Haiku, the Gentle Art of Disappearing

by Gabriel Rosenstock

PART FOUR

Is it safe to disappear? From minute to minute we change. The entity we call the (inflated) self, what was it exactly some minutes ago, some years ago? The same? Surely not! The real Self is unchanging. Some people who experiment with advanced techniques of meditation – without the necessary physiological and neurological stability needed for the job, or with an inadequate intellectual understanding of the mechanics of consciousness – such people can experience traumatic personality disorders. Stuff from the past can surface and unhinge us. Haiku, on the other hand, is a safe technique. Please refer to our title – the gentle art of disappearing. The haikuist momentarily identifies with the phenomena perceived in the haiku moment – “so close an identification with the object that the unstable mentalizing self disappears” . (Introduction, The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, ed. Lucien Stryk).
An awakening … Haiku is an awakening into this world, our birthplace. A living world:


wind in the pines
giving the emptiness
a sound
Adele Kenny, Migrating Geese, Muse-Pie Press, 1987


matter of great urgency
a nut rolls away
alive
Soen Nakagawa


Re-invent haiku? Re-invent the wheel! There may be a double-take in this nut haiku. The nut appears to be moving as if on some urgent business; or its movement – without any intention – can be seen as very important in itself, in the sense that everything within our field of haiku awareness is of the highest significance. Some people would say only a nut could understand this strange haiku. It is too Japanese. Too Zen babe, they say.
Unfortunately, a certain arrogance has crept into the haiku world – and nothing could be more out of place in this or any other world than arrogance; it is an arrogance that belittles tradition and that suggests we should be free of all the trappings and influences that have coalesced, over time - in ways we may never fathom - and that have made haiku what it is; therefore, this arrogance claims we can walk before we crawl!

step by step
a new-born lamb
eternal spring
Soen Nakagawa


the tiny nightingale
stutters
and starts again
Chiyo-ni

The School of Arrogance hopes for a Western-style haiku, a haiku independent of its origins. It says we can forget about Taoist poetry, classical renku (linked verse), Zen Buddhism with its Chinese and Indian antecedents, koans (mind-boggling riddles), Pure Land Buddhism, Shinto, animism, superstition, folklore, custom, the signs, portents, moods and rituals associated with seasonal themes and events, the life and work of individual haiku masters, the sound of the shakuhachi (the bamboo flute), the temple bell, the endless layers of cultural and literary references, the whole gamut of commonplace and esoteric symbols and cosmologies. As if the West could possibly live on its own!

We do not need a detailed, scholarly knowledge of everything listed above and there are paths of awareness that, historically, owe nothing to Zen, but the least we can do is absorb good haiku from original sources, accepting the inadequacy of translation.
Soen Nakagawa collected pebbles on his travels. He kept them in a bag. He liked to swing the bag on occasions:

touching one another
each becomes
a pebble of the world

This simple haiku should become the motto of the emerging world haiku movement.
Be a nut … If an anti-Zennist cannot see a nut, contemplate a nut, or see eternity in a nut, he shrugs and blames it on the impenetrability or irrelevance of Zen; instead, should he not examine the mote in his own eye and understand the self-imposed limits on his perceptions?
Limited perception arises from struggling in the snare of duality, an inability to let go, to penetrate and interpenetrate, to flow and merge. Is there a way out of this predicament? Yes: in a word, disappear.

Zen is just another word. Why get worked up about it? It’s foreign to you, you say? Look at the pebble. Is a pebble foreign to you? A nut? Be a nut. Vanish entirely into nut-ingness!

waking from a nap
dewy mountain
approaching

Modorijo
(Version: GR)


Do you think we disappear when we are asleep? No, it is when we awake we disappear. Awakening to our true nature, our true home. The universe. In which we must disappear if we are to be there.

Haiku is a great, eventful homecoming. The Swedes say that people over fifty are strangers in their own land. True. So many changes occur in the space of fifty years, changes in mores, eating and drinking, speech, taste, doing business, the arts and sciences, the physical environment and so on. There is a lot of alienation out there. Does not the earth appear, sometimes, to be populated by millions of exiles, hordes of the displaced?

my native place
whenever I turn to look
mountains smile

Shiki

Let’s all go home! We have been wandering long enough. This planet, this universe, this galaxy is our home. Near and far. And we share it with thousands and thousands of other species whose home this was before we tumbled on the scene.

Difficult to disappear? Our shoes, our wallet, our watch, clothes, car keys, credit cards … How do we unburden ourselves? Go on a streaking mission? No, you will be more visible than ever before.

Seifu-jo had to wait until everyone else had gone to bed before she could disappear:

everyone asleep
nothing will come
between the moon and me

Describing his enlightenment Dogen summed it up as this: ‘Body and mind dropped off!’ Exactly as Santōka said. Of course, Santōka was addicted to rice wine. Did alcohol numb his sense of being in a body or cloud his mind? Not at all:

Slightly tipsy;
The leaves fall
One by one

(Mountain Tasting, Zen Haiku by Santoka Tanedda, John Stevens, Weatherhill 1980)

The body… Ah, the body …How do you think of your body? It might be helpful to consider this, from Francis Lucille: ‘Your body is in you. You are not in it.’

Permanence and impermanence … Haiku is terrific when it comes to
drilling the essential message of flux and mujō, impermanence:



cuckoo call –
a monk wrote haiku on a rock
and journeyed on

Haritsu
(Version: GR)

There was a time when all peoples had this wisdom, when the sayings of the elders had poetry and weight. As Crowfoot, a Blackfoot warrior and noted orator, said: ‘What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset …’ This is not some syncretic sleight of hand. Truly, there is no distinction whatsoever between the spirit of Crowfoot and the spirit of haiku master Bashō!

Scientifically and technologically we are in a position to “conquer” outer space, to “civilize” other planets. But what do we mean by civilization? What do we know? We’ve learned nothing. We are forgetting what really matters. We continue to repeat the mistakes of previous generations and have not retained what those generations knew to be beautiful, good, healthy and wise. We cannot, we must not press forward any more, or expand blindly with no concept of sustainability. We must, in fact, beat a retreat, savour once more the creative core of silence, the flow of silence, out of which the thousand things emerge anew.
There are thousands of ways to our senses. Haiku is one. A beautiful way. Haiku masters have shown us how. The path awaits you.

its voice
stolen by the moonlight –
the white cat

Sayumi Kamakura


Head without a body … Think of ten or so of the twentieth century’s greatest American writers and intellectuals. It is quite amazing how few of them make any reference at all to the literature and the wisdom of the First Nation peoples, as if the essence of this culture were somehow alien or totally irrecoverable. America will never be at home with the world or with itself until it is at home, again, with what it has replaced. Intellectuality, anywhere, that fails to embrace its indigenous shadowland is a head without a body. Haiku is body and head as one, disappearing in spirit. May we quote George Santayana here? ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.’ Haikuists, in particular, must delve into the invisible past to create nature-haiku of that intuitive connection with landscape and remembered landscape which came so readily to First Nation poets and minstrels.

This is not easy to do unless one first sacrifices one’s false sense of ego, of self, of identity. Susan Sontag addressing the Class of 2003, Vassar College, said: ‘Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American.’ She could as easily have said, ‘Try to imagine at least once a day that you are a Native American;’ the native peoples, through the eyes of John Muir, ‘walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels.’

Waxing and waning …We must re-imagine our own humanity. So, what are you? Your body? Your name? Your mind? Your personality?

Swami Vivekananda cautions us: ‘The body is not the Real Man; neither is the mind, for the mind waxes and wanes. It is the Spirit beyond which alone can live forever … Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body …’ Will that make it easier for us to disappear? Disappearing … It’s not easy, at first. Easier for birds:



in bare branches
the naked love
of sparrows

Darko Plažanin
(Sparrow, 27-28, Croatia)


Resistance to disappearing … The ego will resist. Of course it will. The bigger your ego, the greater the resistance. ‘It is okay to have a big ego, but point it in the right direction. Point it at the stars and on the way it will fall away …’ (This Marvellous Ego by Michael Barnett, Cosmic Energy Connections, 1999). Or beyond the stars:

the last sounds of rain –
the sickle moon rises into
starless infinity

Jasminka Nadaskic Djordjevic

In a very practical sense, the Finns knew how advantageous it was to be able to disappear. White-clad Finnish skiers resisted a superior military force by being able to disappear at will and outwit the visible ones.

Luminosity of being … Yes, if the ego is not pointed at the stars, how difficult it is to disappear. What are we to do? Does the office disappear too? Our home? Our loved ones? The dog? The TV set? We seem to forget, most of the time, that we are ‘luminous beings’ (see Tales of Power, Carlos Castenada).

Easier for clouds to move, to change, to disappear:

a low cloud
pushes the day
westwards

Dunja Pezelj
(Sparrow, 27-28, Croatia)

What magic is required to disappear? Haiku magic! Only by seeing can we disappear:

after the rain
a spider mends its net
with a rainbow

Nedeljka Lupis
(Sparrow, 27-28, Croatia)

Jasminka (above) isn’t pushing the sickle moon, Dunja isn’t shoving the cloud, Nedeljka is not patching up the web. All over the world, happily, thousands of haikuists are appearing. Here, however, we are more interested in their vanishing acts. As editor-in-chief of The Heron’s Nest, Christopher Herold, reminds us: ‘Haiku practice has the capacity to reunite us with things from which we’ve set ourselves apart through SELF consciousness.’

winter galaxy
my aged body
slumbers deeply

Sonoko Nakamura

Chanting to disappear … The self can disappear in such activities and performances as martial arts, meditation, prayer, bhakti poetry, haiku and chanting. For Issa and Chiyo-ni, Pure Land Buddhism offered endless opportunities which might go unnoticed by the faithless:

even the butterfly –

voiceless
Buddhist service

Chiyo-ni

could they be hymns?
frogs are chanting
in the temple well

Kansetsu
(A Haiku Menagerie)

coo-cooing to itself
the pigeon …
until it has no self

GR

This floating world … Things change, things return, things go away, things vanish in this floating world as in this very clever take by Bōsai on Bashō’s famous furuike ya:

an old pond –
after jumping in,
no frog

(A Haiku Menagerie)

Seeing nothing: this is also something.

jumping back in the pond
what only yesterday
was a tadpole

GR

short summer night
floating among rushes
bubbles from a crab

Buson

Universal voice … While it is generally considered that Bashō and Buson were more sophisticated than that country bumpkin, Issa, it can be argued that Issa is not only the most engagingly human of all haiku masters but that his wisdom, ultimately, is the purest:

no need to wail –
wherever you fly, wild geese,
it’s the same floating world

The richness of his wisdom derives from a powerful combination of his extraordinary unalloyed devotion to the Buddha, absorption of peasant lore, his striking humility, his immense compassion and fortitude in the face of the vicissitudes of life; these qualities, and more, are all reflected in the variety of his prolific output. Yes, Bashō is frequently more mysterious:

when the eyes
of the hawk darken
the quail calls

But Issa, too, is capable of mystery, of plumbing the very origins of his
being, his faith, his world:

from the nostril
of the Great Buddha comes
a swallow

(A Haiku Menagerie)

It is inexplicable that such an immortal is excluded from so many major anthologies of world poetry. Hopefully, David G. Lanoue’s ongoing translations of Issa on the internet will help to remove Issa from the footnotes of world literature and place him, finally, among the pantheon. Of course, when this happens Issa’s first reaction will be to compose a haiku:

pantheon ...
winter loneliness
no fleas

GR

Vanishing and reappearing, growing old with haiku, with a child’s pure heart, Issa is constantly in sacramental union with everything that comes to his hut and everything that leaves it:



seeing that I’m old
even the mosquito whispers
closer to my ear

Issa
(Haiku People)


Live and let live …When we lose sympathetic contact with nature, one species after the other – unless we can eat it – becomes an annoyance, an irrelevance. Pests! This attitude eventually extends to members of our own species whose attractiveness or usefulness may become questionable to us. And then it begins all over again, man’s inhumanity to man. Haiku can break this vicious circle in numerous ways. Issa can teach us how to live and let live … May his haiku proliferate in the remaining languages of the earth.

Infinite patience … If haiku is a way of interpenetrating with the visible signs of the universe’s constant regeneration, it does so by teaching us infinite patience:

a white chrysanthemum –
however much I look
no speck of dust

Bashō
(Version: GR)

We gaze, intently, emptily, until the flower reveals its immaculate whiteness. The joy of haiku is this: contemplation and meditation, usually seen as distinct practises, become one in an electric stillness. This is one of haiku’s great gifts to the world, to you. If you are ready to receive these gifts, they will come, unbidden:

ill in bed
the cat brings me
a scent from the garden

Stephen Toft
(Blithe Spirit, Vol. 12, No. 2, Sept. 2002)

A fresh scent from outside becomes stronger than the whiff of medicines or the stale odour of illness – the living world becomes more significant than our condition. What is often expressed loftily or in abstract terms in the world’s religious and mystic traditions becomes concretized or crystallized in haiku.

In Songs of the Ultimate (Hymns from Shankaracharya and Abhinavagupta, collected and edited by Éric Baret, Absent Crocodile Publication, Athens , 1994) we read:

Wherever you find yourself, stay.
Go neither towards the outside nor the inside.
Let the infinite variations of becoming be cast aside
by the glowing of Consciousness alone …

Wisdom tradition … Certainly we should be open to all wisdom traditions; they are part of mankind’s inheritance. But does not the best of haiku also belong to a wisdom tradition, a tradition of silent witnessing with the whole heart and all the senses and, furthermore, one that is essentially inclusive, non-elitist, open to all, and within everyone’s compass and capability?

scraping a parsnip
still not as white
as Bashō’s chrysanthemum

GR


my eyes, having seen all,
came back to
the white chrysanthemums

Issho

edge of town
a gypsy’s horse
drinks winter rain

Matt Morden
(Snapshots #7, 2000)

Cleaning the slate … The haiku moment presents us with a tabula rasa each and every time. To clean a parsnip is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Just something to be done. Looking at a chrysanthemum. No big deal. The gypsy’s horse takes a drink. Has to be done. As simple as that. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor (121 –180), had a way with words: ‘If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.’ A wise man, by all accounts, and there is much in his twelve books of Meditations that reminds one of Confucius; both advocates of tranquility have a certain relevance still today, in our unquiet world. Looking around us, examining various national and international scenarios, can we say, hand on heart, that our rulers are wise and that their utterances promote tranquility among their own people and among nations? Why have rulers anyway? Why should they rule us? Should they not simply serve us, in the spirit of wisdom and the brotherhood of mankind? Of course, Aurelius was caught up in wars, too, mostly defensive. And, admittedly, he gave Christians a hard time. But his domestic policy was enlightened and his care for the poor extended to selling his own possessions in order to help victims of hunger and plague. Where are the political and religious leaders to emulate such action today? Don’t you wish that some of our leaders might just disappear for a while!




slave cemetery
i scrape the moss to find
no name

(This Wine, William M. Ramsey, 2002)



harvest moon
my ashes
still wrapped in flesh

(ibid.)