It's estimated that in Japan today between 1 million and 2 million people regularly compose the miniature Japanese poems called haiku, or the slightly longer tanka verses. And every morning Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun newspaper carries a poem, or an extract from a poem, on its front page, together with a short commentary. There are thought to be more people writing haiku worldwide now than there have ever been.
Rediscovering Basho commemorates the 300 years of haiku since the death of the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other books. It takes the shape of a collection of essays, all -- as befits the haiku form -- low-key, but many of them quietly informative.
Matsuo Basho was born into the samurai class in 1644, but a taste for poetry and wandering led him to take to the road as a solitary, distinctly unmilitary traveler. About 1,000 haiku by Basho survive. They're spread out like thumb-nail sketches in his equally spare travel journals, and constitute moments of silence, peace and vision. Made up of only 17 syllables, and usually three lines long, they're what James Joyce was later to call epiphanies, sudden insights into the meaning of things.
A typical haiku by Basho is this:
On a bare branch
A crow is perched
Autumn evening.
Worlds are not likely to be swayed by the haiku. Characteristically it celebrates the hidden weed rather than the showy rose, as one of the editors of this book, Stephen Henry Gill, puts it. So one of the chapters is made up of the journal of a five-day trek along the UK's Offa's Dyke by half a dozen or so poets, composing haiku and scattering them (at least metaphorically) to the westerly wind as they went. Fifty were literally loosed into the air on London's Parliament Hill on another anniversary occasion, attached to helium-filled balloons colored according to the season celebrated in each poem -- viridian for spring ones, cobalt for summer, dull gold for autumn and aubergine for winter (to use the precise terms of one of the contributors). Yet more were written on a hot summer's day on a commemorative walk along the city banks of the River Thames.
This is a very English book, over and above its being published under the auspices of the British Haiku Society. Japanese culture may be more influential in California than it is in Sussex, and another of the editors, C. Andrew Gerstle, American, albeit teaching and researching as a professor in London. Nevertheless parallels between the Japanese and British islands are often made, and it's not surprising to see a chapter devoted to R.H. Blyth's Zen in English Literature (1942), a book I happen to have read in the British Library, though not many literary scholars I know are even aware of its existence.
Born in the UK (in Ilford, Essex), Blyth was in Guam in 1941 and after the attack on Pearl Harbor was interned by the Japanese. In 1945, however, he acted as an intermediary between General MacArthur and the Imperial Court. He wrote a History of Haiku (1964) and was admired by at least two of the emerging American writers of that era, J.D.Salinger and Jack Kerouac.
Another 20th century creator to be influenced by Basho was the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein. Montage -- the following of one image by a different one in such a way that they throw light on each other -- was one of his key cinematic techniques. In his book The Dialectic of Cinema he wrote that montage was at the heart of traditional Japanese culture, and quoted the Basho haiku printed earlier to illustrate his point.
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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