In recent days I have been reading through the content of forums on the website of The Haiku Foundation and, in particular, Sailing 14: What kind of sword do you carry?
The following message by Peter Yovu together with the poems he quotes struck a particular chord that I intend to explore.
So I’ve mentioned some ideas, like Kaneko’s “words of the body” (by which he means, I believe, the mind-body as a whole), and Al’s formulation from Olsen-- “returning poetry to the primary energies of mind and body”, and I’ve alluded to Eve Luckring’s poem discussed elsewhere:
words/ still pink/ close to the bone
And I brought in, prior to all that, Jim Kacian’s poem from Roadrunner:
the high fizz nerve the low boom blood dead silence
These are possibly difficult ideas to work with, not well represented (or presented) by actual haiku or discussions about haiku in the English language world, and for all I know, not much discussed in Japan.
And all this was intended to be in the context of “vigorous language”, something which Basho apparently praised, though perhaps he conceived it differently than language arising from the “primary energies of mind and body”.
I don’t believe “primary” means the same thing as “primitive” exactly, though I suspect Kaneko might like the latter for its shock value. I think, in fact, it relates to an original impulse around haiku toward raw, immediate perception and the challenge of finding language sufficiently vigorous, or sufficiently alive to meet or even magnify the raw aliveness of Being. Words still pink, or raw, close to the bone, close to the Zero, close to the Enso, the swiftly brushed, never perfect, always perfect circle of ink, circle of incorporation, embodiment. And emptiness.
My response will flow from my initial reading of Kacian's poem published in Roadrunner 11.1.
the high fizz nerve the low boom blood dead silence
In 1980 my wife and I attended a Catholic Marriage Encounter weekend in which we focussed our undivided attention on each other unveiling the mystery of the other by writing letters to each other responding to prepared prompts and then shared our letters with each other in the privacy of our room. The letters were to be attempts to express our feelings about a variety of interpersonal matters using words only to express how those feelings felt physically. What does loneliness feel like? What does joy feel like? How does my body feel it? Explain how a peach tastes to you?
Kacian's single line found resonance in me. In it I sense the very nature of being as experienced in the loneliness of one's self with a fine mastery of that which seems unique to haiku poetry notwithstanding that few haiku achieve that depth of expression. The images are not concrete and, equally, they are not abstract. They portray sensations that are only noticed at moments of "peak experience" and can only be named when "recollected in tranquility".
An individual in a peak experience will perceive the following simultaneously:
- loss of judgment to time and space
- the feeling of being one whole and harmonious self, free of dissociation or inner conflict
- the feeling of using all capacities and capabilities at their highest potential, or being "fully functioning"
- functioning effortlessly and easily without strain or struggle
- feeling completely responsible for perceptions and behavior. Use of self-determination to becoming stronger, more single-minded, and fully volitional
- being without inhibition, fear, doubt, and self-criticism
- spontaneity, expressiveness, and naturally flowing behavior that is not constrained by conformity
- a free mind that is flexible and open to creative thoughts and ideas
- complete mindfulness of the present moment without influence of past or expected future experiences
- a physical feeling of warmth, along with a sensation of pleasant vibrations emanating from the heart area outward into the limbs.
The visceral images of fizzing nerves and of pulsing blood suggest melody and bassline working simultaneously to beget silence and, by inference, death. It is an experience of being embodied. What is more everyday, what is more verifiable in our own experience, what do we know better than the experience of embodiment?
In his 1998 Encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II, wrote:
God comes to us in the things we know best and can verify most easily, the things of our everyday life, apart from which we cannot understand ourselves.
In one line, Kacian has written down, for those who will hear, what the poet felt, at a particular moment, felt like. An echo of Kaneko Tohta's poetics when he refers to "words of the body". We do not get to glimpse the particular stimulus (and neither do we need to).