that highlight
the liveliness of nature that is part of its attraction. The first, in the
seventeenth century, is by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), the creator of the haiku
form:
suzume-go to
koe nakikawasu
nezumi no su |
young sparrows cry
and responding with squeaks
mice in their nest |
The young sparrows and mice are presented objectively. We hear them crying and
squeaking in response to each other, and yet the liveliness of these creatures
evokes tender sentiment from us, even humor, the same way all young animals in
their silly behavior do. The onomatopoeic "su," "zu,"
"m," "o," and "k" sound repetitions, like a
child's run through the hiragana and katakana tables, fill us with childlike
simplicity and even delight.
The second, in the eighteenth century, is by
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), perhaps the foremost exponent of haiku celebrating
the liveliness of non-human life:
jihi sureba
fun wo suru nari
suzume no ko |
be tender to them
and the young sparrows
will poop on you |
This haiku will give us some insight into
Basho's "fleas, lice" poem. What is going on here? Are the young
sparrows being fondled or are they being softly called to in their nest? It
really doesn't matter. Issa is being facetious. He is celebrating the liveliness
of these young sparrows as expressed in their pooping. They can't help it. It is
their nature to do it just as it was the horse's nature to urinate. Basho was
only being more seemingly reserved about the matter than Issa. In effect Issa is
suggesting that one can't help but be tender toward such creatures and their
charm.
The third, in the nineteenth century, is by
Ishii Rogetsu (1873-1928), a prominent student of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the
so-called father of modern Japanese haiku:
aogaeru
naku ya wakaba no
toriame |
the
tree frogs are crying
while a passing shower falls
on the young leaves |
The poet's exhilaration over the frogs' cries is directly noted in the particle
"ya" ("oh!"). There is no indirection like Basho's
seeming objectivity over the mice and young sparrows or Issa's rhetorical
insistence on tenderness toward the young sparrows. Rogetsu presents the crying
frogs and adds, so to speak, the word "incredible." This interjection
"ya" becomes a conjunction between the lively elements of nature in
the haiku, the astounding crying frogs on one side and the passing shower
falling on the young leaves on the other side. The young frogs are crying
because the rain has stimulated them. The rain in turn is falling on the new
summer leaves that surround them. A perfect portrait is thus presented here of
the wonderful fecundity and seeming synchronicity of nature.
The appreciation of nature's liveliness that
these poets felt from the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century
might appear to be mere sentimentality to those fostered in the troubling
currents of the twentieth century and our new twenty first century in what has
been called the postmodern condition. This attention to liveliness in the
postmodern world, at least in the West, can be said to skirt the distinction
between sentiment, a positive value, and sentimentality, a negative one. How can
we write haiku about the liveliness of nature, particularly in the West, without
being accused of displaying sentimentality? In a time when most people live in
urban environments and nature is thought of as an object to be manipulated
rather than something of value in and of itself and when more human
communication incorporates technological modes, such haiku on liveliness would
appear to be simply a foolish expression of sentimentality or a misguided and
anachronistic expression of romanticism. From such a perspective we are light
years away from the aesthetic of "flowers and birds." R. H. Blyth has
defined haiku this way: "Haiku is a kind of satori, or enlightenment
in which 'we see into the life of things.'"(5) He later adds: "When we
are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is
living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku."(6) If we
were to contrast Blyth's affirmation of "seeing into the life of
things" with the obvious encroachment of the postmodern condition,
particularly in the West, it would seem an act of futility. There is a
metaphysical rift in human nature, as exemplified by the Holocaust, Hiroshima,
and the Vietnam War and in an overwhelming drive toward depersonalization. There
is also a rift from nature itself, as exemplified by philosophic naturalism,
scientific empiricism, and global ecological catastrophes. But this situation is
not just in the West. It is found all across the globe.
Hayao Miyazaki, the influential anime director,
has addressed these issues in a succession of animated films that have received
worldwide attention. His films address the loss of sacred wild space in Japan.
In My Neighbor Totoro (1988) the young heroines discover a magical world
in an idealized countryside when they move there, such as animated dust
creatures, the pixy-like giant totoro, and a magic flying cat bus. In Princess
Mononoke (1997) we are transported back to a fabled time in Japan's past
that is inhabited by animal gods, tree spirits, and Shishi Gama, the Great
Spirit of the Forest. In his latest film, Spirited Away (2002), a young
girl and her family find themselves trapped in a communal bath for demons in
which the parents are turned into pigs and a god of a river is covered with
trash and sludge This god of the river is of course Miyazaki's critique of the
postmodern devastation of nature, but the other creatures and magical
occurrences are an evocation of an animated world of nature inhabited by gods or
kami that has been lost sight of. Miyazaki is direct in his criticism of the
postmodern world:
Today, the world has become ambiguous; but even
though it is, the world is encroaching and trying to consume everything.(7)
He even half-seriously locates the murder of
the Shishi Gami, the Great Spirit of the Forest, to the Muromachi era. After
this period, he suggests,
...we stopped being in awe of the forests"
and as we gradually lost the awareness of such holy things, humans
somehow lost their respect for nature.(8)
Miyazaki's word "ambiguous" is his
way of describing the postmodern condition and its encompassing devaluation of
nature. The magical creatures of his films are gestures to revaluate nature. If
we are to escape the charge of sentimentality or even romanticism in writing
haiku about the liveliness of nature, we might give some attention to Miyazaki's
critique of our relationship with nature. That critique is a metaphor of how we
should and should not be touched by the things of nature as in the telling
phrase from Japanese poetics, "mono no aware," "to be touched by
things," or literally, "the pathos of things." How can our
feelings be truly connected to the heart in haiku if we are not truly connected
to nature? How can we be truly connected to nature when, as the saying goes in
the West, everything is surface and presentation? Blyth was right. We must truly
look into the life of things in all their liveliness. Although Miyazaki is not
sure what will come from the situation of ambiguity that surrounds us, it is
certain that he considers this true connection with the life of things to be a
valued, even necessary part of our human nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882), the great philosopher of American Transcendentalism, would have
agreed with him.
Emerson in poems like "The Rhodora"
and "Each and All" and in essays like "Nature" and "The
Over-Soul," expressed his idea that there is a "fundamental
unity" between humanity and nature. In our encounters with nature,
according to Emerson, we make contact with the "Over-Soul", an
ultimate spiritual force that unites all things. Nature is thus somehow a
reflection of human spirituality. Emerson and American Transcendentalism
legitimized the idea that our claims for exploring our true inner spirit were
more important than the claims of an endless pursuit of the material thing. So
we may begin to make a true connection with nature by simply engaging with
nature. How do we start? We must simply quiet down our ordinary mind and pay
attention to nature. We must also commune with our own inner nature to develop
our capacity to pay attention to nature and to realize that we ourselves are a
part of nature.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Emerson's
secretary, put Emerson's philosophy to the test by spending two years and two
months in a solitary cabin on Walden Pond. As he states in his classic journal
of his stay, "Walden,"
I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to font only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach . . .(9)
He also expresses his Taoist-like conception of
the Emersonian "fundamental unity" like this:
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make
my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature itself.(10)
The various chapters of "Walden"
clearly attest to the depth of sensitivity toward nature that Thoreau came to
achieve. The reason we must, like Thoreau at Walden Pond, turn to nature as a
mirror of our own spirituality is that the pursuit of the external material
thing has suppressed that spirituality in its purist form. Two centuries earlier
Basho spent almost two seasons in a rustic dwelling called "Unreal
Hut" in the woods near Lake Biwa to rest and perfect his inner nature and
connection to non-human nature. A section of his short prose record
describes his activities:
When the sun sets under the edge of the hill
and night falls, I quietly sit and wait for the moon. With the moonrise I begin
roaming about, casting my shadow on the ground. When the night deepens I return
to the hut and meditate on right and wrong, gazing at the dim margin of a shadow
in the lamplight.(11)
Basho is here testifying to the spiritual
practice that underlies his "transpersonal" poetics of presence in
haiku. He is sitting quietly and meditating while paying close attention to the
inner life of things in nature: dusk, the moon, shadows. His highly
regarded haiku with their nature subjects reflect the sensibility founded on
such inner cultivation. He had studied such cultivation with his Zen master
Buccho but had taken the haiku path as his discipline rather than the monastic
life. Such a mode of quiet cultivation is one means of subverting the postmodern
condition. But Basho is also walking around in nature in a kind of moving
meditation that perhaps characterizes his travel journals.
Some of us have just visited a number of the
highlights of Basho's most famous poetic journey, Oku no Hosomichi,
(Narrow Path to the Interior). Like Thoreau in his travel journals, A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), and The Maine Woods (1864),
Basho immersed himself in the wonders of natural beauty in wilderness
environments. He also visited sacred temples, areas of historical significance,
and places associated with poetry. Along the way he recorded encounters with
interesting people as well as moments of natural beauty such as this:
atsuki
hi wo
umi ni iretari
Mogamigawa |
the
hot sun
pours into the sea-
Mogami River |
There are many haiku on the reflections of the sun, moon, and clouds moving in a
body of water, but here an almost alchemical interaction of fire and water
deepens the imagery of nature's cyclical flux that is centered on the wonderful
image of the sun pouring into the sea. The aesthetic value of such moments is
undeniable. Yet there is possibly an even richer justification for such moments
and such journeys.
The religious pilgrimage is universal and quite
ancient. Even Chaucer's medieval Christian Canterbury Tales betrays, in
its prologue, an even earlier fertility ritual to ensure new crops in early
spring. Clearly Basho was following in the footsteps of wanderer-priests like
Saigyo and returns in the Oku no Hosomichi journey to a location that
Saigyo wrote a poem on. Certain places of astounding beauty occur as "power
spots" in the long traditions of primal and archaic cultures. We understand
what a visit to a well-known temple or spiritual relic represents. But what
would a visit to a "power spot" mean beyond its natural beauty and its
appeal to the "flowers and birds" aesthetic? In earlier, more
animistic times the Emperor would make a circuit through such mountainous spots
to propitiate the gods. Later esoteric spiritual cults like Shugendo Buddhism,
with their yamabushi mountain priests, incorporated a Shinto worship of
nature and the much earlier practices of mountain hermits and shaman. Shugendo
founder En-no-Gyoja established a pilgramage route in the mountains of
Omine-sankei that is used by devotees to this day. Those on our Basho Journey
may even have seen these practitioners in the Dewa Sanzan Mountains. What can
the spiritual relation to trees, waterfalls, and the like by these adherents
tell us about a haiku poet's relation to nature?
The word kami is literally translated as
"God" or "god." In the West it is thought of as a nature god
that is part of Shinto worship. Apparently in Japanese thinking there is a
distinction between the visible world (kenkai) and the invisible world (yukai),
the latter a kind of shadow substance. According to Ueda Kenji in a collection
of essays on the concept of kami Japanese and Western views of
materiality differ:
The Japanese had no word to indicate sheer
"matter" (busshitsu) in the Western sense. As intimated by the
term mono no ke ("aura of a thing"), even the word, mono ("thing"),
was thought to refer to a kind of spiritual being (reiteki na sonziu).
Namely, all things were conceived of as spiritual existence, which existed in a
relationship of mutual effect on human beings, and those which possessed
particularly awesome agency were the tama (spirit) revered as kami.(12)
Professor Ueda Kenji is referring in the last
sentence to an understanding of "kami" established in the eighteenth
century in which kami were considered dramatic natural forms, a
definition not unlike "power spots" and perhaps a reduction of an
earlier understanding in which all of nature was animated as kami. It
shouldn't be too difficult then to see embedded within the poetics of "mono
no aware" the phrase mono no ke. In effect, the liveliness of nature
may bare the residue of the idea of spiritually animated things. In this line of
thinking haiku that capture such particularized liveliness are evoking the auras
of those particular beings and things. But again, in the postmodern condition,
how can we experience such auras and express them convincingly?
The Southeast Asians, including the Japanese,
conceive of their spiritual center as hara, that internal area a few
fingers' width beneath the navel, rather than in the area of the head as in the
West. This center is the Chinese dan-tien and the Buddha belly of
meditation. In martial arts, such as aikido or tai chi chuan, all movement
naturally flows from here. It is a focal point for various kinds of internal
energy as well as an intuitive center that connects us to the universe. In this
latter capacity, unlike the mind, which merely collects and organizes sense
experience, hara connects our feelings to the deeper essence of
things in their wondrous outpouring from nature, both natura naturata and
natura naturans at the same time, to borrow from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In the long history of Japanese poetry there
has been a magnificent affective resonance that exhibits this union of
metaphysical contexts for nature, natura naturata, and forthright
depictions of nature in the particular in its various manifestations, natura
naturans, as expressed in uniformly short lyric forms. Derived from Shinto
animism and later Taoism and Buddhism, this union makes the simple haiku an
extraordinary vehicle for adding allusive depth to feeling taken from nature
subjects. There has been within these poetic forms tendencies that vacillate
between an animated representation of nature as such and a more literarily
stylized treatment. Without appearing to simplify the matter, one could refer to
the tired distinction between romantic and classic, what has been called the raw
and the cooked, to distinguish the two directions. Much of the affect of such
poetry is in the associative nature of its images. With all such canons of
feeling there is the danger of the given imagery to be used in a superficial or
trite manner, disregarding Ezra Pound's sage advice on poetry: Make it new. Or
to borrow from Takamura Kyoshi (1874-1959): shin is shin or deep is new. More
than a naturalist's handbook the saijiki, like medieval Western bestiaries and
emblem books, codify the canons of natural life and seasonal activities as they
reflect a consensus of understood relations to such life and activities.
Yet it is the treatment of nature in an
individual poem that determines its emotional affect. In the modern period such
canons have come up against the challenges of the postmodern condition. Fruit
blossoms, particularly sakura or cherry blossoms, are perhaps the
singularly most common imagery for beauty in Japanese poetry. But a kind
of deconstruction of the classic idiom of traditional blossom viewing imagery
has occurred in the modern period. Here are two haiku, the first by Shiina
Fumiko (1908-) and the second by Hosomi Ayako (1907-) that suggest such a
change:
kobai ya
eda eda wa sora
ubaiai |
sitting down I take
the chair that is farthest from
the red plum blossoms |
fudangi de
fudan no kokoro
momo no hana |
in everyday clothes
thinking everyday thoughts-
peach blossoms |
In these haiku the inherited sensibility toward
the beauty of fruit blossoms is mediated by a quite modern word choice and tone
that deconstructs a more classically traditional haiku on such a subject -- here
there is a modern, let us say intellectual, adjustment of consciousness, let us
say its assertion, before obvious beauty to produce a well-crafted expression of
aesthetic irony. The following tanka by Tawara Machi (1962-) carries such
deconstruction further by perhaps questioning the very idea of beauty itself:
sakura
sakura sakura
sakisome
sakiowari nani mo
nakatta yona koen |
cherry
blossoms
cherry blossoms cherry blossoms
begin blooming
end blooming then nothing
except for the park |
Deliberately alluding to Basho's haiku that exuberantly repeats the name
Matsushima to express its beauty, Tawara Machi ironically adjusts the common
Buddhist metaphysical idea of the ephemeral nature of life that appears as a
presiding metaphor in Japanese poetry to the modern world. She contrasts the
beauty of the cherry blossoms to the empty park not to provide a lesson in
Buddhist wisdom but to take a clear-eyed look at what this phenomenon of beauty
really is.
The trend in haiku after the high water marks
of Basho's "transpersonal poetics" and Yosa Buson's (1716-1783)
painterly aestheticism, which both relied on nature naturans reaches a
turning point with Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Compare Basho's sabi-drenched
"autumn crow" haiku, Buson's picture-perfect heron in the shallows
haiku, and Shiki's cockscomb haiku. Basho's haiku accomplishes it deepness
through its selection of stark images. Buson's haiku evokes its beauty by the
delicacy of its lilting phrasing. Shiki's haiku takes its emotional coloring
rather from the biographical fact of his illness. Otherwise we merely have him
approximating the number of these striking plants. Shiki's "sketch from
nature" approach has a tendency to deconstruct the metaphysical tonalities
of Basho and the aesthetic ordering of Buson. But especially it devalues the
more direct animism that is evoked in a poet like Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827).
Later twentieth century Western influences enhanced the simple objectivity of
Shiki through ideological, naturalistic, and expressionist haiku,
notwithstanding a steady stream of nature haiku deriving from Shiki's student
Kyoshi. Aside from matters of culturally defined canons of beauty and its
expressions and deconstructions in Japanese poetry up to the present day, we are
still left with the issue of sentimentality.
In his 1960's entry on Japanese poetry in the
"Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics" the scholar of Japanese
literature Earl Miner offers some focus on the issue: "After Buson haikai
once more deteriorated, as can be seen in the famous though largely sentimental
poetry of Kobayashi Issa . . . and in the development of the parodic form of the
hokku of haikai, senryu."13 In art and literature sentiment is
characterized by a desired expression of delicate and sensitive feeling. The
word is derived from the Latin sentire, or "to feel." In it we
can find connections to "mono no aware" and other aesthetic values
that characterize Japanese poetry. Sentimentality is thought of as a negative
expression of excessive or affected sentiment. Are Issa's haiku different in
their manner of expression from those of Basho, Buson, and Shiki? Although the
answer is obvious, we still must ask it. Each of the latter three haijin
approached their nature subjects through a different focus of sentiment: Basho
from a Zen-minded engaging; Buson from an artistic ordering; and Shiki from an
objective recording. Each of their approaches employs its unique kind of mental
functioning: Basho's as an empty and receptive mind; Busson's as an imaginative
restructuring mind; and Shiki's as an empirically collecting mind. Issa isn't
using his mind as an approach to haiku in any of these ways. Nor does he seem to
be using his mind as such to construct his haiku.
How is he constructing his haiku? And are we to
value those haiku or denigrate them as mere sentimentality? If we return to the hara,
that belly-centered function that connects us to nature, we find an approach to
the first question. Hara might be contrasted with the mind that might be thought
of as a processor of sense data. Those haiku poets who approach nature subjects
through their feeling as mediated by some aspect of the mind, whether through an
"ego-less" Zen emptiness, the artistic imagination, or simple
receptivity, are writing a kind of haiku that represents the central direction
of the form in its literary manifestations. More recent haiku in the manner of
social commentary or expressionism are more blatantly using the mind. Opposed to
this is a haiku that is guided by pure intuition emanating from the hara.
Here there would be no mediation by the mind as such in an exchange with nature.
There would be rather an unsophisticated naturalness to such an exchange. In
other words, sentimentality when it is expressed as haiku. This
"subversive" and "romantic" approach best describes in a
positive way what Issa is doing in his haiku. The postmodern condition, literary
modernism, and literary postmodernism clearly undermine this approach. Yet as we
have seen in Basho's "young sparrows" haiku and Rogetsu's
"tree frogs" haiku this approach spans the time from the beginnings of
haiku in the seventeenth century with Basho to the beginnings of modern haiku in
the late nineteenth century with Shiki's student Rogestsu.
What value is there in such so-called
sentimentality? Perhaps hiding beneath the natural liveliness of such haiku,
like one of the little appearing and disappearing tree spirits in Princess
Mononoke, is a hint of the kami, the spirits inhabiting nature. Are
such intuitive gleanings to be thought of as simply excessive or affected
sentiment? From the perspective of the postmodern condition, the answer would be
yes. From the perspective of the literary world, the answer would be yes. From
the perspective of an intuitive feeling for non-human nature and humanity, the
answer would be the opposite. Do such intuitive haiku have a valuable aesthetic?
From the perspective of the literary world, the answer would be no. But they
nonetheless have their own aesthetic, one that boldly hints at anthropomorphism
in its visceral engagement with the natural world and humanity. This aesthetic
is accordingly quite far from the classical court poetry, mainstream haiku, or
the verses of renga.
Here are some modern American haiku that with
more or less success follow that aesthetic. The first two are by the
extraordinary nature haiku poet John Wills:
touch of dawn
the snail withdraws
its horns(14) |
dusk....from rock
to rock....a water thrush(15)
Notice how the lives of these two creatures are brought vividly to life in their
activities during that magical time between day and night.
See how the mysterious essence of birds are concretized in their calls in these
two haiku by Charles Dickson and Carol Field:
out of the fog bank
croak
of snowy egrets(16) |
through falling snow
the pale form of a snow goose-
trumpeting(17) |
Notice how the fog and the snow intensify the
ultimately unknowable natures of the birds.
The embodiments of nonhuman nature have a
liveliness that clearly meets their own ends, or presumably so. Here are three
examples by the Americans, Elizabeth Searle Lamb and Molly Magner, and the
Canadian Tim Sampson:
field of wild iris-
the pinto pony
kicks up its heels(18) |
the neglected garden growing faster than ever19
not going gently
into the dark bag
ivy clippings(20) |
One must of course excuse here the overworked
allusion to Dylan Thomas in Tim Sampson's feisty ivy clippings.
I have often driven by a house that, on nice days, had a table of something for
sale. One day I looked closely. In sitting positions on little shelves, like the
dressed-up dolls on Hina Matsuri or Doll Festival, were all kinds of
Beanie Babies, those sought after miniature stuffed animals:
bright spring day
a table of beanie babies
on a front lawn(21) |
It was early spring and I thought these Beanie
Babies in their seeming liveliness almost sprouted up like colorful new spring
flowers.
Admittedly, the ivy clippings and Beanie Babies
haiku all but skirt anthropomorphism, but what about haiku in which the author
their self engages directly with a nonhuman creature? Here are three cricket
haiku, the first two by the Americans Garry Gay and Brent Partridge and the
third by Issa:
3:15 a.m. i carry a cricket
still I can't fall asleep
you too cricket?(22) |
i
carry a cricket
back outside
it wants in again(23) |
negaeri wo
suru zo soko noke
kirigirisu |
I'm turning over
look out! move out of the way
cricket |
Neither Garry Gay nor Brent Partridge is actually talking to their respective
crickets. They are expressing their emotions about the creatures in a
conversational way. Nonetheless there is a clear bond between them and their
crickets that incorporates the crickets into human situations in an almost human
participation which in turn registers appealingly in the haiku. Issa is probably
really addressing his cricket, which is more likely a grasshopper or katydid. He
is, as a Buddhist, concerned about the welfare of all living things and doesn't
want to crush the creature. His haiku lets the reader of his haiku share the
humor and compassion contained in his predicament.
Garry Gay and Brent Partridge reflect the
occasional appearance of Issa-like haiku in modern Japanese and American haiku.
The reason for this rare occurrence is the reluctance that contemporary haiku
poets have in facing the criticism of mere sentimentality being directed at
their haiku. One new contrary voice is the Canadian, Tim Sampson. He has the
sensibility of an itinerant Zen man who expresses through haiku his humor,
appreciation, joy, and compassion in relation to the flora and fauna that share
this world with us. In Tim Sampson, as exhibited in his chapbook
"'chirp'" (2001), we find a type of sentimentality that Issa would
recognize and that can stand up to the scrutiny of the postmodern situation.
Here are some examples, set beside similar haiku by Issa, of the extraordinary
beings and their lively activities that inhabit Tim's rollicking word:
rusi ni suro zo
koi shite asobe
io no hae |
we're going out
make love and play together
my house flies |
Ryokan is dead!
mosquito - it's you and me
in this moonlit room(24)
The Zen monk Ryokan lived in simple dwellings
like Issa and begged for his food. His haiku are full of the joys and
tribulations that wavered between his solitary meditative activities and those
in villages where he begged and played with the children. Sampson's haiku
reflects both activities, the mosquito standing in for the children. His
consideration of the mosquito as a fellow traveler in the solitary Zen existence
relates well to Issa's attitude toward his house fly housemates.
Both Issa and Sampson can continue in this vein
of concerned attention to the benefit of our amusement:
nomi domo ni
matsushima misete
nigasu zo yo |
but fleas
I'll show you Matsushima
then let you loose |
terribly sorry
I wasn't paying attention
but did you say "chirp"?(25)
Would any of us on the Basho Journey have
thought to share the beauties of Matsushima with a lesser creature like a flea?
Would any of us try to pay more attention to the meaning of a half-heard bird's
call? The answer to these questions would probably be no. But this does not mean
that we couldn't if we could attune our sensibilities in a different way and
respond to the particularity of these creatures.
Eating and the pursuance of food take up much
of the time of non-human creatures. For that matter we humans seem to spend a
lot of time at it too:
ya ga yoku ba
no hitatsu tomare
meshi no hae |
if the world were better
one more of you could perch
flies on the rice |
enough on the shell
to keep 3 sandflies
interested(26) |
chased by a child
but the pigeon never far
from the french fry(27) |
Issa's universal compassion may be more direct
than Sampson's more reserved observation but they share the same appreciation
and wit in regard to these creatures.
Such compassion in both Issa and Sampson is in fact almost always expressed
through wit:
yare utsu
ne
hae ga te wo suri
ashi wo suru |
oh, don't touch him!
the fly is rubbing its hands,
rubbing its feet |
bead of summer sweat
rolls back up my cheek
or an aphid(28)
We have seen a fly rubbing its hands before it
eats. What scientists say it is doing, I don't know. "Rubbing" is
often translated as "wringing" to imply the fly is imploring or even
praying. There is a long tradition in Japanese art and poetry to project onto
non-human creatures attitudes of Buddhist behavior basically as a metaphor for
universal compassion. Here Issa's projection is Sampson's legitimate puzzlement.
A bead of sweat cannot flow against gravity; therefore, it must be an aphid.
Unstated but understood is the thought that if it is an aphid it can't be rubbed
off of the cheek for fear of harming it. Both the projection and the puzzlement
are of course a cause for humor.
Here are three last haiku by Sampson that
highlight the animated qualities of non-human nature in their often humorous
actions as they interact with the human world:
hitting my head
at less than tremendous speed
windblown blossom(29) |
no real option
but to push the barrow faster
and catch the leaf(30) |
after bouncing
off the monk's bald head
hail lands softly(31)
Who would have thought to portray, or should I
say experience, blossoms, leaves, and hail this way? Who would have thought of a
kamikaze blossom, an errant leaf, or a cautious hailstone? Yet they are there in
a way, if we are able to see them.
We are back to the "flowers and
birds" of the "Kokinshu," but not as ancient poetic conceits but
as lively, living entities. If we would look at R. H. Blyth's English
translations of Basho's mice and sparrows haiku, Issa's young sparrows haiku,
and Rogetsu's frogs and young leaves haiku in the four volumes of his
"Haiku," we would find that he highlighted the liveliness of these
creatures with words like "squeak," "poop," and
"crying."(32) There is a reason for this, and it is in our delight,
his delight, and those haiku poets' delight. In high school I read an essay by
Aldous Huxley on writing a modern "Ode to a Nightingale." He insisted
that such a poem should include the latest scientific information about the
bird. But would such a course really serve our delight in the bird? Somewhere
the physicist Werner Heisenberg has said that atoms are not things. The
so-called building blocks of matter are living entities not static objects. His
influential "Principle of Indeterminacy" explicates the implications
of this. According to this principle you cannot see the whole of a subatomic
particle, its position and momentum, at once. Metaphorically speaking, the
beings of reality from the subatomic electrons to the whirling galaxies of the
cosmos do not want to be turned into objectified things. Nor should they.
If we remember that "
humor" or the ability to enjoy what is comical is derived from the word
"fluid" and that from an early date as "humour" was
associated with the bodily temperaments that determine one's health, we will
notice that humor is concerned in a sense with concretized vitality, with the
Japanese ki and the Chinese chi. If we are centered in our hara or
dan-tien we will have balanced ki or chi. We will have good
humour. And because we are connected in a balanced way to the liveliness of
those non-human creatures and to the manifested world as a whole we will see
them and it in all their sprightliness and singularity. Yet, except for the
postmodern West, we may not be so far from such a connection. There is
apparently no concept for time in the languages of the Algonquin Indians of
North America, that culture derived from a proto-Japanese-speaking Asian stock
that later became Hinduism and Taoism, except as it is embodied in "the
things of nature."(33)
On the contrary, the postmodern
West is dominated more and more by an abstract conception of time that propels
the hectic pace of postmodern life. The concrete embodiment of time is found in
all primal and archaic cultures. Japan's major annual festivals to this day are
accordingly comprised of seasonal agricultural festivals, festivals of exorcism
and purification, and ancestral festivals, including moon viewing, rice
planting, flower watching, harvesting, equinox celebrating, and the like. There
is even a water kami festival. Such orientations to concretized time in a
centered body should lead to the kind of haiku sensibility that movingly
registers nature's liveliness and Emerson's "fundamental unity." In
other words, if we are in a state of connection with the liveliness of nature we
are in true time, in the "haiku moment." Needless to say, it is
a wonder that this nation hasn't produced more Issa's. I have often mused over
the possibility that the exhibition of natural energy is a valid criterion of
beauty in a revised aesthetic. In haiku, in the haiku presented in this talk, we
have found examples of such beauty and the beginnings of such an
aesthetic.
Notes
1....My translations.
2....All of the English versions of Japanese haiku
and tanka are my own.
3...."Frogpond" 6:2 (83). By permission
of the author.
4...."Reed Shadows" (Burnt Lake, 1987).
By permission of Marlene Mountain.
5....R. H. Blyth, "Haiku," vol. 1
(Hokuseido, 1981), p.8.
6...."Haiku," vol. 1, p.11.
7....Online interview.
8....Online interview.
9...."Walden and Civil Disobedience"
(Penguin, 1983), p.135.
10..."Walden and Civil Disobedience,"
p.132.
11...Makoto Ueda, "The Master Haiku Poet
Matsuo Basho" (Kodansha, 1970), p.31.
12...Quoted by Norman Havens, "Immanent
Legitimation: Reflections on the 'Kami Concept'" in "Kami,
Contemporary Papers on Japanese Religion 4, ed. Inove Robutaka (online).
13..."Japanese Poetry" in "Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics," ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton
University, 1974), p.428.
14..."Reed Shadows." By permission of
Marlene Mountain.
15..."Reed Shadows." By permission of
Marlene Mountain.
16..."Brussels Sprout"6, no. 2 (89). By
permission of Virginia P. Dickson.
17..."Modern Haiku" 31, no. 1 (2000). By
permission of the author.
18..."Casting into a Cloud: Southwest
Haiku" (From Here, 1985). By permission of the author.
19..."Modern Haiku"29, no. 1 (89). By
permission of the author.
20..."'chirp'" (self-published, 2001). By
permission of the author.
21..."Modern Haiku" 30, no. 3 (99). By
permission of the author.
22..."Wind Chimes" 4 (82). By permission
of the author.
23..."Brussels Sprout" 8:1 (91). By
permission of the author.
24..."'chirp.'' By permission of the author.
25..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
26...''chirp.'' By permission of the author.
27..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
28..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
29..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
30..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
31..."'chirp.'" By permission of the
author.
32..."Haiku," vol. 2 (Hokuseido, 1981),
pp. 520, 526; "Haiku," vol. 3 (Hokuseido, 1982), p. 814.
33. ..Evan T. Pritchard, "No Word for Time,
The Way of the Algonquin People" (Council Oak, 2001), pp.11,
244.
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