A Comic RomanticismHumor and Religiousness in 17 th Century Japanese Poetics

written sometime in mid 1990s

Little flower -- but if I could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.

Tennyson

If stately passions in me burn,And one chance look to Thee should turn,I drink out of an humbler urn A lowlier pleasure;The homely sympathy that heedsThe common life our nature breeds;A wisdom fitted to the needs Of hearts at leisure.

Wordsworth, “To the Daisy (‘In youth’)”

Yúgao nohana de hana kamu musume kana

Among evening

blossomsthe shy young maiden is heard blowing her nose

Kobayashi Issa(1763-1827)

The joke in Issa’s poem of course is in the contrast of the

evocative blossoms and the very human act. For the Japanese,

the contrast would be contradiction and could hardly be wider.

Flowers and natural emblems of seasons have almost sacred

resonances and yúgao no hana is the most honored or poetic

flower of summer, while the act of blowing one’s nose in public

is an almost unforgivable faux pas, as serious as audibly

farting. Then there is a verbal pun: hana de means “among the

blossoms”, while hana kamu means “to blow one’s nose”. This

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double meaning (kakekotoba) for hana, rhythmically harmonized

together on the line, bridges a vast gap. This poem is hugely

funny (or shocking) to most Japanese. But for a sensitive

reader, Issa’s poem passes beyond crude humor, beyond simple

contrast into an aesthetic contradiction, and if successful,

beyond contradiction. Contradiction, humor, and synthesis

define the approach to enlightenment in Zen.

If Romanticism rises out of certain identifiable social,

economic, and political conditions, then there ought to be many

variants of “romanticism”, not only a variegated one across

Europe, but in different cultures at different moments in their

histories. I am not the first to notice the strong echoes of

“Romanticism” in the poetics of early Tokugawa Japan of the mid

to late seventeenth century, but no one has teased this out in

any detailed or systematic way. I can suggest a confluence of

four factors in Japan at this moment: first, a poetic tradition

both “affective” and “expressive”, rendered very serious and

elitist through its exclusive appropriation by the aristocracy.

This was countered by a culturally hegemonic Zen Buddhism.

Third, a poetics which became ever more weighted with the robes

and furred gowns of a role as religious texts. And fourth, a

popularizing (i.e. coarsening) of taste by a new and surging

bourgeois age. Their nexus in the seventeenth century produced

a poetry at once Romantic, serious, “religious”, yet knocked

about, self-subverted by humor, confused and largely

unsuccessful.

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“Affectivism” and “expressivism” I will pass over for this

talk and turn for a moment to the legacy of the Tao and

Confucianism, which came to Japan in a Zen Buddhism already

strongly resembling English Romanticism. This is seen in the

original four basic tenets of Zen:

1. Seeking revelation outside of scripture, rite, andritual (kyóge betsuden).2. Not trusting words or intellect (furyú monji).3. Looking directly into the heart of man (jikishi ninshin).4. Seeing into one’s nature as the route to revelation(kenshó jóbutsu).

The Japanese adapted it in ways even more Romantic, incomplete separation from European contact [see poems #s 2-4 onthe handout.] I have identified roughly twenty characteristicsor approaches where Japanese (Rinzai) Zen and Romanticismsuggest each other:

1. In a shared image of man within Nature.2. In a fondness for a life both reclusive and communal.3. In how they thought about the nature and spirit of

the Universe.4. In the idea of enlightenment as synthesis.5. In the state of satiety so necessary before the

plunge or ascent to satori, Keats’ Cave of Quietude,the stillness of the old pond before the splash ofBashó’s frog.

6. To approach eternal truths specifically anddoctrinally through the particular.

7. In images contrasting the transient and eternal.8. In the language of transcending the particular.9. In a language of things-in-themselves, the

irreducible fundamental essence of things. 10.In the faith in the feeling heart; “the holiness of

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the heart’s affections” says Keats.11. In the artistic or aesthetic act of faith in the idea

of Wordsworthian “wise passiveness” (taikyoku),willnessness, no interference from the intellect.

12. In the seemingly contradictory faith in the self-creative mind.

13. In the idea of inner moral justification.14. In the pure natural morality of the child.15. In the epiphany which is in the “Act”, without

thought.16. In momenti mori.17. In the moral aesthetics that finds virtue in the

imperfect, the fragment, in simplicity. 18. Likewise, in wabi , the cultivation of poverty ,

refined austerity, being consciously out of fashion,as Thoreau at Walden, Wordsworth in Dove Cottage,Bashó in his “Unreal Hermitage”.

19. In yugen, the sense of “cloudy impenetrability”, theBurkean sublime.

20. In the failure of language to represent theexperience.

“Paradox is the life of haiku”, R. H. Blyth tells us, andit certainly is of Romanticism. Buddhism has always expressedestrangement from the eternal, separateness; Mádhyamika(“Middle Philosophy”) of Maháyána Buddhism stresses theabsurdity even of relation, wherein things exist, by observing(Hume-like) the absurdity of causation itself. The deepest ofRomantic angst is faced in the fundamental doctrines ofBuddha’s teaching. The response, however, is a whimsical grin,not the gnashing of teeth. By contrast, despite all of thesepoints of convergence, you could trek the lone and level sandsof Romanticism for many a career without so much as the mirageof a joke.

Prior to Byron’s “anti-Romanticism”, English Romanticismnever found in itself the self-effacement of Zen (even this

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remained a social statement with worldly object and focus andfar from Zen). Romantic paradox retired into furrow-broweddialectic, rarely knowing that “convulsive inclination tolaughter about the mouth” that Hazlitt (though no one else)claims to have detected in Wordsworth. “Contradiction”, thoughtreated with po-faced seriousness, was not extended byColeridge into the truly serious issues of spirituality andfundamental truth, remaining rather in creative psychology:

in the balance or reconciliation of opposite ordiscordant qualities; of sameness, withdifference; of the general, with the concrete;the idea with the image; the individual, withthe representative; the sense of novelty andfreshness, with old and familiar objects; amore than usual state of emotion with more thanusual order.

(Biographia Literaria, XIV)

For Bashó, dialectic began in the serious fundamental andspiritual nature of things, but never was dour: “every truthhas a kind of untruth that draws us by its veryabsurdity . . . its self-contradictory nature”. All thingshave within themselves the seeds of their own contradiction,and thus of their own elevation. Zen employed humor as achief means of self-effacement quieting the ego into “wisepassiveness” which never spilled over into the chest-thumpinginflatable Germanic “self”.

The third factor, sacerdotal poetics, is perhaps the mostfascinating, because most strange to a Westerner. [There is,however, no time for it here.] As the Japanese coalesced intoa nation and power centralized, poetry (waka) becamemonopolized by the court and aristocracy. Delicacy of feelingand precision of expression easily slides into artifice andHeian court poetry (eighth to the twelfth centuries) becamealmost exclusively social, public recitation with a strong

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emphasis placed one recondite conceits, technical skill,specific effects, and performance. Out of waka, in reactionto its calcification, came renga, linked poetry, an irreverent(mushin) revolution away from stilted and costive formalism.This became a familiar Japanese dialectic: a nationalcharacter and (Zen) religion tending to humor and unseriousself-effacement pulling against a national character and(Confucian) religion tending to deference to higher or priorauthority. The worship function of Japanese poetry and theconformist pressures of the social ethic turned renga itselfformal, class and rule-bound, and serious (ushin), which thennecessitated the birth of haikai in the sixteenth century toparody it.

The technical rules (shikimoku) governing imagery andstructure set by waka and later by renga in its “serious” stylewere intricate, mostly sacrosanct, and highly esoteric.Regulations applied to thousands of identified words andhundreds of possible relations between them. Each reference,bit it a specific flower, insect, bird, or the moon itself,resonated with a certain amount of power, which must beorchestrated for the harmonious flow of the verse. Theunderlying rhythms and ultimate references of the images wereseasonal, and the progress of the seasons is a jo-ha-kyúdramatic text scripted by the gods. Shintó pantheism pervadesall, and its symbolic language must be revered. In thissense, poetry itself serves religion, is devotional text, andthe intricate Procrustean canon that is the waka and renga ofmedieval aristocratic poetry shows it in cabalistic service.

William LaFleur bases his look into “Buddhism and theliterary arts of Japan” on the assumption that “the medievalperiod of Japan is best viewed in terms of a strong conflation ofthe religious and literary dimensions of human experience”.Literature, especially poetry, is the nexus of religion, art,and ethics, or “religion as art”, forming what Joseph Kitagawacalls “the central core of Japanese piety”. To be acceptedfully as a great and serious national poet, a poet needed an

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“induction into the mysteries” of Japanese poetic compositionby apprenticeship with the current poetic “high priest”. Aswith Confucian texts and scholarship during this period,poetic knowledge was “transmitted mainly as secrettraditions”, defended “jealously” by the ruling families, whowould ensure “passing them only to their eldest sons. . . .”Of course, this training was highly esoteric. It included“spending months memorizing the secret traditions of how topronounce the names of the successive emperors and the reign-names (nengó)” and studying the traditions surrounding thatmost revered early Heian waka collection, the Kokinshú (ca.920), which set the template for Japanese poetry for amillennium. For some, this was all a very heady honor; forothers, especially in a liberal climate, this is fertile soilfor parody and revolt. Certainly it is far from the exotericspirit of Zen.

Nor was it a ”religion” to appeal to the new moneyedclasses. The rise of the genryoku society is the fourth factorof this age.. When this lowest of all social orders, themerchants, began to rise into a literate middle class, withthe money to shape culture, they appropriated the shogunate’srituals and expressions of power and authority in Zen culture(e.g. populist and melodramatic Kabuki and jóruri forms likebunraku, puppet theatre, rose up against Nó). Poetry becamefrivolous. Maekuzuke was linked verse reduced to lightamusements, academic exercise, and intellectual one-upmanship.Zappai and later senryú were comic turns and parodies on theestablished poetic themes and conceits. In renga, thebourgeois revolt was called haikai-ka, or “haikai change”, wherethe formal symbolisms and conceits of renga are turned on theirhead.

Tanka, the five-line, thirty-one syllable stanza (at onceindependent and linked) was the form of renga most popular forcenturies. With the rise of a commercial middle class haikai(meaning “light”, “unserious”, “free”) appeared, playingagainst many of the rules of renga while keeping the tanka form.

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A renga or haikai sequence (called haikai renga), opened with ahokku. Each poet’s contribution in a renga required thesubmission of his contribution into the discipline of linkingin complex but original ways to the lines preceding. A hokku,however, had no previous lines, and as it had theresponsibility of providing the germ and propulsion for therenga sequence, it needed a strong degree of autonomy. Fromthe first, hokku showed an internal unity, and soon they beganto stand on their own, their severe brevity congenial to thatuniquely Japanese value of suggestiveness crossed withdiscipline. Collections entirely of hokku appeared withBashó, either as thirty-six stanza kasen or one hundred-stanzahaykuin. Individual poems in this form, the haikai no hokku,eventually were called haiku.

Some early haikai would not challenge the sacerdotal functionof poetry, so typically remaining timid and vapid. (SeeTeitoku’s poems #s 15 and 16); others (the Danrin school) threwoff all restraints and created an “amoral” poetic “pop”culture. Yet among the sons of the samurai made redundant(rónin) by the misfortunes of peace and prosperity was oneyoung poet at once more challenging and more respectful of thesacredness of Japanese verse. Matsuo Bashó (1644-94) rescuedhaikai from both extremes, and suddenly, depths opened beneaththe most seemingly banal observation:

Michnobe nomukuge wa uma ni kuwarekeri

The Rose of Sharonalong the side of the road eaten by my horse

Bashó

The slightly comic scene floats gently over the poet’ssudden moment of recognition and regret. In a sublime momentof aesthetic revelation, the imagination of the poet helddiscourse with the flower, the pure whiteness of the mukuge asan aesthetic expression of the eternal mind. In a sense this

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moment of communication with the eye of the poet is thefulfillment of the flower’s purpose, thus the melancholy momentof its destruction. Bashó affirms the special revelatorynature of the poet’s eye, the spirituality that that eyereceives from the aesthetics of Nature, and the greater depthof feeling transience gives both to beauty and to experience.Then comes the “haikai change” of the last line, the horse bothas an agent of Necessity for “a beauty that must die”, and as aZen horse deflating most irreverently the poet’s ownpretensions to insight. This is a haikai which seeks in itselfthe vision and then becomes the object of its own parody. Thisdeflating Zen self-effacement rescues poetry from theoverbearing subjective Ego of Romanticism.

“Haikai change” typically would pivot on one word or effect,called a haigon, planted specifically to stretch or break theconvention of what is permissible in verse (see “hana kamu” inIssa’s haikai on the first page). This word would suffice todrop the poem into the world of ordinary people and daily life.Or the humor would rise from a general spirit of irreverence,especially to a revered (i.e. “sacred”) image. The timidity ofthe early haikai revolution of Teitoku only served ironically tocheapen and trivialize the holiness or sublime delicacy hefeared to challenge. In this way, he was as destructive in itsown terms as the Danrin poets he opposed, both satisfied withthe titillation of a haigon word to surprise or hint atirreverence. In general, then, though early haikai abounds withevocations and allegories to Buddhism and Confucianism, yet aspiritual depth was lost. To recover what was lost,ironically, the Bashó poets furthered the haikai revolution awayfrom renga; loosening the spirit of play simultaneously theydeepened the penetration.

With a poetic revolution already going on all around him,Bashó’s great achievement was largely reactionary in that mostRomantic way: to reclaim poetry for religion. Bashó and hisdisciples found themselves torn first by the traditionalschizophrenia of Japanese poetics: poetry as social communal

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art and as the isolate spirituality of a yamabushi-like(itinerant priest) poet. As Bashó said of himself, he“resembles a priest but is soiled by the dirt of this world;and he resembles a layman but has a shaven head”. Both as ayamabushi and as a rónin consciously Bashó humbled himself.Further, the Bashó poets were torn by the pressures of thegenryoku age: the demands of a bourgeois reading public eagerfor the cachet of sharing in the aristocratic indulgence ofrefined poetry, against their own sensitive revulsion at thesuperficiality resulting from the bourgeois appropriation ofpoetry. They fled the taste of the age, hoping to find their“fit audience, but few” and “chirp their woodnotes wild”.Thus, in one of the most Romantic of moves, Japanese poetrysets itself up in opposition, just as Romanticism was to. Thisis evidence and consequence of an urban culture.

Haikai achieved its effect of striking contrast andcontradiction several ways. First, contradiction can beachieved within the context and against the expectations of thegenre itself. Bashó’s Sarumino (“The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat”,1691) is a series composed entirely of hokku (the seventeenth-syllable, three-line, beginning stanzas of a sequence).Writing a sequence composed entirely of hokku is itselfrevolutionary and a haikai change in poetics. Further, theexpectations of the internal structure may be subverted. Forexample, in Sarumino, Bashó and his fellow collaborators shiftthe flower and moon stanzas from their accustomed places andreverse the established and sacrosanct ranking of the seasons.

Another way is to play loosely with the relation betweenstanzas. Bashó is the greatest of Japanese poets because hemost successfully married yúgen (deep sublimity) with the lowthemes and attitudes of haikai. In the kasen, Ichinaka wa(“Throughout the Town”) [see the poem # 19], the opening hokku(the first three lines below) was granted to Bonchó (d. 1714),as the usual courtesy to the guest of honor of the poetryevening. He opens with a “haikai change” of proper spiritualseriousness. The image here is of the Buddhist and Christian

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Romantic (but distinctly not Japanese Zen) dualism of theearthly and the spiritual. The moon above the smelly cityevokes the Buddhist lotus blossom, a spiritual allegory for theenlightened soul rising out of the muck of life into perfectnirvana:

Ichinaka wamono no nioi ya natsu no tsuki

Throughout the townon a the sea of smelly things floats the summer moon

Bonchó

As the host, Bashó is given the second (the waki) stanza,to complete the full tanka by adding two lines of sevensyllables as linked poetry requires. In the good-naturedfellowship that marked these poetic sessions, he leapt at theopportunity to puncture Bonchó’s air of sublimity. Yet, onlyif he was comfortable that the spirituality was assured wouldhe drop us into the haikai change of the sweaty laments from thestifling streets:

Ichinaka wamono no nioi ya natsu no tsukiatsushi atsushi tokado kado no koe

Throughout the townabove the sea of smelly

things there’s the summer moonhow hot it is, how hot it iscomes the cry from every

house

Bashó

Suddenly the poem is about the fate of man in thissuffering world aspiring futilely toward the distant, eternal,coolness of enlightenment. Smile at it we may, but the imageis of the inescapable “hell” of this stifling, sweating life,and the unattainable which mocks it. Brilliantly, Bashó hasdeepened the insight, reversed the focus, overturned theoptimism into pessimism, while lightening the tone.

Bashó did not abandon the tendency of poetics toward images

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and allusions [see poem # 24]: Harusane yaTamino no shima no dojóuri

In the light spring rainsthoughts of Tamino Island with this loach peddler

Bashó

This poem resonates only when it is understood that TaminoIsland would represent to poetically literate Japanese thesublime themes of the monsoon rains and cranes, rather thanspring rains and loaches; that the summer rains are morebeautiful and honored than the spring rains and cranes thanloaches; that Tamino Island evokes not only the sublimity ofthe boundless sea, but the emotional sublimities that thesummer rains and cranes plumb in every Japanese, while theloach is a small creek fish, evocative of the dismal dry heatof late summer, and the peddler an equally paltry thing, thelowest possible social class, evocative of despised moneymakingand dusty roads; and that loaches themselves are a food foronly the lowest classes. Then we are expected to notice thatbecause it takes a leap of great imagination successfully tolink such extreme apparent opposites, the haikai change heremakes an especially strong statement about imagination and thegulf of separateness. that is, we, all of us, aspire to TaminoIsland, but cannot in this life rise above loach-eatingpeddlers. In this way, the Bashó poetic was to use the way thehaikai change lowered the subject matter -- from crickets tolice, from cranes to sparrows, from carp to loaches, fromsamurai to peddlers -- as a means to greater sublimity. Bashówas no popularizer; his intention in employing “lower” forms,subject matter, and language was not a revolution to openpoetry to the newly literate middle classes. Typically, herequires not only a basic familiarity with familiar poeticallegories, but often will assume an almost Gnostic knowledge,

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overtly exclusory of the newly educated classes.Bashó knew well enough that he was developing a new sort of

poetic, even while remaining more true to the traditionalsensibilities than even the renga and tanka traditionalists ofhis own day. He offered three elements in image, subject, andlanguage for his sort of haikai. First, “Its feeling can becalled loneliness”. It “plays with refined dishes but contentsitself with humble fare”. This applies first to images andsubject. The new poets would keep and use the sacred images(such as the seasonal references, kigo, like cherry blossoms andthe bush warbler for spring, fireworks for summer, the moon andthe Milky Way for autumn, and other conventions). They wouldretain the recondite allusions to classic Japanese and Chineseliterature, as the common coinage of their education, as theway of giving poetry depth, and as defense against whatColeridge contemptuously called the “Reading Public”. Yet, allsubjects now are game for treatment with the spirit of okashimi:the odd, the low, the humorous. For a traditionally-minded manlike Bashó, estrangement from tradition would well suggest“loneliness”.

Meigetsu wotottekurero to nakuko kana

Oh get it for methat big pretty autumn moon the child pleads crying

Issa

Uguisu yamochi ni fun suru en no saki

The first spring warblershits on the rice cake at the end of the porch

Bashó

Each poet treats a revered image with severe irreverence:

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the moon and the Shinto offering to the gods of New Year ricecakes. There is a long Zen tradition in this, arising from itsattitude of total skepticism. Bashó here reaches back to theslightly mad Zen mystic Ikkyú Sójun (1394-1481):

Ikkyú on a ferry was challenged by a yamabushi: “In theZen sect, you don’t have miracles as we in the esotericschools do.” “On the contrary,” Ikkyú replied, “InZen, everyday acts are miracles.” “Is that so,” theyamabushi sneered, “Can you top this?” Afterperforming an elaborate ritual, the yamabushi conjuredup a fiery image of Fudó Myó-ó, a fierce protectordeity, in the bow of the boat. Ikkyú promptlyurinated on the vision and extinguished it.

Ikkyú, however, was making a Zen challenge to the earlierBuddhisms. Bashó, and Issa following him, are turning thisskepticism back on unfelt religious practice itself, includingZen. And irreverence for Bashó is no longer enough. Bashó’spoem also is celebratory in this harbinger of spring (the bushwarbler, whose migratory progress north was occasion forfestivals and still is reported by the weather forecasters) andits very early appearance at the new year (the Chinese New Yearin February). So reminding us not only of the fatuousness ofthe devotions of men, not only of the justified contempt ofnature for the facile hopes of men, but Bashó takes us beyondthese to an affirmation of Nature as ultimately benign whetheror not we deserve it.

In both poems, not only the irreverence shown to the moon,but the colloquial language counts as a haikai change. So,second, “[i]ts language can be called aesthetic madness.Language resides in untruth and ought to comport with truth.It is difficult to reside in truth and sport with untruth”.Here is the Romantic insistence on the falsity and inadequacyof language. As with the other elements of Bashó’s aesthetic

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doctrine, in its language, haikai plays with the tension betweenthe elevation expected of linked verse and the low subjects ittreats. As Bashó asserts: “The profit of haikai lies in makingvulgar speech right”. We find here Wordsworth’s own seeking ofthe language and subjects of men. The poet Shikó (1665-1731)said “Haikai broadens art to that which is below average”.

Kumo nan tone o nani to naku Aki no kaze

Spider! By the way,With what voice will youchirp? An autumn wind

Bashó

The chirper is of course the cricket, a poetic image inJapan of late summer. The language of the first two lines isstrongly colloquial, thus subverting the somber evocative powerof the image of the autumn wind. Also, substituting a spiderfor a cricket is a bit of Danrin humor, the spider not carryingany sinister suggestions as in Western literature. However,the chirping of the cricket is considered melancholy for itseeks its mate while waiting for death. The spider also waits,and in the autumn wind also waits for death. Unlike thecricket, however, perceived also as musical and gregarious, thespider is silent and solitary. Its lack of a voice, itsestrangement from cheer makes it marginal to society, a thingalone and rejected. By calling attention to the spider’s lackof voice, the poet gives it a voice of far deeper profunditythan the melancholy cheer of the cricket. This voice speaks intones of the most deeply resonant of seasons in Japaneseaesthetics; in its isolation and doom, the spider’s voice isthe wind of autumn. Ueda (42) sees the poet himself here andclearly in Romantic isolation.

Third, contrast between social class and the actions orexpectations of social classes work as well in haikai change.“Its total effect can be called elegance” of subject (fúga nomichi, “the way of elegance”). It “lives in figured silks and

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embroidered brocades but does not forget a person clad in wovenstraw”. These two elements are again of Wordsworth andColeridge, claiming for the common man a place in the mostelevated of poetic styles. However, doctrinally, at least, thesocial / poetic nexus for haikai is from the opposite direction;true to its Zen purpose, haikai “does not elevate a humbleperson to heights . . . [but puts] an exalted person in a lowplace”.

Toshi no yo yahijichi o kikeba kotemakura

Busy New Year’s evethey notice great grandfather sleeping on his arm

Chówa

It would be a mistake to see in this attitude of loweringor disrespect to authority any direct social or politicalstatement for the Bashó poets, as in the Romantics. Socialprotest, even conscious social comment directly betrayed theZen notion of the uses of poetry as guide to enlightenment.Yet Bashó could not help but let fly an occasional pointed barbat the ukiyo values he saw as so corrupting (see the poem #s 26& 27 in the handout).

What concerned Bashó most was exactly what concernedWordsworth and Coleridge: to reach down to hunger-bittenimages, not real girls, with the idea of deepening poetics, notpeasants. For Bashó, this meant a marriage of religioushumility and poetic aesthetic spirituality expressed as sabi(“rust”), which affirmed that there is not beauty but wherebeauty is not: the aged cup, the old, the decayed. The poetTon’a (fourteenth century) defined sabi in saying “It is onlyafter the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and themother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller, that a scroll looksbeautiful.” The Heian court poets, like the eighteenth-centuryEuropean aristocracy, had begun a tradition of admiring the“noble” peasant, the virtuous rustic. The Bashó poets, likethe Romantics, were hardly less patronizing in using rustic

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people to find a sabi “elegance” in their rough and imperfectsimplicity.

Like a true Romantic, he would delight equally at a peasantor a plantain. Writing about the bashó (plantain) tree in hisgarden given by his friends (and from which he took his nom deplume), he loves it for its sabi uselessness and awkwardness,most of all when damaged:

The leaves of the Bashó tree are large enough tocover a harp. When they are wind-broken, they remindme of the injured tail of a phoenix, and when they aretorn, they remind me of a green fan ripped by the wind.The tree does bear flowers, but unlike other flowers,there is nothing gay about them. The big trunk of thetree is untouched by the axe, for it is utterly uselessas building wood. I love the tree, however, for itsvery uselessness . . . I sit underneath it, and enjoythe wind and rain that blow against it.

The tree, of course, is his own self-image, a humilityprojecting itself. Sabi is more often a quality of manmadethings, but it links these through a natural empathy to theasymmetries of Nature, asymmetries in form, concept, orbeauties. It recalls Wordsworth’s “Animal Tranquility andDecay”.

Bashó’s celebrated step into the sabi aesthetic was not hisfinal, nor most profound poetic stage, but it is one theJapanese can grasp with greatest readiness and empathy. It haslittle to do with humor at first, but using “haikai change”, thesurprising contrast, he toyed with the Wordsworthian sublime.

Ara umi yaSado ni yokotau Ama no gawa

Wildly raging seaover Sado Isle quiet spreads the galaxy

Bashó

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The poet again defines himself in that specifically Romanticway of exile and marginality. Sado Island is the place ofexile for political undesirable, and thus a site of many amournful tale. Then there is the placement of the isle on thecusp between the transient and temporal and the eternalchangeless, the mortal / divine schism in man and the poet’sown curse, the Byronic inadequacy of our state to ourconceptions”. Coleridge comes to mind in an 1811 “Fragment”:“As when the new or full Moon urges / The high, large, long,unbreaking surges / Of the Pacific main.” (The very notion ofa fragment is itself both highly Romantic and very much of sabi,most notably in the sabi aesthetic of the visual and sculpturalarts, such as Japanese painting, sumi-e, and tea ceremonypottery).

Sabi, however, is best grasped in the mundane, not thesublime:

Asatsuyu niyogorete suzushi uri no doro

In the morning dewdirty, coolly refreshing, a muddy melon.

There is a “haikai change” in the sharp contrast in the twoqualities of this melon: the diamond-like dew, always a clean,white, and “rising” thing” in Japanese imagery, and the mud.But this contrast is only the slap of the palms together of theworshipper at the shrine, to awaken the gods. Alerted now bythis haikai slap, we are ready for the prayer that is in the sabiof this poem. The uri, is a very humble vegetable, cheap andcommonplace, yet it becomes the classic Buddhist metaphor forhumankind aspiring for transcendence; as the lotus blossom, itshows itself able to rise from the mud and acquirespirituality. The refreshing melon refers back to the coolmoon above the sweaty streets in Ichinaka wa. We remain inseparateness valued for itself. There is yet one more leap to

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take out of mere deep understanding of the dichotomy. There ishere step beyond kóan, the paradoxical questions (impenetrablecatechisms) asked by a Zen master to push the supplicant pastlogic and intellect a contrast of images. Kóan need not seekmore than words on the page evoking images and thejuxtaposition of images for its tools, content making anontological lesson through language, within the logic oflanguage. Poetry of revelation, however, took its epistemologyseriously.

In poetry, Zen encouraged extreme epistemologicaldirectness. Even beyond humor, words can reach for “the thingitself”. In the mundane, not through it as in Romanticism, dowe experience the eternal. In Zen, “what is is -- which is thefinal act of experience”. Direct language is a consequence ofthe Zen insistence on the holiness of direct experience, but(shófú) the full application of it to poetry is a haikai revoltwhich is Bashó’s own.

Nomi shiramiuma no nyó suru makuramoto

There are fleas and liceand now my horse is pissing outside my window

Bashó

We can ask, “is it poetry?”, but to do so is to miss thepoint. Byron might respond rhetorically, rather, “is it notthe thing itself?” This is direct experience for its own sake;it is idle to search for meaning or reference. If you did seekreference, Bashó here reaches back to the Ikkyú story quotedabove. The impossibility of mere language to convey directexperience, either explain it or be it, largely vitiates theusefulness of language for transcendence. This forces the Zenpoet toward ever more brevity and clarity. Above all,asceticism is to be experienced, not spoken about, and whenBashó sleeps among fleas, lice, and pissing horses, it is not

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with self-pity, but to use these because suffering itself isthe truth of life on earth.

Shófú points us to late or “anti”-Romantic experientialism.“Do not, I beg you”, says Goethe, “look for anything behindphenomena. They themselves are their own lesson”. Chanoyu,the Tea Ceremony, zazen, meditation, and poetry are valuableonly if they immerse us in the felt moment of experience,thoughtless experience. Achieving this is revelation. For theancient priest, Tennó Dógo (AD 748-807): “If you want to see,see right at once. When you begin to think, you miss thepoint”. From another post-Romantic, Ruskin, comes: “Thegreatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to seesomething, and tell what it saw in a plain way. . . . To seeclearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion -- all in one . . .[it is to be] a Seer.” This is transparent, truly passivesight, not through the prisms of a restless, Protestant, Ego.

Yet there is a caution here; simple declarative statementis not enough. When Bashó asked his friend and disciple,Kyorai, for a poem in the true “haikai spirit”, Kyorai wrotethe following:

Yúsuzumisenki okoshite kaerikeri

The evening coolnessMy lumbago acted up So I returned home

Bashó just laughed and said “this is not what I meant”.Ueda (160-61) observes that though it is direct experience,objective, and agreeably light in tone, it fails for lack ofdepth of feeling and poetic (and religious) resonances. Thisis the quality, important to Bashó, of yojó, “suggestivemeanings”.

Paradoxically, in loosening haikai, the seventeenth-centuryBashó poets had rescued it from the trivial as Teitoku couldnot. If their haikai ignored Teitoku’s rules and parodied renga,finding popularity with the new bourgeoisie, still they wrotepoetry that endures only because they continued to honor the

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traditional Japanese spirituality and its images. Their poetrywas as suggestive as the Japanese tradition demanded, but theywaded deep into direct experience. With a refocus on directexperience in a manner closest to the Japanese heart whilerefreshing the tradition of poetry as meditative, religioustext, theirs was a “reformation”, keeping poetry focused on itspurpose as prayer while opening prayer to all. The parallelswith English Romanticism encompass much of this rebornspirituality. Their haikai endures only because they honored,even deepened, traditional Japanese spirituality and itsimages, exorcising mere gamesmanship. Japanese poetry inexploiting the ambiguousness and suggestiveness of the Japaneselanguage had long and variously served both as zazen (the basicZen meditation) and as kóan. This was being trivialized. Withthe Bashó “reformation”, rather than subvert spirituality, or,rather, through subverting it, humor now helped to refresh thehaikai. It was humor which could avoid the quarrelsome satireor assumptions of superiority which characterized English“humor” of the Romantic age, not least in Byron. The imagesmay be as cutting as they are comic and Bashó certainly was asdisgusted with the secular, bourgeois values of his age as everWordsworth or Shelley, but in his radicalism was gently andselflessly evoked, without being any less deliberate. Therewas nothing of vituperation or of countering intolerance withcounter-intolerance. The Romantics sought to dismantleestablished religious structures, only to clear the ground forthe cultivation of a new more natural religiousness. It toowas extra-linguistic, an affair of the heart, but the naturalsabi spirituality of Bashó became a focused priestly agenttranslating the experience into the experienced. Through theacceptance of separateness, absurdity, in humor, the Bashóreformation revived the power of poetry as self-abnegatingprayer.

Enlightenment denied, Beppo is Byron’s leap back into thisworld. Romanticism found its way to humor only by denyingitself. Byron played with all the Wordsworthian images and

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conceits through Childe Harold (Book IV); he allowed Shelley toinfluence him to such poems as “Prometheus”; and captured theessence of the Romantic failure of transcendence in the phrase“the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions”, and thefailed marriages of human and divine in such as DeformedTransformed, Heaven and Earth, and Cain. Beppo immediately followsChilde Harold IV precisely because there was no where else to go.Childe Harold IV had taken him as far down the Wordsworthian roadas he would care to go (speculative metaphysics were not inhim) as Manfred closed the book for him on Romantic angst.Wordsworth had faced the bottomless chasm of separatenessalready, as in his admiration for life’s fierce spirit dancingon the surface of blind rolling Necessity in “Stray Pleasures”,as Keats had found himself asking the revealing question, “Whydid I laugh to-night?” Yet, both shied back from the brink;only Byron made the leap beyond faith. Beppo is Romanticismrejoining the world of people, society, and politics andrediscovering humor. This is exactly what the wanderer does inBeppo, the Corsair come home, Manfred come down the mountainfor dinner. Having accepted the cost of ever knowing thegaiety to be self-deception, knowing that only the blind canhope, Byron returns to the living. It was coming down from thefatuous heights of Cain, that he fell into the pragmatism ofBeppo, Don Juan, and acceptance of the absurdity of life, thefutility of hope, and the rediscovery of the possibility ofhumor.

The sabi and shófú aesthetic does not represent Bashó’sfinal, most mature poetic. From the act of subversion, therecognition of futility, hopelessness, vulnerability, throughhumor, there yet was a leap for Bashó as well. It was a leapof acceptance of separateness like Byron’s, of involvementwith the world, but it was as well one out of the Cave ofQuietude to enlightenment.

Furuike yakawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto The old pond

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a frog jumps in the water’s sound

This was the difference, for the frog breaks two kinds ofstillness. Breaking the still surface of the old pond of hisdeep sabi awareness of separateness in this world, came the“plop” of enlightenment and then the creak of old limbs gettingup from beneath the fig tree to return to the world.

In his final years Bashó had grown oppressed with renownand friends, felt badgered and unproductive, and worst of all,suffered poetic blockage. His breakthrough came almost as theact of a bodhisattva returning from the enlightenment of thatfrog leap. He returned to earth with a new light style andoutlook, touched by a wry smile, a lighter tone, taking theaesthetic into a new delicacy and clarity, a transparencycalled karumi, looking at a sandy bottom of a shallow river.This move is especially in one of his last haikai collections,Zoku Sarumino (“The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat Continued”) [Look atpoem # 48]:

Ika-uri noKoe magirawashi hototogisu The squid-seller’s

cryIs indistinguishable From the cuckoo’s song

Unlike the English cuckoo, the hototoguisu is a beautiful,lyrical singer, taking the place of the nightingale in Japanesepoetic images. Thus the comic aural contrast is strong (as isa suggestion of social criticism of the cacophony of city lifeand the loss of touch with Nature and the natural soul of thepeople), but the poet also tells us not to value too highly thesublime nor too lowly the mundane, that all distinctions areunreal.

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