SHIKI Masaoka was a haiku master born in 1867 during the Meiji Period of Japan. He was bedridden by 1897 and died of tuberculosis in 1902. He was 34.
For two days this week, I decided to give lectures on Japanese arts and cultures, and I chose to begin my lecture with haiku. I call this series of lectures my retirement lectures, as I intend to retire from teaching this year.
Shiki’s poems are quiet, but disturbing, even if one does not have a background of this man and his struggle with the disease. It is not a prerequisite in measuring the power of a poetry that we determine the disease that haunted a poet while he was composing those lines. No one, however, can stop a reader to find out more about the man, or the victim as he reads the poet’s words and as he, the perceive, soars and swoops down with the rhythm of the lines.
How does one deal with this haiku:
I want to sleep:
Swat the flies
Softly please
Or this:
After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel
in the cold of night.
Shiki is acknowledged to have changed the haiku tradition, the Japanese poetic tradition which keeps the poem to a 5/7/5 syllable form. Shiki opened the form to realism and to the pains of life and away from the quiet beauty of nature.
When one talks of haiku, one has to accept the allure of the ephemeral and how beauty is never perfect and remains incomplete. Listen, for example, to the words of Shiki again:
A lightning flash:
Between the forest trees
I have seen water.
Here is the isolation of a man and the lightning brings about thought of water. Thirst is hidden as everything just fades in the distance.
Subtleties can be deceiving. Hidden as they are, the anguish of a haiku is both felt and not felt. They are real, however, the feelings that this outburst of images cooped in tiny words bring.
Even as I talk of haiku, I am thinking of two good friends. One is a mountain climber or one who had become one for the last few months.
Through the social media, I would see him alone or with friends deep in the forest or on sitting on top of a ridge. I wondered then what was pushing him to go into those activities. I told him about Mount Kinabalu and he climbed it, assuming that I also climbed the mountain. I did not; I was just looking in awe at how Mount Kinabalu seemed to scar the clouds.
This friend was at Kathmandu when the massive earthqukte hit the region. He was there because he wanted to reach the base camp of Mount Everest. For some reason, the forces of the universe were with him. Soon, he was in Tibet to continue his adventure.
One morning, I got a text message telling me that this mountain-climbing friend had a stroke. He is recovering now, but I miss his many photos in the forest, standing beside rare orchids and green snakes, on top of peaks that kissed the low clouds. I miss him moving around.
Another friend cannot move now. She is in the hospital, the cancer cells having invaded her brain. One night, I was there in her room. I called her name. I wanted to say, “Hello out there!” That was our way of greeting each other after days of not being in contact with each other. She understood my schedule. We love isolation.
Hello out there. That was a line from William Saroyan’s play, which I performed as a college student centuries ago.
When I lost my aunt who was a terrific cook, this friend promised to cook me anything at all.
The last message from another friend is cryptic: blood pressure of 60 over 50. She is comatose.
It is strange that we never really know that one day everything about us will stop; that our body will cease to move; that one day, not even the favorite line from a play about isolation and the beauty of the transitory can wake up a friend from a deep, deep sleep.
Can she hear me?
Issa, another haiku master, has these lines:
In my old home
which is forsook, the cherries
are in bloom.
Can she hear me. Hello out there, I like to think she can.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano