Throughout this haiku class I have attempted to experience the Haiku as they have been spoken and read. Because I am ignorant of Haiku tradition and Japanese culture I have tried to approach this poetry as a child would—.

Being an American child of twenty-six and not too afraid to grope in the dark (playing the fool) I have written tentatively and with care. These following thoughts serving as an introduction to my paper are only so much cotton candy spun out on a particular night in an attempt to explain a fairly inexpressible experience tinted with a child’s wonder and belovedness for what grows.

I wonder about these men and women of medieval Japan: Basho, Issa, Buson, Komachi, Lady Ise. Their poetry invites me to walk country roads with them, sit in the moonlight, sweep leaves in the courtyard, notice two flies in an empty room, and visit a lover far away while dreaming.

A Haiku is compact (not condensed) and substantial. Composed of concrete images it is easy to swallow. I chew on Haikus for a while and some I have to spit out. The ones I swallow take a long time to digest; I don’t think I’ve digested one yet.

Haikus don’t easily digest because they have another quality besides the concrete; they are indicative. Indicative of what? That’s my wonder. To backtrack a moment—the reason for this indicative quality is what is referred to as a ‘Haiku moment’ which is something which at best can only be hinted at or explained but not expressed.

This isn’t anything new to the West. The essence of our poetry has an inexpressible logic or transcendent, indicative quality too. A Haiku is unusual because of its power. This power does not come from its size (17 sounds short) or concrete imagery but because ‘so much’ is indicative with ‘so little.’ A ‘Haiku moment’ is qualitatively different than a Western poetic moment because of what is being attempted.

The ‘so little’ is striking in its simplicity. The ‘so much’ is a big itch. From here on in it’s all scratching:

A Haiku is like a concave lens which takes all of the light hitting one surface, then funnels the light into one small point and re-expands the light to its original image on the other side of the lens. On one side of the lens, say, Basho is writing and on the other side of the lens I am reading.

I live in 1981 American light, seeing my contemporaneous images, my self a particle in our modern world. I am ‘so little’ because of my simple atomic story and particulate nature in our world. I am ‘so big’ because of this is-ness, my presence in presence. In this sense I am a lot like a Haiku.

A Haiku on the page is only a collection of translated laryngeal-manipulative symbols—words which another human being wrote down in another time and culture. I feel that the entire Haiku form on the page expresses, symbolically, a man: expresses itself a lot like a woman: is. (This is the reverse image of my self-sense that I am a lot like a Haiku.)

If someone writes a great Haiku, a Haiku that is indicative of ‘so much as there is’ with ‘so little as there is’ then this person must be a direct communicator of is-ness and the relativity expressed by his particular (momentary) position in the cosmos. He must be aware of both the concrete and indicative quality of what he is, his life is. This indicative quality of a Haiku moment is experiential—in the moment. It cannot be separated out of the totality of is-ness. That’s why we can’t think it or talk it or write it down, only indicate.

More often than not the Haiku poets of Japan practiced the awareness communicated through Zen Buddhism. I don’t know what this awareness is. But to try to understand a bit more what makes Haiku I have set up a symbolic experiment.

I have tried by experience, to become a Haiku; tried to remove the separation of subject and object. Also, I have attempted to write in the experience as the Haiku writer does. This experiment is not serious! I’m not trying to prove anything or find something out. Only to attempt to experience a different viewpoint; perhaps to learn something by unlearning.

Haiku eye of a croaking frog is me. My Haiku eye sees. That’s all I can do. See what I see. I cannot literally enlighten my awareness to that of a great Haiku poet. I can, however, do this in a ritual sense, using symbols of heightened awareness which I am attracted to. This is why I have used quotes from Tilopa and W. on either side of Buson’s Haiku. I have tried to mirror symbolically, both my ‘so much’ and ‘so little.’ I also played John Coltrane’s Ascension while writing because of its spontaneous, emotive power.

I must also add that this is something unusual for me to do. This paper has been spawned out of several weeks of wondering how to approach the material in order to get the most relevant and concise response in a three-page paper.

The paper is disappointing to me in its content. It is odious, dumb, intellectual, self-indulgent and conceptual. I would much rather eliminate and re-write these self-abasing pages. . .  But this wouldn’t be true to the nature of the experiment and the openness of learning.

Something occurs looking at Haiku. Something relevant and something to grow on. Like any live thing I would rather fertilize the soil and watch it grow than nip off new buds by becoming coldly rational—accepting the mind-set of a culture which has hardly any use for poetry.

Exposition 1.

. . . Though words are spoken to explain the Void,

the Void as such can never be expressed.

Though we say ‘the Mind is a bright light,’

it is beyond all words and symbols.

Although the Mind is void in essence,

all things it embraces and contains.

—Tilopa, Song of Mahamudra

(cf. Teachings of the Buddha, Kornfield, p. 168)

By day, “Day go away!”

    by night, “Night turn to light!”—that’s what

         the croaking frogs say.

—Buson

  hi wa hi kure yo yo wa yo ake yo to naku-kawazu

(An Introduction to Haiku, “6.14” Henderson, 1958)

To stand on the far edge of Being,

and neither to fall back into the futile comforts

of blind existence, nor to plunge over into the chill abyss

of Nothingness—that, beloved is Subud.

—Remembrance of Things to Come, W.

(1960; http://amzn.to/11NMfKv)

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