Haiku in the Company of Fools
The flower is the mind; the seed the performance. Zeami
One of the most interesting effects that haiku has had on my life is the need to be constantly rethinking my understanding of the subject. What runs parallel to that is the seeking of a balance between haiku’s Japanese aesthetics and spiritual context (which is what attracted me in the first place) and the contemporary Western culture that I live in. Where and how do they meet? The crucial thing for me has always been authenticity of experience and how we connect with the authentic experiences of others through the medium of haiku. I’m aware that some successful haiku are made up, and others do something else entirely, but I’m taking it on trust that the majority arise from experience and that that is a shared value. What I first noticed about both classical Chinese and Japanese poetry was the sincerity of expression. To be sincere in the West is to be daringly original and it’s a risk as we may not be believed or accepted by our audience. Haiku isn’t the kind of poetry that can be written and kept to ourselves. The audience is paramount and there’s a parallel with the theatre that’s worth considering. They have something in common: both seek to portray life in such a way that the audience can identify with and find themselves in the performance. Of course there are exceptions in both cases, but the general principle applies.
A few years ago I spent five weeks on a full-time course studying improvised theatre and the Fool. The Fool has its roots in history as the court jester and is the Zero, the first card, the first step on the journey towards spiritual enlightenment, in the major arcana of the Tarot. Both innocent and ignorant, the Fool is often portrayed as a wandering figure about to step into an abyss. The idea of the Fool in the theatre is to always be stepping into the unknown. For most of those five weeks that I spent in the Company of Fools, when we weren’t doing training exercises, we were either performing or being an audience. If you related an anecdote, you might rind yourself being called upon to perform it as a solo. If you were having an interaction with another group member, it would become apparent that the rest of the company had silently formed into an audience and you were performing a two-hander and so it went on. There was no clear division between theatre and life. The spirit was that everything was an experiment. The five weeks culminated in an hour-long completely improvised public performance that must be the zaniest thing that I’ve ever been involved in. Afterwards we took questions from the audience and the main question was how could it have been completely improvised. Of course, we couldn’t answer, because it had simply happened, without us trying to control it.
What struck me at the time and has stayed with me is the interchangeability of audience and performance. I didn’t realise it until later, but I had become cured of a social phobia that always had me feeling an outsider; as someone who didn’t belong. I feel sure that my interest in haiku also had a subtle bearing on this realisation. After years of taking refuge in travel and other, particularly Eastern, cultures, I was at last able to embrace and accept my own culture. The observer in me had become absorbed and integrated into the performance. This experience enabled me to put my finger on something in haiku that I’ve been pursuing ever since: that haiku unite, rather than separate, through a transference between writer and reader. Actually this is nothing new. Haikai as a genre has always had a social function. The zig-zag principles of renga are similar to those of improvised theatre; that each new departure (or link) should be open and not so personal that it blocks the flow. Correspondingly, each member of the group needs to be open and willing to accept the next departure even if it takes them away from their idea of it. You are constantly giving something up and accepting something new. What roots the entire thing in reality is the audience’s participation in what is being physically presented and what works best is the most obvious. Keith Johnstone said that: ‘An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts.’ Basically, there’s trust in self, in the circumstances of the work, and most of all in the audience. Audiences aren’t psychic and they need to be able to believe in what is happening. This applies equally to haiku with its roots in communal poetry; it’s meant to point to a shared reality. If every haiku was written in the spirit of linking, then that would be a strong unifying principle. It would solve many of the problems associated with the so-called avant-garde and the abstract. It would make writers pay more attention to what they are writing by thinking in terms of audience participation.
The theatre of Nō is a highly stylised ritualistic theatre, a representation of the Buddhist round of death, rebirth and karmic consequences, whilst incorporating the notion of salvation. The quotation from Zeami (1363-1443) who brought Nō theatre to its peak can be found in William R LaFleur’s Karma of Words which explores the relationship between Buddhism and the literary arts of medieval Japan. Zeami’s statement apparently alludes to one that can be found in the preface to the 10th century anthology of waka, the Kōkinshu that ‘poetry has its seed in the human heart and issues forth in myriad words.’ LaFleur says that if Zeami’s statement had been applied to Nō theatre in a straightforward way then ‘Zeami would have asserted that the seed planted in the mind of a Nō actor, perhaps in growing through disciplined training, eventually flowers on the stage for all to see.’ But Zeami chose to turn the image around and LaFleur discusses how this linked the training of a Nō actor with the Zen discipline expounded by 10th century Zen Master Dogen in that practice is not a means to an end but is enlightenment itself. The effect of Zeami’s reversal of the image is to also stress the mutually dependent relationship between performer and audience. An actor is so clear about what is being portrayed, it is so fully integrated and the belief in it is so great that the experience is carried over to the audience.
Whilst discussion of Nō theatre is beyond the scope of this article, the quotation from Zeami is of abiding interest because it is also a sound approach to haiku. Whether or not haiku has anything to do with Zen is beside the point, but a few seconds when everything is in harmony certainly has a spiritual quality. This can bring us to write a poem from a moment of clear connection, rather than the conventional poem’s development from the seed of an idea. Haruo Shirane has described haiku (or more correctly the genre of haikai) as both a performance and social act and a literary text. Shirane says ‘as a social act, as an elegant form of conversation, haikai had to be accessible; it had to be spontaneous; it had to perform social and religious functions’ and he goes on to say that ‘for Bashō, however, haikai was also a literary text that had to transcend time and place, be understood by those who were not at the place of composition.’ In short, it had to have a life of its own; an existence independent of its author. To properly succeed, a haiku doesn’t need its writer, it needs its audience and the essence of a performance is in its reception. What we can learn from Zeami is that a haiku as a fully-realised experience of its author, in its written form, acts as a seed in the mind of its reader. The cycle is simply repeated. This is where the idea of haiku as a ‘one-breath-poem’ is useful. The idea of haiku as one breath is often misunderstood as a format: a haiku as being the length of one breath. Alan Watts describes how ‘in Sanskrit, nirvana means to blow out, to exhale the breath. Its opposite, desire, is to breathe in. Now if you breathe in and hold it, you lose your breath; but if you breathe out it comes back to you.’ If we use the idea of one breath as a metaphor, then a haiku is a moment of coming and going; something that we can’t be attached to, a cycle that is repeated in life in millions of different formations wherever you go. The problem with haiku is not the experiences, which are around us all of the time, or even perhaps making the connection with those experiences which is more difficult, but communicating them to others. This is where the ideas that make theatre work can be used.
My time in the Company of Fools was to lead me to do a foundation year in drama therapy where I encountered the ideas of Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). These ideas offered a natural link between haiku and the theatre. Stanislavski reformed and revitalised the theatre of his time by developing a system that encouraged actors to seek the ‘inner life’ of the part they were playing rather than going through the motions. The focus was to shift from the ‘Star’ system to ensemble playing (in haiku, this means returning to the idea of renga). The sets were to become more realistic and designed to evoke an atmosphere. An actor would seek the impulse to bring the role to life using techniques such as emotion-memory to tap into feelings that have already been experienced at another time. The physical embodiment of the role enabled the audience to connect with the truth of what was being portrayed. The key was the flow of energy from the inner to the outer. Haiku work in reverse: the flow of energy from the outer to the inner and out again (as with the breath).
Of course, haiku isn’t theatre since its impulse comes from everyday life rather than the portrayal of it. Yet once a haiku has been written and acquired its independent existence it needs to work as a performance. It’s worth exploring how these ideas might apply to haiku through a simple test. Let’s examine two haiku and analyse their inner life through their physical embodiment as theatre.
light rain - the postman’s bike outside the shop Alison Williams |
a sudden gust the end of season beach balls jostle in their nets David Steele |
In Alison Williams’ poem which is much more than just a sketch, the scene is set, yet the characters are absent and the action is taking place offstage. We are only given the atmosphere to guide us to the impulse of the poem. The audience is held by the feeling and once that has been tapped into, what is happening off-stage doesn’t draw us away into a narrative. Because the impulse is pure feeling, the text is wide-open and it could go anywhere as a link.
In David Steele’s poem, the given circumstance is the seaside at the end of a season. The author’s attention has been drawn to the smallest of triggers: a sudden gust of wind jostling the beach balls. This haiku has a profound effect on the emotion-memory: it takes us backward through time with the nostalgia of childhood seaside holidays being evoked and at the same time forwards as the end of a season always carries a sadness of something lost or passed. To a child it means going back to school and to an adult, perhaps to a child too, it means another year is passing and the onset of autumn and colder weather. Time is dealt with in four different ways: the past, present and future are evoked through the timelessness of the haiku itself. It works because no narrative is imposed by the author and the attention is held in the moment. The key to the success of these two haiku is that they both have an ‘inner life’ which they achieve through physical embodiment (the ability to come true), both state the obvious (once it has been noticed) and most importantly they both trust their audience. To carry this experiment further, simply apply the ‘theatre’ test to the poems in this journal. In whose mind is the seed?
References for ‘Haiku in the Company of Fools’
Allen D, Stanislavskifor Beginners, Writers and Readers, 1999
Johnstone K, Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre, Methuen, 1981
LaFleur W, The Karma of Words, University of California Press, 1986
Rimmer T & Y Masakazu, On the Art of Nō Drama, Major Treatises of Zeami, 1984
Shirane H, Beyond the Haiku Moment, Modern Haiku, Vol XXXI, No 1, Spring 2000
Stanislavski C, An Actor’s Handbook, Methuen, 1990
Watts A, The Way of Liberation, Weatherill, 1991
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