Leatrice Lifshitz’s “Far From Home” is a postmodern meditation on the grounding of the self in history and the space-time coordinates of perceived experience. Its evident theme is gender and exploration. The context of the work is a trip west that mirrors pioneer women’s treks across America. The tone is set in this interior monologue in a consideration of what essentially is the reality of space and time:
Space. A woman in space. Finally.
traveling west—
ail those wide open spaces
fenced in
Does that mean that space is gone? Used up? Well, if it isn’t space, it’s space coupled with time. Changed into time. The time to cross a bridge. Back and forth.51
The narrator begins by alluding to the first female astronaut and to the vanishing of the American frontier. This leads her to the conception of a new frontier, a dialectic between history and present-tense locality. This dialectic is expressed later in a visit to a cemetery and an abandoned mine. The narrator is trying to make sense of the dialectic but only becomes further disoriented: She is, as she says, “Wandering outside the chain of life.”52 She is now beyond even history and the concrete moment. The concluding haiku conclusively evokes this final state:
far from home—
one crow or another
waking me53
This “rhythm of sameness,” as she calls it, this postmodern malaise, breaks down the singularity of experience at the heart of haiku and haibun as much as it breaks down the traditionally reliable continuity of history. Most English-language travel haibun, however, takes a confident stance in the basic coordinates of space and time, including historical time, by ranging from the light travelogue to what might be termed spiritual literature.
Fewer than a dozen chapbook-length travel haibun have been published. The majority of these, and the few unpublished chapbook-length travel haibun that I am familiar with, aspire to that latter kind of literature. Perhaps the earliest published modern chapbook-length haibun is Robert Spiess’s Five Caribbean Haibun (1972), a collection of haibun and accompanying drawings, one of which was published in Travel magazine. The work is in the “lighter” mode of conveying felt experience, and its exotic locations resonate with the vibrancy and narrative interest inherent in the given locales, such as the description of a fisherman scrubbing a moray eel and an octopus, his dinner, or an encounter with poisonous cave spiders. Some of the prose and haiku is a bit too light in tone and focus to reach the contemplative depth we expect in great literature. But the frequent exceptions capture the undeniable liveliness of the moment: a little girl lifting her dress to reveal her bottom in order to taunt her mother, Spiess haggling over some item at the bustling public market:
Saturday market:
a live hen in the scale tray
-my tomatoes next54
or the pathos of a recognizable emotion, for example, leaving a loved spot:
Last day at the cove
-a little snowman of sand
left facing the sea55
This last haiku is movingly supported by a charming haiga of a sand snowman with a tiny shadow staring out to an enormous expanse of sea, and reflects the appealing light tone found throughout the work.
Although a number of collections of travel haiku, except for the lack of accompanying prose narrative description, resemble the best classical Japanese travel haibun in their subtlety and depth, we perhaps have only one travel haibun that approaches the mood and tone of such classical work. This volume is Tom Lynch’s Rain Drips from the Trees: Haibun along the trans-Canadian Highway (1992). This collection consists of one long haibun describing a hitchhiking trip from Pennsylvania into Ontario Province and west across Canada to British Columbia and four short haibun on hikes into the mountains and forests of Oregon and Arizona. The title piece, like Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior, includes interesting encounters with people met along the way as well as meditative responses to cityscapes, landscapes, wild nature, and the process of travelling itself. An entrance into Lynch’s haibun occurs in “Autumn at the Valley’s Edge,” a short haibun on Mt. Pisgah, Oregon. The second-last paragraph ends: “It is our instinct to be remote. ”56 Lynch is voicing the axiom that allows him to breach the world of, particularly, nonhuman subjectivities. Nature sets up barriers to such breaches that we must intuitively respect, notwithstanding the modern world’s reinforcement, even encouragement, of our objectifying nonhuman nature as mere things to appropriate. Lynch concretizes his axiom of natural separation and his tacit protectiveness of that separation in the conclusion to this haibun:
I notice, far down the hill, that the deer have stepped out of the trees and stand silently in a clearing.
far down the slope
a few deer feed—between us
rain begins to fall57
Despite his conviction of the gulf between individual subjectivities, Lynch is continually registering the very mystery of how things exist as such in a given moment and whether such subjectivities exist separately from his observation of them. He unravels this problem dramatically in “Climbing Kachina Peaks,” a narrative of his trip to these Arizona mountains that are sacred to the Hopi Native Americans. One of the first haiku voices the problem:
car suddenly here,
suddenly gone—
dark mountain silence58
On descending the mountain he has climbed, toward the end of his trip, he restates the problem in terms of nonhuman nature:
suddenly here
grasshopper on my knee
suddenly gone59
Lynch finally resolves the problem in his conclusion to the haibun:
Thinking of a shower, and hot supper, and how to write this, I hike through forest I don’t notice. Now, after shower, and supper, and writing this, I think of forest I missed.
cold moonlight
on kachina peaks—
if I step outside, if I don’t60
The peaks, like everything else in nature, have their own intrinsic existences, regardless of what human consciousness might hold or not hold on the matter.
Yet in Lynch’s haibun, and in nature itself, there seems a protective distance separating human consciousness from the true natures of nonhuman existences. It is as if our own subjectivity fosters such protectiveness in nonhuman subjectivities. In any event, the main theme of his long title haibun appears to be the impossibility of breaching in some final way this protectiveness. However, nature itself seems at times to elicit communion with itself, as in this early haiku:
almost asleep
a breeze wakes me—
northern lights61
But this communion throughout the haibun is never complete, perhaps underscoring an indefinite quality of mystery inherent in intra-subjective exchanges with nonhuman nature. In such exchanges our normal orientation toward normal dimensional coordinates and psychologically felt experience is undermined. Thus the strongest sections of the work record descriptive moments of physical distance, like the northern lights of this haiku or the loon diving in the distance in another;62 transitional moments of going to sleep and waking up, as in this haiku; or eerie moments in which animals are awake while the author sleeps63 such as:
dream under stars—
an