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Crested Wood Partridges (Rollulus rouloul) (female with red wings, green on the body; male with red patches on head), under a small waterfall at Bristol Zoo, England: photo by Adrian Pingstone, August 2003
The multifarious incoherence of the various forms of Western culture gives them a kind of vitality and indeterminate direction of development which makes Eastern culture seem a little monotonous, a little lifeless in comparison. The truth is that the East knows how to live, but does not do it; the West does not know. As D. H. Lawrence said,
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
It is this natural curve which we see in the various forms of Eastern culture; this pointlessness is what we feel so deeply in both of them.
*
.........The grasses of the garden --
They fall,
.........And lie as they fall.
(Ryôkan)
Speaking of the necessity of death:
When Rôtan died, Shinshitsu came to offer his condolences. He (simply) raised his voice in lamentation three times and went away. A disciple asked, "Were you not a friend of his?" "I was!" "Then was it right for you to offer condolences in that way?" "Formerly I took him to be a Man; now (I realise) he was not. I went in and offered my condolences. Old men were weeping as though for their own children, young people were lamenting as if for their own mother. The reason for this must have been that he uttered uncalled-for words, wept uncalled-for tears. This was fleeing from Heaven, multiplying emotions, forgetting whence he had received (his nature).
(Sôshi)
Underneath are the everlasting arms.
(Deut. 33, 27)
His detachedness and his acceptance of something in destiny which people cannot accept. Right in the middle of him he accepted something from destiny which gave him the quality of eternity.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........The heavy wagon
Rumbles by;
.........The peonies quiver.
(Buson)
*
What is the most important thing that we possess?
Nothing is so precious that we cannot afford to throw it away.
(Lawrence, The Man Who Died)
*
Lawrence describes the poet in the following words:
A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame and straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one fixed automatic thing which he is now, grinding on the nerves.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
We may reach the same conclusion from the other end of the scale. In so far as a tomato exists, God exists. When a tomato rots, God rots.
*
Moments of vision come when least expected, unbidden, and in most men, pass into oblivion, unnoticed and unremembered.
.........Ah, grief and sadness!
The fishing-line trembles
.........In the autumn breeze.
(Buson)
This seeing into the life of things may come from the slightest of physical causes, for example, a mere touch, a faint sensation of warmth and resilience:
She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's arched neck. Dimly, in her weary, young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........The old man
Hoeing the field,
.........Has his hat on crooked.
(Kitô)
It comes from some primitive realm of sound, that calls us back to something we have lost, some recollections that have intimations of immortality in them:
When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another, darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her, and there she wanted to go.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........Night deepens,
And sleep in the villages;
.........Sounds of falling water.
(Buson)
R. H. Blyth: Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture, 1947: edited excerpts
13 comments:
Tom - These quotations have a particular power and necessity for me this weekend - the heavy wagon is rumbling by, and I envy the peonies their power of giving before the shock and swaying back. Too cryptic and too personal all at once - forgive me, but the words here fell on ready soil.
- flower and fade, and follow the natural curve -
Barry,
Yes, it's that heavy wagon does it, every time.
And they say man cannot levitate ...
Like those peonies, I am quivering ...
The way that is not the Way, beauty beyond beauty.
Transcendent, Tom. Thank you. It seems to have all flowed through you and out again to the world. To us.
Don,
Of course you were the invisible spiritual mechanic in the engine room during the selection and composition of parts in this post.
Tom,
Very nice to find all this here, including this--
"Moments of vision come when least expected, unbidden, and in most men, pass into oblivion, unnoticed and unremembered."
and this --
.........Night deepens,
And sleep in the villages;
.........Sounds of falling water.
6.20
first light coming into sky above still
black ridge, silver of planet by branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
material which moves a line,
real time co-ordinates
in such a way that measured,
thus, there seems that
grey white fog against invisible ridge,
wingspan of tern flapping toward point
Such a privilege ... thanks, Tom.
Blyth, Wordsworth - and soon, I'm sure, Lawrence - together with a volume of death awareness poems I'm currently reading, are piled high by the bed. Oh, and Santoka, too.
Such riches in one lifetime ... I feel almost embarrassed at the extravagance.
Don,
Speaking of your bedside death-awareness books (familiar) --
"And speaking of the necessity of death" --
Does there come a point beyond which all books are death-awareness books?
What caught me here, and still has me hooked:
"The reason for this must have been that he uttered uncalled-for words, wept uncalled-for tears. This was fleeing from Heaven, multiplying emotions, forgetting whence he had received (his nature)."
Was just having this conversation in a pub with a friend. Indeed, for me, all poems, all books are death awareness books, on some level. My friend suggested to me that it was because I was old and I had to demure. I think he was thinking of the poems of youth, of love, of passion.
But aren't they simply anti-death poems (of course, it also enters the mind that orgasm has been described as a little death)?
The section that struck you, Tom, is puzzling for me, especially perhaps in translation? I take it to mean that all the weeping being uncalled for is because perhaps something is incomplete or left unfinished? I suppose the opposite, too, may be true - that Rôtan was not a man, perhaps is was a saintly figure?
It leaves me puzzled. That, too, might be the point?
Don, I too wondered a bit... and concluded in my wandering way that the point was, one ought to make an attempt to approach the end with at least a smidgeon of dignity intact, if at all possible.
But what do I know?
In any case, the passage Blyth quotes has two more sentences, which perhaps helped to inform my wobbly view.
"The ancient called this, 'the punishment of not being in accordance with Heaven.' It was the right time for the Master to come; it was the right time when he went."
Each time I read it, I get a different feel. Now I feel like it is the old men and the young people who feel that the his words, his weeping, was uncalled for. The additional sentences are helpful - Heaven says it was the right time for him to be called, the right time for him to come and it is the people who have misunderstood and not Rôtan.
Of course, I'm still holding out the possibility that I haven't got a clue.
I googled Rôtan's death for maybe some other thoughts and all I got back was this very post.
So there is that!
Thanks for extending this on through the fog in my brain.
Tom, Don -
It might be helpful to see the story of Shinshitsu's response to Rotan's death as an illustration of the Buddha-wisdom passed down in the Thana Sutta (AN IV.192), as translated here from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
There is the case where a person, suffering loss of relatives, loss of wealth, or loss through
disease, does not reflect: 'That's how it is when living together in the world. That's how it is
when gaining a personal identity.2 When there is living in the world, when there is the gaining
of a personal identity, these eight worldly conditions spin after the world, and the world spins
after these eight worldly conditions: gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, &
pain.' Suffering loss of relatives, loss of wealth, or loss through disease, he sorrows, grieves,
& laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. And then there is the case where a person,
suffering loss of relatives, loss of wealth, or loss through disease, reflects: 'That's how it is
when living together in the world. That's how it is when gaining a personal identity. When
there is living in the world, when there is the gaining of a personal identity, these eight
worldly conditions spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly
conditions: gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain.' Suffering loss of
relatives, loss of wealth, or loss through disease, he does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does
not beat his breast or become distraught.
Yes, certainly. To envisage circumstance all calm, as Keats suggested in his first period of intermittent fevers, or to see and accept the world as everything that is the case, would perhaps be the idea...
If only.
Indeed. The little I know here suggests that this is a genre -'deaths of Zen masters' - designed to exemplify an achieved enlightenment that the rest of us might distantly approximate. As someone saddled, for better of worse, with a 'personal identity'which doesn't show any sign yet of loosening its grip, I find it all a bit strenuous too.
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