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)

Pieces of Lost Conversations

Last post, I mentioned that the haiku genre is conversational both in practice and in its origins, emerging from a tradition, among the literati of Medieval Japan, of writing sequences of short poems over the course of hours or years. And I mentioned as well that this theme would be taken up in a future post, so this seems a good time to note that several of the pieces in this collection are simply my side of conversations held from 2015 and into 2016 with my dear friend Gisèle Lundrigan, emerging from a handful of mead soaked evenings during which the two of us traded words both spoken and written. I've lost the coloured cue cards on which the first versions were scribbled, and my record keeping sucks, but while I no longer recall the exact pieces for which this description holds, somewhere in this mess are echoes of those lost verbal jam sessions.

As for today's sample, these six pieces are from the Summer section of the seasonal sequence. While most are haiku, one is a haibun, a form developed by Basho, generally considered to be the greatest haiku poet in the tradition. The haibun is essentially a short prose piece with a haiku attached, and Basho wrote a number of haibun collections based on his travels around Japan. The form itself owes much to his close engagement with Chuang Tzu, the early Taoist thinker whose short philosophic tales and parables seem to constitute the beginning of Chinese literary prose.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Summer'

gap between old boots

long stare to rushing water

vertigo's soft pull

wild rose startled

pink a brain's response to light—

no one sees the rose

jack pine on a ledge

undercut by years of waves

appears motionless

three days and the wasp

has not moved from my window:

the cleaning can wait

A haibun for Captain Jack Gunn:

Uncle Jack navigated bombers over Germany for the RAF. At 30, he was the oldest one in his crew. The men called him Pops. He never talked about it in front of me. In fact, he rarely spoke, though I remember him smiling from the door as my cousin Kris and I played on the bench swing in his back yard. Mostly, I remember him sitting by a window, sipping rye and water:

Lancaster bomber

on a concrete pedestal—

bright hybrid roses

(Jackson Park, Windsor)

chimneys in tall grass

do not remember salt cod

or call for lost eyes

(abandoned village, Newfoundland)

Fumbling Forward

As I continue to fiddle with the final version of A Few Words on the Way, I think I'll post excerpts from each of the book's sections, so that anyone who may be curious can get a sample of whatever it is I'm up to. The first half of the book consists of a more or less traditional seasonal cycle, beginning of course with spring, so below are half a dozen bits from that part. I hope you like them.

This may also be a good place for a few words on haiku itself, and the approach I've taken to it in terms of form, content, and overall aesthetic. The genre as a whole is conversational, originating as it did in long verse exchanges between members of the Medieval Japanese literati, taking place sometimes over single evenings and sometimes over years—more on this facet in a later post. In terms of formal requirements, the most familiar is of course the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. Other elements include a season word and a turn, that is, a word that evokes a specific season without naming it, and a point that functions as a pivot in terms of theme or imagery and thus gives a sense of inner motion. The imagery, drawing on the long traditions of both Japanese and Chinese poetry, tends to be nature-based and concrete, and the language terse with minimal grammatical indicators. The poem does not paint a picture of what was in the composer's mind at the time of composition, so much as cause an image to arise and then subside in motions of the reader's consciousness.

These words may sound strange, but they're philosophically precise, anchored as they are in both Zen and Taoist thought not only on mind but also on cosmology. In both of these thought worlds, all presence—all phenomena (or if you prefer, all being)—arises from, and subsides back into absence (or if you prefer, into non-being). But non-being is not an absolute lack as it tends to be in Western thought; rather, it's the productive potential both preceding and following any given instance of presence: at once source and destination. This applies equally to specific concrete phenomena, and at one extreme to the entire Cosmos and at the other extreme to consciousness itself, all without the need or even the place for a transcendent agency (or if you prefer, for a prime mover or first cause): a position that incidentally aligns pretty well with the current best empirical understanding of both Cosmos and consciousness. The fleetingness of the experience of the poem thus also evokes, in the philosophically informed reader, the fleetingness of both the mind that experiences it and the world in which the experience occurs. In other words, there is an art to reading haiku that is almost as subtle as the art of writing them: these are short poems, but not necessarily easy ones.

I hope this line of thought isn't too pedantic, but the truth is, I'm neither a writer nor a scholar. If we are what we do—and both the ruthless clarity and the ephemerality of that definition appeal to me—then I am a teacher and a father, neither of which I ever intended to be until I found myself doing them (this, too, is arising and subsiding). And as I'm a teacher of literature on the one hand, and on the other (again quite by accident) of several worldviews that remain uncommon in Western classrooms but some of which are present in this genre and these poems, it's probably natural that I spend a little time in that mode.

Regarding the haiku in English, there are two broad schools of thought, which I suppose we can call traditional and freestyle. The traditional approach is exactly what it sounds like, with practitioners generally sticking close to the formal and thematic requirements of Japanese haiku. Variations are not unheard of, but always occur against a backdrop of those assumed norms. But the norms are, of course, both culturally and linguistically specific, and various writers to various degrees have found that they could approach the heart of the genre more effectively by jettisoning some or even most of its formal elements. So a freestyle haiku will always be a very short poem, probably but not necessarily consisting of three lines, which will themselves be short but not confined to the 5-7-5 structure (usually, the lines are shorter). It may lack a season word, and may or may not have a turn. An excellent exemplar of this approach was Jack Kerouac. As for the poems here, they fall mainly into the traditional school as I find that the metrical constraints stimulate my brain in productive and pleasurable ways, so while I don't follow the classical approach strictly, most of the pieces in this collection will at least look the way most readers expect haiku to look. Subject matter and tone, though, will vary.

Also, I say “fuck” a lot.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Spring'

another snow day:

first day of spring my hairy

Canadian ass

 

blue sky and slow wind—

snowmen slouch in the backyard

emaciated

grey snow dirty streets

not spring so much as winter

terminally ill

over-stuffed river

crammed with four months' snow recedes:

log, carved heart, a name

clearcut under rain

shattered limbs grey roots bare rock—

flash of a blue jay

 

crab apple blossoms

locked in hard buds: cardinal

startles red from air