ALWAYS SEEKING SOMETHING…

People sometimes tell me that the fragmentation and constant change and bickering one sees in modern haiku (in contrast to hokku) are a sign of vitality and creativity.  Not surprisingly, I do not at all see it that way.  Instead I see it as a symptom of instability and impatience and childish ego-centeredness.

The constant jumping from one thing to another one sees in haiku enthusiasts, the constant dissatisfaction and looking for something new, reminds me of the character of Euro-Americans as seen through the eyes of a Native American — a view that profoundly shocked Carl Gustav Jung because he immediately recognized the truth in it:

“Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad.” (from Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

STORK STEPS AND EMPTY HUTS

As I have pointed out in earlier postings, some old hokku do not travel well.  They are so oriented to a specific culture that when removed from that context, they lose their meaning.

A good example is Shōha’s

Haru tatsu ya   shizuka ni tsuru no    ippo yori
Spring begins ya    quiet with stork  ‘s  one-step from

Tatsu in Japanese means to stand or rise, but it also has the sense of “to begin, to start,” just as a person who is about to go on a journey begins by first standing.  Ni commonly means “at, on, in” but in this case it has more the sense of “with,” so shizuka ni is to be understood as meaning “with quietness” or “quietly.”  We can translate the verse as

Spring begins,
Quietly from the stork’s
First step.

The verse only loses its obscurity when one realizes that in Japan the stork is a traditional symbol of longevity — long life.  A first step is a beginning; spring is similarly a beginning (remember the principle of reflection in hokku?)  So when one sees the stork take a first step, that reflects spring beginning as the “first step” of the new year.  The stork’s first step is to put us in mind of the beginning of a long life, as spring is the beginning of the long year.  Thus spring begins as the stork takes his first step.  Those are the cultural connections and intuitive leaps required by this hokku, and of course they are too much baggage to allow it to be meaningful immediately in another culture.  But remember, we are not talking metaphor here; we are using the hokku principle of reflection, which Westerners sometimes confuse with metaphor, but they are not at all the same.

Another hokku, this time by Sodō, is a bit easier to transfer from culture to culture:

Yado no haru   nani mo naki koso  nani mo are
Hut   ‘s    spring something is not indeed everything is

This verse relies on the paradox of nani mo naki (there is not a thing) versus nani mo are (there is everything).  We can translate it as

The spring hut;
There is nothing,
Yet there is everything.

Or one could rephrase it as:

My spring hut;
It has nothing,
But it has everything!

This verse is the kind of spiritual paradox beloved by Zen.  We often divide the world into the “haves” and the “have nots,” but in the spiritual life there is no difference between having and not having.  One who has sees it as no different from not having, and one who has not sees it as no different from having.  This is the “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you.”  You have without having, because neither having nor not having has any meaning any more.  The spiritual novice who gives up things and misses them still has them (mentally), because he has not really given them up but is still attached.  The spiritual novice who has possessions and is not attached to them has given them up already, and physically ridding himself of them is a mere outward formality.

Sodō’s verse has a contrast between “is” and “is not”; Shiki has a verse that contrasts big and small:

Kobune koide    ōbune meguru    haruhi kana
Small-boat floats big-boat around  spring-day kana

A small boat
Goes around a big boat;
The spring day.

If one reads Blyth’s translation of this verse, one will find it as a small boat going around a “great vessel.”  We must always remember than Blyth was not interested in being absolutely literal in his translations.  Instead, he wanted to convey the overall meaning of a hokku to those in the West who were not likely to get it without such an “expanded” translation.  And in this case he is again right.

It brings to mind a large, sea-going ship in a harbor, standing virtually still in the water as a comparatively tiny boat sails around it.  One thinks of a tug going around a large transport ship.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of verse that begins to take us away from Nature, and it was by this and even more borderline verses that Shiki began the movement away from Nature and into technological things that we so often find in modern haiku, but never in modern hokku.

Incidentally, readers will notice the frequency with which Shiki ends a verse in kana.  He does it so often that it is characteristic of him.  But he was really just using the word as a neutral filler to pad out the last number of phonetic units required for a hokku.  There are those who say it was used for emphasis, and in some cases it was, but with Shiki it is generally just a perfunctory space holder not to be translated.

As for the significance of the verse, whatever Shiki himself may have taken it to be (remember that often he was simply interested in making a sketch in words), to the student of hokku it reflects the slow passing of the long day of spring, which is felt in spite of the small activities that happen during it.  But keep in mind that one must not take this as a metaphor.  It is simply the nature of one thing reflected in the nature of others.

David

Shiki and Spring

There are two ways of looking at Masaoka Shiki, the fellow who nearly destroyed hokku through his revisionism.

Historically speaking, Shiki is the originator of the “haiku” as the term is understood today.  All modern writers of haiku, no matter how radical and strange, can be traced back to the revisionist changes begun by Shiki near the beginning of the 20th century.  Modern hokku alone does not trace its lineage through Shiki.

Practically speaking, however — speaking about what Shiki actually wrote as opposed to his terminology and theory — Shiki can be considered the last major writer of old hokku.  Why?  Because in form and structure, Shiki’s verses often still qualify as hokku.  They are seasonal and they follow — broadly — the usual conventions of the hokku.  It is true that Shiki’s subject matter sometimes severely strained or tore the envelope (setting the stage for all the non-Nature related haiku to come), but many of his verses are quite acceptable as hokku, though they are sometimes merely illustrative, often shallow, and occasionally just odd reflections of a physically and spiritually ill individual.

It is important to note that Shiki, though radical in his time, was really surprisingly conservative in his verse.  He kept the seasonal connection and generally the connection with Nature.  He was not even remotely as different as modern writers of western haiku.  Shiki’s chief influence (and negative influence) was not so much in his verses as in the theory and terminology he attached to them.  He was a kind of propagandist of haiku, and as a propagandist he was quite successful, as the history of the haiku movement shows.  But this influence was not in getting others to follow his style, which remained in general that of the old hokku; it was, rather, in introducing the presumed right of the individual to change the hokku however one wished and to call it whatever one wished, and the baneful result of that is easily seen today in the fragmentation, confusion, chaos, and continual change and bickering that characterize the modern haiku movement.

Shiki wrote:

Daibutsu no    utsura-utsura to    haruhi kana
Great-Buddha  ‘s  dozing-dozing  with spring-day kana

The Great Buddha
Dozing and dozing;
The spring day.

R. H. Blyth actually improves the verse in his translation:

The Great Buddha,
Dozing, dozing,
All the spring day.

The improvement is in the addition of the word “all,” emphasizing the length of the day, the passage of uneventful time.

The Great Buddha is a very large outdoor image of the Buddha, actually not sleeping at all, but in meditation.  Shiki, however, being an agnostic, just sees a large figure with eyes closed and motionless, and he thinks of it as drowsily dozing away on a peaceful spring day.

We can analyze the structure like this:

Setting:  the spring day
Subject:  the Great Buddha
Action:  dozing, dozing.

Blyth’s punctuation is a bit unconventional.  In modern hokku we would likely present it like this:

The Great Buddha,
Dozing and dozing
All the spring day.

That is fully acceptable as a hokku.  The only difference is that understood as a haiku, one could not use it as the first of a series of linked verses; as a hokku, one can use it either alone or in a linked verse series.  Hokku, then, is still a part of haikai, the term used by Bashō and all the others for their wider practice in which hokku were written.  Haiku, in contrast,  has not been a part of haikai since Shiki.  Hokku is also haikai; haiku is not.

It is worth nothing that Blyth’s improvement of the verse makes it better when considered a hokku, because the uneventful length and peace of the spring day are reflected in the immobility and apparent ongoing drowsiness of the image.  Remember that hokku do not use metaphors — they instead use elements that reflect one another.

One of the best old hokku on the beginning of spring is this, by Issa:

kado-gado no   geta no doro yori  haru tachinu
gate-gate   ‘s     geta ‘s   mud  from  spring  rises

Geta are the traditional wooden clogs worn in old Japan, platforms for the feet, each set on two vertical wooden cleats that kept the foot well above the mud.

The verse makes more sense if we anglicize and westernize it, and take it as an American verse written in a place that gets cold winters:

At every door,
Spring begins with the mud
On the shoes.

This verse then becomes very meaningful.  It tells us the days of winter frost are over, that the surface of the ground has melted, and with it comes the mud that sticks to shoes.  Outside every door muddy shoes have been left as the wearers went inside.  The muddy shoes are spring; spring is the muddy shoes at each door.  That is the hokku way to understand the verse.

We see something similar in a verse by Rankō, which I will again westernize:

Chickens
Dusting themselves in the dirt;
The spring day.

This may not mean much to someone raised in a city, but every country person will know that chickens fluff themselves up and dig themselves into the ground, “dusting themselves” as farm people say.  It is just something chickens do.  One can often see birds doing the same thing.

But the point of the verse is that the dirt is dry enough for chickens to do this, meaning the rains have ended, the warmth of spring has come and has dried the soil, and the chickens hurry to dust themselves in the fine, dry powder.  That is a manifestation of spring as sure as Issa’s mud on the shoes, though of course considerably later in the season.

David

SPRING AND NEW BEGINNINGS

In old hokku, spring began with the Lunar New Year, which came on varying dates between the end of January and the middle of February.  This year, for example, the Lunar New Year will happen on February 14th.

In modern hokku, however, we orient ourselves neither to the Western calendar nor to the Lunar calendar.  Instead, we either follow the old traditional European calendar, in which Spring begins on Candlemas at the start of February, or we see what is happening in Nature.  When we see the first early signs of spring, that is when spring begins for us.

Yesterday I took a long walk up a nearby hill, and on the way I saw pussy willow catkins already appearing, and that means early as it is, spring is beginning.

In hokku we always orient ourselves as well to the universal elements of Yin and Yang.  Beginning spring is the most yin time of the season, but already yang is visible within it.  Yang will increase until it reaches its spring high at the end of the season.  Then it will continue to increase into summer, when yang reaches its peak, and then it will begin its decline again as yin increases through autumn and finally reaches its peak in winter.  So all of Nature — all of the seasons — are the interplay between Yin and Yang, and that is important to know in hokku.

The beginning of spring, then, means the first obvious signs of growing yang appearing in Nature — the appearance of green shoots out of the earth, of catkins and buds on trees.  In human life this corresponds to infancy and early childhood.  In the day it corresponds to the first signs of dawn and the early hours of and after sunrise.

It should be obvious, then, that hokku expressing spring deal with freshness and beginnings, of signs of activity appearing out of the inactivity of yin.

Every writer of hokku must keep in mind two things:  Nature and season.  Without Nature there is no hokku.  Without season there is no hokku.  Hokku is the verse of Nature and the seasons.  It expresses Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, set within the ever changing context of the season.  That is why anthologies such as that of R. H. Blyth (though he mislabels hokku as haiku) present hokku divided into four seasons — spring, summer, autumn or fall, and winter.  And within each season, the hokku are further divided according to traditional Japanese categories.

Those categories for spring are:

The New Year (traditionally a category of its own);
The Season;
Sky and Elements;
Fields and Mountains;
Gods and Buddhas;
Human Affairs;
Birds and Beasts;
Trees and Flowers;

These remain useful categories for our hokku today.  When further subdivided, they reveal the characteristics of spring in a given location — local climates and plants and creatures, which vary from region to region.  Spring in the Pacific Northwest, for example, manifests itself differently than spring in the Appalachians.  One will find different trees, different plants and flowers, different creatures, and so on.

The most important thing, however, is never to forget that a hokku should manifest the nature of the season through what is included in it.  A spring hokku about pumpkins would be incongruous and inappropriate.  A spring hokku about violets is in harmony with Nature and the season.

I have always taught hokku primarily from the best examples of the old Japanese writers translated into appropriate English-language hokku form.  By studying these, by using them as models, one may quickly learn the structure and nature of hokku.  They show us what to do and sometimes what not to do in composing.  Teaching from old models further ensures that what the student is learning is real hokku, not some form of modern haiku or make-it-up-as-you-go brief free verse.

Spring is the time of beginnings, and it is a very good time to begin learning real hokku, seeing how the season was expressed by those who founded our practice of hokku so long ago.

Whenever discussing hokku, it is always a good idea to say something about R. H. Blyth.  Unfortunately his books are all out of print at present.  The modern world has such different goals that Blyth has been, if not forgotten, put aside for the present.  That is a very sad symptom of what our society has become.

The most important things to know about Blyth are these:

1.  He unfortunately generally referred anachronistically to hokku as “haiku,” using the term popularized by Shiki near the beginning of the 20th century.  One must forgive Blyth, because he simply used the term popular in the Japan of his day.  It can be very confusing to readers, however, who must know that in reading him, the bulk of what he talks about is hokku, not haiku, even when he uses the latter term.  Today we correct that by simply recognizing that haiku did not begin until the revisions of Shiki near the beginning of the 20th century, and that what came before is correctly termed hokku.  Bashō, Onitsura, Buson, Issa, and all the rest who came before Shiki were writers of hokku within the wider context of haikai.  So hokku is much older than haiku, and it is very important today to make the distinction.

2.  Having said that, one must recognize R. H. Blyth as still the foremost authority on the aesthetics of hokku.  If one wants to understand what is behind hokku, one should read all of Blyth’s commentaries very carefully, comparing them to the verses on which he is commenting.  This provides the reader a “master class” in the aesthetics of hokku, and learning from Blyth in this manner is invaluable.

3.  One must realize that Blyth’s purpose in writing was not to teach Westerners how to write hokku.  When he began, he was explaining an old tradition that by his time, after the revisions of Shiki, was in a profound state of decline aesthetically.  He thought that hokku was virtually dead, and though he bemoaned the fact as evidence of the stupidity of man, he did not anticipate an interest in its revival until near the end of his writing of works on hokku.  Even then, he made only a few perfunctory suggestions as to how what he called “haiku” (but meant “hokku”) might be written in English.

What this means is that though Blyth was an excellent teacher of the aesthetics of hokku, he was primarily a commentator and a translator.  One might expect that one could learn to write hokku in English simply from copying the patterns of his translations, but that is only partially true.  His main purpose was in conveying the meaning of Japanese hokku in English, and to do that he sometimes took liberties, translating what the writer “meant” and not what he actually wrote.  Blyth was superb at this because he really understood the spirit of Japanese hokku, but it can sometimes be confusing for the learner, because in translating Blyth could be much more loose in the use of structure and form than the originals he was translating.  Again, that is because his purpose was to explain hokku to Westerners, not to teach them how to write it.

Of course those of you who have been long-time readers here will know how to write it in matters of form and structure, because I have explained all of that, based directly on the structure of Japanese hokku and of how they are best adapted to the nature and structure of the English language.  It is really quite simple, and once one knows that, one knows how to adapt Blyth’s explanations so they are both meaningful and helpful rather than misleading.

Having said all of that, reading Blyth, though immensely helpful, is not necessary to learning hokku.  Over the years I have taught students what they need to know for an excellent foundation in hokku, and the rest is up to the student.

One need only keep in mind that hokku and modern haiku are two very different things.  In fact one could say that hokku is one thing, and modern haiku is a multitude of often contradictory things, because while hokku has very definite standards and aesthetic principles, modern haiku varies to fit the whims of individual writers, who feel quite free to make up their own versions of haiku.  For all general purposes therefore, hokku is not haiku, and the two should never be confused.  One should never refer to pre-Shiki hokku as “haiku,” because it is both anachronistic and historically incorrect.  Further, it only causes endless and needless confusion.

This rather rambling posting is my way of saying that spring is at the doorstep, and it is time for many of us in temperate regions to begin thinking of spring hokku instead of winter hokku.  And thinking of spring hokku, it is also a good time to refresh and review our practice and understanding of hokku — or for those who know little or nothing about it, a good time to begin learning hokku.

Though I may sometimes mention haiku here for historical and other reasons, I do not teach haiku, and have little interest in it.  I teach hokku, a continuation in English of the same kind of verse that was practiced in Japan for several centuries prior to the popularization of the haiku by Shiki near the beginning of the 20th century.  There are multitudes of haiku sites and teachers.  But to my knowledge, this is the only site that teaches all aspects of the practice of hokku as a modern form of verse making.

I wish there were other legitimate teachers of hokku out there, but they simply do not exist at present, sad though the fact may be.  I hope some day that will change.

DEEP OR MEDIOCRE?

Depth in hokku depends on both writer and reader.  We can see that on examining two verses of Bashō written in two different years, both winter hokku.  Here is the first:

Byōbu ni wa    yama o egaite    fuyugomori
Screen on wa mountain o painted   winter-seclusion

On the screen,
A mountain is painted;
Winter seclusion.

On the surface this is a really mediocre verse.  Remember, not everything Bashō wrote was worth keeping — in fact only a fraction of his verses are memorable.  But this is where season and context come in, so let’s look closer.

Imagine that you are forced to stay indoors because of icy or snowy winter weather, day after day.  In that case, your eyes turn to the painted mountain on the folding screen, because you cannot go out to see the hills or mountains.  The stillness of the painting is in keeping with the stillness of your seclusion and isolation.  In such a case, suddenly the verse becomes significant.  The painted mountain reflects your winter seclusion, your isolation from the world outside.  Without this, the verse is a waste of time.

Now we must ask ourselves, was this in fact what Bashō intended, or is it something we are reading into the hokku?  That is a matter of concern only to academics.  We, as readers, have found the meaning in the verse, whether Bashō consciously put it there or not.  But if we do not have the perception to see the meaning, the verse remains flat and tasteless.  So a great deal in hokku depends not only on the writer but on the reader.

That is the explanation for the peculiar fact that sometimes people who are just beginning hokku will come up with a really significant verse, and then their other verses will simply be wasted ink.  It is often the case that a reader will perceive a meaning there that the writer was completely unaware of, creating a good hokku quite by accident.  Of course one cannot find significance in any verse.  There must be something there to trigger the aesthetic perception of the reader of hokku.

One can see from this that the aesthetic perception of the reader plays a great part in the evaluation of any hokku.  A good writer of hokku will be able to write more good hokku than simply one fortunate accident, but a good reader of hokku may sometimes transform a lack on the writer’s part into something significant.

Here is the second of the two hokku by Bashō:

Kinbyō no    matsu no furusa yo    fuyugomori
Gold-screen ‘s  pine  ‘s  oldness yo winter-seclusion

On the gold screen,
The pine is ancient;
Winter seclusion.

We can easily see how close it is to the first.  But there are differences.  First, the screen is gold, and as a screen with gold ages, it takes on a slightly different cast.  Added to that is the aged pine painted upon it.  This combination makes us feel the slow passage of time through many long years.  That reflects the feeling when one is shut in and isolated for a long duration in the middle of the cold and frost and snow of winter.  So we have here a strong sense of time and transience, of time passing with almost painful slowness.

We can liken that to what I call “Coomler’s Theory of Relativity.”  It is simply that work time passes far more slowly than free time.  Any office worker may verify this experientially.  Compare two hours at work (work one does not particularly enjoy) to two hours of watching an interesting movie or talking with friends.

There is a variant of the verse that uses “aging” instead of “aged”:

The pine
On the golden screen ages;
Winter seclusion.

I prefer this version.  The effect is like sitting in a room, hour after hour, with the slow tick of a grandfather clock in the background.  It gives us a remarkable sense of the drawn-out passage of time, unenlivened by television or music or chatter or any other distractions.  In such circumstances we begin to get a much clearer picture of what our minds are like, of how much they crave distraction.

All of this is a kind of lead-in to telling you that in the past, I have discussed hokku very much in the context of its history — of what this or that writer did to make a good verse.  From now on — to the extent that I post here — I will advocate simply my approach to hokku.

That takes us completely away from discussions of what Onitsura meant by sincerity, what Bashō meant by not imitating, and all the other things with which people interested in the history of hokku like to occupy their minds.

That does not mean the kind of hokku I present here will change much.  It just means that I will concentrate on the approach to hokku that is meaningful to me, and not waste time with anything else that may ever have been written as hokku — examples that may diverge from that approach in one way or another.  I will generally not bother with mediocre verses by any writer, no matter how famous, because my interest will not be in illustrating the range of old hokku.  I may, however, occasionally throw in a bad verse just to show what not to do.

What I am intending, of course, is defining a “school” of hokku, which again means a particular aesthetic approach to writing hokku, along with all others who share the same general aesthetic considerations and preferences.

Perceptive readers will perhaps think, well, isn’t that what he has been doing all along?  To a great extent it is.  But  a major difference will be that I will make no effort to justify this or that historically (though in most cases that can be done).  I will simply present what I think is the best way to read and write hokku.

In doing so, I will no doubt continue with old hokku used as models, because they do such a good job of conveying the matter.  But I will feel perfectly free to depart from conventional translation and understanding of such verses whenever doing so fits the needs of explaining the kind of hokku that really make the matter as a whole worthwhile for me.

Hokku must relate to life.  If it does not relate to life, it loses its value.  Yesterday I was thinking about Chinese brush painting, and how one can become proficient in it by learning to paint things one has never seen.  But does one really want paintings of  a stork by someone who has never seen a stork, paintings of a wild goose by someone who has never seen a wild goose, paintings of a water lily by someone who has never seen a water lily?  Such things are worse than imitation of life — they are simply imitations of imitations.  Our hokku should never be like that.  That is why we must write from our own experiences, constantly deepening and maturing as we walk the path of hokku.

I have often thought that I would like to write what I would call “American talks on Japanese hokku.”  Well, what I will do from now on — again to the extent that I am moved to do so and my time permits — will be pretty much that, except there will be no emphasis whatsoever on the “Japanese” part of it.  Instead, whether I am talking about hokku originally written in Japan or not, it will be simply one American’s talks on hokku.

I hope you will join me if what I have to say on the subject speaks to your condition.

David