Haiku Time

[ . BACK to TOP . ]

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Not 'Here and Now' but
'Everywhere and Everywhen'

QUOTE
©　WHR Summer 2008 / Susumu Takiguchi


Did you know what you were talking about when you mentioned that something, for instance haiku, was in the 'here and now', especially 'now'? Do you know it now? What about the occasions on which you heard or read somebody else mention the same. Did you really understand it, or did you just think you did? Did you not wonder, even fleetingly, if the speaker or author really knew it?


Of course there is no statistics to show how many people do and how many don't. However, I would not be surprised if there were far more people than we think who were saying or hearing this particular expression and did not even think twice about it, let alone trying to unravel the true meaning of it.


It is ultimately a question about time and space, which is a vast and
difficult area to get into. So, at least let us deal with only one of
them here: time, even if in some philosophy, or in physics even, the
two are but one. However, this is not a place for a philosophical
discourse or a theory of physics.



Let us also confine ourselves to an area which is relatively narrow
and familiar to us, even if the question covers the whole area of
human life and beyond. And that area in this editorial is haiku.



If you are someone who would bother to read this editorial you must
have said or heard at least once that haiku was in the NOW. If not, at
least you must have said or heard at least once that haiku should be
written in the present tense, or else, that Japanese haiku poems seem
to be written in the present tense.



I have never once thought or said that haiku is in the now. Nor have I
ever thought or remarked that haiku should be written in the present
tense. However, I have heard and read many people say it, which has
then been repeated almost parrot fashion by a countless number of
others, so much so that the world sounds as if it is surrounded by the
noise of this heavy traffic.



I have had pretty good idea about what they are trying to say or what
they are meant to be talking about. However, I have always been left
with some nagging feeling of suspended judgement (Greek, epoche) or
lingering doubt. It is really none of my business but still it has
troubled me, and troubled me a lot, because not only it is
superficially wrong but also there is something in it which is not
quite right in a fundamental sense.



I knew the main reasons (*see footnote) why the superficial end of the mistake has come about and I have mentioned them often. For me these reasons were as blatantly obvious as the mistake was blatantly superficial. Therefore, it is not worth looking at them here. The superficial end of the mistake has been caused simply by superficial thinkers. However, it has been the deeper and more fundamental end of the mistake that I have been puzzled and kept in the dark. This is the one worth investigating.


Thus I had been in this rather agonising sceptical and intellectual
limbo for a very long time until I visited India. This strange country
with strange mixture of everything strange seems to have all the deep
and fundamental answers to all the deep and fundamental questions.
Once one gets such an answer from India she ceases to be strange and the familiar world we have been accustomed to suddenly begins to look strange instead. This was my impression about India when many of my problems began to be solved by my visit there.


It all seems to have something to do with how we understand time. The
best way to illustrate my point is to compare the following two
questions: (1) What time is it now? (2) What is time?



The first question relates to Newtonian Time and it is the one we are
most familiar with, or even the only notion of time we know and
practice. The second question relates to a very different
understanding of time which I call here 'Indian Time' for want of
better words, or as a symbolic nickname, even if the proponents in the
broadest sense include many other people including Immanuel Kant or
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.



To mention my conclusion first, I have realised that what I understand
by 'Indian Time' is akin to, or even perhaps identical with, what I
now call the 'Haiku Time'.



The 'Indian Time' is larger, wider and far more than the 'Newtonian
Time'. In its ultimate form, it transcends the 'Newtonian Time' which
is a narrow, specific and practical concept of time most useful for
science and technology, and such quantitative things as economics or
history as a branch of science.



Without the 'Newtonian Time' we cannot celebrate our birthdays or
coming of new seasons. Without it we cannot measure speed or predict the moment of sunrise. Without it economists will lose their jobs as they will no longer be able to talk about an annualised inflation rate or forecast the next five years' economic growth, i.e. future tense.
Without it we cannot let bygones be bygones or consign the dead people to history, i.e. past tense. But what we do not normally know is that we are at the same time trapped by, and prisoners of, the 'Newtonian Time'. We cannot think of anything save within the framework, and to the dictate of it. In short, we are at the mercy of the 'Newtonian Time'.



In most of the so-called developed countries mythology, legend,
folklore, or even parables in holy books are all relegated to the past
by most of their population. They do not think twice that events
related in these stories are all things of the past. Not so in India.
Or so it seems, to me at least. Vishnu is just as alive now as in the
past. Dharma (sacred duty) is still a driving force for Indians. The
Upanishads are still the backbone of their thought process. Their
concept of the Universe has not changed from the time of the Vedas and beyond. Nothing, it seems, has changed in India while everything has been changing at the same time.



If I had heard in other countries what I heard in India from the lips
of her people I would have had no alternative but to conclude
instantly and categorically that they were fanatics, or religious
fundamentalists or worse. Instead, I found myself instantly and
categorically in tune with what the people in India had to say. Not
only that but also I experienced an unexpected premonition or hope
that many of the unresolved questions I have been asking myself since
my childhood could find their answers at last in India. The question
about time is one of them.



In India, it seems that past lives with present and future is part of
the present. I go even further than that. My strong impression was
that in India past, present and future seem to be the same thing, all
rolled into one. The 'Newtonian Time' is no more than just a part of
their vast concept of time and in here too the Indians have had a most
complex, gigantic and sophisticated mathematical and quantitative
system since the olden days.



It was St. Augustine who fixed the beginning of the universe to be
5000 BC, which has governed the Western concept of time ever since. In India, Brahma's one day is equal to our 4,320,000,000 years. His day and night is double that. His whole life is equal to our 311,040,000,000,000 years. The interesting thing is that modern physics and cosmology are coming round to figures very close to these. For example, our own planet is about 4.6 billion years old.


The Indians think of time in terms of billions of years. We need not
really worry about what happened before these billions of years
because it is outside of daily human capability anyway. This vast
scale of time also possesses the famous concept of the infinite cycle
of births and deaths symbolised in the shape of chakra. It means that
time is circular and not linear, a very important point in
understanding the haiku time. The circular movement in cycles is
symbolically called the wheel of time. And if one get liberated from
this cycle, then nirvana, and a hope to reach moksha – a total and
eternal freedom where time will have no beginning or end, or past,
present or future! Here is the zenith of Indian thinking, art and
poetry – THE INFINITY.



Even if we think of a fraction of the Indian concept of time, we can
readily and clearly see for certain that there is nothing more absurd
than to say 'Haiku should be written in the present tense'. While the
Indians are seeing birds, flowers, trees, the sun, the moon, the
stars, rains and winds, rivers and seas, human forms and conducts,
religious events and rituals, all in terms of billions of years, the
dominant haiku trend teaches us to focus on 'the haiku moment'.



Indian ideas, philosophy, religions, cosmology and the concept of time
have seeped through the filter of Chinese civilisation to reach Japan
where they have crystallised in various Japanese forms. One of them is
haiku. India may not be the direct begetter of haiku but it has
indirectly given Japan much nutrition to foster what has become haiku
as we know it today. In this sense Japan is a student of Indian
culture, which explains why the Japanese can instinctively understand
what the Indians say and do.



In a sense, what I have been after is a long search for the lost time.
I knew that the time was lost but I did not know what it was or how or
what it meant. Now I am beginning to experience the regaining of the
lost time about which I could only imagine but not feel. It was a long
journey but it has begun to be worth it. Now everything has started to
be clear.



When people were saying that haiku was in the 'here and now' and that
therefore it should be written in the present tense, not only should
it not have been said so for superficial reasons which are no longer
worth debating, but also it should have meant on a much deeper level
what it was not meant by those who mentioned it. It was actually
pointing to something totally different, i.e. the 'Haiku Time'.



Whether something is happening now and you have to capture that
precious, intensive but evanescent split of a second of haiku moment
to take the snapshot of something which is so profound that neither
past nor future should intervene in its ecstatic experience and
enlightenment, is neither here nor there. It is a fallacy, or else a
wishful thinking at best. It probably has never existed.



When we are talking about 'now' in haiku we are not really talking
about a point in time which we call present to the exclusion of past
or future. It is a time which transcends such arbitrary distinction of
the vast presence of time which is 'everywhen'. The fact that there is
no such English word as 'everywhen' is a case in point. 'Everytime'
does not exist in English either, though 'every time' does but means
something different.



Even the expression 'all the time' or 'always' or 'at all times' does
not quite carry the same all pervasive feeling of time which
transcends the level of qualifying different points of time, which is
exactly what these phrases are doing. 'Forever' or 'eternal' has the
closest feeling English is capable of offering to what I am describing
by the 'Indian Time' or 'Haiku Time'. However, even these seem to
reflect wishful thinking rather than reality as can be seen in the
expressions such as 'love forever true', 'eternal life in heaven',
'eternal truths', 'time without end'. If a Christian is lucky enough
to enter the kingdom of God he or she can also enjoy the 'Haiku Time',
but unfortunately not in his/her lifetime. There will be no such
luxury for atheists, agnostics or the damned.



So the only way to genuinely benefit from the 'Haiku Time' is to
'believe in haiku'. This is not a play on word from the association of
religious contemplation just mentioned. Nor is it an inane remark like
typical Zen answers. What I mean is a belief in the 'essence of
haiku'. The 'Haiku Time' is an important part, but not all, of the
haiku essence. It may have the appearance of 'the present' to
non-Japanese haiku poets, especially those in the West trapped in the
'Newtonian Time', but they should not be fooled by it.



My instinct tells me that Indian haiku poets have known this all along
because of their different concept about time. Therefore, when they
were taught that haiku was in 'the now' they must have been thinking
something different from that which the teachers tried to inculcate in
them. Namely, the pupils (the Indians) knew better than the teachers.
In fact there is no need to teach the Indians anything because they
have known everything since the Rig Veda and beyond.



One of my learned Indian friends told me that there were two Indian
words for time, namely 'samay' and 'kaal' . 'Samay', he said, was more
or less like the English word 'time'. However, that seems to be only
part of the story because the other term 'kaal', which according to
him is untranslatable into English, has a much wider and comprehensive
meaning. It refers more to the motion of time and describes the 'flow
of time as a circle, or more aptly, like a river that flows from
silent mountain glaciers to roaring oceans and then comes back to
land, to the mountain peaks in the shape, for example, of silently
drifting snowflakes, or to the plains as rain, or as simply drifting
clouds over the desert.' This remark seems to underpin my perception
of the 'Indian Time'.

Another learned Indian friend has illuminated my dark road to
understanding the 'Indian Time'. It is all either in the absolute
terms or relative terms. Time only exists in the relative sense and in
the mind at that because the ideas of time (and space) are no more
than a conceptual invention of the mind. However, it does not exist in
the absolute sense. My friend says, 'In reality all there is is only
"ISNESS" and in this framework even ideas such as billions of years
are outdated...Words such as eternal, infinite or forever are...the
limited mind's feeble way of expressing that which is beyond it's
conception.' How can a feeble mind cease to be feeble and reach out to
the absolute? My friend presents a well-known saying: Mind or
knowledge has to end for the true self-understanding to begin.


[END]




Notes: The superficial reasons for disproving the superficial end of
the popular misconception that haiku is in 'the now' and therefore
should be written in the present tense:



a) The greatest culprits are those pioneers who introduced haiku to
outside Japan and equated haiku with Zen, or at least exaggerated the
excessive influence of the latter on the former, and their 'disciples'
who swallowed the pioneers' teachings lock, stock and barrel. The
teaching that haiku was Zen led directly to the belief that haiku was
in 'the here and now' and also automatically to the arbitrary
convention that haiku should be written in the present tense, and to
multitude of other misconceptions including the famous 'haiku moment'.



The problem is that even if Zen was used merely as something of an
analogy in order to explain this strange thing called haiku the
analogy was carried too far and also the explanation was half-baked.
Many got an easy, ready-made and too-good-to-be-true but
too-good-to-miss answer to the question of what haiku was and ended up
understanding neither haiku nor Zen. If haiku had been explained not
as a strange, mysterious, exoteric, profound and
difficult-to-comprehend thing, symbolised by the Zen analogy, but as
what it simply is, namely, familiar, plain, specific, concrete,
mundane and easy-to-understand form of poetry, none of these
embelishment, theorising and mystification would have occurred and we
would all have been enjoying genuine haiku like men in a communal
bath, women without make-up or good food without tomato ketchup. In
that case, of course haiku would not have flourished so much as it
has, but even if small in number people would have been enjoying
better haiku.



Among these pioneers, probably R. H. Blyth and Harold G. Henderson
stand accused above else. Their otherwise positive contribution to the
increased understanding of haiku is enormous and cannot be appreciated
enough. This particular teaching, therefore, is a matter for regret.
As their positive influence was so huge, no one noticed or bothered
this fatal flaw. It is largely overlooked even today.



However, as I have said elsewhere, it is not so much their fault as
that of their immediate followers and of hundreds and thousands of
worshipers of today. Pioneers are bound to make some mistakes.
Otherwise, they could not possibly be pioneers. It is therefore the
job of their followers to correct their mistake. Moreover, all too
often it is the followers who can misunderstand the pioneers or make
mistakes of their own regardless of the pioneers' real teachings.



Blyth was interested in so many things, especially in the area of
literature, but Zen can be said to be his consuming interest. He was a
zealot. It is therefore understandable that he should see almost
everything through the lenses of Zen. Haiku was no exception. No,
haiku was especially what Blyth associated with Zen.



Christianity has heavily influenced Western art and literature. Have
we, then, ever heard that Wordsworth was Christianity and Christianity
was Wordsworth?



The other point which tends to escape people's attention is that when
he talked about haiku or Zen or anything else in his haiku-related
books he was doing so virtually not as an academic but as somebody who
was most probably much more important for us poets than a mere
scholar. Most significantly, he was in these books a devout Zen
student and a poet in spirit. Also, there, he was an inspired and
amused intellectual of the ilk of such figures as Soseki Natsume,
Oscar Wilde or even Colin Wilson. These people are fiercely
independent-minded and tend to put things in almost intentionally
unconventional ways. This is partly why Blyth's writings have a lot of
contradictions which he worshiped.



Thus he was that Blyth has not been taken seriously by orthodox
academicians. His books may show his erudition and flare but hardly
academic discipline or respect for the rules, integrity and
objectivity of proper academic papers. Blyth may have been an academic
in English literature but he was no academic in haiku or Zen. He was
more than that. That is why he could very easily be misunderstood.





b) The other reason for superficial end of the misconception about
haiku being in 'the now' is the bulk of English (and a few other
European languages) translations of Japanese haiku, which tend to be
written in the present tense. This is partly because the translators,
who also lack academic discipline, were so much brain-washed by the
pioneering fathers that they believed in presenting English versions
in the present tense. It is also because they, despite being
translators of all people, lacked in the understanding of the finer
areas of the Japanese language where certain expressions sound as if
they were talking about the present but in fact they are referring to
the past. Beside, certain haiku expressions in Japanese are done
without past tense grammatically even if they are talking about the
past. This is because the Japanese grammar is different from that of
English but more fundamentally because of the brevity of haiku which
demands certain grammatical factors to be abandoned. This is called
something like 'the past in meaning', or 'implied past'. The Japanese
have little difficulty to detect it.



c) The third reason is in a sense related to the second reason
above. It is a question of bungo in Japanese. Bungo is old Japanese
which was superseded by kohgo as modern Japanese during the early
Meiji Era (1868-1911). However, it died hard and was used widely up
until the end of WWII, especially in official writings. This bungo
really is the haiku language, though haiku was allowed to be written
also in kohgo in the post-war Japan. Most of the traditional haiku are
still written in bungo or in bungo-style (i.e. not accurate bungo but
permissible) as not every Japanese can use bungo correctly nowadays.
Non-Japanese would not normally make head or tail about bungo unless
they are academics specialising in Japanese studies. This bungo is
capable of expressing past tense in few syllables, which kohgo is not.
However, these subtleties are all lost in translation which makes
everything in the present tense. Japanese is a delicate language but
if it is handled by rough hands with rough minds in rough translations
all that delicacy is gone.



d) The fourth reason is what in Japanese grammar called taigen-dome.
It is a device where sentences are finished with a noun or the noun
form of a verb. (This has been adapted in the American-led haiku trend
whereby nouns are abundantly used to complete lines, plunk, plunk and
plunk.) It was invented to achieve a crisp and emphatic ending as well
as saving the number of words used in writing. This was a God-sent for
haiku poets who could not afford many words and whose preoccupations
importantly included how to economise with the number of words. Now if
taigen-dome is used in haiku, i.e. verbs or predicates are not used,
one cannot readily tell whether the haiku is about something of the
past or of the present. Many hasty readers and translators simply took
it to mean the present tense.


*****************************
BACK TO

AHA the moment

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::