Favor of Crows Read online

  CULTURAL STRATEGIES

  “On the one hand there is the disposition of things—their condition, configuration, and structure. On the other there is force and movement,” François Jullien observed in The Propensity of Things. “The static versus the dynamic. But this dichotomy, like all dichotomies, is abstract. It is a temporary means for the mind to represent reality, one that simplifies as it illuminates.” What, then, really exists, “stranded between these two terms of the dichotomy,” the static and dynamic? “How can we conceive of the dynamic in terms of the static, in terms of ‘disposition’?”

  The Chinese concept of shi is a critical disposition of dynamic literature, and the efficacy of philosophy. Jullien wrote that Liu Xie, a sixth-century literary philosopher, “offers us a fine image for the dynamism at work in a literary text: when one sets down the brush at the end of a paragraph, it is like feathering an oar while rowing. The boat continues to drift forward just as, at the completion of a passage, the text continues to progress. A ‘surplus of shi’ carries it forward, leading to the point where it will link up with its own continuation. A text exists not only through its ‘order’ and ‘coherence,’ but also through its ‘flow’ and unfolding.’”

  The imagistic scenes flow by the cultural strategies of tone and dynamic rhythms, and by an interior sense of natural reason. Many haiku scenes have shi, and the disposition, the temperament, inclination, the mood and aesthetic tendencies, or intuitive moments, continue to move in nature and in our memories, and in the book.

  Jullien noted in his introduction that the “term shi is the same as the word yi, which is believed to represent a hand holding something, a symbol of power.” Xu Shen, the second-century lexicographer, “thinks that what is held in the hand is a clod of earth.” The diacritic radical li, or force, was added to the character later.17

  “Aesthetics plays an exceedingly important role in Chinese writing, more so than in any other system of writing. Calligraphy has been elevated to an art form,” wrote John DeFrancis in The Chinese Language. Xu Shen compiled an etymological dictionary of more than nine thousand characters in some five hundred “semantic keys,” or “significs.” The significs are otherwise named “radicals,” or the basic, significant, semantic elements of characters. “Most striking of all is the fact that the Chinese chose a semantic basis rather than a phonetic one for their system of classification.”18

  Jullien considered shi a “touchtone” character, and, as an imprecise word, shi is semantic and more than a concept; shi is a poetic disposition and “intuition of efficacy.”

  The poem “must be conceived all at once, from start to finish, as a continuous variation,” wrote Jullien. “In poetry, as in every thing else, dynamism must be renewed, through internal contrasts and shifts from one pole to the other, in order to be continuous.” The “poetic shi,” or the “dispositional propensity born of that emotion,” becomes the visionary transmotion of the expression and a creative moment.

  Jullien wrote that a poem is “a single surge of internal energy,” and quotes Wang Fuzhi that a poem is “not like ‘a melon,’ which can be ‘divided into slices.’” Rather, the “continuity is intrinsic.”19

  Kitaro Nishida, the Japanese philosopher of experience and reality, wrote in An Inquiry into the Good, “What people usually refer to as nature is what remains after the subjective aspect, the unifying activity, is removed from concrete reality. For this reason, there is no self in nature,” and, he observed, “that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I thus arrived at the idea that experience is more fundamental than individual differences, and in this way I was able to avoid solipsism.” By solipsism, he means “the theory that the self can know only its own experience,” or the idea that the self is the only source of reality.20

  ECSTATIC DESTINY

  Any hint of the self is absent in most haiku scenes, but even when subjective experience is mentioned it is not solipsistic or the self of nature. Issa, for instance, is moved by nature, and includes references to his presence in haiku scenes. “Issa’s whole life was a tragedy,” Blyth wrote in Haiku: Eastern Culture. “He was one of those men who attract failure and misfortune.” Issa was moved by a sense of fate. “Life goes along joyfully and painfully, with ecstasy and anguish, and Issa goes with it. He does not praise or condemn.”21

  for you fleas too

  the night must be long

  it must be lonely

  “Issa’s sympathies were always with small and weak animals, perhaps because he identified himself with them, as the victim of his stepmother’s cruelty,” and other burdens, Donald Keene wrote in World Within Walls.22

  skinny frog

  don’t be discouraged

  issa is here

  Issa must be here too, a sense of presence in the constant cut of words, transmotion of translation, and, of course, in the creative consideration of readers. I first read his haiku two centuries after he cajoled that skinny frog and then created this scene at Lake Itasca, Minnesota.

  tricky frogs

  croak a haiku in the marsh

  skinny issa23

  Likewise, the anishinaabe created an elusive sense of self and presence in their dream songs, but not the self of nature. “The sky loves to hear me sing,” and, “with a large bird, I am walking in the sky,” and “overhanging clouds echoing my words with a pleasing sound,” and “the wind carries me across the sky,” and “my feathers sailing on the breeze,” and “I will prove alone the power of my spirit,” are the imagistic and ironic scenes of visionaries, the motion of intuition, and transformation of the self, not merely the subjective, solipsistic estates of a material nature.

  the first to come

  epithet among the birds

  bringing the rain

  crow is my name

  This anishinaabe dream song is about the arrival of spring and the crows, a natural transmotion of the seasons. The singer has taken the name of the crow, the favor of the crow, and teases a shamanic, visionary voice of nature. The crow, or aandeg, is a sign of wisdom, maybe even a trace of tragic wisdom.

  overhanging clouds

  echoing my words

  with a pleasing sound

  across the earth

  everywhere

  making my voice heard24

  Shamanic visions come to light in a summer storm. Frances Densmore noted that the singer “hears the reverberations of the thunder and in his dream or trance he composes a song concerning it.” Again, the scene is created in nature, the visionary sound of the storm, but is not a subjective voice of nature. The anishinaabe do not have a word for the concept of nature. The native traces and tease of the seasons are distinct, direct, and visionary.

  from the half

  of the sky

  that which lives there

  is coming

  and makes a noise

  Densmore observed that the singer of this dream song imagines that the thunder manidoo, or spirit, “sometimes makes a voice to warn him of its approach.” The voice is the manidoo, not a mere representation of the native spirit. “The idea which underlies the song is, that which lives in the sky is coming and, being friendly, it makes a noise to let me know of its approach.”25 The anishinaabe word for thunder is biidwewidam, and means to “come making noise.” The voice of thunder is in motion, a dynamic sound, not subjective, or passive mimicry.

  The self, or personal voice, in haiku scenes and anishinaabe dream songs are dynamic and visionary; appropriately the dispositions of manidoo and shi are perceptive moments of presence in nature, but not the subjective voices of nature. The creation of a scene in a dream song, and the perceptive moment of a haiku scene are carried into nature. The voice, tone, and brevity of inspired words continue as cultural strategies in the natural motion of images, in the tease and discussion of transience in nature, and a sense of presence in the book.

  “Only when there is a unifying self does n
ature have a goal, take on significance, and become a truly living nature,” wrote Kitaro Nishida. “The unifying power that is the life of such nature is not an abstract concept artificially created by our thought but a fact that appears in our intuition.” He pointed out, that artists are “people who most excel in this kind of intuition.”26 The intuitive moments and meditation of haiku scenes create the experiences, memories, and survivance of nature.

  Suzuki wrote in Zen and Japanese Culture that haiku “like Zen, abhors egoism in any form of assertion. The product of art must be entirely devoid of artifice or ulterior motive of any kind. There ought not to be any presence of a mediatory agent between the artistic inspiration and the mind into which it has come. The author is to be an altogether passive instrument for giving an expression to the inspiration.”27

  The visionary scenes in haiku and native dream songs are intuitive, a dynamic presence that only appear to be passive because it is not the ego or self that discovers and possesses nature in poetry. The voices of thunder and the favor of crows are intuitive, neither passive nor possessive. Suzuki abhors egoism, but the visionary pronouns of nature are intuitive, not a ruse of devotion or the tricky asceticism of Zen Buddhism as often depicted.

  Philosophy, religion, and literature are inseparable in many cultures. Characteristically, haiku and anishinaabe dream songs are more intuitive than demonstrative; more shadows, suggestions, and concise images than the metes and bounds of linguistic theory and abstract literature.

  “The thought process underlying this nondemonstrative approach does not simply rely on language but rather denies it,” observed Masao Abe in the introduction to An Inquiry into the Good by Nishida. “This separation from language and rational thought is typically found in Zen, which conveys its basic standpoint with the statement, ‘No reliance on words or letters; a special transmission apart from doctrinal teaching.’ The same attitude appears in Confucius, who proclaims, ‘Clever talk and pretentious manner are seldom found in the Good.’ We encounter it in ink drawings that negate form and color, Noh theater with its negation of direct or external expression, and Japanese waka and haiku poetry.”

  Abe declared that to “generate a creative synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy, one must include but go beyond the demonstrative thinking that is characteristic of the West.” The outcome is an “unobjectifiable ultimate reality,” and surely that would become an eternal tease of nature, and a trace of marvelous names. The perceptive moments are haiku scenes, native dreams, and the visionary.

  “Thinking and intuition are usually considered to be totally different activities, but when we view them as facts of consciousness we realize that they are the same kind of activity,” argued Nishida. “At the base of thinking there is always a certain unifying reality that we can know only through intuition.”28

  HAIKU SCENES

  Haiku scenes ascribe the seasons with the stray shadows of words, sunlight on the wings of butterflies, the wind that turns a leaf, a cardinal in the sumac, mounds of snow at twilight. Shadow words are intuitive, concise, the natural motion of memories, and the turn of seasons. Blyth wrote, “Haiku is the result of the wish, the effort, not to speak, not to write poetry, not to obscure further the truth and suchness of a thing with words, with thoughts and feelings.” And yet, we read and write with pleasure in the motion of nature and creative literature. Blyth asserted that a “haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.”29

  Addiss pointed out that “Zen masters did not tend to write haiku very frequently until the modern era, but some monks added haiku inscriptions to their paintings.” Zen Buddhism and the principles of austere meditation and transcendence of rationalism influenced Bashō. The sway of his haiku “comes when there is no overt religious reference, but the haiku resonates with Zen spirit. Bashō himself commented that haiku ‘is simply what is happening here and now.’” Zen spirit is “presented through his ability to take the ordinary world and perceive unexpected images and interactions.”30

  Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644 at Ueno, near Kyoto. He was troubled, ridden by doubts as a youth, and later turned to Taoism and Zen Buddhism, wrote Makoto Ueda in Bashō and His Interpreters. Bashō decided on “fuga, an artist’s way of life, a reclusive life devoted to a quest for eternal truth in nature.” He pursued fuga with sincerity; nonetheless, “he had lingering misgivings about its redemptive power. To his last days, he did not seem able to merge poetry with belief completely.”31

  Haruo Shirane pointed out in Traces of Dreams that “Bashō initially went to Edo in order to become a haikai master, a marker who could charge fees for grading haikai.” However, he soon turned his back “on the most lucrative aspect of haikai. Even as a marker in Edo, Bashō apparently was reluctant to charge fees. Most of his disciples also avoided the profession of a marker.” The name of a marker, or grader, was the same as a haikai master. The haikai, from haikai no renga, was a comic, communal, linked verse.

  “Bashō divides haikai poets into three types,” wrote Shirane. The ideal poet is “devoted to the spirit of poetry rather than to the material benefits and who seek the poetic tradition of Teika and Tu Fu.” Fujiwara Teika practiced an “allusive variation” of classical literature at the turn of the thirteenth century. Tu Fu, the eighth century Chinese poet, was praised for the density of his images, the fusion of emotions and allusions to culture. Poets of the second type are those with wealth and status who see haikai as a game. The lowest are the poets who garner points. They are “the lost children of poetry,” Bashō wrote to a disciple, “and yet they fill the bellies of the marker’s wife and children and bring a profit to the landlord, and as a consequence, they are probably better than those who commit serious crimes.”32

  Bashō died on November 28, 1694. He “dictated this hokku to his student Donshu” three days before his death:

  on a journey, ailing

  my dreams roam about

  on a withered moor

  “As it was a balmy day, many flies had gathered around the sliding screens, and the students were trying to catch them with a lime stick,” wrote Ueda. “Bashō, amused that some were more skillful than others in handling the stick, laughed and said, ‘Those flies seem delighted to have a sick man around unexpectedly.’ He spoke no more. He breathed his last at around four that afternoon.”33

  Bashō was amused, and that image of the flies moves with me by imagination, experience, and by haiku scenes in the book. Bashō might have teased me over this scene, my haiku about the presence of fat green flies at a restaurant in Ellsworth, Wisconsin:

  fat green flies

  square dance on the grapefruit

  honor your partner34

  Japanese poets were once the warriors of literary fusions, classical allusions, loyalties, and, of course, created scenes with a sense of chance and impermanence. Many were actual poets of the road, a meditative, situational tradition of literature. Bashō traveled and wrote haibun, a distinctive form of prose and haiku, on his journeys to northern Japan.

  Haruo Shirane observed that the “Narrow Road to the Interior is marked by a great variety of prose styles, which range from a heavily Chinese style to the soft classical style to vernacular prose to a mixture or fusion of all three. In some sections, the style is extremely dense and terse, falling into strict couplets, and in others it resembles the mellifluous, lengthy flow of The Tale of Genji.” The Matsushima section, for instance, is “extremely Chinese in style and content.”

  Matsushima, the envisioned presence of the great poet, and the haibun scenes he wrote there were extraordinary and memorable three centuries later in my imagination. Naturally, the haibun and haiku moments, poetic images, and the actual presence of the magical pine islands, were a source of inspiration. Bashō was a master of natural reason, the motion of the seasons, and he had
put his “body to the wind.” I had no idea at the time that the creation of a haibun place was a fusion of haiku scenes and literary styles.

  “Although often praised as a work of confessional literature or regarded as part of the long tradition of travel accounts, Narrow Road to the Interior is best seen as a kind of fiction, loosely based on the actual journey, leaving out most of what actually happened. Key individuals are not mentioned or appear under fictitious or altered names. Bashō added incidents and characters for dramatic effect, and often rearranged or reconstructed those events that did occur. “Bashō depicted an ideal poetic world,” wrote Shirane. “Like a linked verse sequence, to which it has often been compared, Narrow Road to the Interior has no absolute center, no single overarching perspective. Instead, a focal point emerges, climaxes and then is replaced by a new focal point.” These literary fusions are similar to the dreams songs and trail stories of the anishinaabe and the fur trade in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario.

  Europeans have celebrated a travel literature of conquest and exotic discovery. Not only the discovery of “new” worlds, but of new ideas and literary experiences. “But for medieval waka and renga poets,” noted Shirane, “the object of travel was to confirm what already existed, to reinforce the roots of cultural memory.”35 That too was the sentiment of the anishinaabe, the native existential sense of travel, totemic associations, and a visionary cultural memory.

  Issa wrote haibun on his journey, The Year of My Life. “At long last I made up my mind to travel north,” he wrote in a translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa, “to get more experience in writing haiku. No sooner had I slung my beggar’s bag round my neck and flung my little bundle over my shoulder than I noticed, to my great surprise, that my shadow was the very image of Saigyo, the famous poet-priest of times gone by.” Saigyo was a twelfth-century waka poet and priest.