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A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud-snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon.
“But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.”
A poem, he said, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper.
One further detail is widely known in the West: the poem must evoke a particular season, by name or association.
over 19,000 haiku about Spam—“Spamku”—have to this date been posted online. Yet
even in Kyoto, hearing a cuckoo, I long for Kyoto
The statement foreshadows by three centuries T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.
dusk: bells quiet, fragrance rings night-struck from flowers
Paths mattered to Bashō, who could—like Wordsworth or John Muir—cover twenty or thirty miles a day by foot.
Each also contributed to a published linked-verse renga—a form of poetry written by more than one person, which Bashō would practice throughout his life.
It would be nice to write these with friends.
The traditional form of Japanese poetry for a thousand years had been the five-line tanka (also called waka), written in the syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. The shorter haiku form emerged from two variations of that long-standing pattern. In one, a person would write the 5-7-5 syllable opening for a tanka and another then would “cap” it by writing the closing lines.
(This was both a literary game and an adaptation of the “capping verses” of Zen, written to express and demonstrate spiritual understanding.) The second, more widely practiced variation was the writing of renga. A renga consists of a series of three and two-line stanzas, continuing for 36, 50, or 100 verses, in which each stanza both completes and initiates a five-line tanka, when joined with the stanza that precedes or follows. Various themes and alterations of mood occur at specified points in the chain. Linked verse could be written by two people, but more often were composed over the
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To sit around and do this at a write club would be a blast.
Bashō’s best known haiku, many began as the opening verses of renga, while others were sent in letters, written in literary travel-journals mixing poetry and prose, or set down within haibun, brief prose pieces ending in one or two poems.
Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.
Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
Shinto, Japan’s other major spiritual tradition, saturates Bashō’s poems as well, most noticeably in the importance given to place and the way that particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes. Shinto’s kami spirits live not in generality, abstraction, or paradise but embedded in the earthly, visitable, and local—shrines, mountains, islands, fields, and trees. Bashō’s lifelong practice of poetry pilgrimage joined Zen non-attachment with Shinto’s deep-seated spirits of place.
penumbra,
the haiku read alone on a page, blurred by lack of shared cultural reference and by translation, was often originally written in circumstances both specific and knowable by its original readers. As mentioned earlier, many of Bashō’s haiku were composed as part of linked verse gatherings. Others were written for poetry competitions with assigned subjects. Many were personal communications—messages sent between friends, between guest and host or teacher and student—or placed within travel journals or the prose settings of haibun, which gave them added meaning. Some were written about paintings,
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Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.
ontological
wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.
haibun
Another reminder of death’s omnipresence appeared soon after, when Bashō saw a small child, perhaps two years old, abandoned by the road. The early 1680s were years of famine, flood, fire, social turmoil, and desperate poverty, and the sight was not uncommon. Still, for a modern reader, this incident is the most difficult to accept of any in Bashō’s life: he tossed some food to the child and rode on,
year-end-thought: one night, even a thief came to visit
The second, haiku written a year later, surely refers as well to the overly social life Bashō had been leading, but here, bitterness has vanished, and the poet seems less rueful than amused. It reminds of the story of a Zen master who, finding his hut has been robbed, goes running after the thief with a last pot in his hand: “Thief, stop! You forgot this!”
New Year’s Eve cleaning— the carpenter hangs a shelf in his own house.
morning glory: a day-flowering lock bolts my gate
He continued attempting to communicate his new ideas to students, whom he worried were not comprehending well his encouragement to see and write “the way a clear, shallow river runs over a sandy bed.” In October he went on to Osaka, continuing to teach and participate in renga gatherings despite headaches, fever, and chills.
wild seas— sweeping over the island of exiles, heaven’s river of stars
New Year’s Eve year-forgetting party— wondering what fish feel, what birds feel?
mountain cuckoo, sing my grief-notes into sabi
He preferred a traveler’s straw hat with a few words inked inside its rim to a roof.
