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In the spring of 1867 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal:

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself, & all things. (1)

While I am reluctant to generalise about the ‘good reader’ I have a strong instinct for what constitutes good reading practice, at least in the reading of haiku. It very closely corresponds to Emerson’s formulation. You seem to be reading about another, but in doing so you are seeking the thread that connects the other to yourself. You seem to be reading of a mere ephemeral incident, very probably humdrum in all its details, but the delight is in discerning the traces of the thread that links, even binds, the moment to the Universe. Nothing more than

pouring spaghetti
into a pot -
winter rain

Carolyne Rohrig (2)

but in its expression the author celebrates not what is unique to her personality or experience, but what is common, what is shared, what unites us. Our small lives are set in the circle of Life. The single incident is taken as emblematic of the rhythm of existence, perhaps through the intercession of the cyclical phenomenon of rain. There is no intention to represent the Truth of Things, no didactic design whatsoever, yet precisely through that innocence of any motive it steals into our souls. It achieves a near-perfect translucency, a light shines through it and it is not diminished. What is it about? It isn’t about anything. Thus, it’s about everything. What does it mean? Nothing much; only pouring spaghetti / into a pot - / winter rain.

This poem is a fine example of something which, back in 1996, I christened ‘open metaphor’ (3) and, for the purposes of this paper, I’d like to redesignate as ‘non-dualistic metaphor’. It is open to the literal interpretation - no problem there - and yet at the same time it permits metaphorical readings. We might look at the resonance between the two halves of the poem, the way in which the activity and the weather are both, in one sense, dull, and yet also familiar, quiet, comforting. This may be a lucky strike by a writer whose aims were merely descriptive; more likely it was composed in full awareness of these further dimensions. The dominant convention in Western haiku practice is thus to prioritise the literal and leave the metaphorical, at best, implicit, but in the Japanese tradition there are numerous instances of haiku in which a metaphorical reading is inescapable.

Yoel Hoffmann’s Japanese Death Poems provides a vital education in learning to read the ephemeral in the light of wider, deeper applications, in this case the drama and irony of death. In reading the poems we undergo practically the reverse of the process described by Emerson - we seem to be focused on the Universe, but we are brought back to attend to ourselves. But notice that the current of energy alternates along this path: no sooner do we focus on the individual than our feelings flow outward again to find themselves in contemplation of the outer reality. The image is not reduced to a metaphor of death; the metaphorical and literal readings are equally valid, and equally appealing. Here’s a perfect example, a poem by Chine, so touching, so delicate, so apt, that I can’t read it without a spine-shiver of appreciation:

It lights up
as lightly as it fades:
a firefly. (4)

The metaphorical application is evident. It expresses an emotion which is both urgent and restrained; and, at the same time, it is self-consistent, true to the nature of fireflies. It’s the co-existence and interdependence of the two readings that I find so satisfying. Deny either, and something vital has been lost.

As an exercise in extending our perceptions, we might look at our familiar Western haiku and ask ourselves whether any of these would be appropriate as, say, death poems. Apparently Norman Barraclough had chosen the following poem as his death poem, and it’s worth pausing for a moment to ask why:

on the moor
wind-chased ripples run
into still water (5)

If we are concerned to emphasise the literal and reject the metaphorical in haiku, our conclusion here can only be that this poem skilfully captures a particularly memorable experience for the author. On grounds of personal significance or contentment with achievement it is one he would have chosen to be remembered by. And that’s it. We would not permit ourselves any consideration of the image itself. But surely the moor recalls Bashō’s moor, and thus taps into its power both as allusion and evocation; the wide expanse, the consequent vulnerability, the individual existence caught between the security of earth and the emptiness of sky. The ripples perhaps also have some allusive value, recalling other time-hallowed images of bubbles on the waves, seen and then gone. The metaphorical application of the stillness needs no further underlining, but it’s interesting that the stillness is that of water, an element renowned for its fluidity, into which the ripples go, and come again, and go. You cannot possibly reduce all this to a religious symbolism. There’s a kind of balance between realism and hope, darkness and light, which only an image so firmly rooted in the natural can ever truly achieve. And this is just because there’s no attempt to make a point; it’s merely the indivisible linking of the individual to the thread of the universal whole. Description and more than description all at once, in a way so resolutely non-dualistic that it is impossible to drive any kind of a wedge between the actuality and what it represents.

We might then allow ourselves the same kind of reading of poems which have never been flagged up as death poems, and we have no reason to suspect were intended as such, but which seem to invite this kind of contemplative attention all the same. This is by Annie Bachini:

sliding on and off
the river’s edge
autumn leaves (6)

Sure, you have the thing-in-itself, it’s clear and we desire that clarity. But might it not also unfold into something else. Do you not sense the thread of the Universe running through it? Never for a second do you lose the concrete actuality, the cold touch of the river, its motion, the motion and colour of the leaves. It doesn’t represent Truth with a capital T in a dualistic way, it is content to express the truth of things in an open, unforced way. It embodies truth, if you like, and thus has as many meanings as the river, the leaves, the autumn itself - only one of which might be the River of Time and the drifting leaf of the individual destiny.

Haiku provides us with a historical opportunity: to recover the non-dualistic mind of the ancient poets who lived and moved and thought in a world of interpenetration, in which things were fully themselves, as we perceive them to be, but were never discrete and insulated entities. All things were, in the ancient mind, open to transformation, simultaneously actual and representational:

I cannot say
which is which:
the glowing
plum blossom is
the spring night’s moon

Izumi Shikibu (7)

The introduction to the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation of the Manyoshu has this to say about the association of spirit and nature, and by extension the application of metaphor in poetry, in ancient Japan:

There were, of course, things in nature which had become objects of affection and admiration by virtue of their beauty or loveliness. There were things which were regarded as resounding with human emotions in that they reflected the joys or sorrows of man. Even in such cases, where natural objects are dealt with purely as poetical material, they seem to retain each their individuality and life - a spiritual entity permeated by a mysterious atmosphere. Never are they allowed to lapse into cold lifeless rhetorical ornament, or metaphor without some fringe of emotion. (8)

What this account identifies is that it is not the mere presence or absence of metaphor that determines a poem’s power, not least because such a rigid distinction is false in itself. What counts is whether the metaphor is ornamental, or organic. Here’s a modern tanka by Dutch poet Gerla Brakkee that doesn’t hide its metaphorical intent and is all the stronger for this integrity:

This smooth stone -
once a part of something
bigger than itself
and so I too must go on,
even without your love (9)

As with the Chine haiku discussed earlier, the current of energy flows both ways. Firstly, we have the object, the stone; then, the subject, the poet, and her dejection modulating into determination; but then we return again to contemplation of the stone, which is fully realised. You may perceive it as architectural, or geological; either way, you see it, you feel it, the sentiment grounded in sensation. The ancient Japanese approach is frequently comparable. Here’s an anonymous tanka from the Kokinshu in Helen Craig McCullough’s translation:

   Am I to go on
forever yearning, my thoughts
   tangled as seaweed
swaying with the waves, neither
drifting out nor coming in? (10)

Again, the alternating current of energy; again, the vividly realised sensory reality of the image, which goes beyond mere decoration; it is of the essence of the thought and feeling.

The literalist approach that sees realism as a necessary antidote to fantasy is itself a product of a modern dualistic world-view. To the ancient mind, all such oppositions are illusory. Our haiku, even at their most apparently literal, appeal to the extent that they retain some emblematic power, an expansiveness which breaks through the isolation of an instant in time. As such, even mere kitchen equipment can be transformed into spiritual entities, and urban residences acquire their own mysterious atmosphere:

cold morning
a fly hanging round
the kettle

Peter Williams (11)

It’s an evocation of inertia that will strike a chord on every wet weekend of our lives. Tedium is as valuable a feeling as joy and sorrow, if you can meet it with poetic acceptance. There’s nothing obviously transcendental about it, but then there are times when life is far from obviously transcendental. Forget about getting out of it, and concentrate on getting into it.

To summarise my position at this point, I identify three different ways in which a poem can meet my criteria for non-dualistic metaphor. The first mode is the most seemingly literal, as in Peter Williams’ kettle and fly just quoted, or Carolyne Rohrig’s pot of spaghetti with which I began. There is no representation at all, in any sense of direct correspondence between image A and idea B, it’s just that the poem as a whole may be taken as representative. It encapsulates some universal condition or mood, and it is precisely through doing so that it communicates. I believe this is the same thing that Brian Tasker has called “a transference between writer and reader”, (12) and I can see exactly why Brian or others of his school might resist the categorisation of this technique as a form of metaphor. Metaphor is dualistic, while the transference isn’t. But the non-dualistic metaphor, if I may continue to call it that, can still be understood as representational, and also be seen as the starting point of a continuum which brings you to undeniable metaphor at the other end. Examples of the second mode, at this other extreme, are poems like the Kokinshu tanka quoted earlier, in which the image of seaweed and the thought it represents are clearly separated; but the appropriateness of the image goes beyond the merely apt, as if linked organically to the idea. Gerla Brakkee’s smooth stone is of the same kind. It’s like a catamaran: you seem to see two separate things, a person and a stone, but as you look closer you see that they are joined, and in effect they’re one. The third mode of non-dualistic metaphor is somewhere between the extremes. Examples are the death poems we looked at, which make perfect sense as literal description, but which invite interpretation on other levels, while still stopping well short of the symbolic or allegorical. Another poem of this kind is one written by Ann Thomas, a member of a class I taught recently. It was her first ever haiku, I believe:

early hyacinths
scent the kitchen ...
now they need staking

Like all of us, I suspect, my first take was the simple enjoyment of the scene, the scent, the light, the sense of personal involvement. But it dawned on me, as I was marking Ann’s haiku assignment, that the image served perfectly to capture the creative process and the dialogue between form and spirit. The hyacinths are just doing their thing, and the poet can never do their growing for them; but what the poet can do is impose a small but perhaps necessary degree of order by propping them upright. So with our poems: you can never force inspiration, which always takes precedence, but form still has a part to play, in our readiness to accept both structure and, perhaps, technical advice. Very likely Ann’s sketch of the dialogue between creation and criticism, or the teacher-student relationship, was unconscious and unintended, but it’s there all the same, and if the poem is not actually better for it, it is without doubt more interesting. It has depth. It is not purely and simply a realistic sketch, although it is that as well.

As an exercise to end on, it might be as well to identify a few of the dualistic patterns in my own thought-structure. How about ancient vs. modern? Eastern vs. Western? How about, even, dualistic vs. non-dualistic? We can’t go on setting up these oppositions. Haiku is not against poetry. It partly goes along with it, and partly walks apart from it. The East is not against the West, nor vice-versa; they are separated by locality and united by the universalities of human existence. I cannot admit the metaphorical within the embrace of the literal without equally acknowledging that there is no point at which metaphor becomes inadmissible, independent of the delicacy of its application. We cannot demand always to be shown and never to be told, or Bashō might have wittered on forever about summer grasses without anyone ever making the connection with the ghosts of warriors of long ago. Haiku is something you have to feel your way into, and although I believe that guidelines can have some value in providing structure in the early stages, at some point all generalisations cease to apply. Each new poem is a new poem, and a good new poem sets its own agenda:

In my dream
I am accepted
as a crow

Garry Gay (13)

Here, it is the dream-logic that accomplishes the fusion of two worlds - reality and imagination are revealed as meaningless distinctions.

The fact is that haiku is a foreign country, or, at least, it was to begin with, and, historically speaking, we equipped ourselves with guidelines and handbooks like hesitant, bewildered travellers. Neither its innermost heart nor its outer limits are necessarily immediately accessible. But I do believe we are beginning to find our feet in a coruscating realm where the literal and metaphorical flow together, merge and separate incessantly (as they must do in renga, for instance, which would lack all value without precisely this dynamic of transformation). I’ll close with three poems from Snapshots 9, which I believe reveal genuine depths of creative freedom, unintimidated by literalism, but at the same time open, accessible and in no sense discordant:

hyacinth ...
I paint a shape
without a name

Peggy Willis Lyles (14)

snow filling
our tracks into the woods
by heart

Tom Clausen (15)

crisp blue night
questioning everything
I know

David Rollins (16)

Note that the writer doesn’t say, “rejecting everything I’ve been told”. We need to be pliant, yielding, supple. We need to reach a point where the boundaries between form and spirit dissolve and our poems embody truth, a truth which is nothing more than plum blossom, or the spring night’s moon.

This is an abridged and slightly edited version of a paper given at the British Haiku Society conference, Ludlow, in April 2002.