concluding haiku intensifies the haibun’s concern with manifesting a clarity of consciousness that will selflessly reflect the objective realities of nature in their cloud-like continuous becomings by objectively focusing on such realities in a moment at dusk. That concern had been already introduced, almost as an epigraph, in Thoreau’s journal entry at the top of the same page: at sunset, he notes, “ponds are white and distinct.”33 The radical complexity and compressed nature of the reverberations built up among the images on this page are typical of Haiku Pond, which, as a work, provides the most experimental use of images thus far in English-language haibun.
The moodiness and sabi-like feeling of the concluding haiku are set within the context of actual meditation practice two pages later in the haibun “Scarecrow.” This haibun records the objective sense perceptions of the meditator’s heightened awareness of silence. It also evokes the central tenet of Buddhism, the inevitable dissolution of human consciousness and all things in death, through the symbolic image of wind: “Wind-within. It sits with me...the scarecrow on the hill. ”34 This passage is followed by a drawing of Tripi in the lotus meditation position. Tripi himself thus becomes the human scarecrow who in as objective a way as possible registers the fact of his mortality as a facet of reality. This haibun’s concluding haiku imposes this fact, however gloomy, upon Tripi’s communion with Thoreau, whose Journal is alluded to in its first line:
Not his Journal
But the winter wind
Is sad.35
This sabi-like reckoning with mortality, which is, as Tripi notes in this haiku, alien to the Transcendentalist spirit and Thoreau’s work, makes Tripi’s Haiku Pond all the more compelling as a spiritual journal that is perhaps understood and colored as much by a postmodern despair as it is by a sabi-like aesthetic.
But a universal insight into nature that is ecstatic rather than moody, and thus precisely in the spirit of Thoreau, occurs in the last section of Haiku Pond. This section begins with the following quote from Thoreau: “Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.”36 It is followed by Tripi’s journal entry on silence. The silence here is intended to be the same kind of Zennian objectivity before all experience that we have already discussed. The next page confirms this intent with a drawing of a splash which, as we learn in the next page’s haiku, wittily alludes to Bashō’s most famous haiku:
This morning from a frog,
I hear all I need to hear—
About the pond!37
So in silence, a state of enlightened consciousness, Tripi commingles Bashō’s frog pond with Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He highlights further this intent by having Thoreau speak like a haiku poet: “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature...”38 If we substitute “objective revelation” for “God,” we have brought Thoreau and Basho together. And then immediately Tripi has the last word by joyfully linking, in a subtle manner, his cabin, Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, and, possibly, Basho’s hut, to the tone and structure of Basho’s frog haiku:
Cabin door
POP!
In July.39
Thus Tripi has united, in this haiku and Haiku Pond as a whole, the spiritual visions of Bashō and Thoreau, the Eastern communion with nature that is echoed in American Transcendentalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of that movement, noticed a “fundamental unity” between man and nature. Here is the American paradigm for the idea of universal subjectivity: all of reality, including nonhuman nature, has its own inherent reality with its own right to existence. Man may not, at his whim, subjugate that seemingly mindless otherness to his own will. In fact, as Emerson would suggest, there is an inherent beneficent relation between man’s consciousness and those non-human subjectivities through which man’s inner life is enriched. These are the subjectivities that Thoreau studied and communed with during his stay at Walden Pond. And these are the subjectivities that Basho advised his students to study and commune with. In sum, haiku and haibun are revelations of such study and communion. One aspect of such a poetics involves the Zennian idea of seeing things just as they are, that is, in their own subjectivity or buddha-nature which, in Zennian terms, reflects a universal subjectivity of consciousness. Another aspect of such a poetics involves the Buddhist value of compassion toward all living things: a broad-based respect for nature, including humanity, that is perhaps expressed in the contemporary ideas surrounding the ecology movement. A final aspect of such a poetics involves the Taoist and Buddhist idea of the ephemeral yet cosmic nature of the moment: that each subjectivity is created and sustained anew moment-to-moment. Hence the mystery of universal creation itself is concealed in a particularized way in each moment experienced, in each subjectivity experienced.
The most common form of English-language haibun consists of one to three fairly short paragraphs followed by a single haiku that sums up or comments on the preceding prose, although a variation of the form intersperses haiku throughout the prose. These prose sections of a haibun are most often expressed in a heightened “poetic” tone that is matched likewise by the accompanying haiku. Such haibun equally represent most often a direct response to some facet of nature. And the majority of the more successful of these address the mystery of universal subjectivity in its moment-to-moment manifestation.
Three examples of such successful haibun are set, appropriately; during the periods of sunrise or sunset when the claims of our ordinary daytime consciousness and so-called objectivity are loosened. Hal Roth’s winter haibun and Dennis Kalkbrenner’s “Lake Superior” occur at dawn. Both are expressed in a dream-like mood that evokes Chuang-tzu’s Taoism with its emphasis on the ephemeral, perhaps illusory; nature of perceived reality. So-called objectivity is broken down by such a mood and the nonhuman subjectivities are revealed to us. For Roth in a bleak winter field, they are the evoked pathos of a sapling that will die because of wounds created by a buck’s rubbing against it and the haunting personified winds, both of which are incorporated into the concluding haiku:
midwinter—
dawn winds approach
the buck’s rubbing tree40
For Kalkbrenner, skipping stones on Lake Superior in the summer, it is the very recovery of a child-like capacity to commune with those non-human subjectivities. The prose thus concludes: “Awake again all young dreams.”41 And this process, provoked by the fragrance of roses and the misty lake, is concretized in a metaphor of those half-forgotten dreams in the fading echoes of the skipped stones described in the haibun’s concluding haiku.
J. P Trammell’s “Sunset on Cadillac Mountain” reverses the oriental convention of watching sunrise from a holy mountain. Here Trammell’s seemingly objective presentation of the perceptual transformations caused by sunset on the mountains to the west and the inhabited islands to the east of Cadillac Mountain comes to elicit a poetically charged response to what Trammell experiences: like whales, “humped islands rise in the bays”; the sun, like a creature, seems to “settle onto the knobs and ridges of the pink and blue mountains”; the waters appear fiery silver “as if poured molten from a ladle.”42 But with darkness a different subjectivity of the mountain is manifested. The lights of the stars and those of the inhabited dwellings on the islands and in the forests surrounding the mountain produce a sabi-like mood: “I am alone in the encroaching darkness...” and evoke the sabi-mooded objectivity of the concluding haiku in which an unseen yarrow’s fragrance “penetrates the night.’”43
G. R. Simser’s “Water Spider,” in the act of describing the play of that creature’s shadow on the bottom of a brook, occasions
