Haiku and Metaxic Attention

In light of at least three aspects of the haiku tradition -- the social nature of linking verses, the tradition of interpretation preserved by Ueda in “Basho and His Interpreters,” and the performative nature of the commentaries coming from the Haiku Foundation feeds— a surplus of interpretation, I suggest, is a DIRECT outcome of the FORM. That is, the gap! Shirane's useful distinction between the "vertical" and the "horizontal" as dimensions of the tension that holds the two-part form together has many ramifications. In his essay in Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces, Shirane notes that "Basho once described haikai as 'thirty-six steps forward, no steps backward,'" and comments, "The added verse must push off the penultimate verse to create a new world." The fecundity of Basho's polyphonic technique, as discussed by Shirane, seems to characterize the ethos of haiku. Metaxically speaking, the tension between the vertical (for Basho, as Shirane says, the vertical is sometimes represented by the ancient and medieval poets) and the horizontal -- the contingent world of the poet's biographical time or an imagined worldly place and time -- is the cause of perplexity, a restlessness that results in open-ended "journies" toward sources of fresh realization. It is too easy for us to overlook the difference between the vectors: the vertical is grounded in an awareness of the porosity of presence from the Beyond. The horizontal is the "thatness" of given space/time experience. For the interpreter, then, there's a kind of "anxiety" of influence in the process of interpreting haiku. The gap “re-presents” formally the perplexity, the polyphony, of the middle, the metaxy. Interpreters must above all "mind the gap" or be "mindfull" of the tension that characterizes haiku as a genre. What we sometimes hear in current discussions is an abuse of interpretation, as if haiku were a license for solipsistic self-confirmation. It is clear what is happening, however. The space structured by haiku is the "middle" between the extremes of absorption of the self in the other and of absolute certainty. It is the middle where we "live" as mindful creatures. The middle can be a confusing place; the tension may indeed create a sense of bewilderment. Especially in America, the poet may long for the "certainty" bestowed by the aura of an object in space/time; but that certainty is illusive since it betrays the polyvocal nature of objects of attention in the metaxy. William Desmond says, "The middle equivocities cry out for more intensive interpretation. Without some seeking of intermediation, the celebration of equivocity, even though it not cease from babbling, will finally be indistinguishable from mute autism, connecting nothing with nothing. We must speak of the ultimate via a metaxological discernment of the between and its equivocity" (God and the Between 122).Haiku as a poetic form is uniquely suited to this way of communication.