Haiku: The Poetry of Science and Soul
by Pravat Kumar Padhy
When we see a flower, we might celebrate it as nature’s divine art in its aesthetic ecstasy. For me, a haiku approaches the flower through a Zen mindset – as if seeing this exquisite and transient beauty of nature for the first time. I am also aware that the structural pattern of haiku writing and its essential characteristics are blended with the physics of sound, the chemistry of colour, the biology of smell, touch, sight and emotional feelings.
As in acoustics,
this non-rhyming Japanese poetry, written in three lines, in 5-7-5 format
(mathematically a prime number, with a total of 17 on or morae –
sound units or phonetic units), creates a wave of sound with a simple
geometrical presentation of specific syllable counts in shorter and longer
sections. Similarly, Billy Collins in his introduction to Haiku in English – The First Hundred Years, talks of
stretching an analogy between haiku and physics. Just as matter is composed of atoms, which give off a great energy when accelerated to the point of collision,[…] I like to think of the haiku as a moment-smashing device out of which arises powerful moments of dazzling awareness.[1]
Many Indian scholars in the Vedic time, too, included in their mathematical theories of geometry and trigonometry, cosmological calculations in verse (mantra) form in Sanskrit. This essay explores such subtle inclinations towards scientific exploration, arguing that these form the content and fabric of haiku.
Haiku
and Phonology
Hayata (2018) has carried out a quantitative phonological study of the Japanese short forms of poetry.[2] Hayata studied the complete works of three Japanese haiku poets, Mantaro Kubota (1889-1963), Shuoshi Mizuhara (1892-1981), and Seishi Yamaguchi (1901-1994), focusing on the sound correlations between different parts of their poems.
The sound correlation as enumerated by Hayata can be seen in this following haiku from Shuoshi Mizuhara:
Step 1: ｛磯の田は｝｛畔の蓬の｝｛春早き｝
Step 2: Iso no ta wa, aze no yomogi no, haru hayaki.
The first and last vowel sounds of the first phrase of this haiku (Iso no ta wa) are the ‘i’ of ‘Iso’ and the ‘a’ of ‘wa’. Similarly, the first and last vowel sounds of the second phrase (aze no yomogi no) are ‘a’ and ‘o’, while the first and last vowel sounds of the last phrase are ‘a’ and ‘i’.
Here we can see a pattern emerging as the following statistical analysis illustrates:
Step 3: ia; ao; ai
Step 4: 〇●；●×；●〇
Step 5: ＡＢ；Ｂｘ；ＢＡ
Nearest-neighbour
correlation: ＡＢ；Ｂｘ；ＢＡ
Far-reaching correlation:
null
Far-reaching anticorrelation: ＡＢ；Ｂｘ；ＢＡ
Note: In Step 4 symbols 〇, and ● indicate rhyming, while symbol × indicates no rhyme.
Hayata
summarizes the findings of this study as follows,
Analyzed results manifested remarkable preference for the arrangements with the far-reaching correlations between heads as well as with the far-reaching anticorrelations between ends. Also preference has been found for specific arrangements showing the nearest-neighbor correlations.
Haiku and Consciousness
In my opinion, haiku also has specific links with our understanding of what consciousness is, particularly if we take the soul as the embodiment of human consciousness, and as related to feelings of love, emotion, imagination, impulses, playfulness, and desire. If this is so, then certainly there are resonances with the poetic dexterity of haiku.
Haiku also involves immersion in physical senses such as smell, vision, sound, and taste. Sometimes these senses are interlinked, with the mention of one sense stimulus triggering another in what is known as ‘synesthesia’ (the color of a sound, the shape of a smell, the sound of the sight, the size of touch and so on). As Peipei Qiu notes, such transference of the senses is also used as a rhetorical device, and is a familiar element in Japanese poetry.[3] Thus, in the following haiku, the auditory image, ‘the voices of wild ducks’ is also linked to a visual term, ‘white’.
The sea
darkens:
the voices of
wild ducks
are faintly white.
--Bashō (tr. Peipei Qui)
Conventionally, a fundamental element of haiku is nature, whether this relates to the seasons or human aspects). Other poetry may share this focus. However, particular to haiku is the tendency to express it through juxtaposition of fragments or phrases across pauses (kireji) and the white space (ma). For me, these kinds of juxtaposition help stimulate a transcendent experience in the readers’ minds. The white or contained space, (ma) can be defined as an ‘interval of betweenness’, ‘psychological interval (of time/space)’, ‘between dimensions’, ‘the arising of psychological space’, or ‘creative imagination’. In addition, the critic Hasegawa Kai refers to white space as psychological ma.[4] In my reading of this, psychological ma enables a shift in a reader’s cognitive state so that images are explored in the present alone. As Bashō states, ‘Haiku are a way of seeing, hearing and feeling, a special state of consciousness in which we grasp intuitively the identity of people and nature and the continuity between ourselves and the larger cosmos…’[5]
Exploring haiku consciousness in the following haiku, Bruce Ross writes: ‘The poet, his will, is not stopping the skis. The snow's silence is.’
The skier stops to leave room for the snow's silence [6]
-- Kai Falkman
Haiku and Geological Science
The haiku’s particular focus on observational experiences of the present can be correlated with the geological natural law of uniformitarianism: that the natural laws and processes happening now have been in operation throughout Earth’s history.
Have the summer rains
come and gone, sparing
the Hall of Light
In Bashō’s Narrow Road, Haruo Shirane Shincho writes, ‘The summer rains (samidare) refers both to the rains falling now and to past summer rains, which have spared the Hall of Light over the centuries.’ [7]
In geological terms, an unconformity is a surface between successive strata that represents a missing interval (break in rock record or caesura) in the depositional history caused by an interruption in deposition (non-deposition), or by the erosion of continuous strata and later followed by subsequent renewed deposition. Haiku can be compared to such depositional history, especially if we consider the haiku’s pause or ‘kireji’. This caesura, or break in deposition (unconformity), is also evident in geology. In geological unconformities, the underlying older and the overlying younger rocks together comprise a juxtaposition of different ages. There is both link and shift, as with the haiku’s ‘kireji’, and connections between fragment and phrase. Such stratigraphic gaps (or unconformities) act as syntactic pivot lines and infer links and shifts between two depositional histories of different geological times.
In stratigraphy, the law of superposition states that the younger strata
are deposited over the older strata in both time and space, while the original
sedimentary rocks are deposited horizontally by means of the action of gravity.
The ways that these temporal and spatial aspects of geological depositional
history intersect broadly corroborate with what has been described as the
interplay between the vertical and horizontal axes of haiku. As Haruo Shirane
says of haiku,
The key point is that for the horizontal (contemporary) axis to survive, to transcend time and place, it needs at some point to cross the vertical (historical) axis; the present moment has to engage with the past or with a broader sense of time and community (such as family, national or literary history).[8]
Marcia Bjornerud writes in Timefulness that ‘Young rocks communicate in plain prose, which makes them easy to read ….. the oldest rocks tend to be more allusive, even cryptic, speaking in metamorphic metaphor…’[9] Bjornerud’s use of ‘allusive’ evokes the traditional practice of honkadori in haiku, as in Bashō’s inter-textual references to Chinese poets Li Po, Tu Fu and others. Such a practice has been elucidated by Bill Wyatt in relation to Bashō’s haiku.[10] In a haiku, written in 1685 when three friends came to visit him late at night, Bashō alludes to the much earlier Li Po poem. Bashō’s haiku runs:
With my sake cup
& the moon, I toast
three friends —
this fine evening
Li Po’s poem runs:
With blossoms, a bottle of wine/Drinking all alone, no one else./Raising the cup, we greet the bright moon/With my shadow we become
three.
Here we can see how Bashō substitutes Li Po’s three friends, the wine cup, his shadow and the moon for three of Bashō’s friends.
Haiku: Space and Time
Haiku also explores the cosmological concept of four-dimensional ‘spacetime’ – the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. The critic David L Barnhill says, writing on Bashō, that ‘on the spirit journey, the poet can instantly encompass all time (in the Chinese sense of past and present) and space.’[11]
stormy sea—
stretching out over Sado,
Heaven’s River [12]
Barnhill enumerates:
The haiku poet enters into a total absorption in the present as a boundless temporal space, which Zen has termed the Absolute Now... The poem is often read as a poem of space—the vastness of ocean and of the star-threaded sky… As a river it suggests the flow of time, yet as a stream of stars it suggests a kind of transcendent stillness.[13]
Elaborating on haiku as possessing four dimensions, Dietmar Tauchner says, ‘Thus far, the coordinate system has traced what might be considered the four dimensions of space-time. The horizontal, formal axis is the axis of space, while the vertical axis, which is rather concerned with content, refers to time…’[14]
In
haiku, Dietmar Tauchner defines shibumi, kire, atarashimi
and yugen as four essential attributes. Shibumi, Aware,
and Kire, constitute the haiku’s horizontal axis. Atarashimi, Aware,
and Yugen constitute its vertical axis. This is a close parallel to
Minkowski’s classic theory of spacetime.
Four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime is often pictured in the form of a two-dimensional lightcone diagram, with the horizontal axis representing ‘space’ (x) and the vertical axis ‘time’ (ct). The walls of the cone are defined by the evolution of a flash of light passing from the past (lower cone) to the future (upper cone) through the present (origin).[15]
Yasuomi says, ‘Haiku is believed [to be] the product of a single thought at a single moment, that is, roughly speaking, haiku is three-dimensional.’[16] The fourth dimension is ‘time’ as he encapsulates this idea in his haiku:
plum tree's shadow
on the newborn's robe
daughter's old album[17]
-- Yasuomi Koganei
To explore this further, it is useful to end with Yasuomi’s own
explanation of this poem,
I was attempting to compose
a haiku, which would indicate the stream of four generations: the woman's
mother, the woman, her daughter, and her soon-to-be-born grandchild. The woman
is hoping that her grandchild, and perhaps even grandchildren, will grow up to
be pure, peace loving and yet tough like plum trees. The shadow may suggest a
dark side of the world, setbacks which her grandchildren may encounter in the
future. [18]
Thus, in different ways, I hope this essay shows how haiku can work as a ripple of consciousness, in the present, unifying the human sense of soul and science, to develop a precious sense of intimacy in its readers:
Bashō (tr. Gabi Greve) writes:
oh this loneliness !/ only the shrill of cicadas/ seeps into rocks [19]
[1]Jim Kacian,
Philip Rowland and Allan Burns, 2013: Haiku in English – The First Hundred
Years, with an introduction by Billy Collins, W. Norton & Company.
[2] Kazuya Hayata, 2018: Phonological Complexity in the Japanese Short Poetry: Coexistence Between Nearest-Neighbor Correlations and Far-Reaching Anticorrelations, Front. Phys., 18 April 2018, Sec. Interdisciplinary Physics Volume 6 – 2018.
[3] Peipei Qiu,
2005: Basho and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, University of Hawai'i Press, XIV, 248.
[4] Hasegawa
Kai, 2007: ‘Cutting Through Time and Space’ in Richard Gilbert, ‘Cross-cultural Studies in
Gendai Haiku: Hasegawa Kai’ Gendai Haiku Online Archive (2007),
Kumamoto University, Japan <gendai-haiku.com>.
[5] Eric W. Amann, 1969: The wordless poem, Haiku Society of Canada.
[6] Bruce Ross,
2007: ‘The Essence of Haiku’, Modern Haiku, Vol. 38.3.
[7] Haruo Shirane, 2015: ‘Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashō, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths’, Juxta 1.1.
[8] Haruo Shirane, ‘Beyond the Haiku Moment’.
[9] Marcia Bjornerud, 2018: Timefulness, Princeton
University Press, New Jersey, p.224.
[10]
Bill Wyatt, 2006: ‘The influence of Chinese literature
on Bashō’ Part 4, Blithe Spirit,
Vol.16, No. 2.
[11]
David Landis Barnhill, 2006: ‘The Creative in
Bashō’s View of Nature and Art’, in
Matsuo Bashō’s Poetic Spaces:
Exploring Haikai Intersections, Eleanor Kerkham (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan,
New York.
[12] David Landis Barnhill, 2007: Moments, Seasons, and
Mysticism: The Complexity of Time in Japanese Haiku, University of Wisconsin
Oshkosh ASLE conference, June 15, 2007, Wofford College, Spartanburg SC.
[13] David
Landis Barnhill, 2007: ‘Moments, Seasons, and Mysticism: The Complexity of Time
in Japanese Haiku’, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh ASLE conference, June 15,
2007, Wofford College, Spartanburg SC.
[14]
Dietmar, Tauchner, 2013: ‘The Aesthetic
Coordinates of Haiku: A Ginkō Towards Mount Fuji’, Frogpond, 36.3.
[15] James Overduin, 2007: Einstein’s Spacetime.
[16] Yasuomi
Koganei, Four-Dimensional Haiku (4-D Haiku). cf. Yasuomi, Koganei 2015:
Haiku Poems and Short-short Stories, Tokyo, Japan. P.108.
[17] Yasuomi Koganei, 2005: ‘Haiku and
the Flow of Time…4D haiku…’, ALBATROS,
No. 1(4), 2005, pp.141-143.
[18] Yasuomi Koganei, Four-Dimensional Haiku (4-D Haiku)
cf.
Yasuomi, Koganei 2015: Haiku Poems and Short-short Stories, Tokyo, Japan.
P.108.
[19]
Gabi Greve, 2007: Emotions in Haiku and Kigo, World
Kigo Database.
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