ON HAIKU - Narrow Road into the Interior

ON HAIKU Rypke Sierksma I Narrow Road to the Interior Say it, no ideas but in things… Words are the burden of poems, poems are made of words William Carlos Williams, Paterson _____________________________ Japan is the land of haiku, a little verse form of seventeen syllables, forced into a scheme of five-sevenfive, distributed over three lines. We may call our sonnet form a strait jacket, compared to the haiku it is hild s play. Such forced feeding, however, like a goose stuffed to its brim to produce foie gras, is not my first interest. What I would like to check in these episodes On Haiku is the relation between words and things. In Aleid “ ie e ga s rather redundant introduction to a Dutch translation of Matsuo Basho s Narrow Road to the Interior – redundant, because the introduction 1 from the English translator is preceding this second translation – we read: Haiku is not so much a poem in the Western meaning of that word, as a thought. The meaning of this phrase hinges on what is to be u de stood as a thought . A efle tio of thi gs? A reflection on things? Pure abstraction, not referring to things at all? As this remains unclear, her phrase is rather empty. One might expect such irrelevant juggling of words from someone who translates the original title of Basho s Narrow Path to the Interior as: Small Road to the Far North, transforming a delicate, meditative metaphor into a mere geographical reference. In 1698 Basho did indeed walk to the North of Japan s main island. His idea, however, as to ea h his o i te io by way of visiting all kinds of shrines, monasteries and famous sights, rather than merely visiting a certain region of his country. Yet another critical remark on the side: The Dutch translator does not seem to able to read Japanese. In the colophon it says that her translation is from “a Ha ill s English rendering of the original Japanese. As I do not 2 speak or read Japanese myself, it has become impossible to check either translation. But double doubt of course affects me, when I must do with a second-hand second ha d ‘ose… What I might still be able to do is to analyse the otio of the haiku as a thought , spe if i g it i to something more defined. My lead in this endeavour comes from my chosen motto from the American poet Carlos Williams, from his long verse Paterson. Say it, no ideas but in things Later on, my second concern will be with poetry and formalism, the way in which formalism affects the ualit of poet . Afte all, field of stud has ee aestheti s… When young, I was somewhat impressed by the haiku. Growing older I discovered that this respect was merely a cover up for my own bad poetry. For an amateur or a beginner, it is so much easier to at least fake a haiku and give oneself the airs of a poet, than to create real poetry. 3 The Dutch poet Roland Holst wrote an essay on the work of the bard, titled Divining Rod and Labour. What a metaphor! The poet, he said, is the man handling the forked twig, searching for water which is hidden deep underground. Having performed his miracle, his divining twig indicating liquids, the hard labour begins: Digging and digging and digging, which may end up in good poetry or in a drink of cool, clear water. I doubt whether Seamus Heaney read this Dutch essay, most probably not. All the more reason to appraise ‘ola d Holst s metaphor as a universal intuition of all poets. In his great verse Digging - an ode to his forefathers who dug potatoes and sods of turf the Irishman wrote: Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun... I ll dig ith it. The haiku seems to be the counter-point of all this. When reading Basho on his travels i to the i te io , time and again ou ill fi d fleeti g spots of ti e i o e ts of poet , hi h all of a sudde haiku as 4 it were o es a out . This see s the o l a I a phrase this. When Wordsworth coined this otio of Spots of Ti e , he as e u h residing inside the circle of Western poetry with its divining rods and its hard labour. Wordsworth had those flashes of wavy words during his cherished walks, then brought them home to work upon and transform these intuitions into often rather long verse. Basho and haikuïsts in general jot down their little verse on the spot, most often in their final form. Of course, this is taking a bit of time; after all, even they had to force such little flashes into the formal mould of the haiku. Thus, e e he e e fi d so e so t of labour , even though the starter of a haiku is that flash of things. Certainly not, like i ‘ola d Holst s metaphor, the longwinded labour of speculation and conjecture. Carlos Williams once more: Say it, no ideas but in things. This, methinks, is also what the haikuïst is after. And perhaps it is this what M s. “ ie e ga s remark on the 5 a ts to express. The haiku has haiku being a thought not all that much semantic flesh on its bones, it is sparse with words, words that only seem to aspire to become things. A e a ple f o Basho s Small Path, lines - so he says – written in an instant and at the request of someone else before leaving that I ould ot a s hospital house. ite othi g… he wrote. And why not, translated by me from the Dutch, which was translated from the English, which was translated from the Japanese, what Basho then did write: The first specimen of poetry I the la d s High North: Rice plant songs. Could the haikuïst be the Samurai of Letters! In the Hagakure, The Way of the Samurai, it is said that what eall atte s is ho to i g thi gs to a e d , that is to their proper ending. It smells a bit of Aristotle too. And, of course, it e i ds o e of Nietzs he s fa ous aphorism in which he claims that only the real masters of the arts know how to find such a right ending: Like the 6 mountains at Porto Fino, there where de bay of Genoa sings its melody to its ending. Could it be that, when in the haiku thing is meant to meet thing, the poet has found their proper resting place in his poem? As if that, and only that very haiku was meant for these thi gs… The Hagukure teaches that one should observe everything as someone backed up against the wall; o ly the o e s i atte tio ill o e s eglige e a d elt a ay like s o efore the su . Yet deep down, William Carlos Williams also already knew: Words are the burden of poems, poems are made of words. II Bright Small Shells … on the attack, without any thought of what has been and what will be till everything lies behind you. The Hagakure _________ Is the haiku-poet, then, the literary Samurai who has e ptied hi self of ego , thus full p epa ed fo 7 attle and open to all things that may come his way, not knowing what they will be and how it will end? A porous vessel, as it were. The thought a out , consists hi h the haiku is said to of impressions, e all involving their association. One might say that such immediate union is residing on this side of metaphor, while dwelling also on the other side of metonymy. An example by Basho: In the sea-surf edge mingling with bright small shells… Bush-clover petals The ideal of haikuïsm implies that, in it, things collide with things, obliterating as it were the words in which this big bang is uttered, while extinguishing with the words the speaki g ego. A o di g to haiku s ideolog , it is ot the I e p essi g itself th ough the poe ; thi gs themselves speak out, using the haiku as their vessel of communication. Haikuïsm is trying to make thing touch thing, this without the intermediary of conceptual ideas. Precisely as Carlos Williams would have it. Which of course is 8 impossible: Man is a linguistic animal, a being existing from the perspective of, as well as inside its own projections. Why not say: Living his p oje tio s… Whatever impresses us, has always already gone through the sieve of our prejudice. We cannot but live our one and only Gestalt life. Exactly this is the meaning of the otio of existe e : To e i side the o ld, however at the same time being out of it. There is i ou o s ious ei g i this o ld always something which functions as fo eg ou d against which a othe thi gs a e i the a kg ou d . Whatever becomes foreground and what background, has al a s al ead ee dete i ed ou up i gi g and education and the situation we are in at the moment. That is: ou o a kg ou d . William Carlos Williams is one amongst many who are weary of these semantic chains, the linguistic prison cell in which we are exiled from a paradise of innocent perception. Back to haiku, a poetic endeavour that is Paradox Per Se. Trying to fix the unfixable entity of a unique and fleeting impression into a verse form, prescribed to its 9 very utmost, is asking for trouble. If any type of poetry might at least approach the unreachable, it would be the Free Verse which Modernity invented. Writing a haiku is more like fucking an exciting woman who suddenly turned up, while keepi g o ou o k s ha it. Could it be then, that instead of opening oneself up to things, like the Samurai opens up to his enemy, it is in fact a matter of releasing oneself to the meandering of the inner, subconscious streams, in order to be ready to ha e the ight o ds eet those u fo esee thi gs? Putting it differently: Things without their words are empty. Words without their things are vain. An indication of the paradisiacal desire of the haikuïst is the custom amongst Japanese poets to change their names. A kind of ultimate realism, which considers a name as determining the named o e s destiny, also considering a change of o e s name as a kind of uncanny, semantic metamorphosis. Nomen est omen. Such name-changing is the complete counter-point of the Western usage of pseudonyms. Here the use of a name, diffe e t f o o es o 10 , has quite often a commercial objective; a good sounding name, combined with a nice picture of someone good looking, makes an author, for instance, better saleable. Another use of pseudo has ee to loak o e s eal ide tit , when for example writing obscene stuff. Or, for that matter, just to hide the criminal or the spy you in fact are. Not so in Japan. When, on the eve of their departure, Basho s t a elli g Sogoro, is a tuall ate a d fello appi g hi self i a e haikuïst, o ks habit and shaves his head, he is also taking on a new name: Soro. Now, for sure, a o k s ha it did make travelling much safer in those dangerous times. However, this dressing up and change of name goes much deeper. Western nominalism - considering a a e as just a a e , i diffe e t to the thi g it a es, so it ould ha e been any other name – is a stranger in Japan. Over here, in the West, the last ironical vestige of mediaeval o i alis T ist a a e fou d i “te e s Tristram Shandy. s fathe deplo es his so s a e: The Sad One. He demands of his friends, who tell him that so eo e s a e does ot eall 11 atte : Would ou, then, have christened your son Judas…? Case dismissed! Japan can appreciate father Shandy, as it believes in a true metamorphosis through words, in the make-over of identity by logo-magic, just like two things meeting in a haiku are believed to change one another. The Asian tradition of using characters instead of our own abstract, Latin or Cyrillic letters is, methinks, critical here. The early Scholastics phrased the principle in this manner: Nothi g is i the i telle t that is ot first i the se ses. This we also find in the ideogramic way of seeing, so praised by Ezra Pound. It is thoroughly Asian and especially indicated by the use of characters. Japanese characters originate in pictograms, a bit like the Egyptian hieroglyphs. They have developed only half-way towards a more abstract language and are often ambivalent, having plural meaning. However, the 12 use of such an ideogram in a haiku, seems to rid its reader from these superfluous meanings, because the number of syllables of the intended wording is indicated by its position in the Haiku. The ha a te s positio i the poe sele ts the one meaning, which is in line with the idea that, after all, it is a specific thing that is meant, not something else, i.e. something in the abstract. Then again, through association, the meaning thus excluded does of necessity enter the mind again. The dialectics of our Gestalt brain – nothing more, nothing less. One might conclude: the e a e lots of ideas s atte ed a o gst all these word-thi gs… The term ideogram is indeed quite confusing. My Van Dale's Dutch Etymological Dictionary defines an ideogram as image writing, the ideo- however referring to... idea. This notion of an idea also has come to us via the Greek, and has a hermaphroditic origin referring to both visual representation of an image as well as to a concept. However, the suggestion that the Japanese and Chinese characters concern real images is misleading. 13 They are a little bit like images, especially when you compare them to our letter alphabet. Yet, precisely because the origin of those characters lies in their iconic representation of things, there are always too few of them around in any language. Hence, these multiple meanings of most of the ideograms. Hence also, phonetics as an awkward entity in any character language. Which one of the multiple meanings is actually expressed a ha a te , is context dependent, for example, the context of its placement in a haiku poem. * In the Interbellum of the 20th century, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Bataille and Bellmer have fought thei a agai st logi , o as I like to call it: against normalism. In their perspective The Logical = The Normal = The Norm, which is just another word for a setsquare that fo es life s e e g i to ise a le o alit . Transgressing these limits, at least desiring to do so, these anti-logic fighters looked for help from the Asiatic corner, not wanting to end up smiling in their sleep, like 14 Master Greene phrased it in The End of the Affair: A ode ate ief i il se a t s ile. One of the weapons of these warriors was the word as an image, rather like it is used in the haiku. I shall return to this in my Paradox of the Obscene, analysing the question as to whether the proper weapon in this guerrilla is not simply the image itself. III Paradox of the Obscene The writer and erotomaniac Bataille spent all his life forcing words from his brain, while seeking for their transgression in imagined, yet still written carnal indiscretion. So: Language used against language. A bit like the Zen scream Katsu! The master is shouting at his pupil, in order to induce in him a e lighte ed state . Garrotte him words! - i ‘es ais aste pie e Providence, the words of the one-time mistress about her former lover Dirk Bogarde. That whole bunch of philosophers, meditating since the se e t s o The “u li e , were on the same war 15 path. How to escape petty bourgeois reality? How to rid oneself of tightening prejudice and of moral hang-ups? How to get rid of what I coined normalism? From Burke to Foucault, from Sade to Bataille: That was the question: To transgress or not to be. This endeavour is tainted with pragmatic paradox. The moment one has found an experience which forces the mind into awe and utter amazement, for one perhaps precious moment excluding language from the mind be ause o e a ot fi d o ds fo that experience - that very moment cannot be but unique. Striving for its repetition is impossible, simply because at that moment you are already expecting what could not be expected the first time. So, the only way out for these sublimists seems to say it in some special way and to seek their transgression in written carnality or in images. However, sexual realism using vulgar words still remains language, being always more eroticism than porn. Language which really hits on things and even seems to be things – it is but a poet s ealist illusio . T ul sho ki g po is al a s of the i age . Not sa i g thi gs - no: show them! Or for 16 that matter show it to oneself. Yet, after a while, even these pictures tend to dull the participant observer of scenes of debauchery. Japanese draughtsmen were quite aware of this, their images do indeed intend to excite by way of shock. Their concern is what Mishima in his little book Sun and Steel des i ed as: All those thi gs that ould e e e e ge f o o ds… The Frenchman Bataille tried transgression by way of imagined, written acts of carnal indiscretion. Hans Bellmer, German immigrant in France, saw that Bataille s shocking words needed to be updated, or for that matter upgraded into true visual astonishment. He illustrated Bataille s o ella Madame Edwarda. 17 Bellmer was, me thinks, certainly inspired by the neat, pointed erotic drawings of the Japanese, both qua style and qua subject matter. However, being such a delicate a draughtsman, his drawings cannot but distract the a t lo e s e e f o the o s e e o te t of his quite often weird images. Hans Bellmer One might say: All this is typical for that period of the 20th-century called Interbellum, with its explosion of energy after that other enormous big-bang: The Great War. Those were the days, when in intellectual circles eg o usi e a e fashio a le, he p i iti e masks were sold on the art market and were used as model by Western painters and sculptors, when ps hoa al sis edu ed a 18 to ea l se e pe ie es. Modern days, in a word, in which that Romantic notion of the hild as fathe of the a as take e e eg a d seriously. A Songye Mask Ho e e , this highlighti g of a alit su el spilled o e life , i to ou époque of Postmodernity, where it was linked to mediations on both The “u li e a d The Bod . Al a s i ed i to this cocktail is the semantic guerrilla against the normalizing effect of language and logic. Why not bring i a pit h of salt Ze : A g eat deed does ot ules… * 19 i d the [In between parentheses: Pound, with his stress on Japanese and Chinese characters, did write true Weste poet , full of ideas, o ds a d etapho s. Why not, in this context, quote his almost haiku-like little poem An Object, a solemn essay in saying what he would like a poem and a thing to be, this in a manner which he later disavowed: This thing, that hath a code and not a core, Hath set acquaintance where might be affections, And nothing now Disturbeth his reflections. And why not also his grand quatrain Quies: all words and ideas, ot a t a e of thi gs… This is another of our ancient loves. Pass and be silent, Rullus, for the day Hath lacked a something since this lady passed; Hath la ked a so ethi g. T as ut argi al.] * Sebastiano Timpanaro, an Italian philologist, wrote an intriguing book on the Freudian lapsus, that slip of the tongue on which the Viennese psychoanalyst placed so u h alue. I F eud s fa ous t eatise o d ea s, case 20 afte ase is sol ed diggi g i to the sexual back- perhaps the underground of such linguistic failures. Ti pa a o fi ds F eud s solutio s oth a it a a d unnecessary. They are, in short, begging the question, as Freud always already knew the solution beforehand. His theory was the norm for his explanation. O e e pla atio , hi h i Ti pa a o s a al sis turns up time and again, is the association of sounds or the i g of o ds. Banalization, confusions between similar sounds, and so on, these are tendencies and not laws. Even the most slovenly and ignorant copyist, or the most distracted and emotional speaker, always writes ore orre t ords tha slips … However, once they slip up and say something untoward and unwanted, the aural association of words explains the mix up and thus their slips. They do not point to some deep, u o s ious profoundly rooted psychiatric disorder as Freud would have it, always looking for the sexual mess in the pressure cooker of Western society: The nuclear family of papa/mama/child. These slips are, then, more or less innocent mistakes. 21 Allow me to suggest the relevance of all this for our understanding of the haiku. Call it innocent, call it infantile; this mix up of same sounding terms does i deed efle t o the haiku e ha is of fi di g o , perhaps better phrased: the assemblage of a poem on the conveyor belt of written images. There is an intrinsic connection between, on the one hand forcing things into a haiku, gluing thing-like impressions together, and on the other hand this associative process in the unconscious grottos of our mind. The haiku may very well be the result of this unconscious pasting of impressions, merely suggesting so ethi g deep . Both haiku a d the asso iatio of ideas are but wafer thin. * The strange, if unwanted bonding between avant-garde philosophers of the Foucault type and latter-day sectarian mystics basing themselves on Rudolf Steiner s anthroposophy and on what not, seems to be an indication of all this. 22 It is amongst these philosophical speculators that haikuïsm often turns up, as I were ringing a bell. To come i tou h ith the ‘eal , the i e o e et ete a; it is always a sign of people feeling cramped in by either the routines of their everyday working life or perhaps by their impoverished language. They will stress the o age i to the depth of the soul a d lo e Basho s isits to places and shrines which, he said, a e poet ade i o tal - even though Basho himself tells us time and again that these e sa e pla es a e ui ed a s own doing or by earth quakes. Of the esse e he e is the sti s desi e fo the Now, for the reduction, if not the sopping of the flow of time into an instant. This perfect and polished Present is as timeless as that other religious hit: Eternity. Both share the eli i atio of so ial histo a d the pe so s own life, of his projective modelling of all things encountered, a capacity that cannot work without the flow of real time. This alleged absolute Now of the mystic is unfathomable, the mysterious moment in which the Ego drowns, to give itself up to what, perhaps with a wink, may be called Das Ding an Sich – the thing in itself, 23 which is always Jenseits, floating in that Nowhereland of Timelessness where it may meet other Dinge an Sich. Haikuïsm plays with these notions, ideally demanding of the poet to lose himself and to loosen himself, thus purging him of his ego and become a thing amongst things, a passionless mirror in which things are supposedl efle ted just the a the a e , i thei pu e chance like being-together inside the mirror image. Thus arises the haiku: a mirror, if not a cage for things. The haiku a o l e o e afte o s ious ess, being time and history, has been shut out. Or so the mystic ideology runs. Esoteric fanatics love this paradox, the one o lite ati g the self hile at the sa e feeli g e , very special, not merely far away from, but more especially far above the madding crowd. That awful, if not awesome cocktail of sickening humility and hubris. In Basho s own words: E e jou e i gs ou a k to the transience of life. If you perish while travelling, this is the will of heaven. That thought made me happy agai . 24 I would also like to point out the paradoxical similarity between, on the one hand, this allegedl eeti g of thi gs i selfless hi h the poet hi self e o es reified as the mere receptor of impressions and, on the other hand, the syndrome of narcissism involving a consciousness which considers itself a thing, thus being able to treat others as thi gs… The Samurai: Being the sword which kills the other sword. Or having read the above on the obscene: Mere bodies, as things carnally and violently banging into one another. Narcissism is the mental make-up which correlates with a technocratic attitude towards o es surroundings: things and people-as-things. Japanese culture is a shame culture par excellence, shame as opposed to guilt. This is also typical for narcissism. It is a world of marionets and personages, more so than a society of persons, a world more of competition and of management than one of cooperation and empathy. In the fourth episode of this essay on haikuïsm I shall come back to this. “o e he e I ead that the haiku is ot just a e se form. It is also a way of life, a state of readiness, 25 willi g ess. Not ill, ut Thi e… - the common notion of mystics, Western of Eastern or otherwise. It seems, indeed, to be the attitude of the haiku poet who gives himself over to what surrounds him and who believes, falsely so, that he can let things flow immediately into him and into his words – ready as he is, for a thoughtless association of sounds and images. To become innocent again – or perhaps just childish. IV Conversation Pieces Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 11. __________________ The haiku lover must have been shocked by my remark in the first episodes of this essay, about haiku verse being wafer thin. After all, most adepts are on the trail of deep spi itualit , sea hi g fo ea i g a d all that sort of thing. My claim is that in the haiku there is mostly pseudo-depth; its coincidences are shallow. 26 However, let me now dig a little deeper into the status of haiku poetry. This last episode concerns the second aspect of its formalism, after having already noted its obligatory verse form with the five-seven-five syllables, distributed over three lines. If this genre, based on associated impressions, may ot p odu e deep ea i g, it does i deed ha e a incredible extension, both time-wise as well textually. Perhaps this remark may appease my critics, though I must warn them: To be extensive is not the same as ei g full of deep o spi itual ea i g. The haiku code implies a historical extension, demanding of the poet that he is immensely well versed in the Japanese literary tradition. Time and again, fat volumes with anthologies have been published; they determine its history. This may be best illustrated with an interpretation of o e of Japa s fa ous te ts, dating from around 1000 A.D. It s given title Pillow Book refers to a Lady-in-waiting at the Japanese imperial court who, before laying down her head, would jot down her observations and 27 experiences, this in a hilarious disorder which does make its reading rather attractive. “hō ago s diary He a e as “ei “hō ago . A d uite a lady she was. She had numerous high-class lovers and was constantly criticizing people for not conforming to the intricate code of the court, more specifically the Japanese code of colours for dressing; the colours of the sorts of paper on which various kinds of haiku should be written; the colour of leaves to which, in certain seasons, the trees had to conform. And, not to forget, the special times for special rites. Ethically she was rather finicky, however in the context of this essay her criticism of othe people s writings is of prime interest. 28 I hate people fro hose letters it e o es lear that they are flouting the rules of etiquette, whether it is in their manner of addressing others or in their over-polite manner of writing to people who, simply because of their social standing, do ot deser e this. O e thi g, agai of i te est he e, is “hō ago deepl sho ked of I ei g he she hea s so eo e talk i te s hile His Majest the E pe o is p ese t. I a culture demanding of the haiku that thing meets thing, thus lea i g out the poet s Ego, this seems to be a crucial state e t. O e is efe ed to this essa s fi st episode. In a haiku the implication of past poetry is all important, this as an obligatory reference to former verse as pre-condition and as criterion for the judge e t o its ualit . In parentheses one may add 29 that this fact already disqualifies most of our Western haiku devotees from reading their beloved poetry p ope l . Whe eas the ai l seek depth i the shee play of words meeting words and - supposedly - things meeting things, the Japanese insider could at least enjoy such historical references. The requisite sedimentation of a haiku in the bed of past poetry also explains the fierce competitive aspect of the writing of those verse. Basho, in his Narrow Road into the Interior, frequently writes a haiku merely to a s e so eo e else s e se, a d i deed almost always in an endeavour to outdo him. This must make one seriously doubt the claim of haiku ideology as to its exclusion of Ego. The sa e applies to Basho s epeated de la ation, while travelling, that, with the spyglass of a famous ite s haiku s i ha d, he is looki g at e tai eternal places or shrines, hi h he lai s to e ete alised by those poems. P e-meditation, then, seems to be the keyword. Words these are, surely o thi gs… While studying The Narrow Path, one sometimes feels that one 30 is reading a travel guidebook camouflaged as poetry – and vice versa. No a k to “hō ago . Co espo de e at the ou t, but also in all higher echelons of Japanese society, took on the form of an exchange of historically coded poems. Even in love affairs, the correspondence consists of an e ha ge of haiku s, and more generally of other types of poem, and was bound to strict rules. A man, after bedding a woman in her own room, is expected to write her a poem immediately after his homecoming and then 31 have it brought to his lady by messenger. If he failed to do so, this meant the end of their affair. Then we have the intense poetic competition in which whole reputations are at stake. This becomes very lea i a passage i “hō ago s dia : I was studying the letter, written down in a gracious hand on heavy blue paper. There was nothing to worry me. I opened it and read: for you it is flower time sitting in the Council hall under a curtain of brocade. U der it he had ritte : Ho does this strophe e d? I as at y it s end. I simply had to prove that I knew the next lines of this poe … All this now turns out to be even more complicated than I have first made out. The poem referred to is in this case of Chinese origin, it is not in Japanese. So, “hō ago is not only expected to be well versed in Japanese poetic history, but to know from memory a lot of Chinese verse as well. I the edito s otes to the Pillow Book it is even said that this popula Chi ese poe o pletel outside the s ope of Po Chü-I was o e . Yet – and of course – “hō ago k o s it a d manages to answer to 32 it in phonetic Japanese. Otherwise the challenge would surely not have been mentioned in the diary of this seemingly modest, but very vain woman. Further on in the diary, when she discusses a similar situation, she lai s to e sho ked No itsi u , her then amant, the fact that has absolutely not understood the pointe of the poem he received. “he even tries to help him, by writing a poem-answer for him, however even while he uses it, he simply goes on to refuse to read “hō ago s verse. More generally she remarks on the writing poetryas- o espo de e, that it is ette to a s e i a u satisfa to a ot to a s e , tha e . So, it is all about that famous Japanese phenomenon of losing face, which is the quintessence of all shame culture. I a fe pla es “hō ago a ot supp ess he u ge to tell of the high praise she gets for her poetry from both her Empress and from His Majesty the Emperor himself. They express admiration for her historical wit and for the poetic references implied. Sometimes the Empress even demands of “hō ago to read her verse publicly, poems for which she has been praised already 33 by others and which originally had been private, but which she has personally manoeuvred into publicity by her little, devious ways. She even mentions the fact that he lite a feats ake he o th of ei g appoi ted to the Bu eau of Pala e se a ts. Poeti o e satio , then, honoured by being incorporated in bureaucracy. Haiku literature turns out to be quite literally an anthology of conversation pieces. * The history of the haiku is, methinks, one of intense formalised shallowness. For sure, my sources date from a long time ago. Yet, we know that the basic features of a society are sediments that remain unchanged for ages. Perhaps, in modern Japan the historical intensity of the haiku has been lost. Nevertheless, both out there and over here we still fi d this false elief i its spi itual depth present. The haiku is intrinsically Japanese. The connection between its historically sedimented meaning and the written characters is simply indispensable. Thus, all 34 rendering of the haiku in other languages is senseless as well as useless. Translation of a haiku is a travesty. As the haiku s fo ed fo a d its histo i al references are dominant over its content, we have come to the ultimate paradox of this essay: A Westerner reading a haiku is not reading a haiku. As a reader, he is essentially disqualified. The same, incidentally, applies to the Japanese who nowadays do not bathe any longer in the pond in which traditional haiku is swimming. The haiku has become a plaything for latter-day would-be mystics with their empty, shallow Self s oo i g i deep thi gs; a cheap and easy path to what I consider to be the illusion of inner depth. It fits so well into the Postmodern Church of Art with its New Religion of Music and Images. Haiku poetry is part and parcel of its Scripture. * Just to i di ate that a sho t, haiku-like poe may sometimes produce real depth, I reproduce a little couplet by the Dutch painter-poet Willem Hussem. Its 35 two lines could have been the motto above this whole essay. From a painter one may expect a fondness for the otio of thi gs eeti g thi gs , ithout any words and ideas interfering. What else does a painter do, but make things meet his brush and paint in order to produce a canvas - another thing! This image of this insect writing on water is added to his verse. Almost untranslatable is the beautiful Dutch word for these little animals! Yet, I try. First the original: schrijvende torren de wolken in het water lezen spiegelschrift 36 My translation: writer insects clouds under water reading mirror words We know from Western painting that an element of the pictor doctus, the learned painter, resides in most artists. So, even in between paint and things perhaps ideas i te e e. As the do i Husse what gives them a real depth. November/December 2016 37 s s all poem, which is