Editorial, May 2008

WORLD HAIKU REVIEW Volume 6 Issue 3

EDITORIAL MAY 2008

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past,

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

(T. S. Eliot: FOUR QUARTETS - Burnt Norton)

EDITORIAL

Not ‘Here and Now’ but ‘Everywhere and Everywhen’

*

Did you know what you were talking about when you mentioned that something, for instance haiku, was in the ‘here and now’, especially ‘now’? Do you know it now? What about the occasions on which you heard or read somebody else mention the same. Did you really understand it, or did you just think you did? Did you not wonder, even fleetingly, if the speaker or author really knew it?

Of course there is no statistics to show how many people do and how many don’t. However, I would not be surprised if there were far more people than we think who were saying or hearing this particular expression and did not even think twice about it, let alone trying to unravel the true meaning of it.

It is ultimately a question about time and space, which is a vast and difficult area to get into. So, at least let us deal with only one of them here: time, even if in some philosophy, or in physics even, the two are but one. However, this is not a place for a philosophical discourse or a theory of physics.

Let us also confine ourselves to an area which is relatively narrow and familiar to us, even if the question covers the whole area of human life and beyond. And that area in this editorial is haiku.

If you are someone who would bother to read this editorial you must have said or heard at least once that haiku was in the NOW. If not, at least you must have said or heard at least once that haiku should be written in the present tense, or else, that Japanese haiku poems seem to be written in the present tense.

I have never once thought or said that haiku is in the now. Nor have I ever thought or remarked that haiku should be written in the present tense. However, I have heard and read many people say it, which has then been repeated almost parrot fashion by a countless number of others, so much so that the world sounds as if it is surrounded by the noise of this heavy traffic.

I have had pretty good idea about what they are trying to say or what they are meant to be talking about. However, I have always been left with some nagging feeling of suspended judgement (Greek, epoche) or lingering doubt. It is really none of my business but still it has troubled me, and troubled me a lot, because not only it is superficially wrong but also there is something in it which is not quite right in a fundamental sense.

I knew the main reasons (*see footnote) why the superficial end of the mistake has come about and I have mentioned them often. For me these reasons were as blatantly obvious as the mistake was blatantly superficial. Therefore, it is not worth looking at them here. The superficial end of the mistake has been caused simply by superficial thinkers. However, it has been the deeper and more fundamental end of the mistake that I have been puzzled and kept in the dark. This is the one worth investigating.

Thus I had been in this rather agonising sceptical and intellectual limbo for a very long time until I visited India. This strange country with strange mixture of everything strange seems to have all the deep and fundamental answers to all the deep and fundamental questions. Once one gets such an answer from India she ceases to be strange and the familiar world we have been accustomed to suddenly begins to look strange instead. This was my impression about India when many of my problems began to be solved by my visit there.

It all seems to have something to do with how we understand time. The best way to illustrate my point is to compare the following two questions: (1) What time is it now? (2) What is time?

The first question relates to Newtonian Time and it is the one we are most familiar with, or even the only notion of time we know and practice. The second question relates to a very different understanding of time which I call here ‘Indian Time’ for want of better words, or as a symbolic nickname, even if the proponents in the broadest sense include many other people including Immanuel Kant or Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

To mention my conclusion first, I have realised that what I understand by ‘Indian Time’ is akin to, or even perhaps identical with, what I now call the ‘Haiku Time’.

The ‘Indian Time’ is larger, wider and far more than the ‘Newtonian Time’. In its ultimate form, it transcends the ‘Newtonian Time’ which is a narrow, specific and practical concept of time most useful for science and technology, and such quantitative things as economics or history as a branch of science.

Without the ‘Newtonian Time’ we cannot celebrate our birthdays or coming of new seasons. Without it we cannot measure speed or predict the moment of sunrise. Without it economists will lose their jobs as they will no longer be able to talk about an annualised inflation rate or forecast the next five years’ economic growth, i.e. future tense. Without it we cannot let bygones be bygones or consign the dead people to history, i.e. past tense. But what we do not normally know is that we are at the same time trapped by, and prisoners of, the ‘Newtonian Time’. We cannot think of anything save within the framework, and to the dictate of it. In short, we are at the mercy of the ‘Newtonian Time’.

In most of the so-called developed countries mythology, legend, folklore, or even parables in holy books are all relegated to the past by most of their population. They do not think twice that events related in these stories are all things of the past. Not so in India. Or so it seems, to me at least. Vishnu is just as alive now as in the past. Dharma (sacred duty) is still a driving force for Indians. The Upanishads are still the backbone of their thought process. Their concept of the Universe has not changed from the time of the Vedas and beyond. Nothing, it seems, has changed in India while everything has been changing at the same time.

If I had heard in other countries what I heard in India from the lips of her people I would have had no alternative but to conclude instantly and categorically that they were fanatics, or religious fundamentalists or worse. Instead, I found myself instantly and categorically in tune with what the people in India had to say. Not only that but also I experienced an unexpected premonition or hope that many of the unresolved questions I have been asking myself since my childhood could find their answers at last in India. The question about time is one of them.

In India, it seems that past lives with present and future is part of the present. I go even further than that. My strong impression was that in India past, present and future seem to be the same thing, all rolled into one. The ‘Newtonian Time’ is no more than just a part of their vast concept of time and in here too the Indians have had a most complex, gigantic and sophisticated mathematical and quantitative system since the olden days.

It was St. Augustine who fixed the beginning of the universe to be 5000 BC, which has governed the Western concept of time ever since. In India, Brahma’s one day is equal to our 4,320,000,000 years. His day and night is double that. His whole life is equal to our 311,040,000,000,000 years. The interesting thing is that modern physics and cosmology are coming round to figures very close to these. For example, our own planet is about 4.6 billion years old.

The Indians think of time in terms of billions of years. We need not really worry about what happened before these billions of years because it is outside of daily human capability anyway. This vast scale of time also possesses the famous concept of the infinite cycle of births and deaths symbolised in the shape of chakra. It means that time is circular and not linear, a very important point in understanding the haiku time. The circular movement in cycles is symbolically called the wheel of time. And if one get liberated from this cycle, then nirvana, and a hope to reach moksha – a total and eternal freedom where time will have no beginning or end, or past, present or future! Here is the zenith of Indian thinking, art and poetry – THE INFINITY.

Even if we think of a fraction of the Indian concept of time, we can readily and clearly see for certain that there is nothing more absurd than to say ‘Haiku should be written in the present tense’. While the Indians are seeing birds, flowers, trees, the sun, the moon, the stars, rains and winds, rivers and seas, human forms and conducts, religious events and rituals, all in terms of billions of years, the dominant haiku trend teaches us to focus on ‘the haiku moment’.

Indian ideas, philosophy, religions, cosmology and the concept of time have seeped through the filter of Chinese civilisation to reach Japan where they have crystallised in various Japanese forms. One of them is haiku. India may not be the direct begetter of haiku but it has indirectly given Japan much nutrition to foster what has become haiku as we know it today. In this sense Japan is a student of Indian culture, which explains why the Japanese can instinctively understand what the Indians say and do.

In a sense, what I have been after is a long search for the lost time. I knew that the time was lost but I did not know what it was or how or what it meant. Now I am beginning to experience the regaining of the lost time about which I could only imagine but not feel. It was a long journey but it has begun to be worth it. Now everything has started to be clear.

When people were saying that haiku was in the ‘here and now’ and that therefore it should be written in the present tense, not only should it not have been said so for superficial reasons which are no longer worth debating, but also it should have meant on a much deeper level what it was not meant by those who mentioned it. It was actually pointing to something totally different, i.e. the ‘Haiku Time’.

Whether something is happening now and you have to capture that precious, intensive but evanescent split of a second of haiku moment to take the snapshot of something which is so profound that neither past nor future should intervene in its ecstatic experience and enlightenment, is neither here nor there. It is a fallacy, or else a wishful thinking at best. It probably has never existed.

When we are talking about ‘now’ in haiku we are not really talking about a point in time which we call present to the exclusion of past or future. It is a time which transcends such arbitrary distinction of the vast presence of time which is ‘everywhen’. The fact that there is no such English word as ‘everywhen’ is a case in point. ‘Everytime’ does not exist in English either, though ‘every time’ does but means something different.

Even the expression ‘all the time’ or ‘always’ or ‘at all times’ does not quite carry the same all pervasive feeling of time which transcends the level of qualifying different points of time, which is exactly what these phrases are doing. ‘Forever’ or ‘eternal’ has the closest feeling English is capable of offering to what I am describing by the ‘Indian Time’ or ‘Haiku Time’. However, even these seem to reflect wishful thinking rather than reality as can be seen in the expressions such as ‘love forever true’, ‘eternal life in heaven’, ‘eternal truths’, ‘time without end’. If a Christian is lucky enough to enter the kingdom of God he or she can also enjoy the ‘Haiku Time’, but unfortunately not in his/her lifetime. There will be no such luxury for atheists, agnostics or the damned.

So the only way to genuinely benefit from the ‘Haiku Time’ is to ‘believe in haiku’. This is not a play on word from the association of religious contemplation just mentioned. Nor is it an inane remark like typical Zen answers. What I mean is a belief in the ‘essence of haiku’. The ‘Haiku Time’ is an important part, but not all, of the haiku essence. It may have the appearance of ‘the present’ to non-Japanese haiku poets, especially those in the West trapped in the ‘Newtonian Time’, but they should not be fooled by it.

My instinct tells me that Indian haiku poets have known this all along because of their different concept about time. Therefore, when they were taught that haiku was in ‘the now’ they must have been thinking something different from that which the teachers tried to inculcate in them. Namely, the pupils (the Indians) knew better than the teachers. In fact there is no need to teach the Indians anything because they have known everything since the Rig Veda and beyond.

One of my learned Indian friends told me that there were two Indian words for time, namely ‘samay’ and ‘kaal’ . 'Samay', he said, was more or less like the English word 'time'. However, that seems to be only part of the story because the other term 'kaal', which according to him is untranslatable into English, has a much wider and comprehensive meaning. It refers more to the motion of time and describes the 'flow of time as a circle, or more aptly, like a river that flows from silent mountain glaciers to roaring oceans and then comes back to land, to the mountain peaks in the shape, for example, of silently drifting snowflakes, or to the plains as rain, or as simply drifting clouds over the desert.' This remark seems to underpin my perception of the 'Indian Time' and to identify the essence of haiku more eloquently than most.

Another learned Indian friend has illuminated my dark road to understanding the 'Indian Time'. It is all either in the absolute terms or relative terms. Time only exists in the relative sense and in the mind at that because the ideas of time (and space) are no more than a conceptual invention of the mind. However, it does not exist in the absolute sense. My friend says, 'In reality all there is is only "ISNESS" and in this framework even ideas such as billions of years are outdated...Words such as eternal, infinite or forever are...the limited mind's feeble way of expressing that which is beyond it's conception.' How can a feeble mind cease to be feeble and reach out to the absolute? My friend presents a well-known saying: Mind or knowledge has to end for the true self-understanding to begin.

[END]

Notes: The superficial reasons for disproving the superficial end of the popular misconception that haiku is in ‘the now’ and therefore should be written in the present tense:

a) The greatest culprits are those pioneers who introduced haiku to outside Japan and equated haiku with Zen, or at least exaggerated the excessive influence of the latter on the former, and their ‘disciples’ who swallowed the pioneers’ teachings lock, stock and barrel. The teaching that haiku was Zen led directly to the belief that haiku was in ‘the here and now’ and also automatically to the arbitrary convention that haiku should be written in the present tense, and to multitude of other misconceptions including the famous ‘haiku moment’.

The problem is that even if Zen was used merely as something of an analogy in order to explain this strange thing called haiku the analogy was carried too far and also the explanation was half-baked. Many got an easy, ready-made and too-good-to-be-true but too-good-to-miss answer to the question of what haiku was and ended up understanding neither haiku nor Zen. If haiku had been explained not as a strange, mysterious, exoteric, profound and difficult-to-comprehend thing, symbolised by the Zen analogy, but as what it simply is, namely, familiar, plain, specific, concrete, mundane and easy-to-understand form of poetry, none of these embelishment, theorising and mystification would have occurred and we would all have been enjoying genuine haiku like men in a communal bath, women without make-up or good food without tomato ketchup. In that case, of course haiku would not have flourished so much as it has, but even if small in number people would have been enjoying better haiku.

Among these pioneers, probably R. H. Blyth and Harold G. Henderson stand accused above else. Their otherwise positive contribution to the increased understanding of haiku is enormous and cannot be appreciated enough. This particular teaching, therefore, is a matter for regret. As their positive influence was so huge, no one noticed or bothered this fatal flaw. It is largely overlooked even today.

However, as I have said elsewhere, it is not so much their fault as that of their immediate followers and of hundreds and thousands of worshipers of today. Pioneers are bound to make some mistakes. Otherwise, they could not possibly be pioneers. It is therefore the job of their followers to correct their mistake. Moreover, all too often it is the followers who can misunderstand the pioneers or make mistakes of their own regardless of the pioneers’ real teachings.

Blyth was interested in so many things, especially in the area of literature, but Zen can be said to be his consuming interest. He was a zealot. It is therefore understandable that he should see almost everything through the lenses of Zen. Haiku was no exception. No, haiku was especially what Blyth associated with Zen.

Christianity has heavily influenced Western art and literature. Have we, then, ever heard that Wordsworth was Christianity and Christianity was Wordsworth?

The other point which tends to escape people’s attention is that when he talked about haiku or Zen or anything else in his haiku-related books he was doing so virtually not as an academic but as somebody who was most probably much more important for us poets than a mere scholar. Most significantly, he was in these books a devout Zen student and a poet in spirit. Also, there, he was an inspired and amused intellectual of the ilk of such figures as Soseki Natsume, Oscar Wilde or even Colin Wilson. These people are fiercely independent-minded and tend to put things in almost intentionally unconventional ways. This is partly why Blyth’s writings have a lot of contradictions which he worshiped.

Thus he was that Blyth has not been taken seriously by orthodox academicians. His books may show his erudition and flare but hardly academic discipline or respect for the rules, integrity and objectivity of proper academic papers. Blyth may have been an academic in English literature but he was no academic in haiku or Zen. He was more than that. That is why he could very easily be misunderstood.

b) The other reason for superficial end of the misconception about haiku being in ‘the now’ is the bulk of English (and a few other European languages) translations of Japanese haiku, which tend to be written in the present tense. This is partly because the translators, who also lack academic discipline, were so much brain-washed by the pioneering fathers that they believed in presenting English versions in the present tense. It is also because they, despite being translators of all people, lacked in the understanding of the finer areas of the Japanese language where certain expressions sound as if they were talking about the present but in fact they are referring to the past. Beside, certain haiku expressions in Japanese are done without past tense grammatically even if they are talking about the past. This is because the Japanese grammar is different from that of English but more fundamentally because of the brevity of haiku which demands certain grammatical factors to be abandoned. This is called something like ‘the past in meaning’, or ‘implied past’. The Japanese have little difficulty to detect it.

c) The third reason is in a sense related to the second reason above. It is a question of bungo in Japanese. Bungo is old Japanese which was superseded by kohgo as modern Japanese during the early Meiji Era (1868-1911). However, it died hard and was used widely up until the end of WWII, especially in official writings. This bungo really is the haiku language, though haiku was allowed to be written also in kohgo in the post-war Japan. Most of the traditional haiku are still written in bungo or in bungo-style (i.e. not accurate bungo but permissible) as not every Japanese can use bungo correctly nowadays. Non-Japanese would not normally make head or tail about bungo unless they are academics specialising in Japanese studies. This bungo is capable of expressing past tense in few syllables, which kohgo is not. However, these subtleties are all lost in translation which makes everything in the present tense. Japanese is a delicate language but if it is handled by rough hands with rough minds in rough translations all that delicacy is gone.

d) The fourth reason is what in Japanese grammar called taigen-dome. It is a device where sentences are finished with a noun or the noun form of a verb. (This has been adapted in the American-led haiku trend whereby nouns are abundantly used to complete lines, plunk, plunk and plunk.) It was invented to achieve a crisp and emphatic ending as well as saving the number of words used in writing. This was a God-sent for haiku poets who could not afford many words and whose preoccupations importantly included how to economise with the number of words. Now if taigen-dome is used in haiku, i.e. verbs or predicates are not used, one cannot readily tell whether the haiku is about something of the past or of the present. Many hasty readers and translators simply took it to mean the present tense.