The Haiku Foundation Forums

every time you read a poem, you are different, looking from a different place. with basho's frog, every time i read it, i have read more about it somewhere. or i have tried to rewrite into english the poem he must have written. i don't really like any of the translations i've ever read. they don't hold up for me.

the mystery of great literature is that wherever i go in life, it holds up, remains fresh, and my deeper experience of things just deepen my understanding of it.

a truly great work of art includes the unsaid unseen the liminal, the uncategorizable, so that we complete it with our own unconscious, it sets up reality in a way that we flow into it. so as we change, it changes. deepens, widens, gets more complex richer more multivalent. IMHO.

thanks for the reference. it is a bit dense.

i wanted to suggest another way to look at it. definitely to understand "ma" is important and its a japanese idea, but to do good haiku, good poetry i believe presupposes a kind of universal awareness of "ma" universal to all who do it, art. otherwise haiku in english is a hopeless idea.

forgive my rant but i find it quite strange that some assert that "ma" is so utterly foreign and incomprehensible to Europeans and Americans and our art literature and poetry. you can't have ever  listened to thelonious monk.   or beethoven's quartet no 15.

Arnold van Gennep in his book (published 1909) The Rites of Passage, asserts the centrality of "limen" "threshold" in all human rites of passage. rites of passage was a very significant contribution to structural anthropology. the whole question of the space between is fundamental to a very great deal of 20th century research into aesthetics. leading in part on the one hand to the whole new discipline of queer studies, analysis of the social reality of being between spaces. i have found this concept of limen, threshold, a fundamental artistic feature across a wide range of cultures. not the same but relating to the same human fundamental, i think "ma" in japanese aesthetics is at its center related to liminality in human experience. all the little rituals we engage in going from here to there. shaking hands, giving selams, graduating ceremonies, circumcision, getting married, holy water font at the front door of the catholic church, inka, grace, lighting the candle at sunset before shabas. passover. easter, newroz bonfire. august first mountain bonfires in switzerland. all these are one way or another "about" the space between this and that.

being between, in between, is a fundamental quality of Our Lady of Flowers, Jean Genet.

yes that is very different from "ma" in haiku. however the poetry of Emily Dickinson is  nothing if not the poetry of the unstated unsaid. the koan MU the gateless gate expresses a fundamental human experience not just a cultural expression. the famous comic genius Nasruddin the Teacher of middle eastern fame, also named Mulla Nasruddin and Doha, has a door over his grave in the town of Aksaray, and no walls. nothing - no it isn't - is true about anything we see and experience.

the Tempest by Shakespeare, the complete abdication of magic power authority expertise, is all about MU, and i would suggest about the ultimate "ma", the unseen unspoken in the everyday commonplace.

i know you can't identify one cultural concept in one culture with that of another in totally unrelated cultures. no two cultures slice the pie the same. but between those slices is human reality. and i think aristotle is correct in identifying aesthetic experience with a universal recognition of commonality: i put myself there and recognize my unseen self. IMHO. 

Robert Frost, to me, describes commonplace and leaves to the reader to understand the unspoken existential reality. Joshu's No Way! [MU!] is our existential fundamental universal. there is no way there and no way back :-)

i believe it is the need to be reconciled with the spaces between the things we people our universes with that is the fundamental driving force behind all poetry and art. and the fundamental aesthetic of haiku poetry is a human universal we all can understand if we do poetry, do music, do theatre. [i am not sure about some avant guard installations which seem more intellectual than artistic but that could be my own failing]. [i once watched a naked cellist play cello on a naked man holding the man between her knees like yo yo ma and was struck by its cleverness]

haiku isn't being clever but using words to show what's between the words, giving significance to everyday things, nature.

hope y'all don't mind my exercising my thoughts.

Quote from: Christopher A White on October 24, 2011, 09:54:32 AM
Dear John,

I think there may have been some academic books published that cover the concept of ma quite thoroughly, though they may be hard to locate.

i thought hiroshima and nagasaki were the christian centers of 16th-20th century japan until WWII.

Quote from: Gabi Greve on March 07, 2011, 07:08:22 PM
quoting from my page
http://wkdkigodatabase03.blogspot.com/2010/02/christian-celebrations-winter.html

Today, about one to two million Japanese are Christians (about 1% of Japan's population). Most of them live in Western Japan where the missionaries' activities were greatest during the 16th century.

my scholarship for this discussion is too limited to make any substantive contribution. may i ask whether any of the greater, well known haiku poets studied "taoism" per se. i don't really know whether any of them were recognized as zen students per se. did any receive zen transmission, inka or denbo or whatever it's called.

over the centuries the relationship between haiku poetries and zen buddhism changed substantially as the place of zen among different buddhisms changed, no? am i mistaken. taoism i would have guessed is more a general part of the whole chinese cultural infusion into japanese society over many centuries. there isn't any specifically taoist tradition in japan is there.

as an aside to the discussion once in my youth i asked a scholar about taoism and was quoted Ecclesiastes, everything has its season etc. every spiritual tradition has its own elements of taoism in it.

Quote from: chibi575 on December 05, 2011, 08:09:41 AM
I would surmise it is difficult to assess the direct enfluence Tao philosophy on haikai no renku or haiku on such as Buson; other than, as one applies what one conceives as Tao-ish to translations or original Japanese.  It's like, at least to me, 20/20 hindsight.  Certainly, Yosa Buson, was keen to know the Chinese roots alluded to in his writing as it was in his time common to such poets as he.