I just finished preparing our Federal and Oregon taxes, so I haven’t had much time for indulging my taste for poetry, or for much of anything else for that matter. But the whole week hasn’t been wasted.

I did receive four haiku books book from Powell’s on Tuesday, though two of the four were sale-priced books I bought in order to reach the minimum $50 to qualify for free shipping.

While taking breaks from doing taxes, I’ve actually grown quite fond of one of these sale books, Inch by Inch: 45 Haiku by Issa, translated by Nanao Sakaki. Perhaps it’s merely that I needed Issa’s humor to add perspective to the thought of paying an additional $1,100 in Federal taxes, though I’m beginning to suspect it is more than that. I think I may really be falling in love with his light poetic style, despite the fact that I generally disdain what is commonly known as “light poetry.”

However, even in his more serious poems, Issa retains a unique perspective, though I’m not sure I realized this until I read:

The Amanita muscaria
can kill you”
Sure, what a beauty!

It’s hard to deny the beauty of this dramatic mushroom, but a little research reveals it’s a powerful hallucinogenic which sometimes proves fatal, a heavy price to pay even for such beauty. If Issa had begun the poem “Sure, what a beauty!” rather than ending with it, I doubt I would have even noticed it. But, as written, it reveals a real mastery of words.

A rather different definition of “beauty” can be found in Issa’s:

Such a beauty “
from the milkweed
a butterfly is born.

We might think such a beautiful insect could only thrive on roses or an equally elegant flower, not on the humble milkweed plant. Thankfully, such beauty is as much a part of our everyday life as we allow it to be, but it sometimes takes a genius from humble beginnings to remind us of that truth.

Sam Hamill’s Translator’s Introduction and Afterword alone would be worth the price of Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior: and Other Writings. On one level, it provides an excellent introduction to Basho’s journal Narrow Road to the Interior:

Narrow Road to the Interior is much, much more than a poetic travel journal. Its form, haibun, combines short prose passages with haiku. But the heart and mind of this little book, its kokoro, cannot be found simply by defining form. Basho completely redefined haiku and transformed haibun. These accomplishments grew out of arduous studies in poetry, Buddhism, history, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and some very important Zen training.

and

His journey is a pilgrimage; it is a journey into the interior of the self as much as a travelogue, a vision quest that concludes in insight. But there is no conclusion. The journey itself is home. The means is the end, just as it is the beginning. Each step is the first step, each step the last.

These insights not only make the travel journals easier to understand but provide a greater appreciation of their literary importance.

On another level, it provides an excellent introduction, at least for a relative newcomer like myself, to Basho’s entire works and to Japanese literary traditions in general. It shows how Basho was influenced by earlier traditions:

From Saigyo, the poet learned the importance of “being at one with nature,” and the relative unimportance of mere personality. Such an attitude creates the Zen broth in which his poetry is steeped. Dreaming of the full moon as it rises over boats at Shiogama Beach, Basho is not looking outside himself-rather he is seeking that which is most clearly meaningful within, and locating the “meaning” within the context of juxtaposed images that are interpenetrating and interdependent.

Hamill’s extended discussion of mono-no-aware helped to flesh out an earlier discussion I had with Jonathon Delacour and Shelley Powers about mono-no-aware:

Insight permits him to perceive a natural poignancy in the beauty of temporal things” mono-no-aware ” and cultivate its expression into great art. Aware originally meant simply emotion initiated by engagement of the senses. In its own way, this phrase is Japan’s equivalent of William Carlos Williams’s dictum, “No ideas but in things.”
“
As a more purely critical term in later centuries, aware identified a particular quality of elegant sadness, a poignant awareness of temporality, a quality found in abundance, for instance, in the poetry of Issa and in this century in the novels of Kawabata Yasunari. Middle-aged and in declining health, Basho found plenty of resonance in temporal life, much of it clarified through his deep study of the classics.

But Hamill also introduced me to concepts I had never encountered before, concepts that should also help me to better understand other haiku poets I will be reading shortly:

Basho believed literature provided an alternative set of values, which he called fuga-no-michi, the “Way of Elegance.” He claimed that his life was stitched together “by the single thread of art” which permitted him to follow ‘no religious law” and no popular customs.

At the same time, this made me wonder how fuga-no-michi compares to Western theories of art like those of Pound or Stevens.

Hamill’s discussion of Basho’s sabishi perhaps explains why haiku poets often seem so “modern” when compared to English or American poets of the same time period:

Despite his ability to attract students, he seems to have spent much of his time in a state of perpetual despondency, loneliness everywhere crowding in on him. No doubt this state of mind was compounded by chronically poor health, but Basho was also engaging true sabishi a spiritual loneliness that served haikai culture in much the same way mu or “nothingness” served Zen.

Personally, though, I think I’m much more drawn to Basho’s idea of “elegant simplicity:”

After flirting with dense Chinese diction, Basho was turning toward wabi, an elegant simplicity tinged with sabi, an undertone of “aloneness.” Sabi comes from the purer “loneliness” of sabishisa. It was an idea that fit perfectly with his notion of fuga-no-michi, the Way of Elegance, together with his rejection of bourgeois values. Elegant simplicity. His idea of sabi has about it elements of yugen and plenty of kokoro.

which, in turn, leads to a simple, direct writing style that becomes nearly invisible:

It was during this stay in Ueno that he first began to advocate the poetic principle of karumi “lightness,” urging his followers to “seek beauty in plain, simple, artless language” by observing ordinary things very closely. Karumi together with existential Zen loneliness (sabi) and elegantly understated, unpretentious natural beauty (shibumi) characterizes his final work.

This “simplicity,” which is anything but simple to attain, almost brings my latest poetic excursion, which began with Emily Dickinson, full circle. I think it is this “simplicity” that I most admired in her poetry, a simplicity, combined with a spiritual longing, that sets her poetry apart from the transcendentalists she resembled in so many other ways.

The Narrow Road to the Interior is a surprisingly short book, barely 30 pages long as translated by Sam Hamill. It’s actually rather hard to write anything meaningful about it because, despite my first assumptions, there is no one pattern to the entries, though many entries consist of a short prose passage followed by a final haiku. Some of the most interesting entries, though, contain multiple haiku written by more than one author, and even entries that contain no haiku seem quite “poetic.”

Any commentary is complicated by the fact that I really can’t think of anything comparable that I have read, though if I were still in college I might be tempted to compare it to Thoreau’s Walden, though Thoreau’s writing is certainly much more discursive. If I had access to some of Emily Dickinson’s letters where she included it poems that I’ve heard mentioned, but not read, it would be interesting to see if they are comparable.

As it is, I am limited to citing two of my favorite passages to indicate the general flavor of this journal, though it is difficult to limit myself to just two citations because this journal contains some of Basho’s most famous haiku.

Personally, I’m fondest of the format where a short prose passage is ended by a haiku. Of those entries, this one may well be my favorite, though I suspect that it is the haiku, more than the prose entry that I love:

In Yamagata Province, the ancient temple founded by Jikaku Daishi in 86o, Ryushaku Temple is stone quiet, perfectly tidy. Everyone told us to see it. It meant a few miles extra, doubling back toward Obanazawa to find shelter. Monks at the foot of the mountain offered rooms, then we climbed the ridge to the temple, scrambling up through ancient gnarled pine and oak, gray smooth stones and moss. The temple doors, built on rocks, were bolted. I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open.

Lonely stillness-
a single cicada’s cry
sinking into stone

It’s hard to decide whether the last prose lines, “The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open.” or the beautiful haiku is more poetic. Both seem profoundly true to me.

What may well be my favorite prose entry contains no haiku at all:

We paid homage at Gongen Shrine on the fifth. The first shrine on the mountain, it was built by Nojo, no one knows exactly when, The Engi Ceremonies calls it Ushusato Mountain, Feather Province Village Mountain, but calligraphers’ errors got it changed to Feather Black Mountain, The province is called Dewa, Feather Tribute, dating from an eighth-century custom whereby feather down from this region was used as payment of tribute. Together with Moon Mountain and Bath Mountain, Feather Black Mountain completes the Dewa Sanzan, or Three Holy Mountains of Dewa. This temple is Tendai sect, like the one in Edo on Toei Hill. Both follow the doctrine of shikaxaztz, ‘deep-sitting concentration and insight,” a way of enlightenment as transparent as moonlight, its light infinitely increasing, spreading from hermitage to mountaintop and back, reverence and compassion shining in everything it touches. Its blessing flows down from these mountains, enriching all our lives.

One wonders whether Basho, as I do, felt that the final lines of this entry were so poetic that it would have been redundant to include a final haiku.

If I had been exposed to this journal earlier in my life, I would have been sorely tempted to use this technique to record week-long hikes I’ve spent in the mountains. As it is, I will continue practice writing haiku, and occasionally slipping them into my blog entries in hopes that I can continue to develop my skills as a writer.

Thinking back, at one point in my retirement, I’d hoped to use a technique very like this to create a hiking weblog with a friend. Certainly my week-long hike in the North Cascades with the Sierra Club, accompanied by delightful companions from throughout the world, would have provided some great material for such an effort.

After reading the shorter travel diaries, I really think translator Sam Hamill would have been wiser to have presented them before Narrow Road to the Interior because, despite some excellent haiku, they came as somewhat of disappointment, though they might have seemed more innovative and stimulating if they had been presented before Basho’s masterpiece. To make matters worse, the second best work Travelogue of Weather Beaten Bones is presented second, and the other two journals drop off rapidly after that.

The most powerful section in Travelogue of Weather Beaten Bones was also, for me at least, a most disturbing one:

On the bank of the Fuji River, we came upon an abandoned child, about age two, its sobs stirring our pity. The child’s parents must have been crushed by the waves of this floating world to have left him here beside the rushing river to pass like dew. I thought the harsh autumn winds would surely scatter the bush clover blossoms in the night or wither them ” and him ” in the frosty dew of dawn. I left him what food I could.
Hearing the monkey’s cries “
what of the child abandoned
to the autumn wind?
How can this happen? Did his father despise him? Did his mother neglect him? I think not. This must be the will of heaven. We mourn his fate.

I’d like to think that we live in a very different time and under very different conditions. But even now reading these words is painful, almost too painful. It reminds me that such conditions still exist in other less fortunate parts of the world, and that some people are still faced with painful dilemmas that force them to rationalize their decisions. But, whether or not I live under “the will of heaven,” I’m glad that I don’t have to see the world this way.

The Knapsack Notebook, the second journal, strings together a series of beautiful haiku united by a narrative thread, but I was disappointed that there was little that actually seemed like modern-day haibun.

One of my favorite haiku reminds me of springs I’ve loved on long-trodden hikes:

I saw a beautiful clear stream pouring from a crack in a moss-covered stone:
A fresh spring rain
must have passed through all the leaves
to nourish this spring.

Unfortunately, the final journal, Sarashina Travelogue, was a mere four pages long, too short to ever really engage me.