I have always had the feeling, when autumn has arrived, that it is time to begin reading Tolkien’s works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And that in spite of the fact that the first book in the series, The Hobbit, begins its adventure “one fine morning, just before May.”
Then I realized that it is the “journey” aspect of the story that connects it to autumn, which in hokku is a time of journeys and migrations. The birds begin flying southward overhead, as cold weather arrives. In the old days, Native Americans would be coming out of the high mountains to avoid the harshness of winter there, going down to winter in the lowlands. In the winter, the high mountains of Europe were considered the abode of spirits, which is the origin of the Germanic custom of the Perchtenlauf, when the mountain spirits come down into the villages and show themselves to the people. I will talk more about that when winter comes.
We see the connection between autumn and travel in verses such as Issa’s
The autumn evening;
A traveling man
Mending his clothes.
The original says “a traveling man’s sewing” (harishigoto) but that is too vague for English. What we see is a poor man on a journey, pausing at an inn in the evening, taking advantage of the time off his feet to mend his worn clothes.
This is a very good verse because it combines the sense of migration that is a part of autumn with the sense of the passage of time, which we feel in his worn clothes that need mending. The passage of time — aging — is very much a part of the feeling of autumn. In addition, the hokku exhibits the sense of poverty that has always been such a significant part of hokku. And there is also that hokku sense of loneliness of — “aloneness” — in the verse; the man has no one to mend his clothes for him, so he does it himself.
Of course spring too is a time for journeys, but they have a different feeling than those of autumn. Spring is a returning, a growing. Autumn is a leaving, a diminishing. That is why it leads us gradually into the silence and inwardness and hibernation of winter.
By the old hokku calendar, autumn is already past. By the new calendar, it is coming gradually to an end. I hope that all of you may find a secure place as autumn ends where you are, and the chill silence of winter begins.
David
HOKKU 