It would be hard to imagine what today's post-structuralist critics would make of this shy little art form. Presumably they would brand its essentially meditative, Buddhist tone, as opium of the masses (although they are at frequent pains to deny it, almost all the authorities such critics rely on are writers in the Marxist tradition). Carl Jung, who they love to hate, would have had a different approach, however. His experience taught him that none of his patients who recovered from mental distress did so without in some way or other adopting a religious outlook on life in the process.
In Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, the heroine sings, "We are a race accustomed to little things, to humble and quiet things" which are nevertheless "as profound as the sky or a wave of the sea." Puccini and his librettists worked hard researching their Oriental material, and this sentence expresses precisely the spirit of the Japanese haiku.
I wrote a haiku once. It went as follows:
The yellow moonlight
My collapsed granary
Reveals.
Friends said that haiku shouldn't try to be funny, but they were wrong. An entire chapter in this book is devoted to laughter in Japanese haiku, with many venerable examples. Anyway, Zen aims to fine-tune the mind by the shock of the absurd. That I didn't achieve the requisite 17 syllables was possibly a more substantial criticism.
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