A Digression and an Invitation

In today's episode of Hey! Look at My Book!, I think I'd like to explore a small piece of one of the worldviews underlying the haiku tradition as a whole as well as my own approach to both language and lived experience. The worldview in question is Taoism (or if you prefer Pinyin romanization, Daoism), with a textual history dating to about the 6^th century BCE but an oral tradition that appears to reach into the neolithic and thus to be culturally prior to the mythologies and thought worlds emanating from agrarian societies. I've seen it convincingly argued, as I may get into in a future post, that Taoism has its roots in a broad web of shamanic traditions that predate, by a long margin, the Agricultural Revolution. The glimpse of mental experience we get, then, when we read the classics—the Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) and the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)—reflected and refracted with some distortion across the intervening millennia—is one of the immanent spiritual experience of nature with none of the dualities, such as self/other, mind/body, or natural/supernatural, that have informed and in my opinion plagued so much later thinking, particularly in the West. This is a worldview in which there is no separation of the human from the rest of nature, no transcendent divine and thus no alienation from the divine with its requisite attempts at reconciliation, no special creation, certainly no mythologically warranted human “dominion” over the world, and in which the models of both Cosmos and human nature (themselves the same model) celebrate what we might call the archetypal feminine with no sense of subordination to any patriarchal authority real or imagined. There are no no commandments, no abasements, and no sin.

But as this is hardly the place for an extended meditation on one of the world's great intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions, I think I'll confine myself to a single passage of the Tao Te Ching, in the wonderful words of my favourite translator, David Hinton. I chose this passage, Chapter 13 to be specific, because the ending touches upon something that haiku at its best can also evoke, calling into question our sense of what and where we are, and the costs and consequences of taking our mental constructions of ourselves to be anything more than words and images. Here's the chapter in full:

Honor is a contagion deep as fear,

renown a calamity profound as self.

Why do I call honor a contagion deep as fear?

Honor always dwindles away,

so earning it fills us with fear

and losing it fills us with fear.

And why do I call renown a calamity profound as self?

We only know calamity because we have these selves.

If we didn't have selves,

what calamity could touch us?

When all beneath heaven is yourself in renown

you trust yourself to all beneath heaven,

and when all beneath heaven is yourself in love

you dwell throughout all beneath heaven.

My goodness, I think I need to read that again …

… OK, I'm back.

And as I don't want to take up too much of your time, I'll just let this lovely passage stand without comment—it wouldn't do, after all, to cross the line between providing information and context, and telling you how to read. So for now, here are a few bits from the Fall section of the seasonal sequence that makes up the first half of A Few Words on the Way, which as I've said before, should be ready for release in early July. I hope you like them, and maybe that you see some of what's posted above in some of what's posted below. Questions or observations are more than welcome in the Comments. And if you feel like writing a haiku in response to one of these and posting it here as well, you are most warmly invited to do so.

Enjoy.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Fall'

a fallen apple

baked in afternoon sunlight

pulps against my tongue

 

yellow lily pads

whistle of a lone duck's wings

a silence of frogs

 

no sign of the guy:

workbench covered in beer cans

under yellow leaves

 

red leaf underfoot

crushed between soles and stones—

your back, receding

 

captured by twilight

the taste of burning leaves

whispers your ashes

(for Alanna)

 

sipping tea beige mugs

lost October afternoon

our words—you—gone

(for Alanna)