The Art of Disappearing 6, March 2009

World Haiku Review, Volume 7, Issue 1, March 2009

The Art of Disappearing Part 6

By Gabriel Rosenstock

(Serialised Instalments from his Book)

Haiku and the exemplary being … Pure haiku stands out as something entirely at odds with the artistic trends of the past one hundred years or so. As Anna Bonshek (ibid.) points out: ‘In this age of consumerism, the love of art is self-love in disguise … today’s artist can no longer be taken as an exemplary human being since his art, which is more an expression of his own personal concerns than that of human universals, is essentially narcissistic …’ Truly, the last thing on such an artist’s mind is to disappear! A self-centred haikuist ( a contradiction in terms, surely) contributes not a droplet to the pool of awakened consciousness.

Gentle art of disappearing … We have already established (or opined) that the true haiku moment is a sacred moment. We could have used many near-synonyms instead of ‘disappearing’, such as ‘melting away’ in the haiku moment. The distinguished philosopher Nishida uses ‘merging’: ‘As long as we set up a subjective self in opposition to the objective world and try to unify that world by means of it, then no matter how great this self becomes, the unity will remain inescapably relative. An absolute unity is only gained by discarding the subjective unity and merging with an objective unity.’ (An Enquiry into the Good, Trans. Masao Abe & Christopher Ives, Yale University Press, 1990).

Merging, vanishing, melting away, disappearing … Listen to the inspired words of Jan van Ruysbroeck: ‘Spiritual inebriation is this; that a man receives more sensible joy and sweetness than his heart can either contain or desire. Spiritual inebriation brings forth many strange gestures in men. It makes some sing and praise God because of their fullness of joy, and some weep with great tears because of their sweetness of heart. It makes one restless in all his limbs, so that he must run and jump and dance; and so excites another that he must gesticulate and clap his hands. Another cries out with a loud voice, and so shows forth the plenitude he feels within; another must be silent and melt away …’ Beautiful words, worth savouring. They were not intended to endorse haiku, of course not. Nor did Angelus Silesius favour animism, pantheism or the like … had he been told about Zen or Shinto he might well have recoiled in horror, at first. To be quoted liberally in the same book alongside such culturally disparate characters as Ikkyu and Crowfoot would appear to him as some monstrous abomination more than likely. And yet, the true haikuist (whether a religious believer or not) can relate to the couplets of the so-called cherubinical wanderer in ways that he may never have suspected:

In Spirit senses are One and the same. True.

Who sees God, tastes, feels, smells and hears Him too

Ruysbroeck speaks of ‘sweetness of heart’. Can there be a ‘melting away’ without this precious virtue? True haiku cultivates sweetness of heart. Sweetness of heart! It is a concept which doesn’t have much coinage today. No one can read a few hundred of the 20,000 or so haiku by Issa without experiencing and absorbing his charming sensitivity and sweetness of heart.

When the heart learns to live with this sensitivity, it discovers that each day, any time of the year, reveals a beauty all of its own:

autumn coming to an end

frogs beginning

to settle underground

Shogetsu

A hitherto invisible aura manifests itself:

a snail is crawling

in a glimmer of light

entirely its own

Chiyoda Kuzuhiko

(Four Seasons)

Luminosity enters our world:

the morning sun

brightly

rising above frosty woods

Dakotsu

(Version: GR)

howl of a coyote –

red cactus flowers open

to the morning sun

Roberta Stewart

(Four Seasons)

In your own way,

however small, paint.

In your own way,

however small, make a haiku.

In your own way, however small,

sing a song, dance a little.

Celebrate and you will find that

the next moment brings more silence.

Osho

(Yoga, the Alpha and the Omega, Vo. IV)

Nights come alive as well as mornings …

is it the night

or trees

that creep through the woods?

Seán Mac Mathúna

morning snow –

where to throw away

the tea leaves?

Chiyo--ni

(Version: GR)

Indoors as well as outdoors …

all silent –

host, guest

white chrysanthemum

Ryo-ta

(Version: Seán Mac Mathúna)

There is a pleasurable eeriness in the Mac Mathúna and in the Ryo-ta haiku, a certain unexpectedness. Their originality forces us to think, or react, originally with, as it were, beginner’s mind.

[End of Part Six]