Commentary on a haiku by Jamie Edgecombe

remembering Basho
a scarecrow emerges
from my brush

-- Jamie Edgecombe



In this haiku, “Basho” is a symbol, a reference to a man, yes, but also a reference to what he means to the poet and, potentially, the reader of the poem. Edgecombe’s haiku – Edgecombe is a painter as well as a poet – reveals Basho as the name of a substance carried through meditation into a work of art.

The poem is grounded in actuality. “Scarecrow” is one of the historical Basho’s favorite images, so there’s an allusion and an homage to the poet in the image. But it’s also a specific image that carries with it narratives of boundaries – seasonal, organic, cultural. The haiku shows a modern poet participating in the symbolic world of his master poet through an image.

Of course none of this would matter were the haiku not well written, if the gap between the superposed line – remembering Basho – and the base where not a formal and persuasive acknowledgement of the master distinction between time and eternity, between particulars and Being as One. The sense of immediacy one gets from a good haiku is achieved here not by sentimental feeling but by juxtapositions of present/past, thing/art – several paradoxes – which, taken in by the reader, produce an experience of “flow” of consciousness which is parallel to the one mentioned in the poem. That is, the poem reveals through juxtaposition and paradox the “simplicity” of Way over against the complexity of the life of composition.

This distinction between complex, plural composition and the simple oneness of “nonbeing” (in one tradition) or Being (in another) is the “unwobbling pivot” of haiku and finds its equivalences in world cultures including Chinese, Japanese, Medieval Christian, and contemporary theology.

In the tension of its two-part form, the ideal haiku acknowledges the invisible behind the visible world of images, the unimaginable behind the floating world of existence. This secret architecture is the basis on which to evaluate haiku as a poetic form “equal” (sub specie aeternatis) to all comers — for example, Dante’s “comedy.”

Theory of course only prepares us to enjoy the gift of this contemporary haiku, which is quite expressive, lively, ardent -- human. The flow of the brush becomes not only an act of tradition but an act of eros: the poet participates through love in the life of the master. Reading the haiku is a pleasure because of the meditative integrity of the composition. A “moment” yes but also a process, a flow toward a transcendent horizon.

Finally, to return to the opening line (which we can now understand in terms of the whole), the act of “remembering” brings into being “consciousness” by which the ego transcends itself in the name of Basho. Indeed, the act of anamnesis (as Plato called it) is profoundly erotic and the essence of humanity.