From Longing to Metaxy: An Analysis of Basho’s Longing for Kyoto Haiku

Gilbert's concept of metaxu is crucial to the study of haiku form as cutting. We believe the conversation should start with the concept of metaxy, since it places haiku in a conceptual world of great significance. One of the outcomes of Gilbert's emphasis on formal cutting (as opposed to the conceptual or categorical cut between beings and being) is a self-multiplying kind of interpretation. I need only refer to the outputs -- the "feeds" -- of the Haiku Foundation. While this emphasis on form often produces eloquence on the part of the interpreter, it has a tendency to reframe the poem as a "prompt" for interpretation rather than being itself an "interpretation" of existence as marked by the master distinction (or cut) between being and beings. What is lost in the exuberance is the poet's poise before the mystery of the otherness of being. The current discussions about Zen and Blyth are seriously anachronistic: the issue is contemporary and philosophical (see e.g., William Desmond, Being and the Between). The poet's ontological discretion, his fidelity to the ontological difference, is subject to the oblivion caused by this new poetic divertissement. We've asked Jamie Edgecombe to write short blog essays exploring haiku in terms of the metaxy. Ed.



by Jamie Edgecombe

At times we get homesick, too, while in our own homes.
Keion (translation Ueda, 1992: 294)

Kyo nite mo / Kyo natsukashi ya / hototogisu
Kyoto to be there too/ Kyoto longing for the past / cuckoo

even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto –
cuckoo’s call

On its surface, the poem’s structure places the individual poet’s desire to recapture the cultural world he has inherited (which forms the poem’s baseline), against the superposed line, the seasonal reference of the cuckoo (which indicates early summer).

What is striking about this poem is the immediate sense of nostalgia (J. natsukashi), the longing for Kyoto, within the immanent experience of being in Kyoto. Shuson, states that the first Kyoto is the real city, while the second is the ancient city than lives yet on in ancient poetry and fiction’ (Ueda, 1992: 294). The objective view of Kyoto becomes overlain with a nostalgic view of the ancient city, in which the poet finds himself, as an individual, confronted by the milieu of history. At such a moment, there is a great sense of the physical impermanence of greatness, while it continues to linger in the cultural memory (see Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku), and the meagreness of the individual in the face of the great and historical.

If one were to be adventurous and apply a dialectical approach, one could say that the greatness of one illuminates the meagreness of the other and vis-versa.

Such a direct expression of emotion is not unusual for Basho, who vouched in the Red Book, that his ‘Wayfarer I shall be called’ poem, in which he directly indicates the poetic-subject’s intentions and emotions, is the product of his ‘effort to infuse the verse with the strings of the heart at this particular moment’ (Kawamoto, 2000: 90) The expression of longing in this poem acts likewise. Such a direct expression of emotion dates back to Shinkokinshu poetry, where these expressions became the vehicle for reasoning (and thus were attacked by Masaoki Shiki as such – see Beichman, 1982), whereas Basho’s use presents something quite different.

The most obvious cause, or trigger, for this sense of longing is the cuckoo’s call, a traditional kigo that has formed in the community of the Kyoto / Osaka (Kanto) area, due to the region’s literary and cultural heritage.

Here art and culture have entangled to make the image of the cuckoo equivocal. The cuckoo, within the haiku’s articulated moment, is both an immanent, sensible phenomenon (i.e. it is a bird that is heard), but it is also a symbol that has developed through and over centuries.

Left as such, the cuckoo’s call, which is both temporal and spatial in its being there, within the created scene, reminds the poet of the Kyoto of old, the cultural, religious capital and artistic hub that it once was.

However, to just leave the poem’s analysis standing at a moment of nostalgia (where nostalgia is to be taken as a longing for the pastt), is to turn the poem into an empty, univocal expression of closure, where the individual, the finite, and the infinite find themselves in a closed circuit made up of the immanent and the imaginary (the imaginary being the only way to make contact with the lost world of cultural importance).

If it were this simple, the poem would not have captivated as many poets, and analysts, as it has. Something in the poem astounds us. It requires more thought and exploration. This is not to say that the steps so far made in this essay are wrong, but they are incomplete.

Attention needs to be given to the poem’s gap, or cutting (J. kire).

Yes, the baseline places the poet-reader within a spatial and temporal context. Yes, the superposed line then destabilises that world through the cuckoo’s call, a sensory perception that is so fleeting that it has vanished before it can be fully grasped, although it has been heard. The call lingers in the memory. A reflective moment arises where the poet longs for a Kyoto that no longer has the prestige it once did (the poem illuminates man’s bodily-located-psyche).

The cuckoo call still lingers; Kyoto still lingers: Basho is astounded by the cuckoo’s call within his contemporary Kyoto. The metaxic tension of Kyoto, which was there all along, has been brought into focus by the cuckoo’s call.

At this moment it is important to note that the cuckoo image, within the complex nature of being a kigo, is also a waka word. It was used in a similar way by the 9th century monk Sosei, in his poem about hearing a cuckoo in Kyoto (translation in Ueda, 1992: 294).

Within Sosei’s waka, the poetic-subject hears a cuckoo and comes to reflect on how that voice hasn’t changed over time, while the city, Kyoto, has. One gains a sense of the ancientness of the city that has changed so much, but more so the vastness of the cuckoo’s symbolic nature, of the natural world within which the actions of man take place. An intertextual depth becomes apparent within Basho’s haiku, where the cuckoo once again calls out within the physical world of the city and is once again heard by a poet, who reflects upon it. The ancientness of Kyoto is further deepened, but the horizons of the natural stretch further still and will continue to do through the flux of the passing seasons. This said, knowledge of the Sosei poem forms a pole within the event of the poem, and is not a prerequisite for understanding the poem’s tensions.

To continue with Basho’s poem: the cuckoo’s call declares that there is at all Kyoto, an immanent experience to be lived, and thus illuminates the continuum that has made all this at all, that has made me and led me here. Basho and his art are revealed to be entangled. Haiku, a thread in the religious and cultural fabric of Japanese literature has led him to this moment, but he also is a product, a conduit and fashioner of concepts and images, that he has the will to explore and create, but which have been forming for centuries and will continue to do so. Basho is both a creator of haiku and is partially fashioned by it through his alignment to its aesthetics and his knowledge of it. He is both himself and is other to himself.

Consequently, the present Kyoto of the baseline is both the Kyoto familiar to Basho, but is revealed to be other. The Kyoto of history, also familiar to the master poet, is both known and ultimately unknowable, although he has knowledge of it. They are both entangled, though. One Kyoto is a culmination of all that Kyoto has been in the past, but is also the physical entity before him; the other stands before and within the present Kyoto, but is beyond that Kyoto in its immanence.

Likewise, the cuckoo, intimate in its sensible presence to the poet, is beyond his full grasp, despite having been grasped (heard) physically and having knowledge of its use in ancient literature.

Kyoto, in the return, becomes metaphysically doubled. The nostalgia that was experienced on hearing the cuckoo can be seen to develop. It is an openness to the Kyoto that was, but also a longing to enter into the Kyoto that is. There is an attraction, felt by the poet-reader, to the Kyoto that has become backlit by its own metaxic nature. Equally, through the mutuality of Kyoto and poet, the poet has become backlit, as well. The attraction returns the self as other in understanding the experience of being in Kyoto and Kyoto’s being; that nostalgia has the power to transform and is empowered by transformation. Through this longing and return to the present, Kyoto and the poet-reader do entangle.

Nostalgia, through the imagination entanglement with the immanent (with man’s bodily-located-psyche), not only illuminates consciousness through memory, but also through the movement outward, towards the other.

Basho’s contemporary Kyoto becomes a perceptional horizon, as does the cuckoo, Basho’s longed for Kyoto and, ultimately, the poet himself. There is a continuous sense of excess, but no end that can gather these horizons into a graspable whole, despite the evocation of these tensions within a single poem, other than that found in the erotic self’s will to understand the passion of being (the wonder that there is this tensional, metaxic Kyoto at all).

The structure of the poem, the movement from immanent place, to fleeting sensory perception, to the perception of the agefullness and agelessness of the place, comes back upon the immanent place, the cuckoo’s sensed call, and the imagined Kyoto of old, and finds no closure in its return, despite the sense of truth the return is imbued with. The poem’s experience becomes perplexing and therefore enigmatic. Such a metaxic tension reveals the depths of reality, while not denying the facticity of the immanent.

References

Beichman, Janine (1982), Masaoka Shiki, Kodansha; Kawamoto, Keiji (2000), The Poetics of Japanese Verse, University of Tokyo; Ueda, Makoto (1992), Basho and his Interpreters, Stanford University Press; Yamamoto Seisaku and Carter Robert E. (1996): Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, State University of New York Press.