We are pleased to present Part THREE in our serial feature from Gabriel Rosenstock’s new book: Haiku, The Gentle Art of Disappearing.
Rosenstock is a regular contributor of World Haiku Review. In this new series, he explores the seemingly strange phenomenon whereby the better haiku poems are the more they seem to disappear in a multitude of senses. This series is a journey Rosenstock invites the reader to join him to walk together and experience these interesting experiences.
Gabriel Rosenstock is the author/translator of over 100 books, including 12 volumes of poetry in Irish and a number of volumes of bilingual haiku. Born in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick in 1949, he studied at University College Cork. A former chairman of Poetry Ireland, he is a member of several international haiku associations, and holds an honorary life membership of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Society. He lives in Dublin.
In Haiku, The Gentle Art of Disappearing, Rosenstock tries to show that the reason why many haiku are superficial and unmemorable is very often because of the intrusion of the haikuist and the accompanying baggage of the grosser aspects of ourselves. He sees in sublime haiku no trace of coarseness found in lesser poems because we can actually disappear! It is as Dogen says: only when the self retreats can the true glory of our multi-faceted earth appear to us. The more we become conscious of the fact that we can disappear in what we do, the more the mind and sensibility is trained to experience an extra dimension to our lives. He believes that we must surrender every vestige of our being to that cloud, that rising moon, that lone star. Sometimes even a photograph of an enlightened being, such as Ramana Maharshi, is enough to help us to focus on the now in the eternal and to disappear.
"Seeing truly is not merely a change in the direction of seeing, but a change at its very centre in which the seer himself disappears ..." (Ramesh S. Balsekar)
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Haiku, the Gentle Art of Disappearing
by Gabriel Rosenstock
PART THREE
Haiku for its own sake … We live in a world obsessed with profit and loss, a world in which our actions are expected to show some gain, some material usefulness. Disappearing in the haiku moment might seem, therefore, to be a form of sacrilege. How does it honour the god of our age, Mammon? There’s an interesting story about a Christian missionary in China. No doubt he was sincere enough in what he was trying to achieve but, as often happens, he was finding it difficult to come to terms with the niceties of an ancient civilization. Out on a contemplative stroll, he comes across a Chinese priest chanting in a temple. Curious as to know what exactly this was all about, when the chanting stops the missionary approaches the priest. ‘To whom were you praying just now?’ he asks. The Chinese priest is puzzled. Strange questions these missionaries ask, he thinks. ‘To whom was I praying? To no one at all,’ comes the honest reply. The missionary is stumped. To no one at all? How can this be? ‘Well then, tell me please,’ he enquires, ‘for what were you praying?’ Again, the Chinese priest is taken aback. He answers plainly: ‘For what was I praying? For nothing.’ The missionary looks at him. Is this fathomable? For nothing? He purses his lips. There’s nothing much to be gained here, he says to himself, and makes to leave. The priest calls after him. The missionary turns, thinking to himself, ‘What next?’ The Chinese priest smiles. ‘And there was no one praying, you know.’
Haiku reaches its purest form in such purposelessness and egolessness: grace for no other purpose but grace itself. By sloughing off all concepts, all preconceptions, all judgments and fashions, by burning the furniture of the mind, the haikuist becomes disinterested – which is not to say aloof. ‘Disinterested contemplation of nature and art brings about a state of mind which is universal in that it can transcend the individual ego,’ says Anna Bonshek in Mirror of Consciousness, Art, Creativity and Veda (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001). Let us always keep the universality of haiku in mind. It now belongs to the world.
Deep ecology … All the creepy crawlies of this world, the bugs and insects and worms, all have their place and their function in deep ecology. When we begin to notice the vibrancy of the microcosm close to hand, we learn to appreciate the grandeur – and the frailty – of the macrocosm and man’s place in the larger picture.
Enjoying quiet moments with haiku does not mean reclining on a rose-scented divan – it is noticing the smallest things as they go into hibernation, or emerge. The haikuist utters the canticle of all creatures:
morning breeze
in the hairs
of a caterpillar
Buson
(Version: GR)
And how lovely that it’s morning! This is a true wake-up-call haiku.
***
In early 2004, the CBS Evening News ran a series called Man V. Nature. Versus! Mountain lions, alligators … all out to get you. Around about the same time the Pentagon was warning about the threat of global warming. We’ve got it wrong. Haiku is a way back to sanity and wholeness.
Disappearing in the haiku moment is to re-appear refreshed and re-energised in this floating world:
vrbe na obali
kap pokap jutarnje rose
pada u reku
willows by the riverbank –
drop by drop of morning dew
falling into the river
Dušan Mijajlović Adski
(A Jug for Dew, Punta, 2002)
As in Tablada’s willow-haiku, there is more happening here than meets the eye. Drop by drop is suggestive of the flow of time. Are we in the moment-to-moment flow or are we carried along by it, unsconsciously?
***
Taken by surprise … The haiku moment is perceived in the present but, of course, the dew becomes the river, eventually to join the seas, the winds, the rains and, in evaporation, the whole process of existence begins anew, out of the past, into the present and beyond. The discerning and witnessing of the naturalness and the meaningfulness of such cycles is one of the important gifts of haiku.
vanishing
in heat shimmers …
the simple hut
Issa
(Version: GR)
Issa was only too well aware of how everything and everyone eventually disappears – even loved ones before their time. Heat shimmers are heat shimmers. They may not be particularly attractive to every eye. But the haikuist presents them and their actions as an event, a significant haiku event. And how can we ever tire of these manifestations, if we are truly alive?
If we lose the capacity to be surprised, we forfeit the deep core of our humanity. Le us remind ourselves that for the Greeks, thaumazein – wonder – was the beginning of all philosophy.
This is the epitaph of every successful life, the alpha and omega of a haikuist’s span on earth.
***
Becoming invisible … When we talk here about disappearing, it is not something out of The Invisible Man. This is not science fiction. Robert Spiess, a prophet of modern haiku, speculated thus: ‘The relation of the poet to a now-moment of awareness that will be the basis of a haiku should be like water pouring into water …’ What haiku was he reading at the time? This one by Bashō, perhaps?
pouring the hot day
into the sun
the River Mogami
(Version: GR)
Flow and merge … the way of disappearing … In many countries, from Ireland to India, rivers are deities, goddesses. Not surprisingly, there are many classical scriptural references to rivers and their flow:
As the rivers flowing east and west
Merge in the sea and become one with it,
Forgetting they were ever separate rivers,
So do all creatures lose their separateness
When they merge at last into pure Being
Chandogya Upanishad
The River of Time … Zen-Haiku Master James W. Hackett tells us about another river: ‘In India, millions of pilgrims continue to revere the Ganges as the world’s most holy river. Meanwhile Time, life’s most sacred stream, flows inexorably on, seldom reverenced or even regarded, save for an enlightened few.’
a corpse
in the Ganges
a crow takes a ride
GR
In the flowingness of air and water and wind we can learn what our own true nature is. As Langston Hughes wrote in The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921):
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers …
***
Merge and flow … this is how to disappear … Glorious as many scriptures are, true haiku can rival them or surpass them in beauty by showing, not merely telling, by dynamic, physical expression of transcendental experience, as opposed to lofty speculation and obtuse terminology.
Haiku is a powerful time-stopper. The haiku moment cannot be measured by time, or bound by time. It is outside of time. As such, it is a sacred moment. Ellen Davis could have been talking about the uniqueness of the haiku moment when she said: ‘The sacred moment lives outside of time and therefore it cannot judge, for it has no past or future to compare itself to.’
Those who think haiku is something slight, something artificial, should think again. True haiku moments are sacred. Bede Griffiths noted how a lot of the time we feverishly anticipate some imagined excitement: ‘We have to learn to step back from this into the freedom and possibility of the present.’
November maples –
cascade of crimson
anointing the dawn
Myrna Sloam
What could be more sacred than to use the syllables of a mantra to count fish:
NA-MU-A-MI-DA
the way my dead mother
counted her sardines
Tsuruta Kyōko
(Haiku International 1995)
Non-grasping …
cranes left
without taking
anything
Kida Senjo
(Haiku International 1995)
The sensibility of pure haiku can be perceived in this exquisite observation of the cranes. Let us call it the ‘non-grasping’ effect. The birds disappear. They have taken nothing, not a berry, not a grain of rice. The nature of ego is grasping, craving, desiring. The nature of egolessness is non-grasping, non-craving – pure witness.
What has caused the wars we have known in our time? Grasping.
Collapse of territoriality … In the sacred moment in which haiku is conceived and born, the haikuist is no longer grossly visible to himself or others. What comes into his sphere of vision is not shooed away as an intruding presence, or grasped selfishly, rather it is contemplated freely with all the senses. Territoriality collapses in sharing, in silent music – la musica callada of John of the Cross …
silence –
the sound of a bird walking
on scattered leaves
Ryūshi
We know, or should know, that wars have been about territoriality, spheres of influence, geo-political strategies. We cannot end wars until we have the mind and the disposition of Ryūshi, so that all things, from centipedes to quadrupeds to bipeds can walk unthreatened on the earth.
Might there be something in a name, some inherent quality in our given name that shapes who we become? It would seem that the name ‘Ryushi’ suggests versatility and spontaneity. Flow!
When the notion of territoriality and tribalism begins to implode on itself, then home is anywhere, everywhere. After all, if you know anything about geology, where your little country – or continent - appears on the map is not where it was, or what it was, some billions of years ago.
with every gust
the butterfly finds a new home
on the willow
Bashō
(Version: GR)
Distinctions flow and become fluid …
opening their hearts
ice and water
are friends again
Teishitsu
What effect does haiku have on the world? We can only guess. Each true haiku brings a little more clarity and harmony into the world and global haiku today increases this possibility:
One after another
as the birds dip their sharp beaks –
water-rings of spring
Katō Kokō
(Four Seasons: Haiku Anthology Classified by Season Words,
Ed. Kokō Katō, Kō Poetry Association, 1991)
***
Invisible words … Sometimes, as the haikuist disappears, transported by the ineffable beauty or thusness or ‘itness’ of his surroundings, words disappear. One is in the world but lost to the world, lost for words. One must call upon words, recall their shape and sound, and there is a certain poignancy in all of this because what words can adequately convey the immensity of creation as it expresses itself in one revelation after another?
wow! … that’s all
upon the blossom-covered
hills of Yoshino
Teishitsu
That’s all, folks ... Perhaps a haiku such as this could not have appeared without the disappearance of many others: Teishitsu destroyed thousands of his haiku.
Do not go to Yoshino … Do not visit the hills of Yoshino – do not go anywhere - with the intention of writing a haiku. And don’t copy the masters - that would be as boring as two halves of a melon, as Bashō warned. (Study the greats, by all means).
Our preparations for the haiku moment will be foiled by intentionality. In his Divine Beauty, The Invisible Embrace (Bantam Press, 2003), John O’ Donohue eloquently states: ‘Beauty is a free spirit and will not be trapped within the grid of intentionality. In the light of beauty, the strategies of the ego melt like a web against a candle…’ If you go on a ginko or compositional stroll, be passively aware, that is all. Observe the appearance and reappearance of phenomena, and the half-hid:
Spring snowfall
on the tucked-in heads
of drifting sea birds
H. F. Noyes
(Four Seasons)
An insect living
in the stone animal’s mouth –
time of melting snow
Katō Kenkō
(ibid.)
When the art of reading true haiku develops, the reader, too, can momentarily disappear, into the colour of a leaf or a blossom:
plum blossoms –
red, red
red
Izen
Those who have looked at Izen’s original Japanese detect a note of idiocy in the diction. One way of dropping out of blue-collar, white-collar or collarless society is to become a ‘holy fool’. But only through wisdom can such foolishness be acquired.
And into colourlessness …
after the storm
fog off the sea
curling into snail shells
Seán Mac Mathúna
Into an absence …
the lake smoothes over
and that loon
still hasn’t come back up
David Elliott
(ibid.)
Let’s have a World Haiku Day and all disappear at once. It would ease some of the world’s weight, its stony gravity.
***
Kabir vanishes … The great Indian poet, Kabir (1398 – 1518), did a famous vanishing act. His Hindu followers longed to claim him after his death. He was theirs. His Muslim followers wished to do the same. Didn’t he belong to them? Scuffles broke out. But to whom did Kabir belong? The Hindus? The Muslims? On lifting his death-shroud they discovered that the poet’s body had disappeared. Nothing left but a bunch of flowers. A scent. Maybe he was trying to tell us something?
Santōka advised us not to care a fig for the fashions, follies and figurations of the times we live in. He composed his haiku ‘in a state of mind and body cast off’.
Today’s world is constantly in search of the latest thing, the latest fashion or fad, the latest diet, the latest label, the new kid on the block. This craving, this dis-ease, is really an incapacity to view everything – absolutely everything - as new. Shiki told his disciple Kyoshi: ‘If you examine a moonflower closely your previous mental images will completely disappear …’ Sound haiku talk!
the old carp’s
red-cornered eyes –
cherry petals falling
Mutsuo Takahashi
(Haiku: The poetic key to Japan, Mutsuo Takahasi, Hakudo Inoue, Kazuya Takaoka, PIE Books, Tokyo, 2003)
Eye-deology … Haiku teaches us a path of deepening serenity. It is not an anaesthetic. Disappearing is not running away. With no full stop at the end, the haiku experience trails off into infinity. Its taste lingers long after we have returned to so-called normal consciousness. All we have to do, then, is to see – it’s an eye-deology! ‘If thine eye is clear …’ We do not have to know anything:
Primavera
Spring has come now
No one knows how
Antonio Machado
(Trans. GR)
the orchard path
disappearing
into blossom haze
Patricia Neubauer
(Four Seasons)
A time for every purpose … In today’s world there is an unremitting bombardment of sexual imagery, much of it unsolicited. In haiku and senryu we see sex as a normal healthy activity – but not something that is meant to be incessant:
deep in the ground
male and female organs too
are hibernating
Kakujirō
(Version: GR)
The profound wisdom of haiku is rooted in the rhythms, colours, sounds, sights, odours and moods of seasonal activity, singly and together. A time for every purpose under heaven. How swiftly haiku penetrates to the manifold mystery of time:
snow again –
how much my son’s footprint
have grown
Izumi Kaneko
(International Haiku Magazine ‘Troubadour’, Ginyu, No. 21, 2004)
Haiku can teach us a joyous – not a gloomily fatalistic – acceptance of the world as it is. Reading and writing haiku brings us ever closer to what a spring morning is, or an autumn evening, until we disappear into its mystery and become one with the rain, the sunshine, experiencing the nature of mornigness or nightness fully in themselves, with our invisible participation. For a split second, the world can belong to a hototogiso, a little mountain cuckoo:
making an echo
a hototogiso
sings as it pleases
Hisajo
It is as it is. It might also be more than it is. There’s a Japanese saying: ‘The bird that cries korokoro in the mountain rice-field I know to be a hototogiso – yet it may have been my father, it may have been my mother.’
Ari no mama, things as they are, no embellishments, no gilding of the lily, this is found in the folk-literature of all lands:
if nothing touches
the palm-leaves
they do not rustle
(African proverb)
Issa’s work, like that of all great haikuists, is imbued with ari no mama:
the snail
goes to sleep and wakes up
just as he is
(A Haiku Menagerie)
In things as they are we find real insight, real contentment and haiku is one of the most powerful tools available to all of us towards this end, which is not an end but an experience of no-beginning, no-end:
evening hailstones
lashing the branches -
their whiteness
Suju Takano
(Version: GR)
Things as they are. Just so! No striving. Becoming the invisible haiku witness, the whiteness, the silent participant. Wallace Stevens in Adagia declares, ‘The poet is the priest of the invisible.’
