Art of Disappearing 5, May 2008

SERIALISED INSTALMENTS FROM HIS BOOK

Haiku and invisibility … Since each pure haiku moment is a cleansing of the heart and mind - a diamond-point of concentrated illumination, a link-up with the unsullied - it can be said that the haikuist comes to be in perfect touch with her/ his own inherent invisibility and perfection. And this invisibility becomes more and more of a reality as haiku moments become richer, deeper and more refined.

St. Augustine of Hippo says: ‘Some men of great gifts, and very learned in the Holy Scriptures, who have, when an opportunity presented itself, done much by their writings to benefit the Church and promote the instruction of believers, have said that the invisible God is seen in an invisible manner, that is, by that nature which in us also is invisible, namely, a pure mind or heart.’

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Becoming dew … Why suffer like the Prince of Denmark - ‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew …’ It is purity of mind, purity of heart which allows us to recognise the dew and share in its nature:

dance, from one blade of grass

to another –

pearls of dew!

Ransetsu

Shakespeare’s greatness as a tragedian rests largely on his supreme ability to depict the tragic consequences of the dualistic mind. Peace and lack of peace are constant themes:

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,

Uproar the universal peace, confound

All unity on earth

(Macbeth)

This contrasts with the opposite mood:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything …

(As You Like It)

He is often concerned with the poisoned mind, the loss of wisdom – as when Othello moans, ‘Farewell the tranquil mind!’

The haiku path, on the other hand, is one of conflict resolution. How can Oneness be in conflict? The great master Dogen puts it like this: ‘When the opposites arise, the Buddha mind is lost.’

Shakespeare sees the problem clearly:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

(Much Ado About Nothing)

Of course, if he only dwelt in the realm of duality, physicality and visibility, Shakespeare would not be the great playwright he is. No – the invisible world, the transcendental world – as must be – finds its place in his work, on Cleopatra’s lips, here arranged in 17 syllables:

Give me my robe

Put on my crown

I have immortal longings in me

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Invisible heart of the world … Haiku reconnects us with the invisible, beating heart of the world. The Sami have a beautiful legend, as pure as the snow that surrounds them. The creator-god took the living, trembling heart out of a young reindeer and buried it deep in the centre of the earth. In times of tribulation, the Sami nomads have only to put an ear to the ground and listen and know that all will be well – the heart still beats.

Haiku is a way of listening just as much as seeing:

does the woodpecker

stop and listen, too?

evening temple drum

Issa

(Version: GR)

Once we are open, who knows what guides may appear:

the moon

has found it for me

a mountain path

Michael McClintock

without a voice

the heron would disappear –

morning snow

Chiyo-ni

Chiyo became a nun in 1775. Why? To flow! To vanish, ‘to teach my heart to be like the clear water which flows night and day!’

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Mahavir vanishes … One can take it that Aurelius was lavish without giving every blessed thing away. The great Indian saint, Mahavir, went one step further than our Roman friend. He gave all his princely wealth away in one grand gesture, leaving himself with nothing but the cloak on his back. In his haste to flee the world, a thorny bush snagged his cloak, tearing half of it away. Mahavir now had only half a cloak. Along comes a hobbling beggar. He had heard that Mahavir was giving away all his earthly goods. Had he missed the event? Was he too late? Mahavir gave the poor beggar all he possessed – the remaining half of his cloak - and vanished, naked, into the forest. Free at last!

In pure, selfless haiku moments, we become the vanishing Mahavir. There is nothing we can take with us on this journey of light.

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Santōka, the beggar monk, was in his ramshackle abode when a dog appeared. It had a rice-biscuit in its mouth. Much appreciated as his begging bowl was rarely full. He split the biscuit with the dog! That wasn’t enough. A hungry cat appeared. He split it again:

Autumn night –

got it from the dog

gave it to the cat

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A delicate concatenation … Many haiku double their effect by introducing subtle counter-images or companion-images and one never ceases to wonder, even after repeated readings, at all that’s going on, all that’s being suggested, within this little form:

the sea darkens

the voice of the duck

faintly white

Bashō

the falling leaves

fall and pile up; the rain

beats on the rain

Gyôdai

It is, of course, an event – one event – that is described in a haiku but in it we discover layers of experience, an accumulation of happenings, a delicate concatenation of related, universal, timeless events. Haiku moments are in the eternal now. Silesius, as we have said before, intuits this valuable insight:

Time is eternity, eternity is time,

If you wish, you can make them rhyme

(Version: GR)

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Alertness in the One … Have you noticed how often rain has occurred in the sample haiku given so far? And will you notice the word ‘rain’ next time it occurs?

It’s going to occur again fairly soon. Stay alert! And even if it doesn’t occur again, stay alert anyway. (Or take another timely break NOW)

In the Gyôdai haiku (above) we have noticed leaves upon leaves and rain on rain. Are these separate entities or are they one? If they were separate entities it would be impossible to disappear into one element and not into the other. One disappears into the whole. One cannot disappear into a fraction, because fractions do not really exist. This is the important point we find in Shunryu Suzuki’s enlightened text, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Weatherhill, 197O): ‘Each existence depends on something else. Strictly speaking, there are no separate individual existences. There are just many names for one existence.’

charcoal

drawing the tree

it was

(The Tree it Was by Sandra Fuhringer, King’s Road Press, 2002)

Everything is everything else as is touchingly revealed in an anonymous poem collected in India in the 1st. century A.D. by King Hala:

Buck and Doe

There’s a clearing in the forest

where a lone buck stands

desire is filling the eyes of a doe

The hunter in the trees

it’s his own girl he sees

and drops the bow

(Version: GR)

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Unexpected showers … Enjoy them! Rain, hail, sleet, or snow. The noise. The silence. Penetrating to the essence:

snow

falling on snow –

silence

Santōka

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Penetrating the void

winter wind

from where to where?

leafless trees

Chiyo-ni

Meditate on This

The Saviour said, All nature, all formations,

all creatures exist in and with one another, and

they will be resolved again into their own roots.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

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Sudden illumination …

flash of lightning!

legs of a spider

scurrying up a wall

Kichō

That lightning flash was no mere natural phenomenon; it was Kichō’s sudden illumination. The spider’s legs, it has often been noticed, can be seen as a miniature pictogram of forked lightning scrawled on the sky. They are, in a way, the same. Inside is outside. Outside is inside. They are one. And Kichō, too, is at one with the one. Where else could he be? Outside? Inside? He is at one with the one – a feat impossible without disappearing in a flash.

In truth, every moment is vanishing, every sound is dying, and everything is being reborn. Catch these dying sounds while you can – disappear into them:

three times they call

and then … no more …

deer in rain

Buson

Vanishing, dying – yes; and yet there’s a palpable sense of eternity in Buson’s brief lines. The ever-curious mind may, in time, wonder what may have happened before, or after, but for one glorious, unrepeatable moment we hear a snatch of the unfinished symphony of life, its faint echo.

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Cameron Burgess could well have been writing about haiku in the following: ‘In truth, there is no teaching, there is no ‘way’ to be or not to be, to do or not to do. In truth, there is only the ever-deepening knowing that it is not the seer, the seen or the seeing that matters, but the place in which all three rest, the awareness of all three. This is who you are …’ And this ‘ever-deepening knowing’ comes to all dedicated haikuists.

It can come in a flash as kensho, an opening, or as satori, enlightenment. These ‘openings’ are not deliberate, pre-meditated actions, such as uncorking a bottle of wine. They come to all who learn and perfect the art, they come as unexpected showers:

the skylark:

its voice alone fell

leaving nothing behind

Ampu

(Trans. R H Blyth)

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Everything is coming and going in this world of dew, including our own manifestations and disappearances. We can disappear at will when our vision penetrates and interpenetrates an event until all clutter dissolves. This from a book called Mit weinig woorden, (With a few words), published in Flanders in 1997:

the grey sea

darkens in the evening

the void grows

Ferre Denis

(Trans. Willy Cuvelier & Ferre Denis)

The haikuist knows how to slip into that void. He does it all the time. And the haikuist who doesn’t know how to slip into that void is simply practising the form and had better start again ab initio.

coming from fog

the bird flies through fog

fading into fog

Dimitar Stefanov

(Version: GR)

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