Gawking at Flowers
I have no idea how old I was when I was first taught the form of haiku, but it was not very old. I went to that kind of school. It probably was an effective way to teach us about poetic form and perspective in a package small enough for us to handle in third grade or whatever. Maybe it was also a perfectly sufficient way to teach us Zen, but obviously that was done wordlessly — and surely unintentionally.
Either way, my exposure to haiku came very early in a lifelong, driven search for exactly the right words. I even got into capital-Z Zen later and realized that more than 17 syllables is usually too many. But I think I got stuck thinking of haiku as a form for children.
Obviously adults wrote the great ones, but these were adults who realized how precious child-mind was and had spent their entire adulthoods cultivating it, trying to get it back. I ran into a haiku in college that knocked me over so hard I wrote it down, and I’ve hung onto it as a kind of motto ever since:
In the midst of this world
we stroll along the roof of hell
gawking at flowers— Kobayashi Issa (trans. Sam Hamill)
Other than the great masters, though, most of the pretty good haiku probably are written by children, and adults should express the complexity of adult mental states in complex, adult forms, right?
Well, a few things have changed about my perspective lately.
One, I became fully immersed in child mind and realized there’s a lot more going on in there than there is in me. Learning is the only mental activity that does any good in the world, and my almost-two-year-old is learning a hell of a lot more than I am.
Two, I picked my Zen practice back up in earnest, which I’m sure could be connected to becoming a parent through some describable chain of events, but ultimately all that matters is that those conditions co-arose amidst the great karmic chain reaction that is what it is.
Three, a global pandemic forced all social interaction onto the internet for months, which was enough to get me to fall back in love, and then back in hate, with social media.
I’ve learned a lesson about grand proclamations about leaving social media, which is that they’re always embarrassing. When I got back on Twitter a year ago or whenever that was, I was so embarrassed by my “never coming back” blog post about deleting my original account that I deleted the post. Now I’m embarrassed about that, because I’m sick of The Discourse™ again and want to see if my feelings this time are different in any interesting ways. I could probably dredge it up on the Wayback Machine, but who cares? I’m not making as big a deal out of it this time. I’m just gonna not use Twitter and see what happens.
The problem is, Twitter really broke my brain. I doubt anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the deep neural need to turn every meaningful experience into a post on the appropriate social network — and the crushing void of conformity and validation pressure that comes with it. No need to hash that out here for the millionth time. It’s just remarkable to me that it’s still there after all these years, and it’s probably only stronger for having drowned out all other ways of establishing social standing for this long. Again, who cares?
Anyway, as the impulse to quit social media again was just crystallizing about a week ago — before I’d even decided to do it — I started writing haiku. It was just a little exploratory Zen practice; I was feeling strong urges to make my zazen into Content™, which I knew from experience would be devastating for my practice, so I figured I could try sublimating that desire into the utterly useless exercise of writing little Zen poems for children afterwards. It would take 30 seconds, it couldn’t hurt, and maybe it would help.
But then I did quit Twitter, and the next time I went to write one of these post-zazen kiddie poems, it suddenly seemed much more significant. These things are tweets — and I’m talking the old-school 140-character kind we had when I was your age — they just don’t go directly into the planetary garbage fire when you finish them.
That’s a big difference, and the feedback aspect of Twitter — maybe especially when it gives you nothing — dramatically changes what you write about. But speaking just of the form, I’ve written like 50,000 little poetic posts and shat them into the netherworld. I’ve done enough writing to know that it’s basically impossible not to improve at a form of writing if you can practice it thousands of times. Twitter may have made me better at fitting something poignant into three lines. Maybe doing it for its own sake and attending to more meaningful subjects will produce more interesting results than I’d tend to expect from kiddie poetry.
That wasn’t the end of the realization, though.
Tweeting tens of thousands of times reprogrammed my entire brain. Given that they’re the same length — and that tweets are probably labored over 20 times as hard — I should be able to rack up thousands of haiku, too. What will that do to my brain?
Of course, in the Zen manner, I will sit with that question, wait and see, and keep writing poems one at a time. But one part of my mind is entertaining the idea that I could actually cure myself of the desire to post everything beautiful that happens to me for likes by writing haiku instead and — get this — not sharing them.
I mean, I’m not going to be weird about it. You want to read one? Here:
5
Aged window frame
barely holds itself open.
Air is thick with rain.
But if I’m going to entertain my monkey mind by concocting a point to this exercise, it’s not going to be to share them; it’s going to be to create a four-digit number of them. As of this writing, I have seven (7), so I am not making much headway sitting here typing a thousand freaking words to you lot about it. I just thought I’d found some interesting reasons to revisit this hoary old form in the character-limited world of today.
(P.S. Jews — Did you know the Shema was a haiku? Count it. I’ll wait…)
