FT7: end of winter poem

Spring Surrounding the Premises
27-Feb-2009; 2:30PM

The sound grew unaware at first
familiar with this end of winter,
then suddenly remembered it was gone
until just now—a red-winged blackbird trills
upon a distant northern bough.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

B2: Basho, Hemingway, and Six-Worders

The blogger ZuDfunck on the site of the same name discusses a literary genre called the Six Word Memoir. Supposedly when asked to write a six word story, Hemingway offered: 'For sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn.'

[note: upon further review, it appears this was actually something written by Rob Bartlett of the Imus Show and available here in its original.]

Later in the post, after discussing some Imus-concentric six-worders and "a new New York Times Bestseller, Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, edited by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith from Smith Magazine," Zud opines that he'd "like to see Basho come up with some Hexagonal Haiku that did the same thing."

I'll just copy my comment I wrote on the blog for the remainder of this post (with a couple of typo corrections from the original):

Actually, Basho wrote several "hexagonal haiku" or actually "hexagonal hokku" as they should be known. And many many more if you would discount the words that need to be used for possessive or exclamatory purposes such as 'no' and 'ya'. Furthermore, such poetry was actually written in a single line. When you read Basho in line breaks, that's actually a translation thing.

Here's just one example:
toshi kurenu kasa kite waraji kakinara.

Translated word by word:
year have-ended hat wearing straw-sandal wearing.

Makoto Ueda translates into an English poem thusly:
another year is gone--
a traveler's hat on my head,
straw sandals on my feet

It's basically a desription of Basho's life. Another year, another road to travel. Of course, the more you ponder it, the more you see in it. Which was the minimalist genius of the man.

in the western sky

Not Now
25-Feb-2009 4:30PM

The sun is now
so high in the western
sky, I’ve lowered
the blinds to block
its illuminating eye.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

Saigyo, Nature, and Impermanence

Reading the verse of Basho or his poetic ancestor, Saigyo, one comes across a transcendental vision, much like Thoreau or Emerson. There is a significant difference, of course. And it’s more than just that Japanese sense of wabi sabi, although that certainly is part of it. But it’s more than impermanence itself. As the selection below from a William LaFleur essay reveals, it’s a vision of nature as an enlightened master. Literally.

The difference between nature and civilization is not that the former is permanent and the latter transitory but that the former seems to accept its impermanence whereas the latter does not. This is to say that Saigyo does not seek a union with cherry blossoms, the moon, the river, or any other phenomenon of nature because it or they are immutable or constant. They are of soteric value to him because they are accepting of their own impermanence and can, therefore, assist him in his acceptance of his own. What we seem to have here is a comparison of the forms of nature understood as fully "realized" religiously and man who still needs to wean himself from the illusion of his permanence and, hence, has only partial enlightenment. In this sense the forms of nature are to man as a "master" or demonstrator of the way. They are ahead of man both in their acceptance of truth and in the spontaneity of life they have on the basis of this enlightenment. They are in an anterior position and have a resulting freedom which Saigyo at times wishes he himself would have. An example of this is the following verse:

Wooed by the wind,
The petals fall, and off they go . ..
Together to who-knows-where!
But my grieving heart, left behind,
Stalled in its body, goes nowhere.

from Saigyo and the Buddhist Value of Nature. Part II
William R. LaFleur
History of Religions, Vol. 13, No. 3. (Feb., 1974), pp. 227-248.

Bashosphere 1: On Basho, Aquinas, and Illusion

From Reverend Tom of The Honest Bark:

In writing about the poet Basho, Harold Henderson in his book An Introduction to Haiku writes "It is...worthy to note that whenever Basho uses the word "dream" he seems also to be thinking of human life; and perhaps it is even more noteworthy that to him the "illusion" of the world does not seem to mean that it is in any sense unreal, but rather, as with St.Thomas Aquinas,that it is far more real than it seems".

I'm not sure the Aquinas comparison holds. Or rather maybe it holds in the negation only.

What we call reality is an illusion made with our senses and mind. That in no way denies the reality of the manifest world. It merely means we are dreaming a consensual human reality.

Where Aquinas would hold that it’s the soul and afterlife that is true reality, I believe Basho would hold to a more nondual vision that all is actually God, or Spirit.

Aquinas would see the world as a testing or proving ground to attain the beauty of heaven. For Basho, the world was instead the essence of beauty itself.

The illusion is seeing it as anything but.

Olfactory Direct

East Broadway 2/22

Snowmelt
waters the roadside
nurturing signs of spring—
roadkill skunk
resurrecting one's awareness.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009





revision 1: L4 "roadkill" replaces "a dead"
revision 2: L5 "one's" replaces "my"

Basho Buddhist Batman (and Barnhill)

Cherishing the memory of a follower of the poetic spirit, I resolved to see the moon over the mountains of Kashima Shrine this autumn. I was accompanied by two men, a masterless samurai and a monk. The monk was dressed in robes black as a crow, with a bundle of sacred stoles around his neck and an image of the Buddha descending the mountain placed reverently in a portable shrine on his back. Off he strutted, thumping his staff, alone in the universe, no barriers between him and the Gateless Gate. I, however, am neither a monk nor a man of the world. I could be called a bat-in between a bird and a mouse.

from SUGIWARASHOICHIROet al. 1959. Basho bunshi (Basho's prose). Nihon koten bungaku taikei 46. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

quoted in:
Basho as Bat: Wayfaring and Antistructure in the Journals of Matsuo Basho
David L. Barnhill
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2. (May, 1990), pp. 274-290.

now void free tanka four

White Mountains 2/21

Immortal
mountains populated
in evergreens, now
void with last night’s
snowfall.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

Seasoning Free-Tanka

February 20th 10:00AM

Heavy wet snow eclipses
bare branches, foiling
an almost-spring high sun,
growing summer-like shadows
haunting the woods again.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

Rites of Februum

February 19th 9:00AM

On a wet-black branch
above a snaking
creek unfrozen
for three days, the hawk
follows the rain.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

The Return of Kokoro

February 14th 10:00AM

Now no ice
stills the river
flowing this morning
to my inevitable
surprise.

~Kokoro Sonzai 2009

basho poster haiku: old pond, frog jumps in...

Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku
(Thirty-one Translations and One Commentary)