Poetry is better than self-help, Part 2….

 

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There’s an old Zen koan about the old Zen master, Linji that goes: 

Linji ascended the hall and said, ‘Here in this lump of red flesh
there is a True Man with no self. Constantly he goes in and out
the gates of your face. If there are any of you who don’t know this
for a fact, then look! Look!’

At that time there was a monk who came forward and asked,
‘What is he like — the True Man with no self?’

Linji got down from his chair, seized hold of the monk and
said, ‘Speak! Speak!’

The monk was about to say something, whereupon Linji let
go of him, shoved him away and said, ‘True Man with no self— 
what a shitty ass-wiper!’

Linji then returned to his quarters.

The “True Man with no self” is a concept that originates in the ancient taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. The person with no self is empty, able to incorporate any rank or role they may need to, to be completely in the moment. Linji’s test was to see if any of the monks could respond from such an empty, selfless position, which response would come automatically, spontaneously, without effort (wu-wei, 無為). Linji grabbed the monk and demanded an answer, but the monk, too full of his Self, had to think of one, and as soon as the monk fell into conceptual thinking, Linji knew the monk was done for.

Koan are like sword fights, the person who has to think before moving is
bound to get cut down.

Linji insists that all selves are “mere empty names.” They are:

Phantoms, illusions, empty flowers — 
Why trouble yourself trying to grasp them?
Gain, loss, right, wrong — 
Throw them away at once.

To understand Linji’s demand for the man of no Self to speak, is to understand poetic living at its core, and to understand whence the selfless poetic tradition truly arises. 

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This Selfless poetic inclination would eventually coalesce most purely in the haiku poetry of medieval Japan. Poetry already occupies very little seating in the (crashing) plane ride of American culture, but haiku even less so, being little more than a carry-on bag or purse or wallet. No one thinks of haiku at all, and if they do, it’s usually in a trifling manner, either outright using it as a kind of joke, or otherwise not bothering to understand it at all.

In serious haiku circles, though, a poet like Basho is typically considered the greatest of all the poets — a kind of Homer in 17 syllables, or a Whitman of the east. But show any American the following poem (translated by Robert Hass), even one with some degree of poetic literacy — 

The peasant’s child
husking rice, stops
and gazes at the moon

— and they don’t know what to make of it. It doesn’t even look or sound or feel like poetry. What is that? In a Self constantly soaked in symbols, there’s not enough symbols to derive meaning. In translation it’s even less than 17 syllables. What can possibly be conveyed? What kind of purpose or theme? It’s too empty. This is why haiku occupies so little space in the already claustrophobic poetic circles, because its simplicity is so foreign to the type of people who believe, say, that the type of “backsplash” in their pre-established defecation space (i.e. bathroom) is indicative of anything at all about their “selves”.

But let’s take a look at a few other Basho poems:

Moonlight slanting
through the bamboo grove;
a cuckoo crying558

Stillness — 
the cicada’s cry
drills into the rocks559

The dragonfly
can’t quite land
on that blade of grass

The hollyhocks
lean toward the sun
in the May rain

I have to force myself to stop whenever I begin quoting haiku. I have to pick poems basically at random, because so many of them are so good, and I bemoan having to leave dozens of them out of these examples. But can you see what’s happening here, yet? What is Basho’s mission? What is his intent?

Don’t think about these poems. Empty your self as much as possible. Then what happens?

A paradox. There is no “you” but there “you” are, right along Basho, seeing with Basho’s eyes, hearing with Basho’s ears, smelling with Basho’s nose. The secret of haiku is that it is a celebration of life, even, as we will see with the poet Santoka, at its most deprived. The secret of haiku is not in the poetry, but in the philosophy of the haiku poet. There are no wasted moments. With the right set of eyes, everything is worth writing about. Joy, pain, love, hate, lust, disappointment, drunkenness, loneliness — this is it, right here, right now.

This is real. The dragonflies, and the hollyhocks and the peasant children gazing at the moon. Are you living it or distracted by the various trifles of the Self? Chasing after totems? Accumulating hieroglyphs? Money, degrees, sexual conquests, cars, furniture, clothes, likes, followers, appliances, prestige?

But life is happening right here, right now. The sacred is the profane. Look! LOOK!

Real haiku poetry is a way of life, and a true haiku poet can write about anything, because the haiku poet is living poetry not writing it. As Whitman said, “…and your very flesh shall be a great poem….”

My personal favorite of all poets is Kobayashi Issa, who writes (all Hass
translations):

Summer night — 
even the stars
are whispering to each other

This stupid world — 
skinny mosquitoes, skinny fleas
skinny children

In the spring rain
a pretty girl
yawning

I’m going to roll over,
so please move,
cricket

Having slept, the cat gets up
Yawns, goes out
To make love

A huge frog and I,
Staring at each other,
Neither of us moves

Even with insects — 
Some can sing,
Some can’t

I don’t know about the people
But all the scarecrows
Are crooked

The moon tonight-–
I even miss
Her grumbling

Pissing in the snow
Outside my door — 
It makes a very straight hole

The world of dew
Is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet — 

Argh. I bristle at not being able to post every last one of them, but I think you get the picture. In less than a dozen haiku, you see the breadth of Issa’s experiences, and in how he wrote about them so you can experience them too. From the trifling — “I’m going to roll over//so please move//cricket” — to the depths of human lamentation. The “world of dew” poem was written after the death of his third child, a second daughter, and Issa lived a life of unimaginable loss, his first three children died while in infancy, and the fourth died during labor, when Issa’s first wife also died (the “I even miss her grumbling” poem is about him missing this wife). Issa’s mother died when he was two, and Issa’s only surviving child was a daughter born after his death at age 63.

Part of the reason for this dalliance with poetics is that none of the poets I’ve mentioned thus far lived easy or privileged lives. Every poet quoted dealt with personal loss, disappointment, sadness, loneliness, nerves. Every poet quoted lived in times of high tribulation — war, pestilence, famine existed at levels anyone reading this book likely cannot imagine. All of them pretty much lived in shacks not much larger than a modern bedroom and struggled with abject poverty. As mentioned, Han Shan didn’t even possess a shack, he lived in a cave, where he would at times have dreams about the wife and daughter he left behind when he chose to escape the world and live as a recluse, when he changed his geometry from that of a husband and father to a religious hermit-poet.

And yet…there they were, living pretty joyful lives. Embracing all the Difference that life threw at them. Feeling their emotions without being marionetted by them.

The great paradox of American Self–ishness — the more one focuses on the self, the less stable the self becomes. Like the beautiful supermodel or actress, staring in the mirror, seeing nothing of the beauty of which the entire world celebrates her for, only her own perceived imperfections. What the rest of the world finds beautiful, she finds ghastly. Just the same, the more we fixate on our selves, the more insecure we become. The true source of pathological anxiety not being solely a lack of control, but, more importantly, the lack of self-confidence to deal with whatever ends up happening. No self-esteem. Very “self-aware” people tend to be very anxious people. This is not a coincidence. The self crumbles like a fallen leaf under the weight of its own gaze.

Instead of the Self, the haiku poet is constantly conscious of the moment. And if this sounds like I’m promoting or perpetuating typical self-help, new-agey mindfulness mumbo jumbo, I promise you I’m not, because the dirty little secret of all of the typical new-agey rigamarole is that it’s
designed to keep you producing and consuming. The mindfulness is simulated mindfulness, meant to keep you commodified, but only with more tolerance for it. Or, like everything else, mindfulness and meditation too become commodified. The people selling you this stuff always keeping your mind full of all the ways you’re still not still, or calm or enlightened enough. There’s always a new mindfulness retreat to pay for and attend, always a new level of calmness, relaxation and selflessness to attain. There’s always some enlightenment or insight that needs to be accessed. There’s always more. 

Making more money. Finding more success. Wiser. More compassionate. More vulnerable. At best, American self-help focuses on becoming more “authentic” even though nobody can quite exactly tell you what that means.

More, more, more. The Will for it never stops. You’re always missing something.

Like most real things, consciousness of the moment is free. You pay for it with nothing but your attention, without judgment or discrimination. It’s empty. A certain kind of mindlessness is what is called for.

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Suzuki Shizuko was a “woman of comfort” who wrote haiku. Even sex work, to the empty, mindless mind is worthy of haiku, of poetic living (all translations by Hiroaki Sato).

Desiring heart:
my fingers in gloves
touch the thing

Amaryllis:
my mind resembling
a hooker’s moves

Open cold flowering quince:
my flirty self
surprises me

Alas
fingerprints taken
from all the hookers

Prostitution:
warmth of a chicken egg
that’s in my palm

Being a hooker’s good too:
eating
a ripe persimmon

Naked body:
blood vessels on the thighs
trail blue

In the hot bath
my breasts are dear
this autumn night

Amid north wind
at end of a climax
I wipe away tears

It is in Sato’s translations of Suzuki’s haiku that we, Americans, can begin to grasp the significance of the “single breath” in which haiku is to be read. Haiku is a pure distillation of the moment, all excesses shorn, and a good haiku in the bodymind of a good reader evokes a bigger picture. “Alas fingerprints taken from all the hookers.” I can’t help but laugh picturing a law enforcement sting of some kind, and all these world-weary, bemused, listless sex workers sitting in an old police station, most of them probably having gone through this procedure before, waiting for it to play itself out so they can get back to their lives.

Even in jail, arrested for prostitution: creativity, playfulness, love.

Or take the aforementioned Santoka. Santoka was a peripatetic drunk, monk and poet. He was so “mentally ill” that he had attempted suicide on several occasions and had been hospitalized for psychiatric distress at least as many times. However, even in such a life, Santoka recognizes there are no wasted moments. He writes about everything:

if I sell my rags
and buy some sake
will there still be loneliness

my heart is weary — 
the mountains, the sea
are too beautiful

alone
listening
to a woodpecker

No path but this one –
I walk alone

I have no home
autumn deepens

Darkness
wet with
the sound of the waves

Just as it is –
It rains, I get wet, I walk.

Begging: I accept
The blazing sun.

the breeze from the mountains
in the wind bell
makes me want to live

Well, which way should I go?
The wind blows.

Even in the abscesses of his loneliness and despair, Santoka found reasons to live and to write. He even found time to revolutionize and reterritorialize the haiku form, as he abandoned the 17 syllable mandate, and also began to write in such personal ways that were, to that point, traditionally taboo in the haiku milieu.

But it is in Santoka’s bare bones poetry that we perhaps find selfless liberation in its most powerful form — begging, receiving only the blazing sun, this too is enlightenment. This too is worth writing about, and, just perhaps, living for. 

In the meantime, start playing, keep creating, and stay in love.