The Red Beret: Creation as gift

in a red beret
an old woman makes change --
u-pick apples

Madeleine Findlay


This haiku illustrates to a fine degree the analogical principle of haiku form: it is very hard to separate, once one "sees" the poem as a whole, the old woman and the apple. The base and the fragment intersect “metaphysically.” The tension of the structure keep them apart: apples remain just apples. The analogy is transparent to the structure of understanding.

That red beret certainly gets the ball rolling. The idiom "making change" given the circumstances connects seasons and the "excess" in a human transaction: there is something excessive about both, but in different ways. Typically, harvest is experienced as abundance, overflow: Creator’s cornucopia. (A bad year is experienced as deformed, and the deformation of the seasons through climate change is a terrible sin.)

As for the other transaction, capitalism is excessive in the way it equates a "creature" (a created thing) and a medium of exchange: there is always a remainder in favor of the creature! Money is such a reduction! We fear, perhaps, the woman is reduced to her labor. But her red beret suggests otherwise; a touch of style!

There’s great pathos in this portrait.

Finally, in the fragment (the vertical element in the New England kigo of apples), the phrase "u-pick" suggests a whole range of feelings, including a response to the come-on. Are they picked over? Was the woman overlooked in her youth by the dashing young man on the tractor who later went to college and now lives in Newton Center? Or is she -- more likely, given her hat -- rather at home selling apples this way, from the tree--a human link in the cycle of growth and harvest.

In the end, there’s the theme of the gift of Creation in the u-picked apple. I choose THIS apple out of so many offered to me; I can only pay for it, not truly return the favor. I am not just part of the natural cycle, I may break it with ingratitude. Or, contrarywise, I may accept with humility the difference between the Creative and me. In the “divine gift” exchange is a lack of symmetry between original gift and response.

But accepting the gift as gift changes me, if only momentarily. In the long run, I may change my attitude from subjective sense of loss, inadequacy, resentment, to a lively sense of spiraling circularity and assymetrical return.

This haiku is itself a gift, the only kind I can give back.

And in short: The genius of haiku is that it preserves particularity while revealing significance within several overlapping structures. The world of the haiku is that of consciousness that is itself illuminated by the act of creation it understands symbolically without reducing the world to linear discourse.