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| photo by N.Kimy, Flickr |
How does the haiku in his narrative help him get there?
Offer some thoughts here, or reflect on a classmate's ideas.
Alternatively, if you would like some more specific questions to prompt your thinking:
1. Which haiku do you find most effective in both presenting a striking image and illuminating the narrative account of the journey (or the author's thought processes)?
2. What makes the "boring mountain" (p.420) different from the mountains that Basho finds more interesting?
3. What does Basho mean when he says, "The days of uncertainty piled one on the other"? What is uncertain?
4. What difference, if any, does it make that this narrative was written long after the journey it describes, rather than in the course of the journey it describes?
5. According to the evidence of these excerpts, how does Basho understand his relationship to a larger poetic tradition?
Deadline: Wednesday (3/9), start of class.
8 comments:
Answering Question 1:
I think the haiku that strikes me most is the haiku near the end on page 425 (the one referring to the samurai and the cricket). This particular haiku stirs up feelings of mourning and solitude, particularly surrounding the idea of aging and death. The cricket under the samurai's helmet implies age and decay (as opposed to the beauty of age), and reflects on Basho's though process.
Clearly, Basho is seeing all of the monuments around him, all of these testaments to age, and is becoming all the more aware of his own aging. Everyone is afraid of change, and as Basho sees all of the change occurring around him, he also fears his own age and his own decay. We can see evidence of Basho's age in the rest of the book, be it Basho's tiring or sickness (page 323).
I found myself comparing Basho and Kant. Their commonality is one of enlightenment. Both of these men led the way to a new way of seeing: Basho by honoring the common man with his poetry, something poets were not known to do in his time; Kant by walking out on a philosophical and political limb with his promotion of free-thinking.
On the other hand, their attitudes and lifestyles are remarkable different. Basho explores life with an artist’s instinct; Kant explores life with a philosopher’s careful logic and argument. Basho physically and emotionally embraces the world and his life until he finds his “body and spirit … tired of the pain of the long journey; [his] heart overwhelmed by the landscape” (417). Kant, in contrast, never once leaves the town of Konigsberg, and was known to consider proposing marriage but then end up thinking “too long” (509).
This is where I am intrigued. It was interesting to me that Basho died ninety years before Kant’s Enlightenment essay was published. It seems the philosophical recognition of the value and potential of the unenlightened common man -- Kant would say “minority” (600) -- was prefigured by emotional (artistic) instinct for change. I wonder if this is how enlightenment comes to most people as individuals. I suspect so, but I don’t know so. If someone out there has an insight about this, please clue me in.
The haiku that strikes me the most is the one on 417, the one he writes for Tokyu. The footnote in our book says that it is a greeting to Tokyu and a way for Basho to compliment Tokyu's region. Basho is also expressing joy at being able to compose linked verse for the first time in the Interior.
Especially after reading the footnote, this haiku was the most striking to me because it shows his thought process and how the journey is affecting his writing. The beauty of nature and the joy he feels at being able to experience it and write about it, at least in my opinion, is truly represented for the first time in the story here. The "beginnings of poetry" line shows that the journey is creating a better poet out of him, and the nature contributes to his process.
The haiku I find most effective in presenting a striking image and illuminating the narrative account of the journey is the one on 422:
Cloud peaks
crumbling one after another-
Moon Mountain
I like this one because of the reference to clouds. It is one of the only haikus that not only depecits what is happening in the moment but also the entire journey- that cloud peaks crumble one after another, meaning that he is continuously moving and truely on a journey- not just sitting still somewhere. It represents the entire journey, not just a short clip of it.
The haikus seem to me to be a device to keep track of his journey and to make a mental picture of places he thought were important enough to remember in particular. My favorite haiku is on page 420, "Have the summer rains/come and gone, sparing/the Hall of Light?" During this part of his trip, Basho is visiting two halls. The Hall of Light contains the coffins of three generations. The outside of the hall that used to be beautiful and covered in jewels has no worn down through snow and wind. However, the hall on the inside is intact, the four sides are still enclosed and the roof is still covered. Basho says it "became a memorial for a thousand years". I think the haiku illustrates his description of the Hall of Light beautifully.
For prompt #4, I think that the narrative being written long after the actual journey had been taken adds a rosy-hue to the attitude Basho has on his journey. Generally, when you look into your past, I feel that unless the experience was exceptionally horrible, we have a tendency to glorify our memories and past experiences. Basho’s account of his journey is primarily a recounting of the places he visited and the people me met. Moreover, a tool that he uses to assist his memory is the haikus he had written during his journey. The nature of poetry is such that it emphasizes emotion and carries some meaning that a mere literal reading cannot find out, deduce. In addition to this, the poems are haikus, which are focused on nature and nature is something to be respected and awed at. Considering these things, I feel like Basho exaggerates his spiritual experience during his journey. Not that I don’t appreciate this kind of spirituality but I think it’s interesting or important to keep in mind the effect that time has on memory and what not.
For question #3 I don't believe that Basho is saying that the boring is boring because it is less remarkable in stature or shape, but rather the experience. When he was in the mountain "for three days, the wind and rain were sever" (420). That suggest that unlike other previous mountains or locations that he had visited, he was not able to fully explore the land as he had wish to. Instead he was confined in the house of the bording guard. It's not that the mountain is any less impressive than the rest, but that the experience their was nothing to gaze at with all the rain. I believe that he probably wanted to see something magnificient, or at least nature on the mountain, but because of the rain he was not able to. By the end of the three days he was probably so bored with the place that he also considered the mountain to be boring by association.
I agree with Debbie that the haiku functions as a more vivid illustration to Basho's journey, and I also feel it provides more for the story's audience. With them interspersed throughout the story, it allows the reader to see Basho's emotional reactions to what he was encountering better than mere narrative descriptions could provide. With the haiku allowing a pause for reflection, the reader can use his/her own interpretation to take away from what Basho was seeing, in a sense allowing them to participate in the journey themselves.
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