Which of us maps the other, World?
Birch-leaves, trembling as I watch them.25
The enigmatic nature of this synthesis of inner and outer reality that is held in Zen-like stillness while yet being presidingly sensuous is movingly exhibited in one of the haiku following this passage:
amid the wild rice
chewing
the bittern’s stillness26
But for all the monumental depth of its exploration of such consciousness, Ribs of Dragonfly is still explorative, if sentimental, fiction, and, unlike the haiku in Desolation Angels and almost all American haibun, its appended haiku for the most part relate to the general mood of the work as a whole and not to the specific section to which they are appended.
Another ambitious chapbook-length haibun is Vincent Tripi’s Haiku Pond: A trace of the trail... and Thoreau (1987). The work, all of whose profits go to the Thoreau Society, represents an act of spiritual communion with Thoreau and his vision as expressed in Walden. The work consists of Tripi’s journal entries and haiku relating to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s spirit, and present-tense nature from the spring of 1984 to the autumn of 1985. Thus the work adheres to Thoreau’s temporal structure for Walden, although Tripi’s journal entries are not in chronological order. This material is interspersed with quotations from Thoreau and sumi-like paintings. Tripi conceives of each page as producing a haiku-like aesthetic whole. As he notes in his Introduction: “Each page becomes a ‘picture’—the pond ‘infinity,’ the symbols ‘life,’ and the poems and art ‘the spark’ that makes them one.”27 The connection of the given page to the “haiku moment” is then made explicit: “The ‘pictures’ when settled are themselves moment-to-moment awakenings of mind... a passing of water in the night.’”28
The communion with Thoreau is introduced in the first entry of the first of the four sections of Haiku Pond. On this page Tripi creates his imagined invitation to communion by quoting from Thoreau’s Journal: “I should be pleased to meet a man in the woods. I wish he were encountered like wild caribous and moose.”29 Tripi responds as that man with an entry from his own journal: “Solitude was the face in whose smile... my eyes began to find themselves again.”30 The source of that solitude, the experiment recorded in Walden, is illustrated on the next page with a drawing of Walden Pond. The following page continues this dialogue with an entry from Thoreau on solitude, followed by a haiku and journal entry by Tripi, which consider Thoreau’s and Tripi’s own relation to Walden Pond as a focus for meditation and higher consciousness in nature.
This consciousness is firmly established for Tripi in the second section. One page from this section inserts this haiku between quotations from Thoreau’s Journal on the visual clarity of nature at sunset and on guarding one’s spiritual purity:
White moon,
Snowman’s shadow
Gone.31
Tripi, like the snowman without a shadow, has attained a purity of spirit that is selflessly united with nature. The haiku is followed by Tripi’s journal entry, which is a haibun, entitled “The Way of Spruce,” that exhibits this purity of consciousness that fuses itself completely with external nature:
The way of spruce begins to glisten. Sleeper in things, the green-wet woodsmoke disappears.
It is enough to fill myself with clouds. A speckled alder, a broken willow...from the bottom.
Woodsmoke—
Dusk
In the grass-spider’s web.32
In the second paragraph of the haibun Tripi’s consciousness seems to become Walden Pond itself, reflecting the clouds and containing the sunken trees. The concluding haiku intensifies the haibun’s concern with manifesting a clarity of consciousness that will selflessly reflect the objective realities of nature in their cloud-like continuous becomings by objectively focusing on such realities in a moment at dusk. That concern had been already introduced, almost as an epigraph, in Thoreau’s journal entry at the top of the same page: at sunset, he notes, “ponds are white and distinct.”33 The radical complexity and compressed nature of the reverberations built up among the images on this page are typical of Haiku Pond, which, as a work, provides the most experimental use of images thus far in English-language haibun.
The moodiness and sabi-like feeling of the concluding haiku are set within the context of actual meditation practice two pages later in the haibun “Scarecrow.” This haibun records the objective sense perceptions of the meditator’s heightened awareness of silence. It also evokes the central tenet of Buddhism, the inevitable dissolution of human consciousness and all things in death, through the symbolic image of wind: “Wind-within. It sits with me...the scarecrow on the hill. ”34 This passage is followed by a drawing of Tripi in the lotus meditation position. Tripi himself thus becomes the human scarecrow who in as objective a way as possible registers the fact of his mortality as a facet of reality. This haibun’s concluding haiku imposes this fact, however gloomy, upon Tripi’s communion with Thoreau, whose Journal is alluded to in its first line:
Not his Journal
But the winter wind
Is sad.35
This sabi-like reckoning with mortality, which is, as Tripi notes in this haiku, alien to the Transcendentalist spirit and Thoreau’s work, makes Tripi’s Haiku Pond all the more compelling as a spiritual journal that is perhaps understood and colored as much by a postmodern despair as it is by a sabi-like aesthetic.
But a universal insight into nature that is ecstatic rather than moody, and thus precisely in the spirit of Thoreau, occurs in the last section of Haiku Pond. This section begins with the following quote from Thoreau: “Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.”36 It is followed by Tripi’s journal entry on silence. The silence here is intended to be the same kind of Zennian objectivity before all experience that we have already discussed. The next page confirms this intent with a drawing of a splash which, as we learn in the next page’s haiku, wittily alludes to Bashō’s most famous haiku:
This morning from a frog,
I hear all I need to hear—
About the pond!37
So in silence, a state of enlightened consciousness, Tripi commingles Bashō’s frog pond with Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He highlights further this intent by having Thoreau speak like a haiku poet: “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature...”38 If we substitute “objective revelation” for “God,” we have brought Thoreau and Basho together. And then immediately Tripi has the last word by joyfully linking, in a subtle manner, his cabin, Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, and, possibly, Basho’s hut, to the tone and structure of Basho’s frog haiku:
Cabin door
POP!
In July.39
Thus Tripi has united, in this haiku and Haiku Pond as a whole, the spiritual visions of Bashō and Thoreau, the Eastern communion with nature that is echoed in American Transcendentalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of that movement, noticed a “fundamental unity” between man and nature. Here is the American paradigm for the idea of universal subjectivity: all of reality, including nonhuman nature, has its own inherent reality with its own right to existence. Man may not, at his whim, subjugate that seemingly mindless otherness to his own will. In fact, as Emerson would suggest, there is an inherent beneficent relation between man’s consciousness and those non-human subjectivities through which man’s inner life is enriched. These are the subjectivities