and spirituality In a tour de force of compression Simser moves from the breath-like five-part shadow of the creature to an epiphany of material creation itself:
...five ephemeral pods closing together to become one and then opening and closing again and again, motions in time tracing breath’s flow over bony ribs; tracing briefly the crucifix, the magic discovery of homo ad circulum’s head, hands and feet, and then the snow-angel wonder of youth, arms pumping its wings to exhaustion, then finally fully extended these magic pods become our gliding five-point star; while all the while above us, somewhere, floats the draughtsman, silent and unseen, of such natural art... 44
The allusions to God and Christianity in Simser’s act of perceptual meditation are clearly evident, the water spider becoming a metaphor of God’s sustaining moment-to-moment creation and, by consequent extension, of the interrelationship of all realities, of, ultimately, universal subjectivity. Such associative complexity leads Simser to the realization that the individual human has many realities within his or her self and the haibun’s prose ends with this realization: “...we too continue to float in many dimensions ”45 The concluding haiku reinforces both this realization and that of universal subjectivity by describing, in a return to the objective creature, the water spider’s shadow which, in the haiku’s third line, has, like human beings, “many dimensions.’”46
The democratic compassion tacitly expressed in linking man’s nature to that of a water spider is straightforwardly presented in Liz Fenn’s “No Monkey Business,” a simple narrative of the nourishment and release of five orphaned newborn mice that were found in the family’s house. The mother in this haibun expresses her love for her son’s act of kindness in rescuing the mice but worries that one of the mice will return to be caught in one of the family’s seemingly necessary traps. Notwithstanding the apparent lack of awareness of cruelty-free traps, the haibun ends on an upbeat note with a senryu-like expression of universal good will in a haiku that notes that a “no trespassing” sign has been placed in the house’s crawl space.47
Another common form of English-language haibun is the travel journal. The standard for such a form is set by Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior. Besides the artistry with which Basho commingles deftly descriptive prose narrative and deeply evocative haiku, this work and others like it resonate with a shared cultural history. That history, which includes centuries of poetic responses to well-known natural and cultural settings, augments whatever artistry is present in a given travel journal. But without the artistry, mere reliance on familiar or exotic settings alone cannot carry the work. Robert Spiess, editor of Modern Haiku, in a discussion of haiku sequences based on travel, noted that most of such “‘vacation haiku’ ... are too much recordings of stimuli, rather than creative, in-depth work.”48 A great number of published short travel haibun unfortunately support this view. The best of such haibun reckon with the resonances of history upon the modern present felt moment, expressed in haiku, within the context of the given haibun’s travel narrative. So, in these works, the haiku carry the narrative. Dave Sutter’s “Italia: Quattrocento/Ventecento,” as its title indicates, is a light essay on the impingement of the Renaissance and other past Italian history on the decidedly flamboyant present-day modern culture in what Sutter calls a “quintessence of contrasts and extremes.’”49 Perhaps generated by Sutter’s visit to the cemetery where his uncle, who died as an American serviceman in Europe, is buried, this haibun discusses the observed contrasts in a straightforward manner, almost always exemplifying each of its eleven paragraphs with a forthright illustrative haiku. If you are charmed by the “light touch” of the prose and the haiku, you will enjoy the haibun. But most of its haiku are based on a simple direct contrast that unambiguously underscores the work’s thesis: a blind man selling broken statues, farmhouses eight hundred years apart in age, schoolchildren leaning to look at the Tower of Pisa, a topless woman compared to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Unless you feel the aesthetic weight of the thesis, the success of the work’s haiku comes from the simple irony of the depicted contrasts.
More successful is J. P. Trammell’s “The Temple of the Snail,”50 an account of a visit to the ruins of the temple of Ixchel, the Mayan moon goddess, on the Mexican Caribbean island of Cozumel. The haibun conveys a poetic entrance into the realm of sacred history as concretized by the temple (Trammell quotes from Wordsworth’s The Prelude on this theme) and manifested in the seemingly protective barrier of a rainstorm that Trammell must cross in order to commune with the sacredness of the temple. His taking shelter in the temple leads him to a heightened perception of spiritualized time and space, evoked by a colony of hermit crabs that climb out from the temple floor carrying colorful seashells and fossils that rise from the weathered surface of the temple’s stonework. Thus the temple and its mystery are somehow animated for the narrator and we are left to make the connections generated in him by these observations.
Leatrice Lifshitz’s “Far From Home” is a postmodern meditation on the grounding of the self in history and the space-time coordinates of perceived experience. Its evident theme is gender and exploration. The context of the work is a trip west that mirrors pioneer women’s treks across America. The tone is set in this interior monologue in a consideration of what essentially is the reality of space and time:
Space. A woman in space. Finally.
traveling west—
ail those wide open spaces
fenced in
Does that mean that space is gone? Used up? Well, if it isn’t space, it’s space coupled with time. Changed into time. The time to cross a bridge. Back and forth.51
The narrator begins by alluding to the first female astronaut and to the vanishing of the American frontier. This leads her to the conception of a new frontier, a dialectic between history and present-tense locality. This dialectic is expressed later in a visit to a cemetery and an abandoned mine. The narrator is trying to make sense of the dialectic but only becomes further disoriented: She is, as she says, “Wandering outside the chain of life.”52 She is now beyond even history and the concrete moment. The concluding haiku conclusively evokes this final state:
far from home—
one crow or another
waking me53
This “rhythm of sameness,” as she calls it, this postmodern malaise, breaks down the singularity of experience at the heart of haiku and haibun as much as it breaks down the traditionally reliable continuity of history. Most English-language travel haibun, however, takes a confident stance in the basic coordinates of space and time, including historical time, by ranging from the light travelogue to what might be termed spiritual literature.
Fewer than a dozen chapbook-length travel haibun have been published. The majority of these, and the few unpublished chapbook-length travel haibun that I am familiar with, aspire to that latter kind of literature. Perhaps the earliest published modern chapbook-length haibun is Robert Spiess’s Five Caribbean Haibun (1972), a collection of haibun and accompanying drawings, one of which was published in Travel magazine. The work is in the “lighter” mode of conveying felt experience, and its exotic locations resonate with the vibrancy and narrative interest inherent in the given locales, such as the description of a fisherman scrubbing a moray eel and an octopus, his dinner, or an encounter with poisonous cave spiders. Some of the prose and haiku is a bit too light in tone and focus to reach the contemplative depth we expect in great literature. But the frequent exceptions capture the undeniable liveliness of the moment: a little girl lifting her dress to reveal her bottom in order to taunt her mother, Spiess haggling over some item at the bustling public market:
Saturday market:
a live hen in the scale tray
-my tomatoes next54
