From the Editor's Desk

WHR August 2020

Make my Life Glad with Nothing

Rohini Gupta

Haiku arrived in my life, quietly, as is its nature, on a winter evening a long time ago. I remember that it was a Friday and a cool sea breeze was blowing. I finished my writing and I was taking the weekend off. I browsed the web looking for poems to read - the internet equivalent of mindlessly surfing TV channels.

I began as a poet but had not been writing poetry for a while. I kept in touch by attending poetry readings and I had gone to one earlier in the week. I knew many of the poets and it was a pleasant evening, in a bookshop, surrounded by books and coffee and samosas.

But I did not enjoy the poetry. None of it moved me. It was too full of protest, satire and modern dissonance. All of those can make good poems if they spring from the depth of emotion, but without the feeling they are no more than an intellectual pastime, word games or a rant.

So, I was looking for poetry which could move me and I found it where I least expected. At that point, I had heard of haiku but had no idea what it was. However, while flipping internet pages, I came upon a poem by Matsuo Basho. Found it, lost it and went back searching for it. It was so short that my eye had slipped over it at first.

I do not remember whose translation I was reading then but I remember clearly how deeply the poem spoke to me.

autumn moonlight

These two words in the first line, and my mind dipped into the stillness of a vast open night, full of stars, clouds, night birds and the wind. Those two words took me to windy outdoors, far from my room. I forgot my chaotic, problematic life and my mind filled with bright autumn leaves and silver moonlight.

So, then, I was ready for a peaceful night scene. Lotus lakes or lovers under the moon perhaps. A scene of quiet beauty. The next line was a jolt.

a worm silently

What? From the grandeur of the night I had taken a dizzying plunge to the tiniest of creatures in the second line. It was surprising and unexpected. A worm under the moon. Now I was intrigued. What was the worm doing? What was the poet saying by zooming in to so minute a creature so suddenly?

drills through a chestnut

Another shock. I sat back. What had just hit me? The quiet night had ended in violence - the assault of the worm on the chestnut. And I was moved and shaken and had fallen in love. Three lines, a mere fistful of words and the poem could speak of life and desperation, of the fragile and the vast, with a hint of death and a whiff of beauty, an entire story in a single breath of words.

I found one more verse, with the same deceptive simplicity.

petals tremble

on the yellow mountain rose

thunder of the waterfall

Matsuo Basho

Again that stunning journey but this time in reverse. At first, the image of the lovely yellow petals trembling. What was shaking them? The obvious answer would be the wind but surprise is the heart of haiku. From that tiny flower, the poem rises to the backdrop of the mighty waterfall whose powerful vigour shakes everything, the petals - and me, too.

I think what caught me that night was the skillful juxtaposition of the vast and the tiny, the moon flooded night and the worm, the mighty waterfall and that delicate yellow petal, the moon which will be there a thousand years from now and the petal which is already crumpling and falling. Life both vast and minuscule, both transient and forever.

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

E E Cummings

In ancient Sanskrit thinking, language has three levels. The first is learned in school, words and grammar. Beginners start here with the arrangement and rearrangement of words to form a barely acceptable verse which is sometimes painful to read. Desk ku, words wrestled by force into form, an empty shell without a heart.

The second is thought and concept, the thinking of the educated mind, taught in higher education and found in books and media, in essays, reports, critiques and rants. The formidable intellect in full play here, but poetry needs more.

It needs the third level which transcends both and it is the domain of poets and seers. This is pashyanti, seeing, direct perception. It is the depth beyond words, speaking straight to the heart, lifting above the bare letters into the realm of universal experience and touching the timeless. It soars above the word games of most poetry. These poems will touch the reader's heart even after a few hundred years, just as the Basho poem spoke to me in the language beyond language, even though it came from another age and a distant land.

Where roads are made I lose my way.

In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.

The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.

And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

Rabindranath Tagore

As an editor, I see many desk ku - the lazy haiku scribbled as an exercise, often to a prompt. Most of them are little more than the rattling of words. The empty pot, the old saying goes, makes the most noise.

Great poetry and great haiku needs more. Its power is revealed when the stillness meets the stillness. The poet's power, not only of words but of pashyanti, the language beyond words, meeting a reader who has slowed down enough to listen.

forgotten

the brittleness of the day

the words

Later, I read about Basho's life and I could relate deeply to it. He spent his entire life in the search of depth and meaning and found it in poetry. I am lucky enough to live in India, a country where that search is not extinct, where sanyasis, those who seek, still walk in the Himalayas, meditate on the show peaks, carry nothing but a spare robe and an old Sanskrit text. I have met many of them. My own great great uncle was one. He renounced the world and disappeared into the Himalayas to meditate in a cave. When he returned he meditated under a tree. They built an ashram around him, where today people come from all over the world. The search for meaning, for depth - in poetry or in meditation - that I understand.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

E E Cummings

You have to be silent to read a haiku, not the silence of the lips but the stillness of the mind. You can't read a haiku like the label on a can of beans or the ad on the bus stop as you wait for the light to turn. In today's fleeting, inattentive world it's too easy to overlook something so short, a mere scatter of seeds, sailing on the vast white of the page.

You have to slow down and stop for this profound encounter with a poem. You have to tuck away your every day worries and be receptive and open and let the haiku wash over you.

firefly moment

the poem flares

within

Perhaps the search is for that shift, that moment when you are taken out of yourself, when you lose yourself and plunge so deep that you disappear. I wanted that experience though I had no words for it in those days. I was looking for poetry still rooted in depths of the heart.

under the still leaf

litter of the water

a movement

Haiku, was for me, a happy surprise. This was no intellectual puzzle to be worked out like a maths problem. This was a form which spoke of karumi, lightness.

It meant something to me. There are many definitions of karumi but what drew me to it is exactly why I had taken a back step from poetry. It brought me back to the unending beauty of the simple, the quiet, the gentle, the voiceless, the deep and silent delight of things so small that they become vast. Not the heaviness of the intellect, not arguements and angry rants. Just that quiet moment which modern life teaches you not to notice - a flower petal shaking beside the waterfall. What can be gentler or more profound than that?

Make my life glad with nothing.

The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable

wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars

thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing

but my own depth of joy.

Rabindranath Tagore

A new journey started that night and it is still going on, the path lost in the distance but as wilderness green and brilliant with sunshine as ever.

poem interrupted

the wind blows me

a flower

Note –

the haiku without attribution are by the author.