Writing and Film: Haiku

BY LEONARD PRIESTLEY, CANADA

About two years ago, I began to write haiku. It wasn't a calculated decision. I found myself attracted to haiku, and felt a need, almost like a physical hunger, to begin to create in that form. What attracted me, I think, was its purity and its down-to-earthness; it was a form in which the words seemed to dissolve into reality itself instead of forming a beautiful screen by which the reality could be represented and also concealed. In fact, of course, as in any poem the words of a haiku have their own texture and grace, and these contribute powerfully to the experience conveyed; but because of its extreme concision, in the immensity of what is not stated there is almost infinite room for the significance of its words to expand. In fact to read a haiku is like dropping a seed into damp soil: when the mind of the reader is quiet and receptive, the haiku germinates and grows into a living presence, sometimes quickly, sometimes only after several minutes of contemplation.

I've adopted the policy which I believe Shiki recommended, of writing my haiku only from life, never simply from the imagination. Certainly fine haiku can be written from the imagination, but an important aspect of haiku (perhaps an essential aspect) is the sense they convey of concrete reality, this reality here and now, in which the Power of God, the Dharmakaya of the Buddha, is immediately present; I distrust the ability of my imagination, as it tries to conjure up a particular moment of reality, to find that immediate Suchness, universal and unique. So I write my haiku like a photographer, trying to be awake to the eloquence of the forms and beings around me, trying to let them speak wordlessly through the words by which I present them.

The four greatest masters of the haiku were Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki. I feel that my closest affinity is to Buson, with his exceptional clarity and objectivity. His haiku are a kind of centre point from which I move out to explore further aspects of the form, and to which I constantly return. Like Buson, I am fascinated by the expressive power of the visible, and through my haiku I try to evoke pictures that will have something of the mysterious reticence of a painting. I admire Basho, especially for the grandeur of some of his greatest haiku. To bring out the resonant beauty of things which are apparently trivial is no doubt the special genius of haiku; but I am fascinated by the way in which with a few words he can awaken us to the vast energies of the universe. Issa I am somewhat less comfortable with. His haiku are intensely personal, intensely emotional, and of course both light and moving. I am impressed and touched by his humanity, at least as much as by Basho's; but a good many of his haiku belong to a different aesthetic world from mine. Yet there is an Issa in me too, as in all of us. Since these are the four generally acknowl-edged to be the greatest writers of haiku, I have read more of their haiku than anyone else's. But of course there are many others who have written fine haiku, and from whom I have learned or hope to learn. In fact two of my favourite haiku are by one of the less well known writers, Gyodai (or Gyotai).

What I look for in haiku is that opening of awareness in which the precise, distinctive flavour of a particular moment expands in all its richness and universality. Some-times this release of flavour is brought about by the juxtaposition of two things or events which are akin, either by similarity or by op-position; the two then illuminate and strengthen each other, blend-ing with one another while becoming more intensely themselves, like the mutually reflecting jewels in Indra's net. Sometimes it results from the symbolic power of the images, through which the familiar, unrecognized character of our own existence enters more deeply into our consciousness, so that we feel the world in that moment of our experience to be permeated with transience, death and eternity. Sometimes it arises mysteriously from what seem to be the most ordinary elements, which in their combination, and through the quiet harmony of the sounds of the words, have become transformed into a presence of in-comprehensible beauty and significance.

The sounds of the words are important. The haiku in Japanese is a strict form, though not always strictly adhered to. It consists of seventeen syllables, divided into units (or lines) of five, seven and five. The obvious course when writing haiku in English is to write them with the same number and distribution of syllables. But when we do this, the result often seems wordy by comparison with the Japanese; English haiku written in this way tend to be too long. Moreover, the huge variation in length among syllables in English produces a kind of movement in the lines which is not remotely like the smooth, equable flow of the Japanese. Many years ago it struck me that part of the problem is that even the notion of a syllable is not really the same for the Japanese as it is for us. A Japanese haiku is supposed to consist of seventeen syllables; but perfectly strict haiku in Japanese often consist of what we would interpret as fewer than the prescribed number of syllables. An example: Chisoku wrote,

tombo¯no
kao wa o¯-kata
medama kana

the dragonfly's
face is mostly
eyeball.

(Japanese from H.G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku, p. 184.)

We naturally count three syllables in the first line of the Japanese, five in the second, and five in the third, for a total of thirteen syllables. But the Japanese will break the syllables up as follows:

to-m-bo-o no
ka-o wa o-o-ka-ta
me-da-ma ka-na

So the haiku is in fact perfectly regular. But since in English we hear "tom", "bo¯", "kao" and "o¯" as single syllables, for us the verse is quantitative, with these syllables twice the length of the rest. Now quantitative verse is possible in English, though not common ex-cept in nursery rhymes, so when I was thinking about this problem, I tried writing a quantitative haiku, and that experimental haiku became the basis, more than twenty-five years later, for the kind of haiku in English which I've been writing for the past few seasons. Here is that early haiku, written around 1970: still beneath Buddha's photograph a dead fly (The photograph was a photograph of the great statue of the Buddha at Kamakura.)

In this haiku, "still", "-neath", "-dha's", "-graph", "dead" and "fly" are all long (or function as long); the rest are short. If we use "—" to represent a long syllable and " ^ '" to represent a short syllable, the rhythmic pattern can be expressed as follows:
– ^ – / ^ – ^ ^ – / ^ – –

Although this haiku has only eleven syllables, when we count each long syllable as equal to two of the short ones, its eleven syllables are equivalent to the seventeen short syllables which the form requires.

I've found that when I write quantitative haiku, the movement of the verse is more like that of the Japanese, and since English tends to use fewer syllables and more long syllables than Japanese to express the same ideas, my English haiku are roughly comparable to the Japanese in compactness. But the two languages are very different, and English haiku, however one han-dles them, are incorrigibly English. That's not really a shortcoming, of course; English has its own strengths, its own Suchness, which it offers to the writer of haiku in ex-change for those of Japanese. And fine poetry can certainly be written in adopted forms: we have only to think of the splendours of classical Latin verse, almost all of it written in forms borrowed from the Greeks. This tiny, almost impossibly compressed poetic form reveals, through the demands it imposes upon the writer, new possibilities in the sonorities and images of the English language.

Writing haiku is a training in the technique of handling the form and its characteristic rhythms; as with any poem, one has to learn to be aware of the patterns and apparent movements of the sound and to be open to the possiblities they offer for aesthetic integration. It's also a training in a certain kind of thought, a thought which works with the immediate suggestiveness of im-ages rather than through concepts and logical connections. It's a training in the judgement which is able to select the two or three essential and decisively expressive elements of an event or scene. But above all, it's a training in vision, in perception: the mind becomes a kind of lens through which the living substance of our experience becomes focussed as a pure and concentrated presence. Both the creation and the enjoyment of haiku thus involve a gradual refinement and deepening of our awareness.

Finally, here are a few haiku which I particularly like. First, one by Basho:

even the wild
boars blown together
the fall storm

Are the wild boars running before the storm, or are they actually bowled over by the force of the wind? The power of the storm is expressed in its mastery of these fierce animals, but they, with their speed and roughness, are themselves embodiments of the harshness of the storm.

Next, a haiku by Buson:

not even one
leaf moves awesome
the summer grove

In the stillness of the grove, we feel the mysterious intensity of summer, when the sun's heat has reached its apex, and the life of the world of trees and growing things vibrates around us and within us. The grove is surely a sacred grove, numinous, filled with the presence of spirits and of God.

And now one by Gyodai:

falling leaves
fall pile up rain
beats on rain

Here there is all the quiet relentlessness of time, the weariness we feel in our instinctive struggle to oppose it, and our deep acceptance of the necessity of downfall and return. Leaves fall on the leaves that have already fallen; the rain strikes heartlessly, sadly, upon the rainwater on the leaves; our lives follow the lives of those who have gone before us. Here is the sorrow of our existence and its dark, luminous beauty, and the joy and comfort we find in the faithfulness of its evanescence.

Leonalr Priestly's HAIKU EXPERIENCE as well as his poetry appears here through the kind courtesy of Subud Toronto's publication, MEETING PLACE.

MEETING PLACE is regularly published online in PDF format and is available at Subudportal.org

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