The gap is “the issue” in haiku criticism, it seems to me. The haiku “crisis” would appear to be prompted by a recognition of the tension between the vertical and the horizontal elements in haiku, and this division is troped by the formal distinction between the two parts of the form. (See previous blogs.) Bruce Ross’s thesis that the gap engages something he calls an “absolute metaphor” is a brave attempt to bring the discussion down to earth. Ross’s philosophical terms – absolute, particular, universal – are highly charged and may distract one away from the artistic nature of the haiku as a form. Haiku is not a philosophical problem but an art form that persists in and through other art forms, some closely related, some not, and we need to think about the aesthetics of haiku.
Haiku are by nature deceptive: they look so simple (this is true of many art forms but not all at least not all in the same way). Here’s a haiku by Basho:
scent in the wind
also suggests the south--
the Mogami River
A friend wisely comments: “One thing that keeps coming back to me is the way this haiku was written to compliment his host, a prosperous merchant ( note the connection to water). The fact that the Mogami River was ‘the pride of the locality’ gets in the way for me. I wonder if Basho is allowing his poetic vision to spill over into flattery.”
Historical criticism comes alive in such comments. The emphasis on social context helps us recreate a poem’s historical context but may hide from us some aesthetic elements which are the province of aesthetic criticism. It goes without saying that what follows is only one kind of response to the poem.
That said, the juxtaposition of scent, south, and river needs explanation but not before one can experience the base as well as the superposed line separately. The base — “scent in the wind / also suggests the south” — disturbs the linear mind with the word “also.” What else suggests the south? Is the answer the Mogami River? That would close the “gap” between the parts of the poem. But it doesn’t suggest the experience Basho suggests in the base: southness in the wind.
So one goes back into the poem: perhaps crossing the Mogami gives the wind a special scent? So, the haiku is a way of “suggesting” a quality of the river?
The superposed line – where the kigo often is placed – is just this proper name: the Mogami River. At least one may say this: There are few symbols of the way (Tao) as expressive as “river”; and by naming it, Basho indicates a gnosis that transforms the conventional mind not by transcending it but by contextualizing it. Haiku is about a spiral of contexts.
A spiral of contexts may be seen in any thorough discussion of a given haiku. An awful lot of questions are raised by a close reading. But then as we know from Ueda’s Basho and His Interpreters, a certain “conflict” of interpretations is absolutely normal in such cases.
A commentator quoted by Ueda cites Po Chu-i’s poem: “The fragrant wind comes from the south.” Perhaps one doesn’t need a poem to tell one that! But it’s nice to have the connection to the great Chinese poet because Basho intentionally situated his art in contexts shaped by some of the greatest Chinese poets, not to mention the Zhuangzi.
One may get a bit closer if one refuses to cross the gap and just deal with the base by opening up to the concept “scent in the wind.” What kind of scent? A fragrance on the wind is associated with temperate weather, perhaps as a welcome change from bad weather (this is noted by Meisetsu, quoted by Ueda). So the haiku would “point to” a certain fragrance not due to the river but to the time of year.
In any event, the flourishing of multiple readings suggests that the gap is an invitation to participate in the “creation” of the poem. But mere multiplicity of interpretation is not the goal of understanding; the haiku is a form that has held its own in time and as such promotes a certain kind of experience of the world. (I am aware I am getting dangerously close to theory here!)
Haiku as Form
Let’s start with the fact that the haiku has two parts and a gap between them. Where others have seen doublets -- verticals and horizontals, universals and particulars –- I will suggest we grasp the independence of the two sections and then try to understand how the two sections relate in aesthetic terms. Perhaps the “haiku” experience has more to do with the haiku than with an originary experience.
For my aesthetic terms I have chosen the concept of correlating proportion. What if we said that the haiku is built from two sets of proportions: the scent IS to the south AS the river is to X.
So we are solving for X.
What a cold way to put it! Like any formula, “solving for X” is incomplete without the actual flesh of embodiment, the poem itself.
Taking these proportions into account changes the feel of the poem as a whole: it heightens the openness of the poem towards a “truth” which is desired by the poet but which he can’t put into words without writing a poem. Ultimately, haiku is not a “sketch” of some thing but a form of art that embodies the human desire to understand the ineffable.
To recap: What is the X? Since the form of haiku involves three lines -- a short line and two other lines, one short and one longer -- we are always “solving” for a big “meaning” in the independent, seemingly fragmentary, short line.
The X is always the same. Briefly, X is what I call “zoka consciousness” which participates in The Creative (see Qiu, Basho and the Dao, 81, passim). The root of this aesthetic is the tao. Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, writes: “It is an aesthetic which simply rejoices in the vast and infinite variety of forms and in the inexhaustible world of protean transformations as such.” See also the works of Barnhill and Qiu often mentioned in this blog.
What generates the transformations is a living order, a tension, as indicated by the proportions, which is the sign of the zoka consciousness/The Creative. If I read the Mogami river haiku with these proportions in mind, I am affected emotionally by the poem because the river takes on the burden of the “south” and all that might mean to the creative consciousness. The base is complete in itself except for the word “also.” That whets my appetite for the final image, which turns out to be a very big image full of southness.
The ultimate mystery is zoka consciousness, since it is a kind of deification of the mind through the grace of art.
Haiku as Knowledge
Or put it this way: what kind of knowledge comes with haiku?
The very form of haiku—for instance, the interruption of normal syntax and the normal act of predication that is the raison d’etre of the sentence -- doesn’t allow for mapping of an object on a space-time grid. When we refer to a “spiral” of contexts, it is more than a metaphor. What is out there somehow becomes what is also in here – “inherent” in a consciousness that is engaged by the haiku.
Contemporary philosophers struggling with questions of knowledge include John Milbank. A recent formulation reminds one of ecological awareness of systems and networks. Building on Merleau-Ponty, Milbank writes:
“Things do not exist as discreet solid items, but as networks of interconnections, remote echoes and indications, associations, ‘kinships,’ expectations and deferrals. . . . Here the real and the signifying are tangled up, and not just for us, but also intrinsically within an objective reality that is, however, also subjective reality. There are two never-interlocking circles: the one of the world that includes the body within its cycle, and the other of the individual perceiving body that exceeds and jumps out of the first circle to form its own. Within the second circle, the world is equally included. But this inclusion is only possible because the depth within bodies also is the depth within things. There are not really two confronting depths mediated by a screen. Instead, the density of things that the screen of flesh shows is itself the unconscious fold within flesh wherein the conscious fold of perception can emerge. Things appear as separate from us, things that are not us appear at all because they are simultaneously resistant to appearing. What appears is a density, a not-showing, which is the depth of things. In seeing things we can inhabit this depth, which then becomes our depth, our distance from things, and even from our own body, within our body.” Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty 12.
Haiku as Gift
The form of haiku layers two types of time: the arrow and the cycle; the cyclical nature of the space/time continuum and, in tension with this cycle, the once-only event of the particular in that continuum. Is this tension the end of the story?
Following Milbank, we can speak of “integration” of these two aspects of experience. He writes: “ . . . time is the time of unprecedented arrival and of irreversible one-way gift. Things occur, never to return. Yes, one can conjecture that their loss is also their later returning as different, since they are given as self-differentiating and so as living. But this suggests a spiraling and not a pure circling. In this way, the arrow and the cycle can be integrated” (32).
What I have somewhat clumsily called zoka-consciousness is precisely this awareness of “unprecedented arrival and of irreversible one-way gift.” This awareness has traditionally been referred to as “the haiku moment.” Haiku does seem to be formally suited to the integration of the arrow and the cycle into the spiral. In this very specific way, haiku can be understood as gift.
Seamus Heaney as Witness
There are signs that haiku as a way of knowing is having an impact on contemporary poets. In his Lafcadio Hearn lecture in 2000 on “the pathos of things” published in The Guardian on November 24, 2007, and in the book Our Shared Japan, Seamus Heaney used haiku as a norm for a valued poetic. After a brief but insightful history of how literary Japan and Britain influenced each other, he discusses Old Irish lyric in light of haiku. He concludes: “In each case, it’s as if the poet is caught between the delights of the contingent and the invitations of the transcendent, yet by registering as precisely and poignantly as possible his consciousness of this middle state he manages to effect what Matthew Arnold would have called “a criticism of life.”
This “middle state” is the goal of haiku and the form of haiku is perfectly suited to create it. The gap reflects the tension between Heaney’s two poles of experience. In the best haiku, the tension that forms the gap remains creative through the participating consciousness of the well-prepared reader. So when we say that the “gap” between the two parts of a haiku are problematic, there is a moral aspect to the issue—Arnold’s “criticism of life.” That is, the gap allows for yielding to the temptation to close the gap, resolve the tension, in a given reading, but the form is there to remind us of alternative readings, ever less garrulous and opinionated, especially readings that refuse to confuse “the delights of the contingent and the invitations of the transcendent.” For zoka consciousness, beauty lies in distances and proportions, in the “between.”
