Of Goddesses and Fatherhood

This selection from my forthcoming little mess of little little poems, A Few Words on the Way, is from the final, winter section of the seasonal sequence that makes up about the first half of the collection. In each of the previous little bits I've released, I've tried to catch your interest by getting into some of the context underlying the genres and worldviews I'm exploring or through which I'm seeing the world in these pieces. Not sure whether that's the best promotional strategy or not, to be honest, as I've never been really gifted at putting myself forward and am, when not standing in front of a classroom or other audience, actually quite shy and socially awkward.

In terms of contextualizing today's selection, I think I'll just focus on a single piece, “a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali.” Strictly speaking, a tanka is a haiku in the standard 5-7-5 syllabic measure with a 7-7 couplet attached, there generally being some sort of thematic or narrative pivot in the juncture between haiku and couplet. It's a less common form, but one that I enjoy playing with from time to time. This particular piece also touches upon Hindu thought, something foreign to both the culture in which I live and the cultures from which the poetic forms and main influences on these poems arise, but one in which I was immersed when this poem was written, through teaching both the Bhagavad Gita and an abridgment of the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a small part). While this is hardly the place or a long discussion of the Hindu pantheon, I'll just say that one of the figures in that endlessly fascinating and ever-shifting collection of gods, demons, and beings for whom there is no English translations, has long been the goddess Kali, associated most closely with death and, more broadly, with the ever-repeating cycle of birth, life, and death that is not completely incompatible with the Taoist notion of arising and subsiding, which I discussed in a previous post and that is central to the thought world underlying the haiku tradition.

Kali's visual depiction is gorgeous. She often appears in her multi-armed form, long tongue snaking out of her open mouth, wearing a necklace of severed heads, her hands red with blood, feet not touching the earth but rather beating out the rhythm of her dance on the bodies and sometimes even on the heads of the slain, her hands bloody. Incidentally, the root kal- in Sanskrit signifies both death and time. A central facet of Hindu thought, as well, is that the divine in all its forms—and these can be both plural and singular simultaneously—is immanent in all things and all people, and in the Cosmos itself. That is, while you may worship the god(s), it/they is/are also you, were you only able to see beyond the illusion of your own alienation, your own isolated separateness from everything and everyone else: your own internalized binaries. But of course, from the perspective of a parent, this vision of a perennially immanent embodiment of divine time/death can lead down some interesting roads ...

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Winter'

failing sight—hillside

disassembles itself: stars

and snowflakes

 

broken beer bottle

reflected constellation

one dirty mitten

 

talking to myself

the blizzard's reply

melts on my tongue

 

cook fire hemmed in close

by knee-deep snow, naked birch—

thin light, long shadows

 

a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali:

 

from unseen cloud birth

white slow drift down to her tongue

pink dissolution—

snowplow chunks like faded skulls

don't quite burst beneath her feet

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)