the pathos of a recognizable emotion, for example, leaving a loved spot:
Last day at the cove
-a little snowman of sand
left facing the sea55
This last haiku is movingly supported by a charming haiga of a sand snowman with a tiny shadow staring out to an enormous expanse of sea, and reflects the appealing light tone found throughout the work.
Although a number of collections of travel haiku, except for the lack of accompanying prose narrative description, resemble the best classical Japanese travel haibun in their subtlety and depth, we perhaps have only one travel haibun that approaches the mood and tone of such classical work. This volume is Tom Lynch’s Rain Drips from the Trees: Haibun along the trans-Canadian Highway (1992). This collection consists of one long haibun describing a hitchhiking trip from Pennsylvania into Ontario Province and west across Canada to British Columbia and four short haibun on hikes into the mountains and forests of Oregon and Arizona. The title piece, like Basho’s Narrow Path to the Interior, includes interesting encounters with people met along the way as well as meditative responses to cityscapes, landscapes, wild nature, and the process of travelling itself. An entrance into Lynch’s haibun occurs in “Autumn at the Valley’s Edge,” a short haibun on Mt. Pisgah, Oregon. The second-last paragraph ends: “It is our instinct to be remote. ”56 Lynch is voicing the axiom that allows him to breach the world of, particularly, nonhuman subjectivities. Nature sets up barriers to such breaches that we must intuitively respect, notwithstanding the modern world’s reinforcement, even encouragement, of our objectifying nonhuman nature as mere things to appropriate. Lynch concretizes his axiom of natural separation and his tacit protectiveness of that separation in the conclusion to this haibun:
I notice, far down the hill, that the deer have stepped out of the trees and stand silently in a clearing.
far down the slope
a few deer feed—between us
rain begins to fall57
Despite his conviction of the gulf between individual subjectivities, Lynch is continually registering the very mystery of how things exist as such in a given moment and whether such subjectivities exist separately from his observation of them. He unravels this problem dramatically in “Climbing Kachina Peaks,” a narrative of his trip to these Arizona mountains that are sacred to the Hopi Native Americans. One of the first haiku voices the problem:
car suddenly here,
suddenly gone—
dark mountain silence58
On descending the mountain he has climbed, toward the end of his trip, he restates the problem in terms of nonhuman nature:
suddenly here
grasshopper on my knee
suddenly gone59
Lynch finally resolves the problem in his conclusion to the haibun:
Thinking of a shower, and hot supper, and how to write this, I hike through forest I don’t notice. Now, after shower, and supper, and writing this, I think of forest I missed.
cold moonlight
on kachina peaks—
if I step outside, if I don’t60
The peaks, like everything else in nature, have their own intrinsic existences, regardless of what human consciousness might hold or not hold on the matter.
Yet in Lynch’s haibun, and in nature itself, there seems a protective distance separating human consciousness from the true natures of nonhuman existences. It is as if our own subjectivity fosters such protectiveness in nonhuman subjectivities. In any event, the main theme of his long title haibun appears to be the impossibility of breaching in some final way this protectiveness. However, nature itself seems at times to elicit communion with itself, as in this early haiku:
almost asleep
a breeze wakes me—
northern lights61
But this communion throughout the haibun is never complete, perhaps underscoring an indefinite quality of mystery inherent in intra-subjective exchanges with nonhuman nature. In such exchanges our normal orientation toward normal dimensional coordinates and psychologically felt experience is undermined. Thus the strongest sections of the work record descriptive moments of physical distance, like the northern lights of this haiku or the loon diving in the distance in another;62 transitional moments of going to sleep and waking up, as in this haiku; or eerie moments in which animals are awake while the author sleeps63 such as:
dream under stars—
an elk’s breath
mists the darkness64
They also record atmospheric indefiniteness, as in a haiku on rain-soaked trees in misty twilights65 or this on a reoriented sea gull:
dense mist—
in dawn light a gull
again finds land66
This haibun does not resolve the mystery of such indefiniteness but tries to simply poetically record or celebrate it. At its conclusion, echoing Whitman’s breaching of eternity in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Lynch engages in a more traditional way Lifshitz’s concern with the limits of human perception and consciousness:
Victoria, buy a few peaches, toss pits into the sea. To what avail time, waiting for the ferry.
cross the straits
through evening blue
venus behind thin clouds
I lean on the rail. Tonight too, crossing Victoria ferry, white sea gulls high in the air float with motionless wings. To what avail space.67
But, more importantly, Lynch’s haibun as a whole are a testament, beyond the question of the failures of human subjectivity, of the revelatory subjectivities in nature which—though partially hidden, like the star in this haiku—are nonetheless waiting for our aesthetic contact.
A volume as strong as Rain Drips from the Trees is Penny Harter’s At the Zendō (1993), a collection of haiku, haibun, and poetry centered on trips to the Dai Bosatsu Zendō, a traditional Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and on the act of attaining Buddhist enlightenment. The main section, “A Weekend at Dai Bosatsu Zendō,” is a diary of a visit to the monastery in September 1987, beginning with the picking up of friends at Grand Central Station in New York City and ending with Harter’s departure from the monastery: This haibun records Harter’s gradual induction into the way of life and, finally, the consciousness of a Zen Buddhist monastery registering Harter’s gradual awakening into a Zennian consciousness through the more and more subtle presentations of her responses to her thoughts and perceptions.
A key passage occurs at the first morning meditation. After an hour of chanting sutras while walking rapidly with the other residents, a period of silent sitting meditation, and ten minutes of collective silent walking, Harter and the others begin silent
