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Adam Schaeffer
Dr. Bailey
ENG. 207
Basho’s Immortal Contribution
Coming to terms with our humanity is one struggle that ties and binds all of the human species together. Finding what it is that makes humans human, and not evolved primates has been the quest of many different disciplines. Most fields of science have taken several swings at it, hopefully getting satisfying answers with their mountains of empirical data. Religion and it’s subverts have been wresting with the gift of humanity since its inception. Taking the opposite stance of science, they have constructed astounding belief systems involving jealous, omnipotent creators and dead men rising from their graves to quickly be spirited away to a haven where humanity can live in supervised perfection. Philosophy has also intimated a plethora of theories as to what it is that borders our humanity, ranging as far as nihilistic moralism (believing that all morality is meaningless.) Also on the staggering list of human investigation endeavors is art. Art can be split into subjective categories, but the one most relevant for this essay is poetry. To be more precise, the short and often frustrating form of the Haiku. This poem form, since it’s discovery by the western world, has been translated into dozens of languages with mixed results. One thing can be said about it, however. It has an unparalleled ability to capture small moments of the human experience that have mind-boggling amounts of depth behind them. Almost every child has a father, and the Haiku is no exception. If there was one man who brought the Haiku out into it’s most perfect and easy to approach form it would be Matsuo Basho.
Matsuo Basho, mostly known as just “Basho”, was born in 1644 (circa) in Japan. Japan, sometimes described as a dragonfly perched gingerly on China’s back, is the home for several unique poetry and prose forms. The haiku is an original Japanese poetry form consisting of one stanza with three sentences. The first sentence has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five again. During its early life, the haiku was known as a hokku and was part of a long intertwining chain of up to one hundred separate hokku’s written by two poets taking turns. This genre of poetry, being an ancient Japanese pastime, was called haikai no renga or just renga for brevity (Harries, 1). Basho was also famous for spearheading unique forms of prose, which blended and blurred the line between poetry and prose writings. His travel journal, “Oku o hosomichi” or, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is one of the greatest and most well known examples of Japanese literature. Basho was, in ways that thousands before and after him were not, a true artist. Art was not something that Basho did, but was his way of life. Art became his quest for religious truth, which he hoped to glean from his constant wandering through nature’s comely pathways (Harries, 1). Like most good art, Basho’s writing style evolved and changed as he grew older. Starting with poems sometimes containing artificial wit, he later developed a genuine sense of humor in daily mundane things (Harries, 1). When he went into his hermitage he became a master at writing with sabi or loneliness. Sabi mostly illustrated the processes of the macro system by highlighting seemingly trivial occurrences within the immediate environment (Harries, 2.) At the end of his life, Basho was immersed in a perspective called karumi or lightness. This was a generally less tense set of poems, which had an air of contentment about them (Harries, 2). When Basho died, Japan lost one of the greatest proponents of metaphysical introspection that it had ever had. Thankfully, one of the main differences in Japanese poets when compared to Western poets is that Japanese poets had disciples. These disciples would record as much of Basho as they could, and some would forge ahead in his spirit, furthering his work in the quest for the human element and mastery of the challenging art form that is haiku.
The haiku does one thing better than any other poem form. In a way that almost no other form can, the haiku uses the most mundane, trivial occurrences as a vector to deep considerations of the “bigger life”. “Here, and here only, is the little life set inside the circle of the greater, the ordinary in the extraordinary, the commonplace in the miraculous, the material in the spiritual, the human in the divine” (Hokuseido, 329). In a quest for the human element, the haiku offers a unique tool. Whether the writer be of a more religious inclination (like Basho) or a more humanistic and subjective position like one of his future contemporaries (Issa) the haiku still functions as a magnifying glass into the greater construction that is the mortal human experience.
Startling to some, and feared by others, is the facet of the human element that is true mortality. But this is what gives humanity some of its most intense significance, flavor and color. Each moment could be the last, and each moment is built off of the moment before it. The haiku freezes these moments for the mind of the artists to glean meaning from at their own pace. The haiku is a recording of human mortality, but it is itself immortal, staying for the ages so that those questing for insights into their own humanity might have something better to build upon.
Reference:
Blyth, R. H., “Basho” in Haiku, Hokuseido, 1951.
Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, p. 96. Reprinted in Poetry for students, Vol. 18.
