COMMENT
The world in 17 syllables
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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Can modern haiku move away from the climate and season to express today's issues?
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ONE of the original and time-tested contributions of Japan to world poetry, haiku, other than tanka, is a poetic form fast becoming popular these days in many languages all over the world. For the Japanese, it is much more than poetry. As Edith Marcombe Shiffert and Yuki write in Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry "millions attend group meetings under a master and continue for years to work at improving their skill at composing these little poems. Office workers, factory workers, housewives, students, all can join others of their associates in these endeavours."
Current concerns
But, does this mass poetry-production mean anything but recreation? To what extent it would be possible to "contain" today's "violent world" in 17 syllables, in three lines? How far is modern haiku, gendai haiku in Japanese, successful in going beyond simply creating words and images that emanate, as is the tradition, from climate and season? Will a "world haiku" materialise through this effort? These are some of the concerns Ban'ya Natsuishi, the leading Japanese contemporary haiku poet and Director of the World Haiku Association (WHA), shares through his haiku and his attempt at promoting it.
In the endnote to his latest collection, A Future Waterfall, Ban'ya Natsuishi writes: "More than three hundred years after Basho, I am trying to create in my haiku diverse, astonishing traditions and phenomena of the world." In the 17th Century, haiku evolved from the Japanese practice of linked verses. And there had already been great poets like Basho (1644-94), Buson (1714-81), and Issa (1763-1827), who displayed perfect mastery over haiku's form and content. But its emergence as an emotionally and philosophically sensitive poetic form to reflect the vagaries of man's relations with time and Nature happened in the latter half of the 19th Century with Japan coming into contact with the rest of the world, especially the West, ending the isolation imposed by geographical and political conditions.
Modern haiku, Ban'ya Natsuishi says, is the ultimate of the Japanese cultural history of shortening things. But, the western attraction was mainly due to its fragmentary and suggestive nature. "The situation is rather confused today for, while, the West, following the Japanese, is shortening poetry, we are lengthening it. Some are imitating classical haiku poets, not knowing what haiku actually is. Haiku is the essence of poetry. It has a purifying effect. That is why I'm writing it and promoting it"
In general, haiku is believed to be a three-fold movement: first, a simple sense of being, then, a flickering of attention in the thought or sense-field, and, finally, a "communication between the sense of being and the sense of object". But, Natsuishi refutes this perception. "Haiku catches not only one moment, but more than two. Each moment is either a symbol or a metaphor of other moments," he says. "My haiku/a little cedar/nine hundred and ninety-nine years old" is his approach.
For Ban'ya Natsuishi, the word "World Haiku"sounds peaceful as well as painful. Peaceful because it reminds him of `world peace', and painful as it brings the memory of `world war'. Hence, between `world' and `haiku', there is a multidimensional relation. The "principal purpose of haiku is to discover something new in everything and to reveal it to the world". The "Flying Pope" series is the outcome of this realisation.
What is (Who is) this "Flying Pope"? A meaningful meaninglessness that can be interpreted as anything a reader thinks meaningful? "Flying Pope," Natsuishi explains, "is you and me. It's a symbol of the 21st Century. The old West is ruling the whole world, sometimes, bringing us disasters in the name of god or the good, for example, the Iraq War. We are meaningful as well as meaningless."
Ban'ya Natsuishi says "Flying Pope" was accidental. One day, in a dream he said to himself: "soratobu hoo" (flying pope). Then, he began writing the series without thinking what it really meant:
With peacocks
the Flying Pope
enclosed in a cage.
Mirage
in his eyes
the Flying Pope.
Flying Pope!
The fire of War
is a jumping flea?
For our days
The `viewpoint' of `Flying Pope' could be peculiar to our days. "It is a mobile and imaginary viewpoint from which anything that occurs on the earth could be watched," he says. Those who perceive it from a more synthesised standpoint, transcending the east-west divide, going beyond the good and the evil, the substantial and the joyful, can see the `Flying Pope' clearly as in:
Flying Pope
becoming
a sunspot
Dressed up and behaving like an executive from the world's most affluent economy, the poet in Ban'ya Natsuishi (whose real name is Masayuki Inui) doesn't easily show when one chances upon him as I did two years ago at the Zurich airport during a four-hour-long wait for a connection to the Macedonian capital Struga. Begin listening to him; we hear a silence as engaging and penetrating as his haiku:
"For my absence
of a thousand years I hang
a waterfall," he seems to say.
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan writes in Malayalam and English. He is editor of Yeti Books, and can be emailed at rthachompoyil@yahoo.com
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