The visible in the invisible; the invisible in the visible.
The old aesthetic chestnut comes alive when applied to haiku.
the cool breeze:
crooked and meandering
it comes to me
Issa (trans. Blyth)
Nothing could be more immediate than a cool breeze on the surface of the skin during a summer day. But a haiku, while devoted to the surface of creation, structures the event according to difference not immanence.
“Crooked and meandering”: The ultimate, non-negotiable, absolute difference between the breeze and me; to use Shirane’s distinction, being is vertical, I am horizontal (part of the horizontal world), and the haiku is the intersection. “Crooked and meandering” refers then to the series of intervals, the differences, that compose the contingent, floating, ungrounded world.
“It comes to me”—It comes to me as coolness; it comes to the reader through the haiku which, by means of the analogy of being (the only way to speak of being is by means of analogy), produces a non-visible image of immanence—breeze-on-skin.
The ultimate image created by the haiku, in the mind of the reader, is an invisible image of invisible being. This impossibility is what we may call immanence.
Being is invisible, infinite, non-reproducible, so this arrival of coolness is experienced with a shiver of recognition as impossible return of the created me to the cool creative origin of all things like me.
There is nothing of the sublime here. No fireworks. The coolness is received as a gift of nature, a gift of peace.
That’s so cool.
