PLANTING HOLLYHOCKS

There was frost on the rooftops this morning, which is typical here for early spring, when the air is pulled back and forth between the lingering cold of winter and the increasing warmth of progressing spring.  It is time to begin planting seeds indoors, to later move into the garden when the arc of the sun is higher in the sky and the earth becomes warm enough for the young seedlings.

Today I planted some Russian hollyhock seeds (Alcea rugosa/Alcea taurica/Alcea novopokroskiy).  They are said to be from the Crimean and Caucasus regions, and they do quite well in my area (zone 8b, which has an average extreme winter temperature of 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit/9.4-6.7 Centigrade).  I grew them years ago, but lost them when I moved from a place with a garden space to one without — and I really felt the change.  Now that I am happily gardening again, I want them back.

Russian hollyhocks do not grow as tall as some hollyhocks and hybrids, usually between about three to five feet.  The flowers are a cheery light yellow, and also — unlike the hollyhocks one commonly finds in plant nurseries (Alcea rosea)– they are perennial, coming back faithfully each year.

And — this is very important — Russian hollyhocks are free of the fungal “rust” disease (Phragmidium) that plagues the  Alcea rosea hollyhocks — those with which most people are familiar.

For those wanting hollyhocks that are free of rust but offer more in color variety than Russian hollyhocks, there is fortunately another kind that is easy to grow and has a bright range of colors — the Fig-leaved/Figleaf hollyhock (Alcea ficifolia), said to have originated in Siberia.  Its leaves are shaped rather like those of a fig, with toothed edges instead of the more rounded leaves of Alcea rosea.  And — oh joy! — it is rust-resistant.   Sometimes called the “Antwerp” hollyhock, you may find seeds of  it also under the name “Happy Lights.”

Hollyhocks are one of the old traditional garden flowers, and their blooming spires offer a strong and welcome height variation in gardens afflicted with that “flat” look — with all plants on the same level.

And speaking of the “flat” look, you have perhaps noticed — as I have — that taller perennials seem to be disappearing from the selections of plants in many nurseries.  The reason, of course, is that it is easier for growers to pack more plants into less space if they are quite short.  And so increasingly it is becoming harder and harder to find varieties of plants that are not “dwarf” varieties.  This benefits the commercial growers, not the home garden.  And you may also have noticed a decline in the range of flower seeds offered in nurseries and plant shops.  Some things that were once quite common have now become a challenge to find.  Following the pattern of modern society, there seems to be an effort to limit and standardize the variety of seeds available.  And perhaps you have also noticed that seeds are much more expensive than they were just a few years ago.

The rising cost of seeds and the difficulty of finding some kinds of flowers in seed form is a good reason for saving the seeds from your own garden each year, rather than assuming you will be able to replace them from garden shops the next growing season.  You may be disappointed.

But back to hollyhocks.  If you like the “old-fashioned” look to a garden, there is nothing that achieves it quite as well as adding a few hollyhocks.  Now you know that you can grow them without fearing rust, if you select the right kinds, and it is easy to save the seed of your favorites (and hollyhocks produce prolific seeds at the end of their growing season).

This year I am also planting a kind new to me — the Turkish hollyhock (Alcea pallida).  It grows from Greece and Turkey into the Balkans.  From the photos, it appears to be a very  pale rose color, with a more “wild” look to it.  I don’t have great expectations of it, but one never knows until a plant flowers in one’s own garden.

 

David

 

THE OBJECTIVE SELF

(Early Spring)

There and back,
The only footprints are mine;
The snowy road.

Because Objective Hokku is a very selfless kind of verse, we generally avoid the words “I,” “me,” and “mine,” except in cases where they are necessary for clarity.  That does not mean, however, that we do not use them at all.  We use them, but we use them objectively.  That means we speak of the self just as we would of a fox or a wild goose, or a river — without adding our own opinions and comments and interpretations.

Now oddly enough, when we do that, it removes the writer from the verse.  The “self” in the verse — the experiencer — then becomes the reader.  So when you read the hokku above, it is you seeing that the only footprints on the snowy road are yours, in spite of the fact that I wrote it this morning on my way back from walking through the snow to the grocery store.  And because that is the way of Objective Hokku, I am happy to disappear entirely from the verse so that it may become your experience.

That is how the self appears in hokku.  We might call it the “selfless” self.

THE HOLES IN THE ROOF

The medieval Japanese woman Izumi Shikibu, whose life spans the late 10th to early 11th centuries, wrote a waka that we might render simply and loosely like this in English:

Where the wind

Blows through the gaps

In the roof,

The moonlight

Also shines in.


It amounts more to a kind of proverb than a poem — one gets the good with the bad, the light with the dark.  A pessimist will notice just the cold wind, but an optimist will see the moonlight.  Most of us lie somewhere between.

We could also see it as a kind of Buddhist parable:  the difficulties, suffering and impermanence of life can also be the impetus for us to take the path to enlightenment.

PURE EXPERIENCE

Issa wrote a hokku that we might render in English as:

Half of it
Is fluttering snowflakes;
Spring rain.

It is not a profound hokku, but it does express the “mixed” nature of early spring weather, when we still feel the Yin effects of winter though spring has weakened them.

The hokku makes a statement, but it is not an interpretation.  That is important in distinguishing Objective Hokku from other kinds.  It just tells us — objectively — what Issa saw (those last two words make me want to say “I saw Issa sitting on a seesaw” really fast), and because it is limited to that, we see it too.

That is the great virtue of Objective Hokku (in contrast to other kinds of hokku); it does not put a writer between the reader and the experience.  And it does not block the experience with unnecessary words and interpretation.

In Objective Hokku, the difference is that we present the experience directly, in simple words.  We do not write about the experience — we write the experience.  Now of course we use words to do that, but the words are not important for their own sake — as they are in what we usually think of as poetry.  Instead, the words are just the means of conveying the experience, as a cup conveys the experience of drinking cold water or hot tea.  We do not want them to get in the way.

Nor do we want the writer to get in the way.  If he or she does, then we no longer experience the hokku directly.

Issa wrote another hokku in which he “gets in the way” of the experience by adding an interpretation:

Spring mist;
Noisy from morning on —
The foolish crow.

Instead of just presenting us with the mist and the morning and the continual caws and rattles of the crow, he comments that the crow is “foolish,” or we could also translate that as “stupid.”  Issa has added his own “thinking” to the experience, so it is no longer objective.  He has obscured the pure experience with his own opinion.  To remove his comment, we could rewrite the verse as Objective Hokku, like this:

Spring mist;
Noisy from morning on —
The crow.

I hope you see what a difference that makes.  It is no longer Issa telling us about his experience, it is now we who are having the experience itself, with nothing added, and no writer’s interpretation in the way.

Now how you react to Issa’s verse — and to the objective version — will tell us how you react to verse in general.  Some people are not accustomed to thinking of verse as pure experience, without the added comments, opinions, or “thinking” of the writer.  Some feel that to be “poetic,” all of that must be added.  But as I constantly repeat, we should not think of hokku as “poetry” in the usual sense.

The great difference is that in Objective Hokku, the poetry is not in the words.  They are — we could say — only the seed of poetry, that when read by the receptive reader suddenly sprouts into the experience in the mind.  And that experience itself, pure and alone and unobscured — is the poetry in hokku.

In the first hokku, the experience is the spring rain, half mixed with fluttering snow.  In the third, revised hokku, the experience is the spring mist and the continuous noisiness of the crow from morning on.

This purity of experience, with no writer or comments to hinder it, is the very essence of Objective Hokku.  If you find that a significant discovery, then you are the kind of person who can appreciate Objective Hokku and its remarkable aesthetics.

 

David

OBJECTIVE HOKKU: THE VERSE OF SENSORY EXPERIENCE

What is Objective Hokku?

It is a hokku of things — not about our opinions of them or our interpretations of them.  It is somewhat like tasting a bowl of soup.  If someone asks you what you think of the soup, or what it reminds you of, or what it is like — then what you tell them is subjective.  It is you talking about the soup, giving your opinions and interpretations of it — not the actual taste of it.  So in hokku, we do not talk about the soup, we just hand you the bowl and say, “Here … taste!”

Because it deals with the “thing in itself,” Objective Hokku has no symbolism, no metaphor, no similes.  It has meaning, but that meaning lies in the sensory experience, not in any explanation of it.

Objective Hokku is the distillation of the old Japanese hokku tradition down to its purest essence — the sensory experience of Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature, set within the context of the changing seasons.

In Objective Hokku we leave aside all other aspects of the range of old hokku and focus on what is best and most unique in that tradition — the ability of one writer to transmit a sensory experience of Nature to another person, without any commentary or ornamentation or ego intervening.

Because our goal is to achieve that in the writing of hokku, we need not concern ourselves with how or why hokku were written in old Japan, or what the intent of the original author was.  All we need do is to open ourselves to experiencing Nature and the seasons now, and to learn how to simplify an experience down to its essentials.  Then we put that experience into a few simple words.

I often use translations of old Japanese hokku as examples of Objective Hokku, even though some of them originally had hidden allusions or meanings other than their “surface meaning.”  To us that makes no difference if, as they stand, they work as Objective Hokku.  We take the obvious meaning and leave the rest, because in Objective Hokku, the meaning is in the experience; nothing is hidden.

We see that in this spring hokku by Onitsura:

Dawn;
On the tips of the barley leaves,
Spring frost.

It is primarily visual, but there is also an undertone of touch in the chill of the morning air as the eastern sky lightens.  It allows us to experience a dawn in early spring, when the Yang energies — the active, warm energies — are growing, and the cold passive Yin energies are beginning to wane; spring is growing and winter is receding.  We see Yang in the dawn and in the young barley leaves, and we see lingering Yin in the white frost that covers their tips.

Here there is no symbolism.  There is only the bare experience, with nothing whatsoever added to it. Further, there is no writer visible anywhere in it, because the writer has become a clear mirror that reflects without addition or distortion.  That is how a hokku experience is transmitted — selflessly — from one person to another.

It is important to note that even though I like to use selected old Japanese hokku as examples of Objective Hokku, one need know nothing about Japan or about the history of hokku.  All we need are the principles of Objective Hokku as we practice it today.  That makes it a living thing, not a relic of the past or a subject of academic speculation.

It is important to note that people too are a subject for Objective Hokku, but people seen as part of Nature, in the context of a given season, as in this spring verse by Suiha:

Spring cold;
The puppeteer
Keeps coughing.

In Objective Hokku, we see the constant change inherent in Nature, inherent in our existence.  Impermanence — transience — is at the very heart of hokku, because it is at the heart of life.

In future postings I hope to discuss Objective Hokku in more detail — its aesthetic principles, and how to write and read it.  If there is anything you do not understand in these discussions, please ask, because no doubt there are others with the same questions.