True haiku is a celebration of unclutteredness, emptiness, fleetingness, vastness, littleness, nothingness, change. Emptiness finds its way from silence to words, often in parataxis. An example of parataxis from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
“out . . . into this world . . . this world . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . in a god for- . . . what? . . girl? . . yes . . . tiny little girl . . . into this . . . out into this . . . before her time . . . godforsaken hole called . . . called . . . no matter”
Parataxis is the lack of conjunctions. We must fill in the empty spaces. Beckett, Pinter, modern masters of breath, of pause, of emptiness. It has been happening for centuries with haiku.
True haiku catapults us into infinity; creating an aperture which not only suggests infinity – it actually allows us through, into the Void. Haiku is a portal to emptiness.
Going through that portal is “a naked moment”, to use a term in Patricia Donegan’s book, Haiku Mind (Shambhala Books). Mahavir, who said “Know the moment”, Mahavir had only the cloak on his back, which he gave to a beggar, then off he goes into the forest, naked. Through the portal. Empty.
Entering this emptiness need not be a dramatic event. It can be an ordinary event of extraordinary beauty and significance. Let us taste a haiku now:
the spirit, the truth
of silent prayer –
just the moon on the road
Kikusha-Ni (1752-1826)
Kikusha-Ni, the wandering nun, what did she see when she visted Yoshino?
on the summer hills
I saw a cloud – that's all
there was in Yoshino
To follow her path today – the path taken by modern haiku wanderers such as Santoka – requires a mindset which Kaneko Tohta calls teiju hyohaku or "settled wandering". American master photographer Ron Rosenstock takes students of photography around the world, to Morocco, Bhutan, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, in search of emptiness. Nowhere can it be found if it is not found within.
In the book Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics by William Theodore De Bary (Columbia University Press) we find a comment on this haiku by Basho:
shizukesa ya
iwa ni shmiiru
semi no koe
how still it is!
stinging into the stones,
the locusts' trill
Our attention is drawn to the frequency of the “i” vowel in this haiku – the sound of the locust, or cicada. For me, this sound can be reproduced better in Irish than in English. English closes off sounds with its consonants. Irish and Japanese have more going on in terms of vowel music.
Here’s the Irish (this is not a subjective thing – the vowels in Irish add more resonance and echo than is possible in English):
nach ciúin atá sé –
clocha á ndingeadh
ag giolc an chiocáda
I learn from De Bary that the sound of the cicada goes from a verb to mean “seep” to a verb that means to “cut” or “penetrate” or “sting”. An enlightening insight. I feel that Basho was attempting to cut through materiality itself, to find and explore the nature of silence and emptiness. The sound of the cicada travels through the empty air, stabs the rocks, seeps into them, stings them, cuts through them. And then? It dies in emptiness.
Haiku create silences, arise from silence, return to silence. How? Haiku shut out the noise of the world in concentrating on pure phenomena – even when such phenomena themselves contain sound. It becomes a silenced sound, a return to the beginning of sound, the first quack of a duck, or the cry of a pheasant that has just swallowed a whole field, the silence before and after that cry.
A haiku has the ability to present phenomena with such intensity that we feel something unique is happening. Emerson says: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years how would men believe and adore … but every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile …”
Had he known about haiku, Emerson would, I believe, have championed the form as an important contribution to the world’s wisdom literature, for he says, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
Nishiyama Soin (1605 -1682), a contemporary and acquaintance of haiku master Basho, in One Hundred Buddhist Verses, says: “Above all, the way of haiku is to put emptiness first and substance last . . .”
Emptiness, therefore, sounded like a good title for this new book with Ron Rosenstock, the American master photographer whose life quest has been to expose with his lens those prayerful moments that illumine themselves in haiku. Here's a link to Ron's own thoughts on photography and a previous book we did together, The Invisible Light.
Haiku is uniquely suited to respond to landscape photography. The art of the haijin, or seasoned haikuist, is simply to allow his spirit to enter into the mystery of everyday miracles of creation.
Emptiness by Gabriel and Ron Rosenstock, is published as an ebook by Long Exposure Press
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Irish-Japanese diplomatic relations, the Irish Writers Centre and Five Lamps Festival host a special haiku workshop with one of Ireland's foremost haijin, Gabriel Rosenstock, on April 1st, at 1pm
