“The Eternal and the Temporal in the Dynamics of Haiku.”
by existential calvinist on 2006年02月02日 01:13 PM
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1. Introduction
Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. One key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku has unique features in its literary heritage that make it especially suited to manifesting these two views of the world simultaneously, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.
Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and contain a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When properly employed, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of life. This ability is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.
2. Ways of seeing
Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between philosophers who prioritize the temporal, like Aristotle, and those who prioritize the eternal, like Plato. Though neither philosopher perfectly embodies their respective category, their association with these ways of seeing remains strong due to the strength of their inquiries and the continuing influence of their work on later philosophy.
2.1 Temporal
In its purest form, temporal seeing begins with the hypothesis that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no external structure that can order experiences. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane underlying essence to the world, Aristotle’s focus on substance as a combination of matter and form that corresponding to the potential and actuality of an object led later thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot have experience the forms, they cannot directly impact us, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.
Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it is present before us, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.
For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experiences of the world and then draw inferences about what, if any, substructure supports experience. The temporal scholars are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.
2.2 Eternal
Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we experience are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It seems impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from without, and our prior knowledge of such a framework is necessary for right understanding of the world. The external framework that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them and are themselves unchanging though they underlie our changing experience.
For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation by placing an emphasis on the unseen template which undergirds the recurrent order that we are able to experience.
2.3 On the utility of the distinction
The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue of defining a distinction between the eternal and temporal for use here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where it was left. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it does go by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.
The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4)
Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. As human beings, we find ourselves engaged in both sorts of activities. Even the mystic must eat, and even the laborer must dream. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully, because both play a part in human nature and human understanding. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because these poems are clearly structured in such a way that they are well suited to speak to the basic condition of humans in our search to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.
Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as an influence towards eternal perspective, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an influence towards temporal perspective. Thus, it is appropriate to see the connection between the eternal and temporal parts of a haiku and explore the ways that these parts strengthen its impact.
3. Brief history of haiku
To understand the ability of haiku to connect the temporal and eternal, it is useful to have an understanding of its literary origins, which allow it to make allusions to past works, yet break with reader expectations. It is also helpful to contrast haiku with other forms of Japanese poetry, in order to see the uniqueness of its ability to make such connections.
Haiku inherits a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consisted of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by an ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole.
Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. (Though occasionally, some poets worked alone.) In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.
Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form and had numerous rules about the topics to be used and the means for linking verses, haikai cut itself loose and used haigon 俳言, colloquial or vulgar language, Chinese loan words, and other terms banned by the rules of waka, and haikai experimented with different means of connecting verses.
Haikai, like other forms of renga, was usually composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. Here is part of a sequence contained in Bashô’s Saru Mino 猿蓑:
Shihô:
The north wind of the cold islands.Kyorai:
They climb up to the temple on the peak
To light the lantern.Bashô:
Sung their last song. (Haiku 129)
Worth noticing is that the meaning of the center verse changes depending on its grouping with the verse before or after. As a pair, the first two verses take place in winter, but pairing the second verse with the last results in a summer scene. Also the setting changes from the peak of an island temple to an isolated forest one. In this way, it was common for middle verses of haikai to have variable meanings.
By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was meant to also stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, because these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was its inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. The writing of hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. (Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both a connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.)
There were a number of cutting words historically, but the most common are ya, keri, and kana. Ya is a kind of exclamation or cry and is frequently translated “oh!” or “ah!” Keri is a classical form of the past tense, though in some texts it functions only as an emphasizer. Kana has come to mean, “I wonder…” in modern Japanese, but in classical texts, it quietly intensifies attention on the preceding word.
Season words in Japanese are too numerous to list here, and by the time of Bashô, there had already been a thousand years of written codification of such terms and their proper usage and associations. Traditionally, haiku are grouped according to the five seasons—New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter—each having its own set of characteristic flowers, birds, festivals, foods, and so on. There are a few poems with two seasons or none, but these are less common. Even in modern Japan, casual observers can remark that the love of seasonality displayed by average people is quite pronounced compared to Americans. The key quality of kigo is that they allow a wealth of associations to be transmitted by only a few words. They are “a kind of poetic algebra or shorthand, enabling poets to speak to one another open secrets” (Haiku 336). Thus, for example the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû 新古今集 (Poetics 34). These associations not only keep haiku’s brevity from undermining it, they also provide a powerful resource for creating rich interpretive frameworks.
The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Blyth says of humor in haiku, “it is some indispensable element without which haiku can hardly exist” (Haiku 313). Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verses that they created together.
As a simple example of the humor in individual haikai verses, here is a verse by Kikaku that Bashô quotes in his Saga Nikki 嵯峨日記: “Accused her of faithlessness/ and forgave her on Abstinence Day” (Essential Haiku 66). Seeing the first line, the reader has the expectation that drama will follow, perhaps a violent quarrel with the lover or the author’s withdrawn loneliness. Instead, there is a quick reconciliation that takes place on a day set aside for refraining from physical affection.
Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself later when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the expressive capacity of haiku itself.
4. Dynamics of haiku
Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. Due to the history of haiku, part of its basic definition is to combine these two ways of seeing into a simultaneous tension. The seasonal element presents an eternal picture, while the rest of the haiku creates a specific scene. The genius of haiku is that neither perspective crowds out the other, but both perspectives are held together in tension by the reader. As Bashô says, “One should know that a hokku is made by combining things,” and, “The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world” (Essential Haiku 234). In other words, the key to haiku is the juxtaposition and suspension of contradictory images.
4.1 The eternal aspect in haiku
The eternal can be seen in haiku in the incorporation of Shintô elements. Though Blyth downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought in Haiku, devoting just three pages to it, Shintô is in fact a central influence on the nature of haiku. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of a haiku. However, when understood as a folk religion (rather than as the state religion imposed during much of Blyth’s lifetime), Shintô circumscribes the topic under consideration but not the propositions within that context. Thus, Shintô should not ordinarily be a topic for particular examination. Rather, Shintô is the means by which particular topics are manifest.
In particular, the kigo that is required for haiku is advanced in part by Shintô considerations. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between kigo and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,
bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization. (225)
Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we realize that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition.
Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Seasons, for example, can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate. The ancient Japanese may have attributed these recurrent trends to the working of kami, while we attribute it to the motion of the earth’s axis. However, in either case, the recognition that these separate experiences are driven by a common source is an acknowledgment of the impact of the eternal aspect on life. Our experience is driven by the eternal principles underlying orbital mechanics and heating dynamics. Their experience is driven by the shear will of harusame and shigure. In either case, as Hume suggested, causality is invisible to experience qua experience. Hence, it is only our rational inference of an eternal principle’s existence that illuminates its theoretical workings.
Haiku is also aided in the expression of complex meaning in limited space by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka, as seen before with “autumn nightfall.” With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood, and these associations can in turn be seen as an eternal essence underlying individual poetic experiences.
The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Koji Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase using kigo or waka calls into mind some eternal precept. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. It is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event. The superimposed section gives that scene a context by juxtaposing an evocative phrase in a surprising fashion. Together, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.
4.2 The temporal aspect in haiku
Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to illustrate doctrine—such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)--this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. (Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Shiki [Poetics 52].) Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Though composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leave an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô, and over many of its translators.
Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intentionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the transcendent profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. In other words, one is tempted to view them only from the eternal aspect. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, examination of a haiku is best informed by beginning with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding to reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv).
In The Poetics of Haiku, Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it.
Nevertheless, it is in the base section that haiku create a unique and specific picture of the world as it is. The great poets attempt to cast off how the world should look and capture how it is actually experienced. Along with the superimposed section, haiku now contains both an eternal aspect concerned with past and future expressions of the world and a temporal aspect concerned with the world as it is in this instant.
4.3 Their simultaneous tension
Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct his skill not toward merely punning by means of kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as was done in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world. It was common for waka to have two or more separate meanings hinging on the interpretation of some pivot words. This trend continued somewhat in haiku. More important was the way that this tradition created a culture that was comfortable with superimposing multiple meanings on texts.
Also significantly for the interpretation of haiku, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings, as was shown before. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing point about haiku is how its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense the dual perspectives of hiraku triplets into a single verse. Just as one hiraku is meant to be juxtaposed with another, one haiku is meant to contain two or more images in simultaneous juxtaposition.
The brevity of haiku and the nature of the Japanese language itself both conspire to make the interpretation of haiku somewhat difficult. Bashô’s disciple Kyorai recorded an incident in which he and Shadô, another of Bashô’s pupils, were quarreling about the meaning of Kyorai’s verse, “The tips of the crags—/ Here too is someone,/ Guest of the moon,” 岩鼻やこゝにもひとり月の客 (Essential Haiku 246). Shadô felt that the accompanying moon-viewer should be a monkey. Kyorai, however, states the verse recorded his seeing another poet along a mountain ridge one night. Bashô corrects them both by saying the subject of the verse should be Kyorai himself. However, Bashô does not suggest any revision to the verse, and furthermore he includes it as is in one his publications. Blyth remarks about the incident, “we have here the entertaining picture of Bashô telling Kyorai, not what he ought to have said, but what he ought to have meant by what he said” (343). The point is that this single verse contains multiple interpretations—poet, monkey, or self as the subject—and none of them crowd out the others. A genius like Bashô is able to see the highest interpretation but other interpretations also have their validity. Going further, not only can this poem be seen as illustrative of Kyorai’s individual, temporally existent situation, but also it can be seen as encapsulating the eternal unity that underlies all lonesome climbers who glance another with a smiling heart. As with kakekotoba or connected hiraku, there are two poems here. In one, each traveler is a guest of the moon. In the other, Kyorai alone has traveled, and reflects on his own solitude as a guest of the moon.
5. Examples
5.1 From haiku
To further illustrate the dual perspective contained by haiku, let us examine some individual poems. Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道 and the first recorded after Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry; the fish’s eyes are tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or temporal theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “Yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the relationships of the Platonic forms, this relationship is extra-temporal. Any and all going springs may attract such bird’s cries. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and temporal world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the timeless and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.
Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobi-komu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as a comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one (some commentators consider oto onomatopoeic). Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, whereas the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the eternal and the world of the temporal, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.
Similar analyses can be performed on most haiku by seeing the connection between the dynamic base section and the static superimposed section. Since most haiku have a seasonal element, there should be at least one eternal aspect to any haiku. The inclusion of a more ephemeral section in the haiku is not as mandatory, but many of the good haiku juxtapose such an image, while the great haiku create a space for the mind to use both means of seeing non-exclusively.
5.2 From waka
Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. The point is not that all haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something particular about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the eternal and the temporal, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.
Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka can be intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the temporal and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal objective reverberations of the poem as well as the merely subjective ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.
Of course, bridging the tensions between the eternal and the temporal by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the earth to the heavens and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life, haiku must use and then cast off both empiricist and rationalist dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.
6. Practical applications
6.1 Philosophically
The distinction drawn in this essay has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the forms.
Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue eternal thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences outside of pure cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience. Even if one’s conclusions seems logical to oneself, knowing that the insane feel equally unshakeable in their beliefs brings us room for uncertainty.
Even ignoring this uncertainty, no understanding of the relation of ideas, no matter how detailed, is of any value if such a schema cannot be correlated with the external world in a meaningful way. For example, it is a widely held ethical belief that “it is wrong to murder.” However, great confusion persists about the exact meaning of the term “murder.” Some hold that it is murder to abort a fetus, others object. Some say that killing in war is justified, others dispute. Some approve of euthanasia, others disapprove, and no universal consensus exists about whether the relevant factor in classifying something as murder is the intelligence of the victim or the victim’s genetic status as human. Even if such consensus did exist, there are no doubt still further complications and edge cases to be considered, all of which point to the fact that to hold a simple statement to be true is of little use without a stable means of determining the relevance and relationship of that truth to present experience.
Now suppose that one seeks to devote one’s self exclusively to the temporal, with no statement accepted that is not the subject of experience. Here, the problem raises itself again: how can we affix labels onto undifferentiated experience? To even say, “I am looking at a sunset today,” presupposes the categories of “I,” “looking,” “sunsets,” and “today.” All of this is before one can even extrapolate, “thus I will probably see another sunset tomorrow.” What experience tells us that “red discs on the horizon are sunsets”? How can we even say that “red is red” and “discs are discs” without already presuming something from outside of mere experience itself? Without our evolved pre-categorizations for the world, there are only sounds and colors without names. We are left wordless in William James’s “big blooming buzzing confusion.”
The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô, and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since pure experience is prior to either eternal or temporal understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Carter explains that, for example, to understand that an object is red, one must know what red is compared to other colors. Hence, one must know about the concept of colors already. However, the concept of colors is merely a compound formed of our knowledge of individual colors. This leads to a seeming paradox.
The many particular colors express the color system, and the color system integrates the many. In order to know, we must take both perspectives at one and the same time. Hence, color is many, yet one. It is a contradictory entity. (33)
When we examine our knowledge of a color, we are left with the paradox that we must know them before we can know them. Similarly in haiku, we are encouraged to recognize the paradox that underlies haiku. The particular bustling market of Edo illustrates the eternal going-spring, but the going-spring is composed merely of hundreds of scenes like the one that took place in Edo’s bustling market for Bashô. Because of the brevity and tension contained in the poem, we are inclined to interpret it as Carter and Nishida demand we should—by recognizing the contradictory tension in our knowledge itself. We must recognize that the eternal and the temporal are interdependent in haiku and elsewhere.
6.2 Personally
Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks, how is it that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet are almost without hope, because their imitations are three times removed from real source of things as copies of the outward appearance. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet knows. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it could be and in the end, he concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason and potentially gives reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.
An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is to show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. As per the oracle’s motto, the goal of the poet is to “know thyself.” So, while a novelist writing about naval warfare who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist or poet can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way experience can be split into eternal and temporal aspects that are simultaneously manifest.
As the Zenrinkushû says of the poet, “入林不動草、入水不立波,” meaning, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple” (Haiku 27). The poet does not disturb the world around, because the poet enters not through body, but through mind. Though the mind does not have full knowledge of either itself or the world, by playing (the meaning of haikai) but playing seriously (as per Bashô’s example), we can gain knowledge, not of the external, but of the internal. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. It is through poetry that we are allowed to experience two modes of thinking simultaneously via the double aperture.
In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be left without compliment from other renga poet-participants.
Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time before our eyes, ears, and nose. We capture what we see, hear, smell, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience itself can never be captured. All that we can record are seventeen syllables that can be used later as a tool to open our minds once more to dual perspectives of nature, both in its ordinariness and sublimity.
7. Works cited
- Carter, Robert E. The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarô. University of Hawaii Press, Second edition, 1997.Carter, Steven D. On a Bare Branch: Basho and the Haikai Profession. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1997), pp. 57–69.Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Paperback edition, 1981.Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.Kato, Kazumitsu. Review: Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. VII by R. H. Blyth. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 82, No. 3. (Jul. – Sep., 1962), pp. 459–462.Kawamoto, Kôji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse. trans. Steve Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt. University of Tokyo Press, 2000.Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.