Gap and Gift: Madeleine Findlay on a haiku by Issa

hana no kage aka no tannin wa nakari keri

thanks to the blossoms -

on the ground that they’ve shaded

no one’s a stranger

trans. by Lewis Mackenzie

When I was a kid, I used to doodle during classes. Drawing made it easier for me to concentrate and hear what the teacher was saying. The girls competing for attention, the teacher’s next move or a spitball flying through the air worried me. For me, this haiku captures a similar feeling of finding connection through otherness. The pencil and paper grounded me and allowed me to hear what was being said in an uninterrupted flow of words.

The broad picture in this haiku is of cherry blossom viewing and the unity it creates in admiring crowds, not unlike star-gazing, or moon viewing. However, the word “shaded” dilutes the awe. It has deep associations. It suggests relief from the heat and a more reflective state of mind. “Stranger” adds mystery. The word feels coded and is hard to fit with the rest of the haiku. Like a puzzle where the pieces are not yet turned in the right direction, the haiku needs to be shifted around in consciousness. Secondary meanings are usually inherent in haiku but here the words for a second meaning are out in the open.

“No kage” is polyvocal. It means both “in the shadow of” as well as “protected by” or “thanks to.” This points to the idea of the gift which opens the haiku up to a bigger concept. Without the blossoms, there would be no shade. So, paradoxically, more than the transient beauty of these ephemeral flowers, there is a more permanent interpretation. The shade exists on the ground. It creates otherness – not unlike a reflection. This doubleness opens up the gap with the gift giving of itself. For me, feeling the shade helps me to see the blossoms by giving them dimension. This furthers their actuality. Similarly, I furthered my actuality by drawing, by proving myself real so I could go beyond the distractions and hear what was being said.

“No one’s a stranger” in this context extends beyond the unity of the group under the tree and into the realm of each individual where no one is a stranger to him or her self. This allows the sense of community to split into its opposite with each person experiencing the gift, not just receiving it.

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.