Why is it that in almost all of its thoughts, words and deeds, the human species, as a collective, gravitates towards the lowest common denominator of thoughts, words and deeds?
Facebook, which has become something of a surrogate 'sine qua non' for 'social networking', has risen surely to become the lowest common denominator's medium of choice. It has become a stage for the world's vacuity that cheapens the life of the 'dearest freshness deep down things' with the 'reductio ad absurdum' of words.
Virtue, beauty and truth become mere slogans idly deposited digitally in Facebook posts, comments or status updates with little if any connection to their origin. Even the staccato fire of haiku fast descends into repetition, banality and verbal obsolescence. I am just as guilty of this as any are.
Language, even in its silence, is the source and the summit, the alpha and omega of human consciousness. It has its dwelling in untruth yet it has in it the potential to be in harmony with truth. It originates in breath and ends with a breath. Breath drives the enunciation of words as it passes over reed like tissues, and is then shaped by tongue, teeth, palate and lips. Its beginnings are learned within the first years of an infant's life with a complex interaction of muscle contractions to produce and modulate vocal sounds to establish connection first with parents. It is NOT instinctive in the same way that breathing is instinctive. It is the driving force of consciousness and connection with the world within and without. Words, phrases and sentences are produced uniquely in response to internal or external prompts and stimuli.
Language is a social contract of indicative meaning unique to each couple, family, tribe, region or culture and is perhaps the only thing that human beings themselves have created out of nothing. Grunts, groans, shouts, cries etc. have become imbued with a contractual significance to communicate needs, intimacy, fear, doubt, anger, joy, praise, lamentation, cognitive thought, deception, wisdom, manipulation and so much more.
The highest form of language expression in any culture is poetry utilising sound patterns such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhyme just as it relies on figures of speech (or stylistic devices) including simile, metaphor, metanomy, allusion, antithesis, ellipsis, euphemism, oxymoron, personification, litotes, puns, ambiguity, anaphora etc. to achieve resonances of meaning and suggestion beyond what is explicitly expressed. Poetry can do all this in a way that is pleasing to the perceiver's sense of truth and beauty.
Haiku is a very pure form of poetic expression that achieves its affect with appropriate sound patternings and stylistic devices. To this is added the discipline of concision without having to sacrifice any of poetry's power of suggestion as displayed in the poet's attentiveness to the subtleties of sensory or psychological experience and the poet's ever-deepening sensitivity to the subtleties of language.
The single-most significant stylistic device that we can inherit from haiku's Japanese roots is the concept of the cut whether of sound intonation, image, meaning or grammar contained within the haiku itself. It is the timeless moment between a life-breath's inhalation and its exhalation. It is this cut that empowers the sought after concision with ever-deepening layers of meaning and significance.
Haiku, as a very short form of Japanese verse, can only be written in Japanese. The English language is not composed of ideograms (graphic symbols that represent ideas or concepts) as Japanese is. In Japanese, pictographic variations can open up a surplus of meaning and suggestion that are unique to the language itself and and cannot be fully understood without a full life immersion in Japanese life, language and culture.
Haiku in English is, of necessity, an entirely different poetry that has been inspired mostly by translations (or mistranslations) of haiku from the original Japanese.
Words are human-made constructs ascribed by social contract and common usage with meaning to give voice to the connection between the individual human person and the world they inhabit and others with whom they co-inhabit the world. Language, however, seems to constantly become confused as it flatlines into the lowest common denominator of thoughts, words and deeds deadening the potential beauty of the human species. We seem to be doomed to constantly reenact the human/divine conflict of the tower of Babel - The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
Since our concern was speech,
and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. - (T.S. Eliot - Little Gidding)
Is it from this awareness that the future of the new poetic, that has been inspired by the discoveries of Japanese haiku, will find its true path?