The question of the status of haiku in literature is ultimately a question of the status of the haiku poet as a human being. Does the haiku poet, by virtue of personal suffering and artistic engagement, illuminate the perplexities of life?
If the haiku poet keeps returning to Basho or Issa, perhaps it is because Basho and Issa come to mind when he reads the opening lines of "Asides on the Oboe" by Wallace Stevens:
The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
This haiku poet cannot but choose to keep reading Basho and Issa and the others (even some of his contemporaries who belong to that world, his world) and writing haiku in the spirit of their examples. Other possibilities -- and they do occur to him -- do not survive the edge of his need.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Haiku and the traditional modern American style: on a haiku by Roberta Beary
on the church steps
a mourning dove
with mother’s eyes
—Roberta Beary
Roberta Beary is an award-winning haiku writer and someone who would be considered a potential “breakout” poet. That is, Beary seems p0ised to help establish haiku as a genre of poetry both commercially and critically. Her work, as here, is both accessible and emotionally charged. The qualities associated with, among other types of modern American writing, haiku – precision, concision, and clarity – can easily be illustrated by discussing this haiku and many others by Beary.
The public associates haiku with an objective report-- a captured moment-in-time, a sort of emotional snapshot. Here we may imagine a mourner mounting the steps of the church to attend a memorial service for her mother and being haunted by the eyes of the “mourning dove” she passes on the steps. At this moment in time, even the common pigeon reminds her of her mother! The poignance is hardly obscure; the moment happens TO the poet/speaker and by extension the willing reader. The moment is one of grief and as such must be acknowledged; only a cad would question the reality of the emotional scene from which the poem grew.
And yet, studying the poem, one may feel a slight break in the glaze of the poem – the unity that vouchsafes the poet’s sincerity – by the pun on the name of the bird. That crack may widen for some readers with strong imaginations, and/or a knowledge of this particular bird’s way of seeing and looking. Nor would this opening of questions be of the sort sponsored by the form of haiku, which is marked by “cuts” starting with the fold between the vertical – the CHURCH steps – and the base – the last two lines. The fact that such a bird is a common denizen of church steps, indeed frequently the object of attention by those who must scrub the steps, does not make the kind of use of the formal fold that is characteristic of many great haiku, though it does contain the potential note of derision, or “low” value, that is typical of the comic dimension of haiku.
It’s not that all haiku must exhibit a tension between the superposed line and the base (or narrative scene, usually in two lines), only that the tension is more than a formal figuration expressed in the diction. The tension of the major cut is that between the “vertical” or transcending dimension and the self-enclosed givens of the “horizontal” section. That is, the “gap” typical of haiku form – and only it would seem of this genre – is a “metaphysical” feature; as such it can move around within the actual verbal structure of the poem. In any event, haiku as a genre bears witness to the perplexity occasioned by the amazement of “that there is anything at all”: the wonder of being. As William Desmond says, “To live as human is always to be porous to beng struck by this astonishment and perplexity about origin” (Art, Origins, Otherness, 3). Haiku attends to the “being happenings” that characterize this metaxic view of life. Beary’s haiku certainly does seem to aim at recovering such an experience in poetic form, but it does so with perhaps too little concern for loose ends and a sense of sentimentality that makes the poem about the poet’s emotions – her grief -- rather than about anything else. Certainly not her mother or even the bird. And of course mourning one’s mother would be hard to write about (and yet Basho and Issa, and no doubt others, managed to write great haiku about just that).
In traditional Japanese haiku, the gap creates a space in which metaphor happens, analogies and proportions, and these animate the disparate parts that make up the whole poem. But, you may say, well, that’s just how our type of haiku is: it’s about the emotions experienced by the poet and “hopefully” the willing reader. To which I would say, that’s not enough to make haiku stand as a genre of world poetry; it does not distinguish haiku from a conversation, a letter, a phone call, or some other communication. And it does not reflect the artistic accomplishment of the founders of the genre. The virtues of concision, precision, and clarity are hallowed in the US by generations of stylists. Beary’s achievements as a haiku poet aside, these qualities raise questions about the conventions of the master culture; much of experience simply cannot be rendered by these stylistic qualities. Grief may indeed open up to include all of existence – even the pigeon, but then the creatureliness of mortals would be the focus of the moment. Perhaps the unintended issues raised by Beary’s poem suggest the limits of just such a model of excellence.
a mourning dove
with mother’s eyes
—Roberta Beary
Roberta Beary is an award-winning haiku writer and someone who would be considered a potential “breakout” poet. That is, Beary seems p0ised to help establish haiku as a genre of poetry both commercially and critically. Her work, as here, is both accessible and emotionally charged. The qualities associated with, among other types of modern American writing, haiku – precision, concision, and clarity – can easily be illustrated by discussing this haiku and many others by Beary.
The public associates haiku with an objective report-- a captured moment-in-time, a sort of emotional snapshot. Here we may imagine a mourner mounting the steps of the church to attend a memorial service for her mother and being haunted by the eyes of the “mourning dove” she passes on the steps. At this moment in time, even the common pigeon reminds her of her mother! The poignance is hardly obscure; the moment happens TO the poet/speaker and by extension the willing reader. The moment is one of grief and as such must be acknowledged; only a cad would question the reality of the emotional scene from which the poem grew.
And yet, studying the poem, one may feel a slight break in the glaze of the poem – the unity that vouchsafes the poet’s sincerity – by the pun on the name of the bird. That crack may widen for some readers with strong imaginations, and/or a knowledge of this particular bird’s way of seeing and looking. Nor would this opening of questions be of the sort sponsored by the form of haiku, which is marked by “cuts” starting with the fold between the vertical – the CHURCH steps – and the base – the last two lines. The fact that such a bird is a common denizen of church steps, indeed frequently the object of attention by those who must scrub the steps, does not make the kind of use of the formal fold that is characteristic of many great haiku, though it does contain the potential note of derision, or “low” value, that is typical of the comic dimension of haiku.
It’s not that all haiku must exhibit a tension between the superposed line and the base (or narrative scene, usually in two lines), only that the tension is more than a formal figuration expressed in the diction. The tension of the major cut is that between the “vertical” or transcending dimension and the self-enclosed givens of the “horizontal” section. That is, the “gap” typical of haiku form – and only it would seem of this genre – is a “metaphysical” feature; as such it can move around within the actual verbal structure of the poem. In any event, haiku as a genre bears witness to the perplexity occasioned by the amazement of “that there is anything at all”: the wonder of being. As William Desmond says, “To live as human is always to be porous to beng struck by this astonishment and perplexity about origin” (Art, Origins, Otherness, 3). Haiku attends to the “being happenings” that characterize this metaxic view of life. Beary’s haiku certainly does seem to aim at recovering such an experience in poetic form, but it does so with perhaps too little concern for loose ends and a sense of sentimentality that makes the poem about the poet’s emotions – her grief -- rather than about anything else. Certainly not her mother or even the bird. And of course mourning one’s mother would be hard to write about (and yet Basho and Issa, and no doubt others, managed to write great haiku about just that).
In traditional Japanese haiku, the gap creates a space in which metaphor happens, analogies and proportions, and these animate the disparate parts that make up the whole poem. But, you may say, well, that’s just how our type of haiku is: it’s about the emotions experienced by the poet and “hopefully” the willing reader. To which I would say, that’s not enough to make haiku stand as a genre of world poetry; it does not distinguish haiku from a conversation, a letter, a phone call, or some other communication. And it does not reflect the artistic accomplishment of the founders of the genre. The virtues of concision, precision, and clarity are hallowed in the US by generations of stylists. Beary’s achievements as a haiku poet aside, these qualities raise questions about the conventions of the master culture; much of experience simply cannot be rendered by these stylistic qualities. Grief may indeed open up to include all of existence – even the pigeon, but then the creatureliness of mortals would be the focus of the moment. Perhaps the unintended issues raised by Beary’s poem suggest the limits of just such a model of excellence.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Basho as a "singular thinker"
In contemplating the long history of haiku, one becomes familiar with contexts that constrain interpretation. It's tempting, of course, to reduce haiku to an act of "mere" attention, as if "attention" itself were not a construct based on a complex of beliefs and habits of perception. In any event, avoiding that temptation may lead to an opposite extreme: the imposition of beliefs in a non-historical way. In many contemporary commentaries, there's a kind of loss of difference between the text and the commentary; even the act of commenting seems to be a para-poetic act, as if in competition with the poem. The original is subsumed by the commentary. The rest is "gloss" as J. V. Cunningham would say.
It's always possible, however, that we can recover a set of habits of mind -- the "habitus" -- of a poet from the past, and that we may discover it in our own search for truth. Take for instance Basho's haiku "winter sun -- / frozen on horseback, / my shadow" (Barnhill trans., #227 in Basho's Haiku).
This is clearly based on not only an act of attention but an act of contemplation -- one might say a contemplation of the poet's own death. That would be hardly unique in Basho's oeuvre. But the clarity of structure in THIS act of attention, based on the two-fold haiku structure, suggests a paradoxical awareness of life beyond death. It's a short step to think of the horseman as a "thinker."
The following passage from William Desmond, Being and the Between, 13, helps me explore the possible ramifications of Basho's haiku as "thought" -- thought made possible by haiku form. Obviously, the idioms are worlds apart: one idiom is based on a digestion and comprehension of modern philosophy (and not only modern), the other draws on Basho's own complex cultural frames (including the Zhuangzi, as Pipei has so persuasively set forth). And yet reading the haiku in light of the following passage does suggest why we might consider Basho a "thinker."
"Metaphysics is initiated, carried, renewed by singular thinkers, not just by anonymous systems. These singulars have tirelessly worked to think better . . . To speak of tirelessness is misleading if we forget that, in the intimacy of being, such singulars have fought weariness and bafflement, despondency and bewilderment. Yet the very freshness of their work comes from a different source that is not itself work, or the production of a work, or a system. This source is manifested in the gift of fertile astonishment. Needless to say, redeeming the promise of this gift is not common. The more mature a singular metaphysician becomes, the more there is a refinement of childlike astonishment. It is never dead. It may simplify itself to an elemental power of mindfulness, a simplicity not of defect, but of a perfection of attention that defies all determinate objectification."
For me, this passage opens up the haiku in ways that go way beyond justifying the exercise of reading poems in terms of metaphysics. It's as if the text were a profound commentary on the poem. It brings me much closer to what is singular, unique, about the poem and about "Basho" as an artist/thinker. One advantage such a juxtaposition has over other contemporary forms of commentary is that there is no contamination of the commentary by the target text. The two texts sit side by side sharing light from beyond.
It's always possible, however, that we can recover a set of habits of mind -- the "habitus" -- of a poet from the past, and that we may discover it in our own search for truth. Take for instance Basho's haiku "winter sun -- / frozen on horseback, / my shadow" (Barnhill trans., #227 in Basho's Haiku).
This is clearly based on not only an act of attention but an act of contemplation -- one might say a contemplation of the poet's own death. That would be hardly unique in Basho's oeuvre. But the clarity of structure in THIS act of attention, based on the two-fold haiku structure, suggests a paradoxical awareness of life beyond death. It's a short step to think of the horseman as a "thinker."
The following passage from William Desmond, Being and the Between, 13, helps me explore the possible ramifications of Basho's haiku as "thought" -- thought made possible by haiku form. Obviously, the idioms are worlds apart: one idiom is based on a digestion and comprehension of modern philosophy (and not only modern), the other draws on Basho's own complex cultural frames (including the Zhuangzi, as Pipei has so persuasively set forth). And yet reading the haiku in light of the following passage does suggest why we might consider Basho a "thinker."
"Metaphysics is initiated, carried, renewed by singular thinkers, not just by anonymous systems. These singulars have tirelessly worked to think better . . . To speak of tirelessness is misleading if we forget that, in the intimacy of being, such singulars have fought weariness and bafflement, despondency and bewilderment. Yet the very freshness of their work comes from a different source that is not itself work, or the production of a work, or a system. This source is manifested in the gift of fertile astonishment. Needless to say, redeeming the promise of this gift is not common. The more mature a singular metaphysician becomes, the more there is a refinement of childlike astonishment. It is never dead. It may simplify itself to an elemental power of mindfulness, a simplicity not of defect, but of a perfection of attention that defies all determinate objectification."
For me, this passage opens up the haiku in ways that go way beyond justifying the exercise of reading poems in terms of metaphysics. It's as if the text were a profound commentary on the poem. It brings me much closer to what is singular, unique, about the poem and about "Basho" as an artist/thinker. One advantage such a juxtaposition has over other contemporary forms of commentary is that there is no contamination of the commentary by the target text. The two texts sit side by side sharing light from beyond.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Gap and Gift: Madeleine Findlay on a haiku by Issa
hana no kage aka no tannin wa nakari keri
thanks to the blossoms -
on the ground that they’ve shaded
no one’s a stranger
trans. by Lewis Mackenzie
When I was a kid, I used to doodle during classes. Drawing made it easier for me to concentrate and hear what the teacher was saying. The girls competing for attention, the teacher’s next move or a spitball flying through the air worried me. For me, this haiku captures a similar feeling of finding connection through otherness. The pencil and paper grounded me and allowed me to hear what was being said in an uninterrupted flow of words.
The broad picture in this haiku is of cherry blossom viewing and the unity it creates in admiring crowds, not unlike star-gazing, or moon viewing. However, the word “shaded” dilutes the awe. It has deep associations. It suggests relief from the heat and a more reflective state of mind. “Stranger” adds mystery. The word feels coded and is hard to fit with the rest of the haiku. Like a puzzle where the pieces are not yet turned in the right direction, the haiku needs to be shifted around in consciousness. Secondary meanings are usually inherent in haiku but here the words for a second meaning are out in the open.
“No kage” is polyvocal. It means both “in the shadow of” as well as “protected by” or “thanks to.” This points to the idea of the gift which opens the haiku up to a bigger concept. Without the blossoms, there would be no shade. So, paradoxically, more than the transient beauty of these ephemeral flowers, there is a more permanent interpretation. The shade exists on the ground. It creates otherness – not unlike a reflection. This doubleness opens up the gap with the gift giving of itself. For me, feeling the shade helps me to see the blossoms by giving them dimension. This furthers their actuality. Similarly, I furthered my actuality by drawing, by proving myself real so I could go beyond the distractions and hear what was being said.
“No one’s a stranger” in this context extends beyond the unity of the group under the tree and into the realm of each individual where no one is a stranger to him or her self. This allows the sense of community to split into its opposite with each person experiencing the gift, not just receiving it.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Haiku and Metaxic Attention
In light of at least three aspects of the haiku tradition -- the social nature of linking verses, the tradition of interpretation preserved by Ueda in “Basho and His Interpreters,” and the performative nature of the commentaries coming from the Haiku Foundation feeds— a surplus of interpretation, I suggest, is a DIRECT outcome of the FORM. That is, the gap! Shirane's useful distinction between the "vertical" and the "horizontal" as dimensions of the tension that holds the two-part form together has many ramifications. In his essay in Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces, Shirane notes that "Basho once described haikai as 'thirty-six steps forward, no steps backward,'" and comments, "The added verse must push off the penultimate verse to create a new world." The fecundity of Basho's polyphonic technique, as discussed by Shirane, seems to characterize the ethos of haiku. Metaxically speaking, the tension between the vertical (for Basho, as Shirane says, the vertical is sometimes represented by the ancient and medieval poets) and the horizontal -- the contingent world of the poet's biographical time or an imagined worldly place and time -- is the cause of perplexity, a restlessness that results in open-ended "journies" toward sources of fresh realization. It is too easy for us to overlook the difference between the vectors: the vertical is grounded in an awareness of the porosity of presence from the Beyond. The horizontal is the "thatness" of given space/time experience. For the interpreter, then, there's a kind of "anxiety" of influence in the process of interpreting haiku. The gap “re-presents” formally the perplexity, the polyphony, of the middle, the metaxy. Interpreters must above all "mind the gap" or be "mindfull" of the tension that characterizes haiku as a genre. What we sometimes hear in current discussions is an abuse of interpretation, as if haiku were a license for solipsistic self-confirmation. It is clear what is happening, however. The space structured by haiku is the "middle" between the extremes of absorption of the self in the other and of absolute certainty. It is the middle where we "live" as mindful creatures. The middle can be a confusing place; the tension may indeed create a sense of bewilderment. Especially in America, the poet may long for the "certainty" bestowed by the aura of an object in space/time; but that certainty is illusive since it betrays the polyvocal nature of objects of attention in the metaxy. William Desmond says, "The middle equivocities cry out for more intensive interpretation. Without some seeking of intermediation, the celebration of equivocity, even though it not cease from babbling, will finally be indistinguishable from mute autism, connecting nothing with nothing. We must speak of the ultimate via a metaxological discernment of the between and its equivocity" (God and the Between 122).Haiku as a poetic form is uniquely suited to this way of communication.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
From Longing to Metaxy: An Analysis of Basho’s Longing for Kyoto Haiku
Gilbert's concept of metaxu is crucial to the study of haiku form as cutting. We believe the conversation should start with the concept of metaxy, since it places haiku in a conceptual world of great significance. One of the outcomes of Gilbert's emphasis on formal cutting (as opposed to the conceptual or categorical cut between beings and being) is a self-multiplying kind of interpretation. I need only refer to the outputs -- the "feeds" -- of the Haiku Foundation. While this emphasis on form often produces eloquence on the part of the interpreter, it has a tendency to reframe the poem as a "prompt" for interpretation rather than being itself an "interpretation" of existence as marked by the master distinction (or cut) between being and beings. What is lost in the exuberance is the poet's poise before the mystery of the otherness of being. The current discussions about Zen and Blyth are seriously anachronistic: the issue is contemporary and philosophical (see e.g., William Desmond, Being and the Between). The poet's ontological discretion, his fidelity to the ontological difference, is subject to the oblivion caused by this new poetic divertissement. We've asked Jamie Edgecombe to write short blog essays exploring haiku in terms of the metaxy. Ed.
by Jamie Edgecombe
At times we get homesick, too, while in our own homes.
Keion (translation Ueda, 1992: 294)
Kyo nite mo / Kyo natsukashi ya / hototogisu
Kyoto to be there too/ Kyoto longing for the past / cuckoo
even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto –
cuckoo’s call
On its surface, the poem’s structure places the individual poet’s desire to recapture the cultural world he has inherited (which forms the poem’s baseline), against the superposed line, the seasonal reference of the cuckoo (which indicates early summer).
What is striking about this poem is the immediate sense of nostalgia (J. natsukashi), the longing for Kyoto, within the immanent experience of being in Kyoto. Shuson, states that the first Kyoto is the real city, while the second is the ancient city than lives yet on in ancient poetry and fiction’ (Ueda, 1992: 294). The objective view of Kyoto becomes overlain with a nostalgic view of the ancient city, in which the poet finds himself, as an individual, confronted by the milieu of history. At such a moment, there is a great sense of the physical impermanence of greatness, while it continues to linger in the cultural memory (see Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku), and the meagreness of the individual in the face of the great and historical.
If one were to be adventurous and apply a dialectical approach, one could say that the greatness of one illuminates the meagreness of the other and vis-versa.
Such a direct expression of emotion is not unusual for Basho, who vouched in the Red Book, that his ‘Wayfarer I shall be called’ poem, in which he directly indicates the poetic-subject’s intentions and emotions, is the product of his ‘effort to infuse the verse with the strings of the heart at this particular moment’ (Kawamoto, 2000: 90) The expression of longing in this poem acts likewise. Such a direct expression of emotion dates back to Shinkokinshu poetry, where these expressions became the vehicle for reasoning (and thus were attacked by Masaoki Shiki as such – see Beichman, 1982), whereas Basho’s use presents something quite different.
The most obvious cause, or trigger, for this sense of longing is the cuckoo’s call, a traditional kigo that has formed in the community of the Kyoto / Osaka (Kanto) area, due to the region’s literary and cultural heritage.
Here art and culture have entangled to make the image of the cuckoo equivocal. The cuckoo, within the haiku’s articulated moment, is both an immanent, sensible phenomenon (i.e. it is a bird that is heard), but it is also a symbol that has developed through and over centuries.
Left as such, the cuckoo’s call, which is both temporal and spatial in its being there, within the created scene, reminds the poet of the Kyoto of old, the cultural, religious capital and artistic hub that it once was.
However, to just leave the poem’s analysis standing at a moment of nostalgia (where nostalgia is to be taken as a longing for the pastt), is to turn the poem into an empty, univocal expression of closure, where the individual, the finite, and the infinite find themselves in a closed circuit made up of the immanent and the imaginary (the imaginary being the only way to make contact with the lost world of cultural importance).
If it were this simple, the poem would not have captivated as many poets, and analysts, as it has. Something in the poem astounds us. It requires more thought and exploration. This is not to say that the steps so far made in this essay are wrong, but they are incomplete.
Attention needs to be given to the poem’s gap, or cutting (J. kire).
Yes, the baseline places the poet-reader within a spatial and temporal context. Yes, the superposed line then destabilises that world through the cuckoo’s call, a sensory perception that is so fleeting that it has vanished before it can be fully grasped, although it has been heard. The call lingers in the memory. A reflective moment arises where the poet longs for a Kyoto that no longer has the prestige it once did (the poem illuminates man’s bodily-located-psyche).
The cuckoo call still lingers; Kyoto still lingers: Basho is astounded by the cuckoo’s call within his contemporary Kyoto. The metaxic tension of Kyoto, which was there all along, has been brought into focus by the cuckoo’s call.
At this moment it is important to note that the cuckoo image, within the complex nature of being a kigo, is also a waka word. It was used in a similar way by the 9th century monk Sosei, in his poem about hearing a cuckoo in Kyoto (translation in Ueda, 1992: 294).
Within Sosei’s waka, the poetic-subject hears a cuckoo and comes to reflect on how that voice hasn’t changed over time, while the city, Kyoto, has. One gains a sense of the ancientness of the city that has changed so much, but more so the vastness of the cuckoo’s symbolic nature, of the natural world within which the actions of man take place. An intertextual depth becomes apparent within Basho’s haiku, where the cuckoo once again calls out within the physical world of the city and is once again heard by a poet, who reflects upon it. The ancientness of Kyoto is further deepened, but the horizons of the natural stretch further still and will continue to do through the flux of the passing seasons. This said, knowledge of the Sosei poem forms a pole within the event of the poem, and is not a prerequisite for understanding the poem’s tensions.
To continue with Basho’s poem: the cuckoo’s call declares that there is at all Kyoto, an immanent experience to be lived, and thus illuminates the continuum that has made all this at all, that has made me and led me here. Basho and his art are revealed to be entangled. Haiku, a thread in the religious and cultural fabric of Japanese literature has led him to this moment, but he also is a product, a conduit and fashioner of concepts and images, that he has the will to explore and create, but which have been forming for centuries and will continue to do so. Basho is both a creator of haiku and is partially fashioned by it through his alignment to its aesthetics and his knowledge of it. He is both himself and is other to himself.
Consequently, the present Kyoto of the baseline is both the Kyoto familiar to Basho, but is revealed to be other. The Kyoto of history, also familiar to the master poet, is both known and ultimately unknowable, although he has knowledge of it. They are both entangled, though. One Kyoto is a culmination of all that Kyoto has been in the past, but is also the physical entity before him; the other stands before and within the present Kyoto, but is beyond that Kyoto in its immanence.
Likewise, the cuckoo, intimate in its sensible presence to the poet, is beyond his full grasp, despite having been grasped (heard) physically and having knowledge of its use in ancient literature.
Kyoto, in the return, becomes metaphysically doubled. The nostalgia that was experienced on hearing the cuckoo can be seen to develop. It is an openness to the Kyoto that was, but also a longing to enter into the Kyoto that is. There is an attraction, felt by the poet-reader, to the Kyoto that has become backlit by its own metaxic nature. Equally, through the mutuality of Kyoto and poet, the poet has become backlit, as well. The attraction returns the self as other in understanding the experience of being in Kyoto and Kyoto’s being; that nostalgia has the power to transform and is empowered by transformation. Through this longing and return to the present, Kyoto and the poet-reader do entangle.
Nostalgia, through the imagination entanglement with the immanent (with man’s bodily-located-psyche), not only illuminates consciousness through memory, but also through the movement outward, towards the other.
Basho’s contemporary Kyoto becomes a perceptional horizon, as does the cuckoo, Basho’s longed for Kyoto and, ultimately, the poet himself. There is a continuous sense of excess, but no end that can gather these horizons into a graspable whole, despite the evocation of these tensions within a single poem, other than that found in the erotic self’s will to understand the passion of being (the wonder that there is this tensional, metaxic Kyoto at all).
The structure of the poem, the movement from immanent place, to fleeting sensory perception, to the perception of the agefullness and agelessness of the place, comes back upon the immanent place, the cuckoo’s sensed call, and the imagined Kyoto of old, and finds no closure in its return, despite the sense of truth the return is imbued with. The poem’s experience becomes perplexing and therefore enigmatic. Such a metaxic tension reveals the depths of reality, while not denying the facticity of the immanent.
References
Beichman, Janine (1982), Masaoka Shiki, Kodansha; Kawamoto, Keiji (2000), The Poetics of Japanese Verse, University of Tokyo; Ueda, Makoto (1992), Basho and his Interpreters, Stanford University Press; Yamamoto Seisaku and Carter Robert E. (1996): Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, State University of New York Press.
by Jamie Edgecombe
At times we get homesick, too, while in our own homes.
Keion (translation Ueda, 1992: 294)
Kyo nite mo / Kyo natsukashi ya / hototogisu
Kyoto to be there too/ Kyoto longing for the past / cuckoo
even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto –
cuckoo’s call
On its surface, the poem’s structure places the individual poet’s desire to recapture the cultural world he has inherited (which forms the poem’s baseline), against the superposed line, the seasonal reference of the cuckoo (which indicates early summer).
What is striking about this poem is the immediate sense of nostalgia (J. natsukashi), the longing for Kyoto, within the immanent experience of being in Kyoto. Shuson, states that the first Kyoto is the real city, while the second is the ancient city than lives yet on in ancient poetry and fiction’ (Ueda, 1992: 294). The objective view of Kyoto becomes overlain with a nostalgic view of the ancient city, in which the poet finds himself, as an individual, confronted by the milieu of history. At such a moment, there is a great sense of the physical impermanence of greatness, while it continues to linger in the cultural memory (see Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku), and the meagreness of the individual in the face of the great and historical.
If one were to be adventurous and apply a dialectical approach, one could say that the greatness of one illuminates the meagreness of the other and vis-versa.
Such a direct expression of emotion is not unusual for Basho, who vouched in the Red Book, that his ‘Wayfarer I shall be called’ poem, in which he directly indicates the poetic-subject’s intentions and emotions, is the product of his ‘effort to infuse the verse with the strings of the heart at this particular moment’ (Kawamoto, 2000: 90) The expression of longing in this poem acts likewise. Such a direct expression of emotion dates back to Shinkokinshu poetry, where these expressions became the vehicle for reasoning (and thus were attacked by Masaoki Shiki as such – see Beichman, 1982), whereas Basho’s use presents something quite different.
The most obvious cause, or trigger, for this sense of longing is the cuckoo’s call, a traditional kigo that has formed in the community of the Kyoto / Osaka (Kanto) area, due to the region’s literary and cultural heritage.
Here art and culture have entangled to make the image of the cuckoo equivocal. The cuckoo, within the haiku’s articulated moment, is both an immanent, sensible phenomenon (i.e. it is a bird that is heard), but it is also a symbol that has developed through and over centuries.
Left as such, the cuckoo’s call, which is both temporal and spatial in its being there, within the created scene, reminds the poet of the Kyoto of old, the cultural, religious capital and artistic hub that it once was.
However, to just leave the poem’s analysis standing at a moment of nostalgia (where nostalgia is to be taken as a longing for the pastt), is to turn the poem into an empty, univocal expression of closure, where the individual, the finite, and the infinite find themselves in a closed circuit made up of the immanent and the imaginary (the imaginary being the only way to make contact with the lost world of cultural importance).
If it were this simple, the poem would not have captivated as many poets, and analysts, as it has. Something in the poem astounds us. It requires more thought and exploration. This is not to say that the steps so far made in this essay are wrong, but they are incomplete.
Attention needs to be given to the poem’s gap, or cutting (J. kire).
Yes, the baseline places the poet-reader within a spatial and temporal context. Yes, the superposed line then destabilises that world through the cuckoo’s call, a sensory perception that is so fleeting that it has vanished before it can be fully grasped, although it has been heard. The call lingers in the memory. A reflective moment arises where the poet longs for a Kyoto that no longer has the prestige it once did (the poem illuminates man’s bodily-located-psyche).
The cuckoo call still lingers; Kyoto still lingers: Basho is astounded by the cuckoo’s call within his contemporary Kyoto. The metaxic tension of Kyoto, which was there all along, has been brought into focus by the cuckoo’s call.
At this moment it is important to note that the cuckoo image, within the complex nature of being a kigo, is also a waka word. It was used in a similar way by the 9th century monk Sosei, in his poem about hearing a cuckoo in Kyoto (translation in Ueda, 1992: 294).
Within Sosei’s waka, the poetic-subject hears a cuckoo and comes to reflect on how that voice hasn’t changed over time, while the city, Kyoto, has. One gains a sense of the ancientness of the city that has changed so much, but more so the vastness of the cuckoo’s symbolic nature, of the natural world within which the actions of man take place. An intertextual depth becomes apparent within Basho’s haiku, where the cuckoo once again calls out within the physical world of the city and is once again heard by a poet, who reflects upon it. The ancientness of Kyoto is further deepened, but the horizons of the natural stretch further still and will continue to do through the flux of the passing seasons. This said, knowledge of the Sosei poem forms a pole within the event of the poem, and is not a prerequisite for understanding the poem’s tensions.
To continue with Basho’s poem: the cuckoo’s call declares that there is at all Kyoto, an immanent experience to be lived, and thus illuminates the continuum that has made all this at all, that has made me and led me here. Basho and his art are revealed to be entangled. Haiku, a thread in the religious and cultural fabric of Japanese literature has led him to this moment, but he also is a product, a conduit and fashioner of concepts and images, that he has the will to explore and create, but which have been forming for centuries and will continue to do so. Basho is both a creator of haiku and is partially fashioned by it through his alignment to its aesthetics and his knowledge of it. He is both himself and is other to himself.
Consequently, the present Kyoto of the baseline is both the Kyoto familiar to Basho, but is revealed to be other. The Kyoto of history, also familiar to the master poet, is both known and ultimately unknowable, although he has knowledge of it. They are both entangled, though. One Kyoto is a culmination of all that Kyoto has been in the past, but is also the physical entity before him; the other stands before and within the present Kyoto, but is beyond that Kyoto in its immanence.
Likewise, the cuckoo, intimate in its sensible presence to the poet, is beyond his full grasp, despite having been grasped (heard) physically and having knowledge of its use in ancient literature.
Kyoto, in the return, becomes metaphysically doubled. The nostalgia that was experienced on hearing the cuckoo can be seen to develop. It is an openness to the Kyoto that was, but also a longing to enter into the Kyoto that is. There is an attraction, felt by the poet-reader, to the Kyoto that has become backlit by its own metaxic nature. Equally, through the mutuality of Kyoto and poet, the poet has become backlit, as well. The attraction returns the self as other in understanding the experience of being in Kyoto and Kyoto’s being; that nostalgia has the power to transform and is empowered by transformation. Through this longing and return to the present, Kyoto and the poet-reader do entangle.
Nostalgia, through the imagination entanglement with the immanent (with man’s bodily-located-psyche), not only illuminates consciousness through memory, but also through the movement outward, towards the other.
Basho’s contemporary Kyoto becomes a perceptional horizon, as does the cuckoo, Basho’s longed for Kyoto and, ultimately, the poet himself. There is a continuous sense of excess, but no end that can gather these horizons into a graspable whole, despite the evocation of these tensions within a single poem, other than that found in the erotic self’s will to understand the passion of being (the wonder that there is this tensional, metaxic Kyoto at all).
The structure of the poem, the movement from immanent place, to fleeting sensory perception, to the perception of the agefullness and agelessness of the place, comes back upon the immanent place, the cuckoo’s sensed call, and the imagined Kyoto of old, and finds no closure in its return, despite the sense of truth the return is imbued with. The poem’s experience becomes perplexing and therefore enigmatic. Such a metaxic tension reveals the depths of reality, while not denying the facticity of the immanent.
References
Beichman, Janine (1982), Masaoka Shiki, Kodansha; Kawamoto, Keiji (2000), The Poetics of Japanese Verse, University of Tokyo; Ueda, Makoto (1992), Basho and his Interpreters, Stanford University Press; Yamamoto Seisaku and Carter Robert E. (1996): Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, State University of New York Press.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Issa's Metaxy
ISSA (1763 -1828)
over my legs
stretched out at ease,
the billowing clouds
nagedashita ashi no saki nari kumo no mine
Translated by R.H. Blyth
In this haiku written in 1813, the base contains an image that places the poet and the reader at the same vantage point. One imagines being slouched in a deck chair, on a lawn or in a field. Studied carefully before reading and connecting the superposed line, the base becomes grounded and forthright. The tone is one of assurance. “Stretched” is reassured by “at ease” and the phrase “over my legs” has an intimate feel to it. The reader doesn’t know what to expect. What could animate this blissful fragment?
The superposed line holds for a moment and then connects back to the first line. Instantly, there is a more emphatic sense of “stretched out at ease” and yet the base is still stable. The clouds then resume their metaxic otherness as they float in the sky despite the illusion that they are close by.
David Lanoue cultivates the most extensive on-line listing of Issa’s haiku (9200 out of over 20,000 written in his journals ) and 31 of them use “billowing clouds” as the superposed line. His translation of this haiku goes like this:
on the tips
of my outstretched toes…
billowing clouds
Here the clouds are pictured as touching the tips of the poet’s toes. The haiku is a univocal experience made possible by the hyperbolic use of “outstretched toes” and “tips” may explore the epiphanies for the translator but they close the gap of the haiku.
--Madeleine Findlay
over my legs
stretched out at ease,
the billowing clouds
nagedashita ashi no saki nari kumo no mine
Translated by R.H. Blyth
In this haiku written in 1813, the base contains an image that places the poet and the reader at the same vantage point. One imagines being slouched in a deck chair, on a lawn or in a field. Studied carefully before reading and connecting the superposed line, the base becomes grounded and forthright. The tone is one of assurance. “Stretched” is reassured by “at ease” and the phrase “over my legs” has an intimate feel to it. The reader doesn’t know what to expect. What could animate this blissful fragment?
The superposed line holds for a moment and then connects back to the first line. Instantly, there is a more emphatic sense of “stretched out at ease” and yet the base is still stable. The clouds then resume their metaxic otherness as they float in the sky despite the illusion that they are close by.
David Lanoue cultivates the most extensive on-line listing of Issa’s haiku (9200 out of over 20,000 written in his journals ) and 31 of them use “billowing clouds” as the superposed line. His translation of this haiku goes like this:
on the tips
of my outstretched toes…
billowing clouds
Here the clouds are pictured as touching the tips of the poet’s toes. The haiku is a univocal experience made possible by the hyperbolic use of “outstretched toes” and “tips” may explore the epiphanies for the translator but they close the gap of the haiku.
--Madeleine Findlay
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