Basho's Journey - Jamie Edgecombe

        Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought. Basho (Hass 233)

As I write this passage, I am on a plane from Boston to London. Surrounded by azure ocean, Newfoundland passes beneath me. I can see it out the window; each passing moment sees a new section of the coast come into view and the old section disappear.  Knowing I will lose five hours, I set my watch ahead five hours.

         Suddenly aware of the relativity of the frames imposed by space and time, I settle down, open my laptop,  and get out my Basho books: Barnhill’s Basho’s Journey and Sato’s Narrow Road.

           “The months and the days are wayfarers . . .” Our journeys are taken within a larger journey: Cosmic journeys are repetitions or returns with difference. For humans, the journey takes place within the context of these transcending journeys. Basho: Those who float all their lives on a boat . . . inhabit travel.” Barnhill renders: “each day is a journey, the journey is itself home.”

          My journey – THE journey – is paradoxical. I am not just “going” to London: I am returning to it. After all, I am living in, or should more accurately say, am resident in, England.  I have not always lived in England, while paradoxically having always thought England my home. My sense of identity, of origin, is inseparable from these interlinking, entwining journeys and returns.

          Thanks to Basho, Flight BA238 has taken on the double nature of journey, linear and abstract: this flight has become an exploration into the idea of journey, with associative layers of meaning and spreading depth. I understand Basho’s text about journey by understanding my own journey. Both our journeys are real, both depend for their significance on cultural understandings. Basho drew on earlier Chinese and Japanese poets and philosophers; I draw on Basho and interpret Basho according to contemporary thought. Above all, there is a millennial language of journey.   

CONTEMPORARY HAIBUN

        The immanence of passing time can be viewed in the light of a complex of journeys/returns and the tensions between them, be they personal, historical, cosmic. The philosopher Eric Voegelin names this aspect of existence as “metaxy” (he reinvented Plato’s word for the area “in-between” the immanent and the transcendent), and I shall refer to the haibun journey as metaxic.

          Basho understood his journeys through a genre he developed from old travel genres.  He refurbished it through his understanding of haiku. The study of haibun helps us understand Basho’s innovations in haiku. For example, just what is the haiku “moment” in the context of the haibun journey?

          According to much Western haibun discourse, the form is still in its infancy. Despite its 400 year history in Japan, the form is referred to as new.  In our role as inventors, we may – as many do– experience such a sense of discovery as ‘liberating; we can determine the rules; we can even say there are no rules.

          The acknowledged initiator of haibun in English is David Cobb, whose “Spring Voyage”, which was two decades in the making, appeared in 1997. Inspired by Basho’s “Narrow Road,” this work drew on the prose of Edward Thomas and R. L. Stevenson, among others. Lately his inspirations have included G. W. Sebald and Iain Sinclair. In a recent interview, he said that “the essential thing, surely, is that neither prose nor poetry should upstage each other.” Indeed, he feels that there’s so little difference between the prose and poem of a haibun that, theoretically, the haiku could be “written out” as part of the prose.

          In this case, Cobb may be thought to reflect widely held views about Basho’s practice.  In his study of Basho, Makoto Ueda notes the artistic quality of Basho’s prose and concludes: “Haibun can be said to be haiku prose, or prose written in the spirit of haiku.” (112) Barnhill, noting its “terse, imagistic style,”  calls Basho’s haibun “prose poems” (10).  And yet as we shall see, the complex structure of haiku should keep the poem from being dissolved in the haiku prose.

          Cobb’s views confirm our concept of “metaxic” haibun – our contemporary reference to Basho’s complex concept of cosmic/personal journey – when he refers to the writing act as ‘setting out on an adventure’, as ‘roaming between actuality and fiction,’ and when he says that the ‘reader can travel through [the poet’s] memory, experience and universal human experience.’ Such lexical choices as setting out, adventure, roaming and travel, echo the idea of journey.

          If the “haiku prose” of haibun is about journey, what of the haiku? In our English language presentations, Basho’s haiku often appear without original prose contexts, apparently without suffering (Basho himself considered his haiku and haibun separately as well as together). For contemporary haibun writers, the relationship between the haiku proper and the haiku prose needs attention.



HAIKU IN HAIBUN

        “To be a wayfarer is to manifest the transience of life, to expose oneself to uncertainties and difficulties, and to be a living symbol of the itinerant quality of life itself,” writes Barnhill in his introduction to Basho’s Journey (6).  Contemporary haiku, on the other hand, is most often conceived as a “snap shot” of reality, even a timeless insight into the essence of a thing. InBasho: The Complete Haiku, Jane Reichhold writes (9),

‘One of the goals of poetry is to penetrate this essence, to grab hold of it in words and pass it on to the reader, so purely that the writer as author disappears. Only by stepping aside, by relinquishing the importance of being the author, can one capture and transmit the essence – the very is-ness – of a thing.’

         The tension between transience and essence is basic to the contemporary haiku arts.

          In one of his most famous theoretical statements, Basho says, “Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.” (Hass 233). Each pine exhibits pineness but is not pineness itself: each pine alludes to, or is symbolic of, the essence of pine.

          Contemporary writers may find Basho’s statement confusing. To use the Western terminology of essence we see in Reichhold and many modern Western haiku commentators, even the essence of pine is not the same as the essence of being. The essence of things is not located within the thing itself. The is-ness of a thing is not to be gained through attention to the thing alone. Indeed, is-ness is not the same as the “thingness” of a thing.

          Barnhill says that in his travels Basho pursued “the wayfaring life in order to embody physically and metaphorically the fundamental character of the universe.”  (6). He visits places “loaded” with cultural and spiritual significance and his sense of “nature” is bound up with these traditions of place. This intertwining of place and significance, the local and the transcendental, is basic to Basho’s experience. The centrality of “place names” or utamakura is basic to Basho’s outlook. Barnhill says, “Basho tended to write of places in nature handed down through literature, giving cultural depth to his experience of nature.”

          Finally, we note that the vast majority of Western haibun end with the haiku – the contemporary desire for selflessness, for abandonment of the ego, has been structurally arrived at within a given context. The textual journey is over. But such an act of closure may deny haibun a sense of resonance and layers of depth. The “haiku prose” demanded by haibun is deeply metaxic and the only difference between it and the haiku itself is the architecture of the haiku, which formalizes the tension between the particular and the universal, as we shall see.

SETTING OUT: BASHO’S INTERTEXTUAL JOURNEY

        In his introduction to Narrow Road (18),  Hiroaki Sato translates a passage from     Basho’sKnapsack Notebook, the Oi no Kobumi:

Heels torn, I am the same as Saigyo, and I think of him at the Tenryu ferry. Renting a horse, I conjure up in my mind the sage who became furious. In the beautiful spectacles of the mountains, field, ocean and coast, I see the achievement of the creation. Or I follow the trails left by those who, completely unattached, pursued the Way, or I try to fathom the truth expressed by those with poetic sensibility.

        From the very first phrase-- ‘heels torn’-- Basho places himself upon the physical journey, the immanent journey, which in Genroku Japan (and even well past the Meiji Restoration Period) was truly arduous. However, the line then takes on a transcendental nature through the intertextual return to Saigyo (i.e. “I am the same as Saigyo, and I think of him at the Tenryu ferry”). The journey which Basho is “undertaking” (or so the reader believes through the literary suspension of disbelief), engages the metaxical journey-return, for it is both particularly immanent and particularly intertextual. Basho is at once setting out upon his journey and is continuing Saigyo’s journey, thus partaking in his own imaginative projective-return to the readings of his past. And as we shall see, the intertextual references expand the range of reference from his torn heels to zoka and the Way.

HORIZONS AND LIMITS

        On the surface, the Tenryu ferry is a symbol of transience, of journey. Each side of the river is at once a beginning and an end. Does the journey hang suspended between shores? Yes and no: The ferry is its own journey, held within the greater journey of Saigyo’s pilgrimage, which itself is held within the aesthetic of pilgrimage that Saigyo’s poetry has come to signify and evoke through Japanese literature (and now Western literature, too, thanks to translators like Sato).

           This heuristic sense of place is then intensified and given greater credence by its naming. It now becomes a geographically and literarily locatable ‘place,’  which Basho has returned to, a place the knowledgeable reader can return to and a novice can journey to, or seek out and hence ironically, even paradoxically, return to upon reading Saigyo’s work.  The associative nature ofutamakura, places of literary and cultural association, must also embody, symbolically, an “experience of a place” (that of literary work) and the infinite returns embodied within its readership.

          Even for the poet himself, on writing about the place, it becomes part of his experience and hence can never be truly experienced in the same way again. Ferries and mountains, fields, oceans, coasts: all points that lead the poet-reader’s perception to, and illustrate, the journey-return complex. They are both horizons and limits. 

          In the beautiful spectacles of the mountains, field, ocean and coast, I see the achievement of the creation.

          This passage pays homage to nature and its symbols, but the structure of the line is also illuminative. The choice of the collective noun ‘spectacles’ conveys a celebration of these wondrous sights, but also draws attention to the fact that they are sights, objects of nature which have been perceived and appreciated by the poet’s sensibilities.

          Basho does not loose himself in nature: he paradoxically finds himself through a desire to lose himself in nature, knowing that he cannot dissolve his ego completely. He can, though, direct his ego towards things beyond his body. Here this reflective-perception is mirrored, or pointed to, through the structuring of the symbols in dichotomies: mountain/ field, ocean / coast. The first noun within each of these two pairs is a realm essentially separated from man, where the second is inherently a location inhabited by man.

          According to ancient Japanese beliefs, which are pre-Buddhist in nature, mountains were the dwelling places of dangerous spirits not the haunt of man. The ocean is just as much, if not more, of a physical obstacle to man’s habitation: mysterious regions beyond the knowledge of man. Yet they can be ventured into spiritually, intertextually, imaginatively.  On the other hand, fields and coasts are places of habitation, agriculture and fishing. They can be known and are vernacular – areas of common experience.

           Basho does not shun common experience because to do so would be to cause imbalance in the metaxical journey; such an imbalance would cut out a rich source of experiences, cultural experiences and lowly experiences, which also make up the world’s overlapping journeys and therefore deny the universal nature of journey-return. As well as being places for a traveller-poet to travel through, the fields, for example, are richly steeped in the seasonal work of agriculture which reflects the continuing journeying through life, but within the return and progressions of the seasons that ultimately float in the transcendent order of temporal existence.

          . . . I see the achievement of the creation. Or I follow the trails left by those who, completely unattached, pursued the Way, or I try to fathom the truth expressed by those with poetic sensibility.

          Basho is not only a witness to creation, but partakes in it—“participates” in this universal through his bodily awareness and his cultural understandings.  Here the way is ambiguous, but can be taken as the Way alluded to and taught by the ancient Chinese text, the Zhuangzi. In an essay on Basho and Zoka, Peipei Qiu writes (Matsuo Basho’s Poetic Spaces 67):

          A term widely used in traditional Chinese texts, it designates in the Zhuangzi both the working of the Dao—the natural way in which all phenomena come into being and transform—and the accomplishments of the Dao (the existence of all things and beings). The notion is used in Chinese literary theory to imply the natural and spontaneous creative process or the unsullied outcome of such a process. This usage is also found in Basho’s travel journals.

BEGINNING AGAIN

        Already aware of the multiplicity of beginnings, ends and continuances, which form the poles of the metaxical journey and its tension, Basho still has to start his literary journey somewhere.  He rejects tradition at this point, by not opening his poetic text with the first season of the Japanese calendar year (as it would have been in Basho’s time), i.e. spring. He does not even start the first poem at the point of departure upon the road.

          Instead, Basho opens his text with the line: The months and days are wayfarers of a hundred generations, and the years that come and go are also travellers.

          Basho has immediately floated his poem within the transcendental spheres of the infinite (passing time which is the reflective symbol of Eternity) and language (via the metaphor that passing time is diurnal; that lunar and celestially quantified time frames are foot-born travellers).

          The cosmological language of the sage recognizes that the physical journey, which comprises a great deal, even the majority, of the text’s content, is not the only journey that took place nor is it the only journey that will take place, as the reader moves through the symbolised space and time of the text’s articulation.

          Such an opening draws the reader immediately away from the notion that the text, the journey that has “started,” will not be a purely intentionalist investigation of “objects,” but will be (in Voegelin’s words) a ‘process of meditative wandering through the paradoxical manifold of tensions.’ This “wandering” is the quest for truth. The quest has a direction, towards truth; we have the opening to a journey.

          Additionally, these opening lines make us aware of another tension within the unfolding journey: the tension of language. Indeed, years that come and go are named as travellers, a personified (metaphorical) evocation of the multiple-nature of journeys against the universal journey. Day, month, year, generation: each particular is given particular attention and recognition through labelling, naming. Such units – day, month, year – are creatures of an imaginative order.

BASHO AND REALITY

     In a key passage, Voegelin writes (In Search of Order 117):

Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolised without man’s imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolised without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination occur. Through the imaginative power of man the It-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth…



The It-reality encompasses the Metaxy yet it is dependent on the imagination for illumination. Such is the paradox of human consciousness.  This is a contemporary version of the artist’s role in Zoka, the Creative.

          As part of the greater literary work, which heightens the tension of man as the co-partner to the creation of reality (as mirrored in the creative-imaginative act of writing, awareness of and creation of symbols, which Basho is performing), the opening of Narrow Road is also the beginning of his own quest, a seeking of the Way, but commences before his physical life had even started.

          In his essay in Basho’s Poetic Spaces (33), Barnhill quotes the Knapsack Notebook:

Saigyo’s waka, Sogi’s renga, Sesshu’s painting, Rikyu’s tea ceremony – one thread runs through the artistic Ways. And this artistic spirit is to follow zoka, to be a companion to the turning of the four seasons. Nothing one sees is not a flower, nothing one imagines is not the moon. If what is seen is not a flower, one is like a barbarian; if what is imagined is not a flower, one is like a beast. Depart from the barbarian, break away from the beast, follow zoka, return to zoka.

The passage starts with a list of admired artists, where art is represented as a differentiated-multifaceted and paradoxically single medium of the Zoka spirit, the spirit to seek and journey-voyage into the tension of reality.

          The heuristic dimension of reality, that of the body as sensorium, is not to be lost to or absorbed by the imaginative dimension. A flower is a flower. It has its own objectivity. Yet, it is seen. There is an entwining of perception and objectivity. The moon, likewise, is the moon, but now it is imagined. The immanent flower is a flower; the transcendental-imagined moon is a dimension of the moon within the psyche of man: man is co-partner in reality. He cannot escape either dimension; he exists in the tension of the In-between.

          If we deny either tension in the search for man’s truth, either immanence or transcendence, we can have no appreciation of reality and no true concept of ourselves. Instead, Basho journey-voyages into these tensions; he “inhabits” travel; he follows their becoming as he exists; he physically journeys across time-space while he simultaneously journeys into his existence and the nature of these journey-voyages. He follows and returns to zoka, the creative heart of the real.

The Way Of The Text

The first haibun of Narrow Road begins by evoking layers of wave-like returns.  The first line—The months and days are wayfarers –  is an intertextual reference to the Chinese poet Li Po, who proposed, in startling imagery, that life is but a dream, floating in the light and shadows of hundreds of generations. As Li Po looks back upon the continuance of ancestral influences, Basho looks back upon Li Po, as one of his poetic ancestors. The reference itself, with its ambiguous insight engages the tensions of the Metaxy.

          Basho’s use of Li Po and other Chinese poets suggests that the nature of intertextuality and Zoka needs further clarification. According to Barnhill (34):

        There are different ways of conceiving intertextuality. In a broad sense of the term, the influence of one text or writer on another and allusions to older texts are kinds of intertextuality. However, as Haruo Shirane has pointed out, contemporary approaches to intertextuality do not depend on the discovery of direct influence or reference. Rather, they involve the articulation of the cultural context within which a writer or text should be read, a context that helps to define the meaning or the text.

Basho did not see Japanese and Chinese poetics as separate poetics nor did he separate them from his journey. They were entwined through their Zoka spirit, just as the artistic mediums of expression were seen as one spirit.

          Following Basho’s spirit by finding the equivalent understandings in our own Western philosophies of being: such is the metaxy. The journey is indeed universal, intracosmic and transcultural.

          These generations of travellers, which Basho identifies with, are focused upon within the second movement of poem:

Those who float all their lives on a boat or reach their old age leading a horse by the bit make travel out of each day and inhabit travel.

Here we have a generalised ‘those’ who spend their floating lives travelling and in search of travel: their names are symbols of their travel, of their searching. The reference to the boat and then the horse are reminiscent of the previously cited allusion to Saigyo and the traveller-poet aesthetic (those that travel along the trails to discover insight into the Way); also, the reference is to those peasant workers who spend their lives travelling between regions, upon the ocean and rivers, or through the mountains passes. Both “groups” –sages and labourers– inhabit travel: journeying is their way of life; passing between regions is a way of life; they are symbolic of the journey, as well as the physically active participators of their journeys, in the In-between. Thus Basho confirms the universality of the journey/search.

          The universality of the search is also symbolized in the line, ‘[m]any in the past also died while travelling,’ although vague in nature, is most probably a reference to Saigyo, who did in fact die whilst travelling. Such an act mirrors the paradoxical nature of the journey and hence the tension of the metaxical journey: while the journey of his life did end, the quest upon which Saigyo was embarked and which he is identified with was never finished because it was/is unfinishable. Both the aesthetic journey and the literary journey continued, to be entered upon by others (in this case Basho), despite the poet’s physical death. For Basho, Saigyo’s end is a return: an intertextual, aesthetic reaching back into the presence of the past. Four hundred years after Basho’s death, we readers can still continue the journey stretching back nearly a thousand years, by returning to Basho. We are afloat upon the path without finality and closure.

Such a simple declarative—many died while travelling – can also have grave personal overtones. One can infer that Basho foresees his own death upon his approaching journey. The qualifying ‘also’ is telling of such a projective motif. It is as if he is intending to set out on his journey, his quest for the Way, and not physically return to the Basho Hut. He is aligning himself with the ancient traveller poets, the journey of insight which stretches beyond mortality (toward the universal journey). Thus aligned, and already in the realisation that there is no definable, reachable goal of ultimate knowledge, of definitive is-ness, he is resigned to explore the nature of journey, of the Metaxy, yielding to the pull of the Beyond.     Searching, however, is not a futile act. It is a gift, a liberation and can be joyous. Such an understanding of the participatory depths of things is an appreciation of true beauty.

           The poem continues:

In which year it was I do not recall, but I, too, began to be lured by the wind like a fragmentary cloud and have since been unable to resist wanderlust, roaming out to the seashores.

Given his desire to define himself in terms of the journey, the quest permeates and pervades his past, while allowing us to understand that the journey we as readers are currently starting, or are just about to start (for this particular poem hangs in the tension of anticipation) is not Basho’s first. Basho has already travelled extensively before setting out on the “road to the north country.” The Narrow Road becomes one of the journeys overlapping with his previous journeys, within the frame of his life journey and his continuance of the aesthetic of the quest.

          The self-reflective simile of the fragmented cloud being lured by the wind reveals how this desire is beyond direct expression, but can only be alluded to through the “meaning” that emanates from between the images in the metaphorical comparison: him, poet / clouds / wind.

 The Shirakawa Barrier

           The next movement of the poem brings the reader to the recognisable, temporal frame of the previous year:

Last fall, I swept aside old cobwebs in my closet as spring began and haze rose in the sky, I longed to walk beyond Shirakawa Barrier and, possessed and deranged by the distracting deity and enticed by the guardian deity of the road, I was unable to concentrate on anything.

The search for his place in the Metaxy has become obsessive, the pull of the Beyond irresistible. The cobwebs reflect the passing of time, as it takes time for spiders to spin them (therefore it took time for the spiders in Basho’s hut to fashion those cobwebs) and they are then literally swept away: an image of renewal and then sudden destruction, all in the face of decay, the dilapidated hut.      This specific and active image then folds quickly into the textual and literal past as within a clause we have progressed from fall to winter to spring. Such a time-lapse syntactical illusion  collapses the passing seasons, which reflect the infinite progression / return of the temporal world, held within the specifics of a given year, into floating, yet, paradoxically ordered memories.

          The naming of the Shirakawa Barrier indicates a waypoint, a point at which to arrive at, in order to venture beyond it.  The barrier is at once an ending and a beginning and, due to this paradoxical nature, it is neither.  A kenotic spiral has been engaged, emptying the present, rendering it transparent for desire and the unimaginable Beyond. 

          The verb longs – I longed to walk beyond – reflects a desire that has been entertained for a long time, alluding to the notion that Basho has often imaginatively ventured past the barrier: a multitude of journeys and returns, held in the tension of desire, informed by his reflections upon previous physical journeys. The Shirakawa Barrier is also an utamakura—a sacred site in the metaxic journey.

          Again, the Chinese intertextual “pole” of tension is also engaged through the imaginative-projective act of longing. According to Chinese poetic theory, poets, through their imaginative faculties, can take part in a spirit journey. I say take part, i.e. participate in, rather that purely create, because such places are often, as they are in this case, real (they are places within objective reality, too). However, they are real places sponsored by the imagination. They comprise an imaginative journey, but an imaginative return to real places.  Barnhill says that “on the spirit journey, the poet can instantly encompass all time (in the Chinese sense of past and present) and space’ (39) via the spirit thought, the following of zoka.

          In other haibun, such as An Account of Eighteen View Tower, or An Account of the Unreal Dwelling, Basho voyages to places of Chinese poetic lore, whereas here, he is returning to a native landscape. It is as if he is trying to ensure a balance between the Chinese and Japanese spirit, while maintaining a narrative tension. What I mean by this is that he engages a tension between longing, the imaginative journey, and the physical arrival that becomes later in the text, which is simultaneously a return: the tension between the becoming, what has come before and what is to come, flows through the text.

          The Shirakawa Barrier has native intertextual and associative layers not merely attributed to Basho.  Indeed, they stretch back further than the 17th Century. The barrier was ancient even in Basho’s time and once represented the border between the civilised world of the Yamamoto Japanese and the untamed regions of Oshu. At this checkpoint, a fort was erected to protect against the Emishi, or northern Barbarians. Sato describes the site in his introduction to Basho’s poetic sequence (19) :

A few centuries [after it was built] it apparently fell into disuse. By the eleventh century it had become an uta-makura that was supposed to evoke the sense that it was where civilisation and culture ended and what Joseph Conrad might have called the “heart of darkness” began.


There is little evidence to suggest that there were any remains of the barrier’s stockade, when Sora and Basho arrived at the site (an event which, interestingly forms a separate haibun in the sequence, illustrating the internal tension between imaginative return / transcendental journey and physical arrival), but the associative, symbolic nature of the barrier remains emphatic. The longing to pass into the wilderness, from the plains into the mountains, from the civilised world into the unknown, is symbolic of the aesthetic of journey, of adventure, which informs the text.

          The barrier also has “narrative qualities” for the barrier also elicits a sense of danger. The reference to the deity of the road, a Shinto kamisama (god) adds layers of cultural and religious associations, but, again, also evokes a sense of danger, of phenomena upon the road ‘beyond our philosophies,’ beyond our understandings, from whom one must seek protection. This reinforces the concept of the entering of the wilderness, the haunt of Shinto gods.

By The Light Of The Moon

          In the end I mended the rips in my pants, replaced hat strings, and, the moment I gave a moxa treatment to my kneecaps, I thought of the moon over Matsushima.

          The moxa treatment anticipates and signifies the arduous nature of the road-not yet-travelled; anticipation of experiences to come, based on the knowledge of his age and previous travels.  This physical-[immanent]-remembrance act is then brought into balance with the imaginative-projective act of envisioning the moon over Matsushima. This line is truly intriguing for it activates a number of poetic devices and tropes, which entangle within the concept of journey-return.    

          The moon is a kigo for autumn – the poem is “written” in May; the image is “before its time.” Consequently, the time between the “present” and the arrival at the islands has a quasi-definable dimension.

          Matsushima is probably Japan’s second most revered utamakura (the first being Mt. Fuji). Its distance from Edo is well known. The moon and Matsushima are simultaneously occurring within Basho’s imagination: the two together direct us towards a poetic image so popular it is nearly cliché. A cliché, held and celebrated in the Japanese poetic tradition, but none-the-less luminous with reflective distance. This line again places the reader between the temporal-spatial and atemporal-aspatial, the immanent and transcendental, sensibilities of the poet-traveller. Such depth, with its anticipatory, participatory layers makes the image, for Basho and for the reader, beautiful, rather than merely picturesque.

          Chiyo-ni would later use such a trope to win acclaim amongst her fellow poets with a poem about the anticipation of the autumn moon, rather than of the autumn moon itself. This evening! / since the crescent moon / I’ve been waiting (Patricia Donegan trans.). The essence of the scene’s beauty permeates between the lines, between the poet and image, rather than in the act of abandonment by the poet to, or into, the image. This is a key concept for appreciating the power of haibun.

BASHO’S HUT

Basho’s first haibun continues: I gave my living quarters to someone and moved into Sampu’s villa . . . The physical journey, which is to make up the base, the grounding of the narrative, begins. The period of anticipation is over. The act of giving away his residence, of becoming of “no abode” (with its links to Buddhist scripture), is symbolic of entering the trails of those by-gone poets. Basho resists going any further, i.e. he doesn’t forsake his area of residence completely, yet (that is left to it’s own haibun, the second in the sequence) and, therefore, overloading his first haibun and negating the importance of the poem’s prior journeying. Instead, he stays with his rich friend (speculatively, to enjoy a last night of ease before the road) and to pay homage to his benefactor.

          The act of ‘giving away’ his hut is significant because it prevents the hut from being a symbol of return, a place waiting for him. As he writes earlier on, there is an anticipation of not-completing the circular trip and dying, like Saigyo, on the journey. With others occupying the house, it is no longer his: it is their’s. He does not present much information about this transfer, but, instead, applies a light touch that signifies his unattachedness.

Within the narrative order of the haibun, one then encounters the poem’s haiku.

THE HAIKU

          In Basho: The Complete Haiku, Reichhold says that the mark of a Basho haiku is his ability to “capture both the momentary and the eternal in a small poem.” As we shall see, studying Basho’s haiku in the context of his haibun provides new ways of thinking about the haiku.

          The first haiku reads:

kusa no to mo sumi-kawaru yo zo hina no ie

in my grass hut the residents change: [now] a doll’s house



(I find the “now” in the translation extraneous; there is no word for “now” in the original but the superposed line just occurs, which creates a sense of “now.”)  After the initial “shock” when the new inhabitants appear to be dolls, the reader’s attention is directed to nature of each of the two images. This illusion is caused by the possessive “no,” which can be translated as the ‘doll’s house’ or the ‘house of dolls.’

          In the base line, ‘in my grass hut the residents change,’ the image of the residents within the house is an obvious image of change; it is an image of movement, of a “believable” space, in literary time, being left and re-inhabited. There is an obvious sense of passing time. The hut has not changed its physical qualities, but the hut has changed: the line is at once distant from Basho, for he has left the hut, and intimate, because the hut is a symbol of him as poet. The fact that his poetic identity, via the pseudonym coined from the banana tree that was planted by his hut, directs us towards this intimate connection between place and poet, location and creation.

          However, there is a sense of temporality in the new occupants’ presence, due to the ghost-like omni-presence of Basho: he is writing the scene into existence.

          Furthermore, this sign of the new residents’ transience is further enforced by the way in which the hut is built out of grass. The grass hut, despite its change in owner, will not last. There is a return to the concept of proceeding generations, of generations moving on (Basho to the owners of the dolls etc), as we found in the haibun’s first line.

          In terms of the journey, there is the end to the residence of Basho within the hut, which simultaneously signifies the physical event of beginning the journey north, both in the sense of the literary, narrative journey, and the “physical,” spatial sense. Such an image of change reveals the constant tension of the becoming, of journey, due to the relational qualities of things. Indeed, although the image of the hut on its own would signify aspects of change, it doesn’t engage the participatory tensions, as explored previously: it needs another image – the dolls.

          Akin to the new human inhabitants of the hut, the dolls are an image of becoming, of change, transformation and a return to change, but in a very different way to the symbolism of the physical “movements” of the base line.

          When we encounter the superposed line, there is the instant temptation to read the image metaphorically, i.e. that the new occupants have the limited, merely objective, physicality-identity of dolls. However, Basho is concentrating in the leaving of the place, as opposed to its continuance – the reader is to focus on the journey. When we consider that the Dolls Festival (Hina-matsuri) is an annual celebration, that the image is a kigo, the proportions of the two images come more into focus. The festival of the dolls is but a day in the calendar year,  a definable “time” for the leaving of the house, the commencement of the journey into the interior. And, being a kigo, an annual event, the day becomes a symbol of the floatingness of days within the transcending order of time. The journey’s commencement has both a definitive and groundless beginning.

          This sense of new beginning is then compounded by the fact that the dolls are a kigo for spring. This sense of the new season, which is itself a symbol of new life, is heightened by the dolls brightening effect within the dilapidated hut, but more importantly, through the particularity of nature of this beginning of an annual routine in this place. There is a tension between the poles of the cultural celebration and following of annual routine (the historical), which is a form of return and the newness of their placement in this spatial-temporal location. The dolls have taken on symbolic layers, depths of significance, while remaining just inert dolls. Basho’s understanding of dolls has altered, too, their association has shifted and developed. Perceptions, engaging with the Metaxy and the participatory creation of “reality”, shift. They, too, are mutable.

          Additionally, the image of the dolls is striking in that, traditionally, families set out the dolls of the festival in a specific way. The dolls represent the emperor and his court, placed in descending, hierarchical order and are usually brightly attired. The image of colourful, but strict courtly life placed against the transient, rustic, even poverty stricken, life of the hut forms a striking contrast: the world of high and low culture are levelled and maintained and therefore illuminate the alienation of culture. The symbol of culture here is presented as inert – it is Basho who is moving.  And yet as hierarchy, the dolls ironically mock Basho’s mortal desire for fresh knowledge of the sacred places.

          By placing the image of the inert dolls against images of the active change of the residents, the dolls take on both a greater sense of inertness (stillness as signified through opposition to motion). But the way in which the dolls have been placed in their celebratory display for the first time (the new residents would have placed them there) reflects how they take on the symbolism of change. The piled dolls are paradoxical symbols of stillness and movement, of tradition and change, of time and timelessness. The tensions of the base are repeated in the sudden image of the kigo, only the gap unifying the poem and the experience of the reader. This rigorous paradoxic structure has no equivalent in prose, no matter how “haiku” or poetic it is!

                   In terms of the journey and return complex within the haibun, the haiku leads the reader towards a new appreciation of the metaxical journey: that perceptions of things are in a continual sense of becoming, not just because we encounter new things / events, even when they are traditions, but that things (including objects and celebrations etc), while remaining on the surface unchanged, are mutable depending on their relationships to other things and the poet. The paradoxical structure of the haiku illuminates the movement in the Metaxy toward the Beyond.  The journey and return of zoka is in perpetual formation and reformation. Pursuing the tensions between these formations and reformations is the voyage towards truth, a voyage that flows from the gap between the two parts of the haiku and allegorically engages the universal journey.

THE UNFINISHED (UNFINISHABLE?) POEM

The haiku, though, does not make up the final movement of the poem, which in itself raises a number of questions about haibun composition. Indeed, the poem ends with the line: I left the first eight links hung on a post of my hut. The eight links refers to the practice of renga, where a group of poets would take it in turns to write linked verses of poetry, alternating in a 5,7,5 then 77 pattern. The links were derived from a complex set of rules based around imagistic association. Usually, the final poem would be an accumulation of either thirty six, or one hundred linked poems: what is significant about this line as an ending (of the haibun) is that eight poems would not make up a complete chain. The poem remains unfinished.

          The symbolic overtones of such a gesture are numerous. Basho could be revealing how although the haibun has come to an end, the sequence, the journey to the deep north has not. Indeed, it has just begun. Seeing that the act of giving away his hut elicits a sense that he does not intend to return, the unfinished chain could be a reminder that the poetry of life goes on, even when a single poet has shuffled off this mortal coil. If the chain is intended to be one hundred links long, the journey / stage Basho has completed has only skimmed the tip of the iceberg. Poets after his “leaving,” are to return to his work, and continue down the trail he has taken, developing the form as they go.

          The journey, in the return, reforms the past and the continuance of the journey. Alternatively, Basho directs our attention to the haibun as a piece in a sequence of poems, and that is what they are: poems. They are poetic artifice. Therefore, we a directed to view the entire sequence as being held between the tension of an actual poet, a man, and the journey / journeys he took and the work as a piece of art. Again, we as readers are drawn to the metaxical tension between immanent (through the ecstatic memory of the personal duree) and the transcendental properties of art. The writing of the work is an event and experience of this tension, as is its reading.

THE QUESTION OF UNITY

If Basho’s haibun evokes the multifaceted and layered nature of life’s overlapping journeys (where immanence and transcendence entangle), is there an internal structure followed by Basho? Or does he just allow these immanent, imaginative, symbolic, projective spheres to float randomly?

          On examining the structure of the haibun, I feel there is a structure—that is, unity.

          Indeed, on exploring the composition of the haibun, one can see how Basho is directing our attention and illuminating the metaxical tension of journey-return.

Take this exceptionally brief and crude summary of the structure:

1. Universal journey engaged

2. General / symbolic nature of unending journeys, the quest

3. Those whose have sought and been lost to the journey, the quest, before

4. Desire to journey to the past to join those lost

5. Desire to join those have been lost to the journey by going on an actual journey, to continue the journey, the quest for the Way

6. Decision to journey

7. Preparation for the journey

8. Haiku – the paradoxic structure of the moment of departure in consciousness

9. Hope of return / or the hope of others continuing his journey, symbolically engaged.

          What emerges from this break down is that there is precisely the haibun as a “whole.”  Basho starts with the universal, of the universal journey. Each of the following movements form “tests” or qualifications of this concept, which seek to explore and expose the symbolisms, intertextualities, and well as the personal nature of Basho own life and poetry in the face of the universal journey. There is a progression from generality, from heritage and its unstable, evolving nature, to the alignment of a poet to his tradition, to the poet who becomes part of that tradition by extending it.

          Through the haibun, Basho does not loose himself to essence; he does not arrive at its perfect encapsulation; the haibun is not purely about the here-and-now; nor is the haibun purely speculative and imaginary. It has arisen out of memory, out of reading, out of one’s physical and spiritual life – out of one’s journeys and returns, where one’s sense of antonymous self is shattered into a paradox of the perceiving-body and the thinking-body. Our lives are a journey; we are part of others’ journeys; as readers we are part of an artistic journey; we are part of an infinite journey. We are mutable. We participate in Zoka; through an act of imagination, the whole is illuminated from the Beyond.

          This grand theme is sketched by Basho in his letter to the samurai poet, Suganuma Kyokusui (d.1717), translated by Sato and included in his translation of the Narrow Road (22). In the letter Basho criticises those poets who write for money, or who write for lowly entertainment, such as gossiping or technical point-scoring. Instead, he suggests that:

poetry writing is another vehicle for entering the Way, to explore the spirit of [the tanka poets, as symbolised by a reference to Fujiwara no Teika], trace the intent of Saigyo, examine the heart of Lo-t’ien [Chinese poet, also known as Po Chu-yi (772-846)]and enter the mind of Tu Fu [Chinese poet (712-770)].

Basho here not only directs poets towards the importance of spiritual exploration, but also towards intertextuality and reading--the return. His verbs, however, also illuminate the questing nature of these returns: enter, explore, trace, examine, enter. Basho is illustrating possible tests of the journey, while also exposing the metaxical tension of the journey-return. Each test is both active, participatory, and therefore within the poet, but also outside of the poet. The two spheres of experience entangle, and reveal each others’ depths and beauty, where poetry can continue, form and develop the quest into the mysterious, ineffable universal journey towards the Beyond. It is this form of poetry which we find in Oku no Hosomichi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY and FURTHER READING

Barnhill, David L (2005): Basho's Journey: The Literary Prose Of Matsuo Basho, State University of New York Press, NYC.

Barnhill, David L (2006): Zoka: The Creative in Basho’s View of Nature and Art, featured in Kerkham, Eleanor (2006): Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces: Exploring Haikai Intersections, Palgrave Macmillan; Tra edition, USA.

Bird, Isabella (1984 – original, 1880): Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Virago, London.

Cobb, David interviewed by Rees, Lynne (2008): Worth Saying: David Cobb on Haibun, Woodward, Jeffery (ed.): Haibun Today, [blog], Sunday, February 24, 2008, available at
 http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2008/02/worth-saying-david-cobb-on-haibun.html

Donegan, Patricia (1998): Chiyo-ni: Woman Haiku Master, Tuttle, Tokyo.

Hass, Robert (ed) (1994): The Essential Haiku, The Ecco press, New Jersey.

Kamen (1997): Utamakura and the Intertextuality of Place in Japanese Poetry, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Reichhold, Jane (2008): Basho: The Complete Haiku, Kodansha International, Tokyo

Ross, Bruce (ed) (1998): Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun, Charles E. Tuttle and Co., Inc, USA.

Sato, Hiroaki (trans) (1996): Basho’s Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages (Narrow Road to the Interior), Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley.

Shirane, 1998, Traces of Dreams; Stanford University Press, USA.

Qui, Peipei (2005): Basho and the Dao, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.

Voegelin, Eric (2000): Order and History (Volume 5): In Search of Order (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 18), University of Missouri Press, USA.



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