The Heart of Haiku

by Jane Hirshfield

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind.

The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

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. In poetry as in life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.”

To read a haiku is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life.

In the opening words of “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” a prose and haiku journal describing a trip of roughly 1500 miles undertaken by foot, boat, and horseback at the age of forty-five, Bashō wrote, “The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”

He remained aware all his life of the path not taken. But poverty, for Bashō, was neither accidental nor incidental. It was a honing stone for the sharpening of awareness.

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.

Poetry can be thought of in much the same way, and the recognition of impermanence, ceaseless alteration, and interdependence—the connection of each person, creature, event, and object with every other—need not be “Buddhist.”

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No.”

The fidelity of Zen is to this world, and to how we see and taste it in our lives and our lives in it.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

“The rich enjoy the finest meats and ambitious young men save money by eating root vegetables. I myself am simply poor.”

Should a poem be about “loneliness” or “stillness”? Should a sound “soak,” “pierce” or “stain”? These alterations show that even his most seemingly unstudied and artless works were often produced by a method quite unlike what is sometimes described as a “Zen” “first thought, best thought.”

One Zen saying proposes, “Live as if you were already dead.”

His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer. As with so many of his images, the statement can be taken in more than one way. It can be read as a praise of uselessness, saying that poetry, like the bashō tree, is a thing to be loved precisely because it has no utilitarian purpose—by Bashō’s own account, that is what he meant. But the description can also be read as an advocacy of intensification: whatever a person’s experience, bringing it into a poem will strengthen it more. In some subtle way, these two ideas are not so disconnected as they at first may seem.

The reader who enters Bashō’s perceptions fully can’t help but find in them a kind of liberation. They unshackle the mind from any single or absolute story, unshackle us from the clumsy dividing of world into subjective and objective, self and other, illness and blossom, freedom and capture.

Awareness of the mind’s movements makes clear that it is the mind’s nature to move. Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all.

The words he wrote on the rim his home-made traveling hat can be translated, loosely, as these: Under this world’s long rains, here passes poetry’s makeshift shelter.