Basho as a "singular thinker"

In contemplating the long history of haiku, one becomes familiar with contexts that constrain interpretation. It's tempting, of course, to reduce haiku to an act of "mere" attention, as if "attention" itself were not a construct based on a complex of beliefs and habits of perception. In any event, avoiding that temptation may lead to an opposite extreme: the imposition of beliefs in a non-historical way. In many contemporary commentaries, there's a kind of loss of difference between the text and the commentary; even the act of commenting seems to be a para-poetic act, as if in competition with the poem. The original is subsumed by the commentary. The rest is "gloss" as J. V. Cunningham would say.

It's always possible, however, that we can recover a set of habits of mind -- the "habitus" -- of a poet from the past, and that we may discover it in our own search for truth. Take for instance Basho's haiku "winter sun -- / frozen on horseback, / my shadow" (Barnhill trans., #227 in Basho's Haiku).

This is clearly based on not only an act of attention but an act of contemplation -- one might say a contemplation of the poet's own death. That would be hardly unique in Basho's oeuvre. But the clarity of structure in THIS act of attention, based on the two-fold haiku structure, suggests a paradoxical awareness of life beyond death. It's a short step to think of the horseman as a "thinker."

The following passage from William Desmond, Being and the Between, 13, helps me explore the possible ramifications of Basho's haiku as "thought" -- thought made possible by haiku form. Obviously, the idioms are worlds apart: one idiom is based on a digestion and comprehension of modern philosophy (and not only modern), the other draws on Basho's own complex cultural frames (including the Zhuangzi, as Pipei has so persuasively set forth). And yet reading the haiku in light of the following passage does suggest why we might consider Basho a "thinker."

"Metaphysics is initiated, carried, renewed by singular thinkers, not just by anonymous systems. These singulars have tirelessly worked to think better . . . To speak of tirelessness is misleading if we forget that, in the intimacy of being, such singulars have fought weariness and bafflement, despondency and bewilderment. Yet the very freshness of their work comes from a different source that is not itself work, or the production of a work, or a system. This source is manifested in the gift of fertile astonishment. Needless to say, redeeming the promise of this gift is not common. The more mature a singular metaphysician becomes, the more there is a refinement of childlike astonishment. It is never dead. It may simplify itself to an elemental power of mindfulness, a simplicity not of defect, but of a perfection of attention that defies all determinate objectification."

For me, this passage opens up the haiku in ways that go way beyond justifying the exercise of reading poems in terms of metaphysics. It's as if the text were a profound commentary on the poem. It brings me much closer to what is singular, unique, about the poem and about "Basho" as an artist/thinker. One advantage such a juxtaposition has over other contemporary forms of commentary is that there is no contamination of the commentary by the target text. The two texts sit side by side sharing light from beyond.