St. Mark’s Place
Gurdjieff, Zen, and Meher Baba
Prayer for the Soul of a Mare
Aglow
Winter Moon
Winter Haibun
Water Spider
A Mosquito Net on Tobago
Italia: Quattrocento/ Ventecento
Reaching for the Rain
Sunset on Cadillac Mountain
The Temple of the Snail
Early Morning
The Circus
Curbstones
For My Wife on Our First Anniversary
Sunday Visits
A Note on the Haibun
The title of this collection alludes to the well-known seventeenth-century travel journal by Matsuo Bashō, Oku-no-hosomichi, which might be freely translated as Narrow Path to the Interior. In his old age Basho, who may be credited with establishing the haiku form, undertook a long journey to the remote regions of northern Japan, fully expecting to die before completing it. He did complete the journey, and his record of it has become a classic of world literature and an example, in its broadest sense, of haibun, autobiographical poetic prose accompanied by haiku.
American versions of the form began to appear in the late fifties with travel diaries by Gary Snyder and fiction by Jack Kerouac. In the late sixties work identified as haibun was published in American haiku journals. From the seventies through the nineties the typical form was a one-paragraph nature sketch that ended in a haiku. However, there has been also a wealth of experimentation in form, with book-length travel journals, many-sectioned autobiographical accounts, and experimental fiction, and in subject matter, with erotic self-revelations, social commentaries, historical re-creations, and the like. These directions have produced such deft contemporary practitioners of the form as Jim Kacian, Tom Lynch, and William M. Ramsey. But in many ways the title of this collection is justified in its depiction of the decidedly American way that this conservative Japanese form has been transformed to serve a poetic exploration of the unfathomable interior of the self, the emotional nature of love for another, the deep structure of aesthetic value in nonhuman nature, the implicative sense of dwelling in a particular place, the profound revelation of the unknown place, the hidden well-springs of our spiritual sense—all in the context of the so-called late twentieth-century postmodern condition. Although space and aesthetic constraints prevent the inclusion of many haibun discussed in the Introduction, all such creative overtures are invaluable at this stage of the development of this new American form. Similarly, many of the strong haibun reprinted in the anthology, though not discussed in the Introduction, speak for themselves. Readers interested in exploring haibun further should consult the bibliography. The authors of the haibun collected for this volume are to be congratulated for such eventful explorations and for forging an important addition to American literature.
Introduction
There is not great distance between Bashō’s banana hut and Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, nor Bashō’s Oku-no-hosomichi (Narrow Path to the Interior, 1694) and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and The Maine Woods (1864). In fact, modern versions of North American haibun, a form perfected in Basho’s classic work, allude to Thoreau and his example at Walden Pond more than to any other literary figure. In a variety of stylistic approaches, North American haibun is evolving toward the spiritual depth evoked by both the Japanese master and our own iconoclast naturalist.
Yet there is a presiding disjunction between the aesthetic premises underlying the literary writing, particularly of nature, in the long history of Eastern culture and the fairly short history of American literary writing from the Puritans to the present. One aspect of this disjunction is the manner in which each accounts for the relation of consciousness to external nature.
Broadly speaking, the poetics of the East reflects an ontological union of man’s consciousness with nature in which nature is of equal valence to man while the poetics of the West reflects an allegorical subsuming of nature in which man dominates nature. Eastern and Western concepts of subjectivity thus differ, the East accenting an emotional relation of the self to nature and the West accenting an intellectual relation to nature. In the East nature tends to dominate consciousness. In the West the mind tends to determine consciousness.1
This Eastern impetus toward universal subjectivity, which would elicit our poetic empathies for nature in its myriad identities, is subverted in America at the first by our inheritance of simple Christian allegory and later by the predominating mechanisms of materialism, science, and philosophic naturalism. In this condition American poetry, especially contemporary poetry, would reflect an inability to treat the ontological realities of nature with sympathy,2 However, there have been influential waves of the direct influence of Eastern aesthetics upon such American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. A literary form in which most of these writers could—in the broadest sense—be said to be writing is the Japanese haibun.
A simple definition of the form, taken from a contemporary Japanese-English dictionary, is a “terse prose-poem.”3 Yet this definition does not account for the eliding of the haibun into similar traditional Japanese forms like the kiko (“travel journal”) and the nikki (“diary”). This confluence is addressed in a definition of haibun in a scholarly encyclopedia of Japanese literature: “Haikai (related to renga composition and sometimes the seventeen-syllable opening verse of a renga) writing. Prose composition, usually with haikai stanzas, by a haikai poet. Normally with an autobiographical or theoretical interest, it could treat many kinds of experiences. When it treats a journey, it becomes a species of kiko”4