Sun-Dappled Stones

Leaf 351 – Essays on Haiku

 

Shizu Okino - Tied Rocks

Whenever I want to find a calm point of focus in my mind I try to visualise a round, palm-sized pebble on the bed of a clear stream or brook. It’s a very specific, eidetic scene. One which is based on any number of different, but similar streams which I’ve seen flowing down countless rugged, rocky valleys along the Cornish coast. This naturalistic image of water and stone appeals to me and lends itself to my sense of inner calm because it simultaneously represents stasis and motion. It is both calm and refreshing. Permeable and impermeable. The pebble is solid, rounded and unmoved. The water is fresh and clear, and it passes all around the smooth rock, roiling and flowing fast – almost invisible, except for the sharp motes of sunlight which glint and flash golden from the surface down to the rocky, gravelly, sandy riverbed. I have tried to capture this mental image in the following haiku:

 

 

Pebbles shimmying

beneath

sun-dappled water.

 

 

However, I’m not sure it successfully captures the essence which I was aiming to grasp. Sometimes the sentiments (in the married-forms of thoughts and feelings) don’t seem to merge or coalesce quite as easily as we intend. It can be hugely frustrating. There is that sense of certainty; a clarity of perception which somehow resists us and refuses to let itself be translated from pure feeling into words. This is why, as poets, we continue to wrestle with thoughts and themes, with images and words, revisiting verses we have written – revising and reshaping them – over and over again. It’s not so much an obsession, but rather an inexhaustible striving towards perfection. All art is a process of polishing. But in this particular instance, having already tried to capture this impression in my poem, I was taken aback to find the following, almost identical haiku written by one of my favourite Japanese writers over a century before me:

 

The stones at the bottom

Seem to be moving;

Clear water.*

 

I think all haiku poets share in this experience of finding another poet who has had a similar experience or moment of inspiration which they have attempted to encapsulate, just as we have (see also, Leaf 33). It certainly is a deeply curious thing, to peer deep into this mirror. It is a moment of connection. But, in this particular instance, stumbling across Sōseki’s haiku – its discovery was immediately qualified by a passage of interpretation which I found along with it. In this passage, R.H. Blyth comments on Sōseki’s poem, saying: “This poem is a failure, for the poet has allowed his intellect to interfere with his imagination. Movement, simple movement, is perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe. This is the meaning of our deep interest in earthquakes, the stormy sea, horse-races, the clouds, streams, rivers, tobacco smoking. In the above verse, the stones of the bottom of the brook are moving. The water is so clear that the movement can be exactly and vividly seen. The intellect qualifies this with ‘seems to be moving’ but the imagination takes no notice of this. It loves movement for its own sake; whether the movement is in the mind or outside it, does not matter.”*

 

I have to confess I am completely baffled by this interpretation. It seems curious to me that Blyth, if I am reading him correctly, has completely missed the zen-like contradiction which is placed at the heart of Sōseki’s poem. It seems to me as though Blyth is muddling the ‘seems’ and ‘are’ in relation to the movement of the stones. I read Soseki’s poem and it strikes me that he is attempting to convey the same notion as I am in my poem. This notion is quite a simple point: the stones are not moving, but it looks like they are. The play of the clear water moving around them and the way the water refracts the light causes this illusion, and this is perhaps a very zen-like perception; i.e. – even when things are still and unchanging, they change and are changing. One only has to think of Heraclitus’s statement that it is impossible to step into the same river twice, or Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability.’ Contradictions abound in life, but the ability to accept those contradictions is what is most essential to maintaining our equanimity, our balance. It seems remarkable to me that Blyth missed this, if I have read him correctly. Especially given how acutely perceptive he usually is in other instances to the zen-like nature of haiku, and also how easily he relates it to similar sentiments as expressed by Western poets, such as Keats and Wordsworth.

 

Having made this observation though, I think Blyth might well be right all the same. I was not sure my poem worked as well as I had originally intended it, even before I had discovered Sōseki’s poem. I’m still not convinced mine works any better because of this coincidence. Perhaps both Sōseki and I each missed our mark?** – Maybe I will one day manage to rephrase and reframe this poem into something better; or perhaps it may simply have to remain as it is. Unmoved and unmoving amid the flow which continues to pass all around it, glinting and ungraspable to the last. Not quite a success, but not entirely a failed effort either. After all, haiku are simply words which come together albeit only briefly fixing a thought, a feeling, or a view – extending a moment which we hope others might share.

 

 

Shizu Okino - Cho Knot (Butterfly)

 

*R.H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume Three: Summer-Autumn (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), p. 713.

**It’s interesting to note how few of Natsume Sōseki’s haiku Blyth includes in his canonical four volume work on haiku. One gets the feeling that Blyth perhaps didn’t rate the celebrated novelist’s efforts in the art of haiku very highly.

This poem was originally written and posted on Bluesky in response to a #dailyhaikuprompt - dapple.