non-life. An art: mountain-watching.
leaning in the doorway whistling
a chipmunk popped out
listening9
This selection manifests the four characteristics that Makoto Ueda attributes to haibun in his discussion of Basho’s prose: (l) “a brevity and conciseness of haiku,” (2) “a deliberately ambiguous use of certain particles and verb forms in places where the conjunction ‘and’ would be used in English,” (3) a “dependence on imagery,” and (4) “the writer’s detachment.”10 The entry, like many of the others in “Lookout’s Journal”—though a bit more radically spaced on the page than the typical prose of Earth House Hold—intersperses short prose passages with haiku-like poems. Although Snyder may not have been intentionally writing haibun, he was clearly writing haiku in the context of classical haiku aesthetics: in one section he notes that he had written “a haiku and painted a haiga for it” and in another he discusses the concept of sabi, which is at the heart of Basho’s mature conception of haiku.11 And, as in this entry, poems that clearly look and sound like haiku appear. Both of the haiku in this entry, like traditional haiku, are made of juxtaposed images succinctly expressed and allude, directly or indirectly, to a given season: in the first, summer butterflies are connected with the stationary mountain flowers they investigate; in the second, Snyder whistling in the doorway is connected to the (summer) chipmunk that listens to him. Further, the deep resonance built up in the first around the word “chilly” and the in-the-moment humor of the second that is underscored by the rhyming of “whistling” and “listening” make these good haiku.
The prose itself maintains the haiku values that Ueda finds in haibun. Except when Snyder directly cites conversation, the prose entries are expressed in a pared-down, often telegraphic, syntax that is dominated by images, often to the point of Zen-like cosmic simplicity, as in this line from the entry under discussion: “zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.” The evident Zennian mood expresses the ego-detachment which is Ueda’s fourth characteristic of haibun. Thus, “Lookout’s Journal” provides a paradigm, however rarefied, for American haibun: a short poetic autobiographical narrative that includes haiku.
Jack Kerouac, the chronicler of the Beat Generation, immortalized Snyder as the character Japhy Ryder in the novel The Dharma Bums (1958), a novelistic account of that generation’s attempts to achieve Buddhist enlightenment through retreats like the one described in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal.” In one episode of Kerouac’s novel Japhy offers a homespun definition of haiku: “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing....”12 Here the Zennian interest in correctly aligning one’s consciousness with reality supports Japhy’s Bashō-like insistence on the objective presentation of images, of the ontologic value of those images, in haiku. This value of “the real thing” also determines the mood of what is best in American haibun: engaging our narrated experience (and critical appreciations) to their spiritual depths.
The classic Japanese novel The Tale of Genji (c. 1000), by Marasaki Shikibu, provides a model for including poetry (here tanka) in a fictional narrative. The direction culminates in the fiction of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), such as in his Kasamakura (The Three-Cornered World, 1906), which intersperses haiku and discussions about haiku in its first-person poetic narrative fiction. The published diaries of Masaoka Shiki, with their inclusion of haiku and tanka sequences, offer a bridge between the autobiographical poetic journals of Snyder and the fictionalized autobiography of Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac’s long novel Desolation Angels (1965) again narrates the search for spiritual awakening. Perhaps because haiku are testimonies to moments of such awakening, the chapters of “Book One” of the novel often culminate in one or two haiku. But whereas the haiku in Snyder’s “Lookout’s Journal” convey the lucidity of a consciousness perceiving reality calmly from an awakened state, so that these images have a Bashō-like objective depth, as in his haiku on a drowned mouse found in his morning water bucket,13 making such haiku one more account in a day’s events, the haiku in Desolation Angels crystallize in an almost discursive way a moment of personal realization precipitated by the given prose narrative. In such narrative, expressed by Kerouac in poetically compressed, rhythmic prose chapters of about one to three paragraphs, we find represented, more than in Snyder, albeit in a more comprehensively subjective way, the stylistic mode of typical American haibun in which haiku more or less complete given straightforward narrative development.
For example, in chapter forty-one of Desolation Angels, the novel’s narrator and main character sleeps on Desolation Peak, the site of his fire-watching job, as the rainy season begins. This one-paragraph chapter is introduced by a short comment on the rain, but for most of its length describes a dream of the narrator and his thoughts and memories in response to that dream. The chapter’s narration concludes with a quotation from the Buddha on dreams and the true nature of reality. The two haiku appended to this chapter recapitulate all of the elements of the narrative, but, further, offer a moment of revelation derived from it.14 The first haiku leads from an image of the rain (“mist boiling”) to an insight into the true nature of the surrounding mountains (they are “clean” in the rain) in the Buddhist context of the universality of subjectivity in which all things have their own consciousness and exist “just as they are.” The second haiku leads from another image of the rain (“mist”), through the narrator’s dream (which “goes on”), to the implicative contradictory Buddhist ideas of the illusory nature of reality (sam-sara) and the cosmic nature of this same reality when perceived in an awakened state (nirvana).
Another chapter from the novel is a character study of a colorful old Glacier District ranger who is described to the narrator by a character named Jarry Wagner, another stand-in for Gary Snyder. The ranger comments on Jarry: “‘And all dem books he reads... about Buddha and all dat, he’s the smart one all right dat Jarry”’15 This affectionate account by the old ranger is ironically juxtaposed by the narrator to jarry’s actual Buddhist practice. And at the thought of Jarry meditating across the ocean in Japan, the narrator is provoked to the realization that “Buddha’s just as old and true anywhere you go....”16 This opposition leads to the chapter’s concluding melding of the old ranger with Buddhism and, in the light of the ranger’s weather-beaten, unmarried, isolated state, with the mountain and its buddha-nature in a haiku that asks the mountain, Desolation Peak, how it “earned” its name.17
In a final example, another chapter recounts the narrator’s departure from the mountain at the end of his tour of duty. After offering a prayer to his cabin, he meditates upon the beauty and cosmic mystery of a lake in the far distance. He then acknowledges his love of God for creating such beauty and mystery as evoked by the lake. This testament precipitates a final awareness which will prepare the narrator for his reentry into the world of men: “Whatever happens to me down that trail to the world is all right with me because I am God and I’m doing it all myself, who else?”18 He realizes that, in Buddhist terms, there is no theistic God, there is no ordinary self, only buddha-nature, which is a correct orientation of consciousness, and that he is responsible for achieving that consciousness. The concluding haiku, which explains the narrator’s ability to accomplish this state through meditation, such as in his contemplation of the lake, declares, “I am Buddha,” and thus becomes a recorded moment of such a state.19
Experiments with longer versions of haibun in the seventies and early eighties include Geraldine Little’s Separation: Seasons in Space: A Western Haibun (1979) and Hal Roth’s Behind the Fireflies (1982). The latter offers prose accounts of an American Civil War battle by Roth as well as by eye-witnesses, whose writings are juxtaposed to Roth’s contemporary haiku.
An ambitious work that unites the narrative drive of traditional modern fiction and the emotional power of haiku appended to poetic prose in haibun is Rod Willmot’s Ribs of Dragonfly (1984). Each of the work’s
