low tide—
away from me, a small crab
moves sideways
-- Madeleine Findlay
Madeleine wrote this haiku on one of our haiku walks this summer. Initially I thought the repetition of “way” required rewriting; now I think it actually brings out more of the moreness there is to the situation. This kind of “rhetoric” is not a blemish in haiku, despite the current model of plainness.
The beauty of this haiku challenges the interpreter. The fact that the poem does not lend itself to analysis is not a measure of its beauty, only of the poverty of my ability to talk about its beauty.
Like all good haiku, this one seems to describe an event, a happening. Almost all definitions of haiku place the event in the center of the discussion of form. In a degree greater than other poetic forms, haiku has a tie to “direct experience.”
In these post-modern times, we need a new model for experience, for “event.” What is a haiku event? In the old model, the event out there and the event in consciousness were separate: things out there, abstract forms in here. The aesthetic of plainness, of immediacy and transparency, serves this sense that language is a source of obfuscation, that the haiku must avoid being seduced by language lest the experience be lost. As practical criticism, this is just; but it is beholden to an outmoded model of experience.
In his elegant and nuanced discussion of haiku form in Haiku: A Poet’s Guide, Lee Gurga, after a dextrous discussion of the difficulty of finding a balance between “too much” and “too little” in the writing of haiku, enshrines “suggestiveness” as the goal and grounds that in the reader’s response.
But what beliefs inform this ideal reader’s response?
What is the model of event we share, we poets and readers?
In order to explain the beauty of the “event” disclosed by Madeleine’s crab haiku, a beauty that I did not immediately appreciate, I went back to David Hart’s book on aesthetics The Beauty of the Infinite.
Responding to the dichotomy that defines the modern model of experience, which splits the self off from the world, Hart writes (143): “The event of the world and the event of thought cannot be so brutually separated: the self occurs as the manifestation of the world, the event of being: all knowledge is indeed intentional, which means, precisely not only that all thought has an object, but that, as a consequence, thought belongs to being’s disclosure of itself.”
“Being’s disclosure of itself”! It seems, in these post-modern times, there is no escaping metaphysics.
The event emerges from the sense of “self” in which “the subject is already a recipient and, so, creature of a gift: an aesthetic effect.”
The poet’s self is pre-disposed to “see” things—beings-- as disclosures of being – of “being’s disclosure of itself.” The self does not experience being itself: it is open to “being’s disclosure of itself.” Being transcends being. Haiku is admirably shaped to deal with the difference, the gap, between being and beings.
To cut to the chase: the haiku poet is a member of a community of beings. Difference is the sign of each being’s dignity, its ontological presence. The haiku poet is part of a disclosure of being through his art of analogy—a complex comparison that allows for the concrete differences of contingency alongside the unity of being.
The fragment names the given order in which this disclosure takes place: “low tide.” A withdrawal of the stuff that most often suggests unity and immediacy: the ocean. Low tide reveals life in its particularity.
The base repeats that naming with a difference: a return to the self as the site of recognition of being in the otherness of creaturehood. Madeleine’s crab is definitely THERE, doing its odd thing, responding to her by being itself: so her self, in its oddity, its difference, is also revealed as a coordinate of the event. Intervals of difference are suggested by the differentiating use of “away.”
There’s a little dance going on at low tide, isn’t there? A dance highlighting the differences of the dancers: the tide’s withdrawal overlaps that of the crab but is not identical with it. The haiku articulates differences and analogies. The tide’s withdrawal is indifferent to the presence of the poet. The crab’s withdrawal is “sideways” – a response to the presence of this other, but no craven withdrawal, rather a remove to a safe distance and perhaps a “sidelong” look (as imagined in the figure of the language; verbal play can be part of the “moreness” of the creative thing as observed in the haiku process). A moment of peace within the contingencies of the web of nature, yes, but suggestive of an imagined order of nature based on a transcendent vision of dynamic peace.
In the juxtaposition of the “timeless” tide in its paradoxical timeliness, the poet sets the scene for the emergence, the “e-vent,” of two beings in their difference: herself and the crab. The crab’s sideways motion repeats, with a difference, the “away-ness” of the tide. The resulting “empty” space is choreographed, a “sacred” space for “being’s disclosure of itself.”
The model of this event draws on traditions rarely if ever discussed in haiku literature. At a time when the appearance of studies of metaphysical contexts of Basho’s thinking about haiku have suggested just how hard we must work to understand his haiku, perhaps we can look closer to home to undersand our own. As it turns out, in fact, Basho’s models do not appear to be in conflict with the one under discussion, but it would take a book to do the cultural comparison justice.
As a succinct statement about the roots of this model in the Western tradition, I offer these sentences from Hart (142):
“. . . there is the possibility of a community of difference where all transitions and intervals may be so understood, so given and so received, as to be a sharing of goods and a setting free; the dynamism of such a being together is that of epektasis (the Pauline image, read through Gregory of Nyssa): an outstretched and constantly changing love and progress toward and within the divine infinity, within which all finitude is released in the radiance of its differing--not the opiate beauty of Dionysian dissolution or the static beauty of Apollonian order, but a trinitarian beauty that is motile, various, creative, abundant in signs of peace."
I am the first to admit that this model challenges us in many ways: intellectually, spiritually, artistically. It is above all to be understood as a model of beauty. That in itself will give us pause: aesthetics has a bad name in modern times. But I for one cannot deny that I experience beauty as I explore the “world” of Madeleine’s haiku.
My proposal that this is an appropriate model – precisely this “epektasis” – is made in all humility. I certainly do not suggest that we all stop writing haiku and study Gregory of Nissa. But in the search for new foundations, the haiku community would be foolish to neglect the potential of this profoundly aesthetic model of beauty.
