Sometimes we encounter old hokku, such as this by Bashô, that seem to defy common sense:
As the bell fades,
The fragrance of blossoms tolls
The evening.
To “get” this verse, be in the moment; hear and feel the sound of a large bell at evening; its vibrations begin to fade from the still air. As they fade, you smell the scent of cherry blossoms, which is felt to be a continuation, a reverberation, of the fading bell.
We all know that the vibration of one thing can be transferred to another, like a musical tone making a glass vibrate. In some hokku, this “vibration” is felt to be transferred from sense to sense — in this case from hearing to smell. A relationship is felt between the fading sound of the bell, which becomes more delicate on the still air, and the delicate fragrance of the blossoms. One reflects the other, as it were, so the fading sound of the bell is continued in the fragrance of the blossoms. Bashô is saying that the “character” of the blossom fragrance is also the “character” of the fading sound of the bell, so one continues the other.
To explain further, in an autumn verse Bashô gives us the “not sweet” smell of chrysanthemums in the ancient city of Nara, and then shows us very old Buddha images. The smell of the chrysanthemums is felt to be the same — of the same character, as we have seen — as the visual impression of the old Buddha images in the ancient city. It is as though we are smelling time and veneration. The sense of smell is continued in the sense of sight.
Bashô’s best known verse of this kind — the sharing of one sense with another is technically called synesthesia — is this, from the season of winter:
The sea darkens;
The cry of the wild duck –
Faintly white.
Here sound becomes sight. And in addition, there is in this verse the contrast of the darkened sea with the whiteness sensed in the wild duck’s cry.
One has to be very careful with this sort of thing, because it can easily and quickly descend into artificiality, which is death to hokku. And in writing, we will probably use it seldom if at all. So do not focus on the wrong thing here. The important lesson to learn from it is NOT that one should use synesthesia in hokku (even Bashô barely gets away with it), but rather one should always remember that in hokku there is a kind of interconnectedness of things, so that what is seen in one may be smelled in another. In hokku the universe is not felt to to be an immense assemblage of unrelated things and events; on the contrary, it is perceived as a unity of things that are all linked by sometimes visible, sometimes invisible connections. Move a grain of sand and you trouble a star. Strike a bell and smell its fading sound in the cherry blossoms.
Relationships are extremely important in hokku. Haiku often present mere gatherings of unrelated things, but hokku are not like that. Hokku present us with things and events that are felt to be related, even in such un-obvious ways as a bell at evening and cherry blossoms. There is a great deal more to say about this, because it is a fundamental principle of hokku, and we shall see it repeatedly because without it, a verse is not hokku.
In a nutshell, you can forget synesthesia, but remember the great importance of interconnected relationships in hokku.
