Alive in the Skin of a River’s Flow

The haiku form, long after having come to the West from Japan, continues to reflect and refract its Zen-inflected origins. Now, its radically open form of responding to the world must encounter the ravages of planetary climate crisis. How will it meet this inhospitable reality?

That original Japanese poetic impulse moves freely through the world in a natural sense of relaxed emptiness, inhabiting impermanence without opinion or resistance, the poet disappearing into what is being observed. Haiku deliver a sentient world undivided from the experience of it, the sense of self lying low. If an “I” should break the surface, it’s in wryly self-aware and low-key form—firmly ordinary and decidedly un-self-important.

Living so close to just what is happening means opinions about it need not apply; instead, a plain kind of wonder—an engaged not-knowing—can come into play.

Any fully inhabited moment is timeless, lived close to the eternal. And yet—to tell it in haiku is to locate its resonance in a particular time and place, giving the reader access to something that lights up the wholeness of the world, through one of its infinite brief dreams. “Dream,” as in merged in sufficient measure with the mysterious core of everyday reality.

Experience arises in time and place, but also as time and place conjoining with mind. Thus, haiku have traditionally let in and relied upon the emotional “color” a seasonal reference (kigo) provides. While these may be the universals of summer, autumn, winter, spring, kigo may equally spring from the limitless pool of utterly particular local seasonal markers (such as summer cuckoo, ripening persimmon, deafening cicadas, first droning mosquito, migrating humpbacks … and so on, ad infinitum).

In a plainly precarious world in which nothing is certain, we confide our hearts to the shared agreement of the predictable enough seasonal round, and rest in what feels unchanging within the eternal flux. Born of the tilt of a sacred planet, the seasons provide what has long been welcomed as Earth’s sacred rhythm, celebrated in rituals that echo the cycle of mortal life—but in the mode of eternal renewal. Something in us dares trust in the timeless quality of the seasons as a relatively stable reference point of accord with ceaseless change, allowing a feeling of timelessness to surface in the fleeting moments of mortal life.

The blessed round of the seasons, that always seemed predictable enough…

Haiku poets intuit their way to this poise of the eternal within the momentary by relying on just what is happening as the home place within it. Even if offered with poignancy or wry resignation, haiku bend always towards evident reality, and find subject arising exactly on the ever-creative edge of uncertainty itself.

Meanwhile, along with the seasonal kigo, haiku embrace the contingency of endlessly fluctuating weather, letting it also color the immediate moment and exacting circumstance so keenly noticed. Sometimes with the gusto of fourteenth-century Zen master Daito Kokushi, for example:

Write the word “Eternity” in sand and the eternal waves themselves will duly wash it away for you. Again and again, an act of unshielded noticing reconsecrates the moment or thing with an exacting acceptance of what is fleeting and ever-changing, and yet—in that sheer acceptance—finding it to be wet through to the skin with eternity.

Unqualified acceptance is what dissolves the one who keenly notices into the thing itself to the point of sharing one skin with it; and the one who hears or reads the haiku—they come through into that one skin, too. When you feel that slight shift or lift of heart and mind that “comes in” with the edge of discovery in the poem, then poet, reader, and some unrepeatable detail of the timeless universe all arrive together.

It works like that. And what appears in that intimately attentive space of haiku keeps opening, free of interpretation. The relief! Each thing allowed to be just what is, minus all opinions about it.

This quality of already yielding to “just what is” appears directly or by implication, even when the poet’s heart is fiercely protesting. Acceptance folds into the pain. Witness the great haiku master, Issa, for example, marking the tragic loss of his dearly beloved two-year-old daughter:

Here is a traditionally Buddhist consent to the unbending truth of impermanence, offered as inseparable from a father’s resounding cry of protest … This is not resignation, but refusal to diminish what it is to be alive in the skin of an agonized flood of grief.

Issa also leaves in the air an unvoiced question about this mysterious life, that closes nothing off while leaning into the eternal—a rare accomplishment that characterizes the very best haiku. “When did anyone ever lose by crying out?” it seems to wonder. With this contemplation at its heart, Issa’s “And yet!” opens to embrace all humanity.

Every fleeting moment in this way is always “seasonal” in character—round, and yet never repeating, lost to time, and yet ever-returning—reconsecrating the eternal flux that renders each thing unquestionably of value.

Robert Hass’s fine translations of the three great early Japanese masters of haiku, Bashō, Buson, and Issa, reveal how widely this tiny incisive form can move freely in the world of experience—noticing, feeling, enjoying, and forbearing—while remaining uncoercive and light of touch in a generous range of tonal moods.

The poet can reach with curiosity right through transience, contingency, and suffering to register the poignant and timeless quality of these things—and land in fully-human fellow-feeling for a relative stranger, as for example in Bashō’s famous…

Tenderness like this, tinted with loneliness, can also be ruefully aware of how easily attachment makes fools of us. Bashō unearths in himself the endearing absurdity of human beings when memory and nostalgia for something we hold dear removes us from it even when we’re swimming in it…

Or…

Haiku can also draw us with its keen precision right to the strangeness of reality hiding in plain sight—as in Buson’s glimpse of a waiting horse, tethered in snow. No feet in the stirrups. For now, just the formlessness of snow, riding the world … No need to point up any overtones of emptiness in those snow-filled stirrups, which so delicately also draw in the ghostly presence of the human who tethered that horse in freezing conditions…

Or the poet can enter in person to play along with what is, and do so with the relaxed and smiling gaze of Issa, so wonderfully shorn of attitude while so freely admitting to human failing in his companionable willingness not to bother the spiders of the house…

In all three tonal modes, feel for the way that no-time brings forth this one-off intersection of time, place, things, and human mind in the brief completeness of a moment.

And humor is never out of place in tempering the space a haiku opens to let reality look back at our human ridiculousness. As when Ron Moss, ever so delicately, lets the dance of a territorial crow, attempting to jostle its own reflection, glance off also in our own direction…

But now, a climate that has been reliable enough for our flourishing is falling into chaos, threatening even the timeless procession of the seasons themselves to the point that they are beginning to signal inescapable impermanence—Issa’s “The world of dew,” that is born in the morning and has vanished by the afternoon. And yet, like Issa, we must let such indigestible change into our hearts to meet directly with the protest of impossible! That’s where the truth of suffering can render us real and find us present.

While seasonal signals waver and blur from cultural alignment, other markers of the mood of time in haiku remain changeless: the diurnal round of sunrise and sunset rolls on, unperturbed; the equinoxes and solstices continue, impartially, to temper the length of days and nights; and the moon sails serenely through its cycles, indifferent to the tidal surges invading cities, as humans scramble for some foothold in the waters of rapid change.

Plainly, the florid evidence of unseasonal extremes will not be denied entry to a venerable poetic form born in an earlier moment so culturally aligned with the seasons. The ruptured state of the seasons is simply too apparent and present to slip past haiku’s focused act of noticing.

And so, climate now breaks into haiku for the first time, disrupting the saijiki—the traditional compendia of hundreds of settled and easily recognized forms of kigo in haiku—and potentially wreaking havoc on the poetic form and its uniquely seasonal “feel” of time, as the seasons turn more feral.

The Australian summer, starting ever earlier in spring, is losing its old friendly name to “the fire season.” “Stalled highs” cause deadly “heat domes” and stagnated “deep freezes.” “Stalled monsoons” become catastrophic flooding impossible to mitigate, as “rain rivers” drown actual rivers. “Pyrocumulonimbus” bursts its way into the naming of clouds, as the smoke of “megafires” rises into the stratosphere, generating ferocious fire-created wind and lightning, and even spattering futile drops of rain.

Such words have not yet broken into haiku as uncouth new kigo to draw us into the uncomfortable new moods of time, but, if you’re even half alive, the facts of their impact can’t be kept out. And given how intimately embedded and embodied are haiku in the physical fact of here and now, could it be that to bear witness to the ferocity of the changes becomes a kind of kigo in reverse—locating us keenly in the ongoing shattering of the seasonal round?

For haiku cannot budge from its seat at home on the Earth, even when conditions grow inhospitable, and the mood of time turns dark and sorrowful.

The love at large in haiku is too natural, implicit, and bone-deep to surface in sentimentality; and so intimately felt that it can’t separate feeling with the Earth from feeling about it.

Satish Kumar loosens the strictures and solipsism of I think, therefore I am, reverses the flow, and delivers us back home into the mutual relationship that sources haiku, with You are, therefore I am. Self and other on a path of finding each other in one skin. A fierce-enough love for the Earth starts in this confirmed mutuality.

To fiercely embrace a burning world … Is it becoming the job of twenty-first-century haiku to fiercely, and without embarrassment, follow closely with the sacred seasonal procession as it tilts, collides with, and collapses into the heated chaos of “the weather”? To mourn the derangement of the seasons, yes—but with the spirit of Issa’s powerful cry of love, And yet!, that bows to ceaseless change and loss exactly while not shying from the grief it generates. Instead, by opening to both as inseparable, we find what can be invited into steady realization, and even riskily befriended as the wild exacting form taken by the life of the Earth in this moment. The sense of invitation lies in our willingness to bear with and to follow nature while not flinching from what is human—one body of not-knowing openness. All of which can open the way to celebrate at least the ability and necessity of remaining humanly alive in the skin of even the sharpest of moments.

For as we’ve seen, while it will not turn away, haiku firmly refuses to presume to know. Then, even when admitting in full the pain of bearing witness, a steady embrace of what is carries the day. This is the generous, capacious not-knowing found always at play in Bashō:

While the new and ever-shifting categories of weather now stalking our lives will likely prove too unstable to ever form established haiku kigo, their impact will always register in haiku, as it so intimately partners with the natural world, to which, despite our efforts and our doubts, we fully belong.

It’s this accepting and participatory love for the physical Earth that makes natural the way haiku lives into what is happening, directing attention to some radiant fact while closely following it, never getting in front of it with “knowing.” Just like the wind that doesn’t know what month it’s in, even as it may be showering sparks of fire on unhatched eggs in a far-too-early-warm spring that has lost its moorings in time.

Someone called nature the hole in the heart of our human world, diagnosing the source of an elemental sadness and loneliness in a species so insistently standing apart from the entirety of life. Bashō’s advice to haiku poets in his short treatise “Learn from the Pine” is utterly simple and unfussy: “Follow nature and return to nature.” In explaining this strong poetic spirit he calls fūrabo, he advises us to “become a friend with things of the seasons … [For] those who do not see the flower are no different from barbarians, and those who do not imagine the moon are akin to beasts.”

Instead, “Make the universe your companion,” he urges. Then the homely loneliness carried by the Japanese feeling called sabi finds its way with ease into haiku, lightly and willingly borne because it is accompanied—by each thing so closely followed.

“Followed” as in moving in accord with what is as it flows, without manipulating it. At home in doing so. Celebrating the constancy of change that will also take away our very lives in time, Bashō says, “Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace” (my italics).

Haiku finds it natural to disappear into intimate companionship with the world.

Even in the throes of climate stress, the relaxed gaze that lets us move with what is happening can be found, confident at least in a depth of belonging. With little or no “I” in front of things, a haiku becomes an open-pored moment of simply moving with…

Not-knowing mind opens a true conversation with the Earth. Then the stones can find our voice, and our songs can find the Earth. In Australian terms, it’s Country—the Dreaming, moving and thinking along with the place where you are. This is the intimacy and artistry of not-knowing mind—leaving no finger-marks on every glistening fact and knowing not the slightest wish to do so.

And always, less is so much more. “Is there any good in saying everything?” Bashō wonders, plainly answering his own question.

The haiku form carves words away as close as you can get to their natural vanishing point, and in unfussy language, close enough to ordinary speech that it lets us draw close. Then a haiku is not a glimpse or image of the universe—just the universe, plain and immediate, inhabiting the poet, the reader, the stone wet with rain by the side of the path, the autumn moon, the tremor in a hand, a leaf turning bright dark bright dark as it twirls to the ground…

In this way haiku are a kind of open dreaming—mind and reality homing in on each other enough to touch something of the mysterious core of reality in what is here in plain sight … and then just following it by heart.