Walden by Haiku

Notes

[227] Notes 1 In speaking of the tendencies of ecocriticism and nature writing, of course I generalize somewhat. In Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, Scott Slovic has suggested that nature writing does not in fact actually shift attention from the perceiver to the natural world. Rather, it reflects the consciousness of the perceiver, and what the writer seeks is not so much contact with the actual world as psychological awareness. And of course not all nature writing privileges solitude. For more on the social dimension of both nature writing and the haiku tradition, see my comments regarding “The Village.” 2 The association of Zen with haiku is a contested idea these days. Blyth’s assumption of the link has been long-lasting, though, as is evident by such works as Robert Aitken’s A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen (1978) and Bruce Ross’s collection Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (1993). Ross’s introduction stresses that “union with . . . nature” as “derived from Taoism , Buddhism, and Shintoism” is “at the heart of the haiku tradition” (xii). But recently the idea that haiku is inherently an expression of Zen principles has been challenged, perhaps most notably in George Swede’s “Haiku in English in North America,” Charles Trumbull’s “The American Haiku Movement,” and Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (1998). Swede and Trumbull point out that the American perception of a Zen dimension to haiku owes much to the influence of the Beats (foremost among them, as haiku practitioners at least, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder), who learned about the form primarily via Blyth’s work. As is evident by my own commentary—and my references to Blyth—I’m in the camp that finds the perceived connection between Zen thought and haiku aesthetics fruitful and worth exploring further, though I would not insist on it as a necessary component of haiku practice. Lee Gurga, while noting that “the aesthetic ideals of haiku [228] are not uniquely associated with Zen” but are applicable to “any spiritual tradition,” nonetheless notes that it is “useful and instructive to revisit Blyth’s Zen-based aesthetic principles” (132, 128). 3 In a project that anticipates my tracing of haiku principles and language in the work of an American author, see Michael Dylan Welch’s “The Haiku Sensibilities of E. E. Cummings.” As I do with Thoreau, Welch, in addition to suggesting that haiku aesthetic ideas can be productively applied to an analysis of Cummings’s poems, repackages some of Cummings’s words in haiku form. 4 Earlier haiku texts in English referred to “onji” as the sound units of haiku, but onji is an archaic term no longer in use in Japan. For clarification on issues of “onji,” “on,” and morae, see Richard Gilbert’s essay “Stalking the Wild Onji” in his study Poems of Consciousness : Contemporary Japanese and English-Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2008). 5 Though it’s not directly relevant to my analysis of haiku as rheomode, perhaps an example of how Bohm works with verbs to develop his concept of the rheomode might be helpful. Thoreau’s line “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth,” originally from “A Natural History of Massachusetts” and quoted here in the “Conclusion,” will serve as a useful demonstration. As it happens, the nouns fact and truth are two of the words Bohm chooses to analyze. His technique involves finding the essential action underlying an utterance and then working from there. The root of the word fact, he says, refers to “that which has been made (. . . as in manufacture).” So to “factate” is to make or do something, and to call attention to that making is to “refactate,” and if it fits with the context it is “refactant.” So essentially what we see as true is “something that ‘works.’” But we always test what works, or what is deemed factual, and we of course are most interested in facts that seem constant. The word constant comes “from the Latin root ‘constare’ (‘stare’ meaning ‘to stand’ and ‘con’ meaning ‘together’).” So a fact remains constant if it is able “to ‘stand up’ to being put to the test.” “Truth” comes from the Latin verus (as in “veracity”). To see truth is to “verrate”; to call [229] attention to what...