A very short haiku lesson

A breeze
stirs the hairs
in my cat’s ear



The “tension” between the universal kigo — a breeze — and the particular setting — the hairs in a cat’s ear — is pretty firm. There’s also a dimension of silence here. The “breeze” kigo is late summer, usually a time of silence. The (sleeping?) cat is still “listening,” but the ear is the site of stirring of hairs not sounds.

In the way we do haiku at SIP, the “tension” between the parts is “ontological”-- that is, based on the difference between the universal and the particular. In this sense, the dense particularity of reality is highlighted against the background of the universal. Without the separation of the two, there’s no “participation” the one in the other, which takes place in the imagination, or “zoka,” or Voegelin’s imaginative dimension of It-reality.

The ontological difference is underscored by the sounds of the two parts, which are linked by the zed-sound; the base has a slant rhyme (hair/ear) binding it together.