Читать книгу Journey to the Interior - Bruce Ross - Страница 7

Introduction

There is not great distance between Bashō’s banana hut and Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, nor Bashō’s Oku-no-hosomichi (Narrow Path to the Interior, 1694) and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and The Maine Woods (1864). In fact, modern versions of North American haibun, a form perfected in Basho’s classic work, allude to Thoreau and his example at Walden Pond more than to any other literary figure. In a variety of stylistic approaches, North American haibun is evolving toward the spiritual depth evoked by both the Japanese master and our own iconoclast naturalist.

Yet there is a presiding disjunction between the aesthetic premises underlying the literary writing, particularly of nature, in the long history of Eastern culture and the fairly short history of American literary writing from the Puritans to the present. One aspect of this disjunction is the manner in which each accounts for the relation of consciousness to external nature.

Broadly speaking, the poetics of the East reflects an ontological union of man’s consciousness with nature in which nature is of equal valence to man while the poetics of the West reflects an allegorical subsuming of nature in which man dominates nature. Eastern and Western concepts of subjectivity thus differ, the East accenting an emotional relation of the self to nature and the West accenting an intellectual relation to nature. In the East nature tends to dominate consciousness. In the West the mind tends to determine consciousness.¹

This Eastern impetus toward universal subjectivity, which would elicit our poetic empathies for nature in its myriad identities, is subverted in America at the first by our inheritance of simple Christian allegory and later by the predominating mechanisms of materialism, science, and philosophic naturalism. In this condition American poetry, especially contemporary poetry, would reflect an inability to treat the ontological realities of nature with sympathy,² However, there have been influential waves of the direct influence of Eastern aesthetics upon such American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. A literary form in which most of these writers could—in the broadest sense—be said to be writing is the Japanese haibun.

A simple definition of the form, taken from a contemporary Japanese-English dictionary, is a “terse prose-poem.”³ Yet this definition does not account for the eliding of the haibun into similar traditional Japanese forms like the kiko (“travel journal”) and the nikki (“diary”). This confluence is addressed in a definition of haibun in a scholarly encyclopedia of Japanese literature: “Haikai (related to renga composition and sometimes the seventeen-syllable opening verse of a renga) writing. Prose composition, usually with haikai stanzas, by a haikai poet. Normally with an autobiographical or theoretical interest, it could treat many kinds of experiences. When it treats a journey, it becomes a species of kiko”⁴

The important distinctions in the broader definition of the haibun are that it is autobiographical prose, usually accompanied by verse. Basho in fact assigned the phrase michi no nikki (“diary of the road”) to haibun-like travel journals like his Oku-no-hosomichi. The deciding factors in considering a literary diary a haibun are that its prose is poetical and that it contains verse, usually haiku. A more recent example is in the work of the first important modem haiku poet, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who published diaries that included sequences of haiku and tanka. The usual forms of Japanese haibun up to the modern period were a short sketch of a person, place, event, or object; a travel diary like Bashō’s Narrow Path to the Interior; or a diary of events in one’s life like Kobayashi Issa’s (1763-1827) Oraga Haru (My Spring, 1819).

Definitions of haibun by scholars of Japanese literature are broad enough to incorporate all the directions that English-language haibun has taken.⁵ Further, although the Haiku Society of America—the largest society devoted to haiku and related forms outside Japan—did not include haibun in its official definitions of Japanese forms at first (1973), by 1994 haibun had become a familiar enough form to warrant an official definition:

A short prose essay in the humorous haikai style, usually including a haiku, often at the end. “Haibun” is sometimes applied to the more serious diary or journal writing typical of Bashō’s and Issa’s longer works, though technically they are part of the diary or journal literature, which is usually more serious than haibun. But it is not unusual for haikai elements to enter into these longer works.⁶

Notwithstanding this comprehensive definition, the actual practice of modern shorter haibun in English includes, as we shall see, serious as well as lighter treatments of given subjects.

Versions of haibun in English first began to appear in Eric Amann’s journal Haiku (1967-1976).⁷ By 1993 three of the more prominent American haiku journals, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Brussels Sprout, and one new journal, Point Judith Light, had identified poetry and prose entries as haibun. Patrick Frank, the editor of Point Judith Light, also offered a short definition at the top of his journal’s haibun column: “Haiku embedded within a relatively short prose piece.”⁸ This definition accurately reflects what is commonly published as haibun in the American haiku journals, with some interesting exceptions, as would be the case given the space limitations of such journals. But American haibun more properly began with published diaries and haibun-like fiction.

The American literary tradition prepared our early haibun writers with major examples of autobiographical and biographical narrative that evoked episodes of spiritual challenge or revelation in relation to the natural world, as well as to social conditions. The more obvious examples include William Bradford’s (1590-1657) historical account History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Jonathan Edwards’s (1703-1758) “Personal Narrative” (c. 1740), Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-1790) The Autobiography (1867), Henry David Thoreau’s (1817-1862) naturalist’s journal Walden (1854), and, though poetry, Walt Whitman’s (1819-1892) response to the Civil War, Drum Taps (1865). Of these only Walden evokes the Eastern tradition of the spiritual recluse, as Thoreau’s travel writing evokes the Eastern tradition of poetic pilgrimage, both of which are exemplified in the poetry and travel journals of the Japanese poets Saigyō (1118-1190) and Sōgi (1421-1502), who had influenced Bashō’s own travel journals. A transitional American writer leading to English-language haibun is the naturalist John Muir (1838-1914), through his prose accounts and diaries of his travels in the American wilderness, such as The Mountains of California (1894) and John of the Mountains (1938).

The so-called Beat Movement of the 1950s reflects the second major influx of Eastern thought and literary conventions, after the Transcendentalists, into American history. This group, under the nominal tutelage of Kenneth Rexroth—naturalist, landscape poet, and translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry—attempted to model their lives on the lives of the Eastern recluse and pilgrimage poets, in spite of their confirmed adherence to seemingly non-Eastern passionately indulgent experience. The seminal, and perhaps earliest, work of this group that approaches the haibun in tone and structure is Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold (1957), a collection of work journals, travel diaries, reviews, translations, biographical accounts, and essays whose central focus is Zen Buddhism. Snyder studied Zen in Japan for a number of years and includes in the collection a journal of his first travel to and religious study in Japan, as well as an account of an intensive meditation retreat at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. But it is his “Lookout’s Journal,” a poetic log of his work as a fire spotter in the mountains of Washington State, that offers a model of what American haibun was to become.

The entry for August 6, 1952, serves as an example of how elements from the classical Japanese haibun, consciously or not, incorporated themselves into the stream of American literary journals:

Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror Shuksan; they blow over the ridge between here and Three-fingered Jack, fill up the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.

What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds—wind, and mountains—repeating

this is what always happens here

and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.

two butterflies

a chilly clump of mountain

flower

zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.

leaning in the doorway whistling

a chipmunk popped out

listening⁹

This selection manifests the four characteristics that Makoto Ueda attributes to haibun in his discussion of Basho’s prose: (l) “a brevity and conciseness of haiku,” (2) “a deliberately ambiguous use of certain particles and verb forms in places where the conjunction ‘and’ would be used in English,” (3) a “dependence on imagery,” and (4) “the writer’s detachment.”¹⁰ The entry, like many of the others in “Lookout’s Journal”—though a bit more radically spaced on the page than the typical prose of Earth House Hold—intersperses short prose passages with haiku-like poems. Although Snyder may not have been intentionally writing haibun, he was clearly writing haiku in the context of classical haiku aesthetics: in one section he notes that he had written “a haiku and painted a haiga for it” and in another he discusses the concept of sabi, which is at the heart of Basho’s mature conception of haiku.¹¹ And, as in this entry, poems that clearly look and sound like haiku appear. Both of the haiku in this entry, like traditional haiku, are made of juxtaposed images succinctly expressed and allude, directly or indirectly, to a given season: in the first, summer butterflies are connected with the stationary mountain flowers they investigate; in the second, Snyder whistling in the doorway is connected to the (summer) chipmunk that listens to him. Further, the deep resonance built up in the first around the word “chilly” and the in-the-moment humor of the second that is underscored by the rhyming of “whistling” and “listening” make these good haiku.

The prose itself maintains the haiku values that Ueda finds in haibun. Except when Snyder directly cites conversation, the prose entries are expressed in a pared-down, often telegraphic, syntax that is dominated by images, often to the point of Zen-like cosmic simplicity, as in this line from the entry under discussion: “zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.” The evident Zennian mood expresses the ego-detachment which is Ueda’s fourth characteristic of haibun. Thus, “Lookout’s Journal” provides a paradigm, however rarefied, for American haibun: a short poetic autobiographical narrative that includes haiku.

Jack Kerouac, the chronicler of the Beat Generation, immortalized Snyder as the character Japhy Ryder in the novel The Dharma Bums (1958), a novelistic account of that generation’s attempts to achieve Buddhist enlightenment through retreats like the one described in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal.” In one episode of Kerouac’s novel Japhy offers a homespun definition of haiku: “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing....”¹² Here the Zennian interest in correctly aligning one’s consciousness with reality supports Japhy’s Bashō-like insistence on the objective presentation of images, of the ontologic value of those images, in haiku. This value of “the real thing” also determines the mood of what is best in American haibun: engaging our narrated experience (and critical appreciations) to their spiritual depths.

The classic Japanese novel The Tale of Genji (c. 1000), by Marasaki Shikibu, provides a model for including poetry (here tanka) in a fictional narrative. The direction culminates in the fiction of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), such as in his Kasamakura (The Three-Cornered World, 1906), which intersperses haiku and discussions about haiku in its first-person poetic narrative fiction. The published diaries of Masaoka Shiki, with their inclusion of haiku and tanka sequences, offer a bridge between the autobiographical poetic journals of Snyder and the fictionalized autobiography of Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac’s long novel Desolation Angels (1965) again narrates the search for spiritual awakening. Perhaps because haiku are testimonies to moments of such awakening, the chapters of “Book One” of the novel often culminate in one or two haiku. But whereas the haiku in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal” convey the lucidity of a consciousness perceiving reality calmly from an awakened state, so that these images have a Bashō-like objective depth, as in his haiku on a drowned mouse found in his morning water bucket,¹³ making such haiku one more account in a day’s events, the haiku in Desolation Angels crystallize in an almost discursive way a moment of personal realization precipitated by the given prose narrative. In such narrative, expressed by Kerouac in poetically compressed, rhythmic prose chapters of about one to three paragraphs, we find represented, more than in Snyder, albeit in a more comprehensively subjective way, the stylistic mode of typical American haibun in which haiku more or less complete given straightforward narrative development.

For example, in chapter forty-one of Desolation Angels, the novel’s narrator and main character sleeps on Desolation Peak, the site of his fire-watching job, as the rainy season begins. This one-paragraph chapter is introduced by a short comment on the rain, but for most of its length describes a dream of the narrator and his thoughts and memories in response to that dream. The chapter’s narration concludes with a quotation from the Buddha on dreams and the true nature of reality. The two haiku appended to this chapter recapitulate all of the elements of the narrative, but, further, offer a moment of revelation derived from it.¹⁴ The first haiku leads from an image of the rain (“mist boiling”) to an insight into the true nature of the surrounding mountains (they are “clean” in the rain) in the Buddhist context of the universality of subjectivity in which all things have their own consciousness and exist “just as they are.” The second haiku leads from another image of the rain (“mist”), through the narrator’s dream (which “goes on”), to the implicative contradictory Buddhist ideas of the illusory nature of reality (sam-sara) and the cosmic nature of this same reality when perceived in an awakened state (nirvana).

Another chapter from the novel is a character study of a colorful old Glacier District ranger who is described to the narrator by a character named Jarry Wagner, another stand-in for Gary Snyder. The ranger comments on Jarry: “‘And all dem books he reads... about Buddha and all dat, he’s the smart one all right dat Jarry”’¹⁵ This affectionate account by the old ranger is ironically juxtaposed by the narrator to jarry’s actual Buddhist practice. And at the thought of Jarry meditating across the ocean in Japan, the narrator is provoked to the realization that “Buddha’s just as old and true anywhere you go....”¹⁶ This opposition leads to the chapter’s concluding melding of the old ranger with Buddhism and, in the light of the ranger’s weather-beaten, unmarried, isolated state, with the mountain and its buddha-nature in a haiku that asks the mountain, Desolation Peak, how it “earned” its name.¹⁷

In a final example, another chapter recounts the narrator’s departure from the mountain at the end of his tour of duty. After offering a prayer to his cabin, he meditates upon the beauty and cosmic mystery of a lake in the far distance. He then acknowledges his love of God for creating such beauty and mystery as evoked by the lake. This testament precipitates a final awareness which will prepare the narrator for his reentry into the world of men: “Whatever happens to me down that trail to the world is all right with me because I am God and I’m doing it all myself, who else?”¹⁸ He realizes that, in Buddhist terms, there is no theistic God, there is no ordinary self, only buddha-nature, which is a correct orientation of consciousness, and that he is responsible for achieving that consciousness. The concluding haiku, which explains the narrator’s ability to accomplish this state through meditation, such as in his contemplation of the lake, declares, “I am Buddha,” and thus becomes a recorded moment of such a state.¹⁹

Experiments with longer versions of haibun in the seventies and early eighties include Geraldine Little’s Separation: Seasons in Space: A Western Haibun (1979) and Hal Roth’s Behind the Fireflies (1982). The latter offers prose accounts of an American Civil War battle by Roth as well as by eye-witnesses, whose writings are juxtaposed to Roth’s contemporary haiku.

An ambitious work that unites the narrative drive of traditional modern fiction and the emotional power of haiku appended to poetic prose in haibun is Rod Willmot’s Ribs of Dragonfly (1984). Each of the work’s nine sections begins with a short prose “Prelude” on the narrator’s stormy year-long relationship with a woman named Leila. Each “Prelude” is then followed by a number of impressionistic narrative prose sketches that evoke either the narrator’s experiences while canoeing in nature over the course of three seasons or his problematic relationship with Leila. Finally, each section closes with a group of haiku, from eight to nineteen in number, some relating directly to the prose sketches.

Canadian haiku poet Willmot edited the anthology Erotic Haiku (1983), and Ribs of Dragonfly propels itself in part from the erotic drive of the narrator’s relation with Leila, whose name links her to Eastern concepts of illusion. That drive is manifested in the longing of this haiku:

bathing, I think of you

and lift the straw blind

to the rain²⁰

The narrative theme of adultery that supports this drive is evoked compellingly in the following:

lying beside you

thinking of her hair

all night the cries of gulls²¹

Though the narrative of the relationship is at times overdrawn and melodramatic, the power of these and similarly erotic haiku carry half the haibun, beginning with the first of such haiku, which occurs in the group appended to the work’s first section:

she hugs me from behind

my face in the steam

of the potatoes²²

The other half of the haibun is carried by the impressionistic prose sketches of nature, which will prompt the narrator to an exploration of the nature of consciousness, such as this from the first section:

Silence.

On the horizon, drab sketches in olive and sepia of conifers and cottage woodlots. Ice-huts here and there, too distant for motion to be discerned among them or in their tiny plumes of smoke. The ice impassive now, no longer apprenticed to the rhythms of cold as when it boomed and sang responsively. Master of silence in its death. The water, at times wholly reflection, at times pure darkness, at times more silvery than ice. And over everything, the shroud.

Stillness, even in me: a void between each breath where I linger heedlessly, accepting. Yet movement. A fragrance melting. Movement I could smell.²³

The perceptual silence and stillness of the passage, a prologue to an engagement with a Zen-like consciousness in the work, is echoed in this haiku from the same section:

mail on the counter

sits unopened

afternoon sun through birches²⁴

This consciousness, which in Willmot is usually linked with sensuousness, reaches a synthesis of sorts through the psychological dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity described in a late section of the work:

I have felt foreign to the world, honoring its mask of oneness and certitude. But now I see that it is me, or my portrait, endlessly shifting as I do. My infinite anatomy. Then am I so miserable as I seem? Everything I’ve seen or touched has been a sketch of my insides. That field of rotting cabbages in snow, malodorous, but with a dance of pheasant-tracks stitched among the rows, elegant and clean. Those crystal “berries” in a chunk of porphyry, rock within rock and unpluckable, until I tossed it into a pond and received, startled, the resonant fruit of sound. And the mossy woods along the coast where we searched all morning for the source of a strange perfume, until its very hiddenness became a kind of mushroom, edible, that grew within our heads.

Which of us maps the other, World?

Birch-leaves, trembling as I watch them.²⁵

The enigmatic nature of this synthesis of inner and outer reality that is held in Zen-like stillness while yet being presidingly sensuous is movingly exhibited in one of the haiku following this passage:

amid the wild rice

chewing

the bittern’s stillness²⁶

But for all the monumental depth of its exploration of such consciousness, Ribs of Dragonfly is still explorative, if sentimental, fiction, and, unlike the haiku in Desolation Angels and almost all American haibun, its appended haiku for the most part relate to the general mood of the work as a whole and not to the specific section to which they are appended.

Another ambitious chapbook-length haibun is Vincent Tripi’s Haiku Pond: A trace of the trail... and Thoreau (1987). The work, all of whose profits go to the Thoreau Society, represents an act of spiritual communion with Thoreau and his vision as expressed in Walden. The work consists of Tripi’s journal entries and haiku relating to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s spirit, and present-tense nature from the spring of 1984 to the autumn of 1985. Thus the work adheres to Thoreau’s temporal structure for Walden, although Tripi’s journal entries are not in chronological order. This material is interspersed with quotations from Thoreau and sumi-like paintings. Tripi conceives of each page as producing a haiku-like aesthetic whole. As he notes in his Introduction: “Each page becomes a ‘picture’—the pond ‘infinity,’ the symbols ‘life,’ and the poems and art ‘the spark’ that makes them one.”²⁷ The connection of the given page to the “haiku moment” is then made explicit: “The ‘pictures’ when settled are themselves moment-to-moment awakenings of mind... a passing of water in the night.’”²⁸

The communion with Thoreau is introduced in the first entry of the first of the four sections of Haiku Pond. On this page Tripi creates his imagined invitation to communion by quoting from Thoreau’s Journal: “I should be pleased to meet a man in the woods. I wish he were encountered like wild caribous and moose.”²⁹ Tripi responds as that man with an entry from his own journal: “Solitude was the face in whose smile... my eyes began to find themselves again.”³⁰ The source of that solitude, the experiment recorded in Walden, is illustrated on the next page with a drawing of Walden Pond. The following page continues this dialogue with an entry from Thoreau on solitude, followed by a haiku and journal entry by Tripi, which consider Thoreau’s and Tripi’s own relation to Walden Pond as a focus for meditation and higher consciousness in nature.

This consciousness is firmly established for Tripi in the second section. One page from this section inserts this haiku between quotations from Thoreau’s Journal on the visual clarity of nature at sunset and on guarding one’s spiritual purity:

White moon,

Snowman’s shadow

Gone.³¹

Tripi, like the snowman without a shadow, has attained a purity of spirit that is selflessly united with nature. The haiku is followed by Tripi’s journal entry, which is a haibun, entitled “The Way of Spruce,” that exhibits this purity of consciousness that fuses itself completely with external nature:

The way of spruce begins to glisten. Sleeper in things, the green-wet woodsmoke disappears.

It is enough to fill myself with clouds. A speckled alder, a broken willow...from the bottom.

Woodsmoke—

Dusk

In the grass-spider’s web.³²

In the second paragraph of the haibun Tripi’s consciousness seems to become Walden Pond itself, reflecting the clouds and containing the sunken trees. The concluding haiku intensifies the haibun’s concern with manifesting a clarity of consciousness that will selflessly reflect the objective realities of nature in their cloud-like continuous becomings by objectively focusing on such realities in a moment at dusk. That concern had been already introduced, almost as an epigraph, in Thoreau’s journal entry at the top of the same page: at sunset, he notes, “ponds are white and distinct.”³³ The radical complexity and compressed nature of the reverberations built up among the images on this page are typical of Haiku Pond, which, as a work, provides the most experimental use of images thus far in English-language haibun.

The moodiness and sabi-like feeling of the concluding haiku are set within the context of actual meditation practice two pages later in the haibun “Scarecrow.” This haibun records the objective sense perceptions of the meditator’s heightened awareness of silence. It also evokes the central tenet of Buddhism, the inevitable dissolution of human consciousness and all things in death, through the symbolic image of wind: “Wind-within. It sits with me...the scarecrow on the hill. ”³⁴ This passage is followed by a drawing of Tripi in the lotus meditation position. Tripi himself thus becomes the human scarecrow who in as objective a way as possible registers the fact of his mortality as a facet of reality. This haibun’s concluding haiku imposes this fact, however gloomy, upon Tripi’s communion with Thoreau, whose Journal is alluded to in its first line:

Not his Journal

But the winter wind

Is sad.³⁵

This sabi-like reckoning with mortality, which is, as Tripi notes in this haiku, alien to the Transcendentalist spirit and Thoreau’s work, makes Tripi’s Haiku Pond all the more compelling as a spiritual journal that is perhaps understood and colored as much by a postmodern despair as it is by a sabi-like aesthetic.

But a universal insight into nature that is ecstatic rather than moody, and thus precisely in the spirit of Thoreau, occurs in the last section of Haiku Pond. This section begins with the following quote from Thoreau: “Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.”³⁶ It is followed by Tripi’s journal entry on silence. The silence here is intended to be the same kind of Zennian objectivity before all experience that we have already discussed. The next page confirms this intent with a drawing of a splash which, as we learn in the next page’s haiku, wittily alludes to Bashō’s most famous haiku:

This morning from a frog,

I hear all I need to hear—

About the pond!³⁷

So in silence, a state of enlightened consciousness, Tripi commingles Bashō’s frog pond with Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He highlights further this intent by having Thoreau speak like a haiku poet: “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature...”³⁸ If we substitute “objective revelation” for “God,” we have brought Thoreau and Basho together. And then immediately Tripi has the last word by joyfully linking, in a subtle manner, his cabin, Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, and, possibly, Basho’s hut, to the tone and structure of Basho’s frog haiku:

Cabin door

POP!

In July.³⁹

Thus Tripi has united, in this haiku and Haiku Pond as a whole, the spiritual visions of Bashō and Thoreau, the Eastern communion with nature that is echoed in American Transcendentalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of that movement, noticed a “fundamental unity” between man and nature. Here is the American paradigm for the idea of universal subjectivity: all of reality, including nonhuman nature, has its own inherent reality with its own right to existence. Man may not, at his whim, subjugate that seemingly mindless otherness to his own will. In fact, as Emerson would suggest, there is an inherent beneficent relation between man’s consciousness and those non-human subjectivities through which man’s inner life is enriched. These are the subjectivities that Thoreau studied and communed with during his stay at Walden Pond. And these are the subjectivities that Basho advised his students to study and commune with. In sum, haiku and haibun are revelations of such study and communion. One aspect of such a poetics involves the Zennian idea of seeing things just as they are, that is, in their own subjectivity or buddha-nature which, in Zennian terms, reflects a universal subjectivity of consciousness. Another aspect of such a poetics involves the Buddhist value of compassion toward all living things: a broad-based respect for nature, including humanity, that is perhaps expressed in the contemporary ideas surrounding the ecology movement. A final aspect of such a poetics involves the Taoist and Buddhist idea of the ephemeral yet cosmic nature of the moment: that each subjectivity is created and sustained anew moment-to-moment. Hence the mystery of universal creation itself is concealed in a particularized way in each moment experienced, in each subjectivity experienced.

The most common form of English-language haibun consists of one to three fairly short paragraphs followed by a single haiku that sums up or comments on the preceding prose, although a variation of the form intersperses haiku throughout the prose. These prose sections of a haibun are most often expressed in a heightened “poetic” tone that is matched likewise by the accompanying haiku. Such haibun equally represent most often a direct response to some facet of nature. And the majority of the more successful of these address the mystery of universal subjectivity in its moment-to-moment manifestation.

Three examples of such successful haibun are set, appropriately; during the periods of sunrise or sunset when the claims of our ordinary daytime consciousness and so-called objectivity are loosened. Hal Roth’s winter haibun and Dennis Kalkbrenner’s “Lake Superior” occur at dawn. Both are expressed in a dream-like mood that evokes Chuang-tzu’s Taoism with its emphasis on the ephemeral, perhaps illusory; nature of perceived reality. So-called objectivity is broken down by such a mood and the nonhuman subjectivities are revealed to us. For Roth in a bleak winter field, they are the evoked pathos of a sapling that will die because of wounds created by a buck’s rubbing against it and the haunting personified winds, both of which are incorporated into the concluding haiku:

midwinter—

dawn winds approach

the buck’s rubbing tree⁴⁰

For Kalkbrenner, skipping stones on Lake Superior in the summer, it is the very recovery of a child-like capacity to commune with those non-human subjectivities. The prose thus concludes: “Awake again all young dreams.”⁴¹ And this process, provoked by the fragrance of roses and the misty lake, is concretized in a metaphor of those half-forgotten dreams in the fading echoes of the skipped stones described in the haibun’s concluding haiku.

J. P Trammell’s “Sunset on Cadillac Mountain” reverses the oriental convention of watching sunrise from a holy mountain. Here Trammell’s seemingly objective presentation of the perceptual transformations caused by sunset on the mountains to the west and the inhabited islands to the east of Cadillac Mountain comes to elicit a poetically charged response to what Trammell experiences: like whales, “humped islands rise in the bays”; the sun, like a creature, seems to “settle onto the knobs and ridges of the pink and blue mountains”; the waters appear fiery silver “as if poured molten from a ladle.”⁴² But with darkness a different subjectivity of the mountain is manifested. The lights of the stars and those of the inhabited dwellings on the islands and in the forests surrounding the mountain produce a sabi-like mood: “I am alone in the encroaching darkness...” and evoke the sabi-mooded objectivity of the concluding haiku in which an unseen yarrow’s fragrance “penetrates the night.’”⁴³

G. R. Simser’s “Water Spider,” in the act of describing the play of that creature’s shadow on the bottom of a brook, occasions a startling emotional process that commingles perception, illusion, objectivity, subjectivity, dream, memory, revelation, and spirituality In a tour de force of compression Simser moves from the breath-like five-part shadow of the creature to an epiphany of material creation itself:

...five ephemeral pods closing together to become one and then opening and closing again and again, motions in time tracing breath’s flow over bony ribs; tracing briefly the crucifix, the magic discovery of homo ad circulum’s head, hands and feet, and then the snow-angel wonder of youth, arms pumping its wings to exhaustion, then finally fully extended these magic pods become our gliding five-point star; while all the while above us, somewhere, floats the draughtsman, silent and unseen, of such natural art... ⁴⁴

The allusions to God and Christianity in Simser’s act of perceptual meditation are clearly evident, the water spider becoming a metaphor of God’s sustaining moment-to-moment creation and, by consequent extension, of the interrelationship of all realities, of, ultimately, universal subjectivity. Such associative complexity leads Simser to the realization that the individual human has many realities within his or her self and the haibun’s prose ends with this realization: “...we too continue to float in many dimensions ”⁴⁵ The concluding haiku reinforces both this realization and that of universal subjectivity by describing, in a return to the objective creature, the water spider’s shadow which, in the haiku’s third line, has, like human beings, “many dimensions.’”⁴⁶

The democratic compassion tacitly expressed in linking man’s nature to that of a water spider is straightforwardly presented in Liz Fenn’s “No Monkey Business,” a simple narrative of the nourishment and release of five orphaned newborn mice that were found in the family’s house. The mother in this haibun expresses her love for her son’s act of kindness in rescuing the mice but worries that one of the mice will return to be caught in one of the family’s seemingly necessary traps. Notwithstanding the apparent lack of awareness of cruelty-free traps, the haibun ends on an upbeat note with a senryu-like expression of universal good will in a haiku that notes that a “no trespassing” sign has been placed in the house’s crawl space.⁴⁷

Another common form of English-language haibun is the travel journal. The standard for such a form is set by Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior. Besides the artistry with which Basho commingles deftly descriptive prose narrative and deeply evocative haiku, this work and others like it resonate with a shared cultural history. That history, which includes centuries of poetic responses to well-known natural and cultural settings, augments whatever artistry is present in a given travel journal. But without the artistry, mere reliance on familiar or exotic settings alone cannot carry the work. Robert Spiess, editor of Modern Haiku, in a discussion of haiku sequences based on travel, noted that most of such “‘vacation haiku’ ... are too much recordings of stimuli, rather than creative, in-depth work.”⁴⁸ A great number of published short travel haibun unfortunately support this view. The best of such haibun reckon with the resonances of history upon the modern present felt moment, expressed in haiku, within the context of the given haibun’s travel narrative. So, in these works, the haiku carry the narrative. Dave Sutter’s “Italia: Quattrocento/Ventecento,” as its title indicates, is a light essay on the impingement of the Renaissance and other past Italian history on the decidedly flamboyant present-day modern culture in what Sutter calls a “quintessence of contrasts and extremes.’”⁴⁹ Perhaps generated by Sutter’s visit to the cemetery where his uncle, who died as an American serviceman in Europe, is buried, this haibun discusses the observed contrasts in a straightforward manner, almost always exemplifying each of its eleven paragraphs with a forthright illustrative haiku. If you are charmed by the “light touch” of the prose and the haiku, you will enjoy the haibun. But most of its haiku are based on a simple direct contrast that unambiguously underscores the work’s thesis: a blind man selling broken statues, farmhouses eight hundred years apart in age, schoolchildren leaning to look at the Tower of Pisa, a topless woman compared to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Unless you feel the aesthetic weight of the thesis, the success of the work’s haiku comes from the simple irony of the depicted contrasts.

More successful is J. P. Trammell’s “The Temple of the Snail,”⁵⁰ an account of a visit to the ruins of the temple of Ixchel, the Mayan moon goddess, on the Mexican Caribbean island of Cozumel. The haibun conveys a poetic entrance into the realm of sacred history as concretized by the temple (Trammell quotes from Wordsworth’s The Prelude on this theme) and manifested in the seemingly protective barrier of a rainstorm that Trammell must cross in order to commune with the sacredness of the temple. His taking shelter in the temple leads him to a heightened perception of spiritualized time and space, evoked by a colony of hermit crabs that climb out from the temple floor carrying colorful seashells and fossils that rise from the weathered surface of the temple’s stonework. Thus the temple and its mystery are somehow animated for the narrator and we are left to make the connections generated in him by these observations.

Leatrice Lifshitz’s “Far From Home” is a postmodern meditation on the grounding of the self in history and the space-time coordinates of perceived experience. Its evident theme is gender and exploration. The context of the work is a trip west that mirrors pioneer women’s treks across America. The tone is set in this interior monologue in a consideration of what essentially is the reality of space and time:

Space. A woman in space. Finally.

traveling west—

ail those wide open spaces

fenced in

Does that mean that space is gone? Used up? Well, if it isn’t space, it’s space coupled with time. Changed into time. The time to cross a bridge. Back and forth.⁵¹

The narrator begins by alluding to the first female astronaut and to the vanishing of the American frontier. This leads her to the conception of a new frontier, a dialectic between history and present-tense locality. This dialectic is expressed later in a visit to a cemetery and an abandoned mine. The narrator is trying to make sense of the dialectic but only becomes further disoriented: She is, as she says, “Wandering outside the chain of life.”⁵² She is now beyond even history and the concrete moment. The concluding haiku conclusively evokes this final state:

far from home—

one crow or another

waking me⁵³

This “rhythm of sameness,” as she calls it, this postmodern malaise, breaks down the singularity of experience at the heart of haiku and haibun as much as it breaks down the traditionally reliable continuity of history. Most English-language travel haibun, however, takes a confident stance in the basic coordinates of space and time, including historical time, by ranging from the light travelogue to what might be termed spiritual literature.

Fewer than a dozen chapbook-length travel haibun have been published. The majority of these, and the few unpublished chapbook-length travel haibun that I am familiar with, aspire to that latter kind of literature. Perhaps the earliest published modern chapbook-length haibun is Robert Spiess’s Five Caribbean Haibun (1972), a collection of haibun and accompanying drawings, one of which was published in Travel magazine. The work is in the “lighter” mode of conveying felt experience, and its exotic locations resonate with the vibrancy and narrative interest inherent in the given locales, such as the description of a fisherman scrubbing a moray eel and an octopus, his dinner, or an encounter with poisonous cave spiders. Some of the prose and haiku is a bit too light in tone and focus to reach the contemplative depth we expect in great literature. But the frequent exceptions capture the undeniable liveliness of the moment: a little girl lifting her dress to reveal her bottom in order to taunt her mother, Spiess haggling over some item at the bustling public market:

Saturday market:

a live hen in the scale tray

-my tomatoes next⁵⁴

or the pathos of a recognizable emotion, for example, leaving a loved spot:

Last day at the cove

-a little snowman of sand

left facing the sea⁵⁵

This last haiku is movingly supported by a charming haiga of a sand snowman with a tiny shadow staring out to an enormous expanse of sea, and reflects the appealing light tone found throughout the work.

Although a number of collections of travel haiku, except for the lack of accompanying prose narrative description, resemble the best classical Japanese travel haibun in their subtlety and depth, we perhaps have only one travel haibun that approaches the mood and tone of such classical work. This volume is Tom Lynch’s Rain Drips from the Trees: Haibun along the trans-Canadian Highway (1992). This collection consists of one long haibun describing a hitchhiking trip from Pennsylvania into Ontario Province and west across Canada to British Columbia and four short haibun on hikes into the mountains and forests of Oregon and Arizona. The title piece, like Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior, includes interesting encounters with people met along the way as well as meditative responses to cityscapes, landscapes, wild nature, and the process of travelling itself. An entrance into Lynch’s haibun occurs in “Autumn at the Valley’s Edge,” a short haibun on Mt. Pisgah, Oregon. The second-last paragraph ends: “It is our instinct to be remote. ”⁵⁶ Lynch is voicing the axiom that allows him to breach the world of, particularly, nonhuman subjectivities. Nature sets up barriers to such breaches that we must intuitively respect, notwithstanding the modern world’s reinforcement, even encouragement, of our objectifying nonhuman nature as mere things to appropriate. Lynch concretizes his axiom of natural separation and his tacit protectiveness of that separation in the conclusion to this haibun:

I notice, far down the hill, that the deer have stepped out of the trees and stand silently in a clearing.

far down the slope

a few deer feed—between us

rain begins to fall⁵⁷

Despite his conviction of the gulf between individual subjectivities, Lynch is continually registering the very mystery of how things exist as such in a given moment and whether such subjectivities exist separately from his observation of them. He unravels this problem dramatically in “Climbing Kachina Peaks,” a narrative of his trip to these Arizona mountains that are sacred to the Hopi Native Americans. One of the first haiku voices the problem:

car suddenly here,

suddenly gone—

dark mountain silence⁵⁸

On descending the mountain he has climbed, toward the end of his trip, he restates the problem in terms of nonhuman nature:

suddenly here

grasshopper on my knee

suddenly gone⁵⁹

Lynch finally resolves the problem in his conclusion to the haibun:

Thinking of a shower, and hot supper, and how to write this, I hike through forest I don’t notice. Now, after shower, and supper, and writing this, I think of forest I missed.

cold moonlight

on kachina peaks—

if I step outside, if I don’t⁶⁰

The peaks, like everything else in nature, have their own intrinsic existences, regardless of what human consciousness might hold or not hold on the matter.

Yet in Lynch’s haibun, and in nature itself, there seems a protective distance separating human consciousness from the true natures of nonhuman existences. It is as if our own subjectivity fosters such protectiveness in nonhuman subjectivities. In any event, the main theme of his long title haibun appears to be the impossibility of breaching in some final way this protectiveness. However, nature itself seems at times to elicit communion with itself, as in this early haiku:

almost asleep

a breeze wakes me—

northern lights⁶¹

But this communion throughout the haibun is never complete, perhaps underscoring an indefinite quality of mystery inherent in intra-subjective exchanges with nonhuman nature. In such exchanges our normal orientation toward normal dimensional coordinates and psychologically felt experience is undermined. Thus the strongest sections of the work record descriptive moments of physical distance, like the northern lights of this haiku or the loon diving in the distance in another;⁶² transitional moments of going to sleep and waking up, as in this haiku; or eerie moments in which animals are awake while the author sleeps⁶³ such as:

dream under stars—

an elk’s breath

mists the darkness⁶⁴

They also record atmospheric indefiniteness, as in a haiku on rain-soaked trees in misty twilights⁶⁵ or this on a reoriented sea gull:

dense mist—

in dawn light a gull

again finds land⁶⁶

This haibun does not resolve the mystery of such indefiniteness but tries to simply poetically record or celebrate it. At its conclusion, echoing Whitman’s breaching of eternity in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Lynch engages in a more traditional way Lifshitz’s concern with the limits of human perception and consciousness:

Victoria, buy a few peaches, toss pits into the sea. To what avail time, waiting for the ferry.

cross the straits

through evening blue

venus behind thin clouds

I lean on the rail. Tonight too, crossing Victoria ferry, white sea gulls high in the air float with motionless wings. To what avail space.⁶⁷

But, more importantly, Lynch’s haibun as a whole are a testament, beyond the question of the failures of human subjectivity, of the revelatory subjectivities in nature which—though partially hidden, like the star in this haiku—are nonetheless waiting for our aesthetic contact.

A volume as strong as Rain Drips from the Trees is Penny Harter’s At the Zendō (1993), a collection of haiku, haibun, and poetry centered on trips to the Dai Bosatsu Zendō, a traditional Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and on the act of attaining Buddhist enlightenment. The main section, “A Weekend at Dai Bosatsu Zendō,” is a diary of a visit to the monastery in September 1987, beginning with the picking up of friends at Grand Central Station in New York City and ending with Harter’s departure from the monastery: This haibun records Harter’s gradual induction into the way of life and, finally, the consciousness of a Zen Buddhist monastery registering Harter’s gradual awakening into a Zennian consciousness through the more and more subtle presentations of her responses to her thoughts and perceptions.

A key passage occurs at the first morning meditation. After an hour of chanting sutras while walking rapidly with the other residents, a period of silent sitting meditation, and ten minutes of collective silent walking, Harter and the others begin silent sitting meditation again:

Another half hour of zazen. No time passes, and at the gong my eyes start open to see each thing distinct, luminous, itself.

after meditation

one leaf settles

into the grass

sunrise—

tree trunks

dividing mist

Chanting, we file in, to a silent breakfast. Unfolding the cloth that covers the chopsticks and nested lacquer bowls we carried from the meditation hall, we place chopsticks on our right, tips angled off the table’s edge, separate the bowls, all following last night’s instructions.

just oatmeal in the bowl—

oatmeal glistening

in the bowl⁶⁸

This passage reveals the process whereby Harter’s consciousness is transformed so by meditation that she begins to see things, in the Zennian phrase, just as they are, without the intervention of subjective consciousness: a leaf simply falls to the grass, trees simply appear out of the mist, oatmeal simply sits in its bowl.

This newly won awareness carries over through a hectic day and night of activity as memory:

I lie quietly, remembering the presence in the corner of the dining hall:

evening meditation

the jade plant sits

next to its reflection⁶⁹

This entrance into universal subjectivity also registers the Buddhist idea of compassion for all living things when, the next day Harter visits the monastery cemetery:

climbing to the stupa—

not stepping on

the red salamander⁷⁰

In this encounter while visiting an important monastery teacher’s grave, we also sense a hint of the teacher’s spirit incarnated in this simple creature, a moment just as it is, but resonating all the more deeply with Buddhist reality.

The haibun concludes with Harter’s departure and an expression of her newly found compassion and consciousness:

among the trees

somewhere rain falling

on the doe’s back

coming down

so many more leaves

have turned⁷¹

Harter’s compassion for other subjectivities is extended to the doe in the rain. Time has passed since Harter entered the zendō. More autumn leaves have taken on bright color. Nothing much else has changed externally. Yet, for Harter, for her consciousness, everything has changed.

This change remains with Harter into the next year. After a haiku retreat at Spring Lake, New Jersey, Harter returns to her home and begins sitting meditation:

...at once tears rolling down my cheeks, knowing we are only this, only precisely what we are doing at any given moment, no more; we are as transparent as the leaf in sunlight. Nothing matters because nothing exists. Our houses are just paper boxes blown down around us—our bodies are just paper bags blown in around us. Inside we go in and up—we are nothing except everything else. I truly don’t know who, better yet what I am, what we are, all of us peopling, infinite variety, yet all the same, since I (we) don’t exist except in the moment, constantly changing.⁷²

Alluding perhaps to the statement attributed to Basho that haiku is what is happening at a given place at a given moment, Harter here offers the highwater mark for English-language haibun as a revelation of spiritual consciousness.

In a lighter vein, but with a serious underlying motif, is Met on the Road: A Transcontinental Haiku Journey by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter (1993). The work records the authors’ relocation from Scotch Plains, New jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning with a meeting of the Haiku Society of America in New York City and ending with Higginson’s trip to a Haiku North America convention in California just after their arrival in Santa Fe. At both the meeting and the convention, and along the way to Santa Fe, the authors collected haiku from people they visited with. The work thus incidentally becomes an anthology of haiku by some of the strongest contemporary American haiku poets.

The light, but bittersweet, tone of the work is established by the presence of the authors’ pet cat, which becomes an icon of the home they will probably never return to. The mood of nostalgia is introduced the night before they leave:

Finally, around midnight, we begin packing the car—in the garage for the first time since we moved into the house. Don’t forget Purr, the eight-year-old cat.

the neighborhood

silent under streetlamps—

a thin mist⁷³

The pain of nostalgia heats up at a stop in Pennsylvania:

does he even know us

this cat after months

in a cage

purring cat—

how long ago in Paterson

your littermate died

Occasionally blurting out, “What could we do?” we drove to our evening’s stop.... Getting ready for bed, we close the door and turn Purr loose in our room for the night, setting the pattern that we’ll follow for the next several days. From our old house, 320 miles.

the cat stares down

from the second-floor window:

crickets⁷⁴

Until they reach Santa Fe, the marking of the distance from their home occurs intermittently as a refrain of nostalgia. Purr is obviously a soothing icon of the comfort of domesticity even when he is naughty, as when, for the first time on the trip, Purr causes a minor catastrophe by breaking a host’s ceramic bowl. Lamenting their letting their guard down, the authors only half-seriously scold themselves: “We should have known: Never take your cat for granted.”⁷⁵

The serious motif concerns the relation of haiku to ecology. The motif is introduced while the authors are visiting with the haiku poet Lee Gurga and his family. During a discussion of Patricia Donegan’s essay “Haiku & the Ecotastrophe,” collected in the anthology Dharma Gaia, Higginson has a flash of recognition and quotes from the essay:

When she writes of her study of season words with the elderly Japanese haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi, Pat goes on to express the very ideal that deepened my own commitment to haiku a decade ago when I was writing The Haiku Handbook:

Stopping the ecocrisis, eliminating the bomb, or spreading the world’s wealth more equitably [are] directly connected to stopping our own greed, aggressive tendencies and overconsumptive habits. The activities and personal habits of human beings... contribute most powerfully to the ecological imbalance and destruction of nature’s ecosystems. Even the writing of one haiku, and therefore some recognition of our interconnectedness, is a small positive step beyond self-interest.⁷⁶

The motif enters again on Higginson’s trip to Haiku North America where part of his talk at the convention will discuss the relation of haiku to the environment. During a visit with James W Hackett, author of The Zen Haiku and other Zen Poems of J. W. Hackett, Higginson again recognizes his own ideas when Hackett “expresses his concern for the environment, saying that he hopes haiku will help us recognize the equality of all species. ”⁷⁷

Higginson’s major insight into this motif occurs while he is thinking about a senryu from The Gulf Within, an anthology of haiku and sen-on the Gulf War that was published by the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He meditates on the internal nature of war, which might be conceived of as violent thought and emotion, and quotes from one of Marianne Moore’s poems on this theme: “never was a war that was/not inward.” Finally, he relates these lines of poetry to his thinking on the connection of haiku to our relation to the nonhuman world and ourselves to produce one of our most profound expressions of haiku poetics.

If we could but bring this kind of insight, each day, to ourselves and our fellow human creatures, perhaps there would be fewer occasions for wars without. The haiku to face, unblinking, the natural world we must each make peace with and live within; the senryu to face, unblinking, the inner lives we must each somehow make more human, more natural.⁷⁸