Tapping the Common Well

   It has no particular academic standing. It has no wealthy benefactor. It has no patron saint. It does not appear, at least in a form that serious practitioners would recognize, in the mainstream media. Though many people have heard of the word, few can offer even a single example, and those who can usually quote a poem in translation that is over three hundred years old. Even the most serious of scholars can hardly agree upon a definition of the term. When it is taught in schools, it is nearly always taught incorrectly, and with the wrong emphases. And yet despite all these impediments, haiku is more a part of international  literature and culture today than ever before. How can this be?

   The reason, I believe, is simple and important. Haiku, in its many manifestations, offers something to people that they must have: a way to speak of the things they value in their lives, large and small, in ways that are communicable to others. Other art forms often require considerable grounding in theories and techniques, but haiku are simple and clean. This is not to say they are easy to create: they are as easy as any clean and simple truth, which is to say, difficult in the extreme. But they offer the possibility of such communication which is out of the hands of most through the medium of painting, for example, or music. It is an available art, and success in it seems possible through repeated exposure and practice.

   This, then, is the epistemological grounding of haiku, but there is an aesthetic one as well. There can be no gainsaying the poet's moment of insight, truth, clarity, oneness with the world. But how well he or she communicates it is a matter that affects us all. If the goal of the poet is to help the reader recreate the moment for himself, then the skill with which the poem is constructed and displayed becomes central to its availability to the reader. It thus becomes a literary art, not merely  a religious or philosophical one, and as such may be judged in terms of literary values. The very best haiku encompass a moment of insight, and do so in resonant language in an accessible and appropriate form. It takes a very great artist to be deep and simple at the same time, and not leave her thumbprint all over the poem. That is why it is adjudged a great feat to create a perfect haiku--not just because one has seen the truth, but because one has communicated it. 

   Haiku is elemental, like water. Though it has come to us from Japan, but it is no more Japanese than water. Nor is it English, the language of this volume, or Slovenian or Bantu. Like water, it is universal, instantly recognized for what it is anywhere. Like water, it arises from a deep place which underlies all our common ground, unaware of the temporary boundaries that men may place on the surface above it. It may emerge in a great many places and in different forms. It may have a slightly different taste in one region, may stagnate in another, may be fresh or salty, thin as vapor or hard as ice, but it is still recognizably itself.This is because what it does not trade in the relative truths of nationalities or religions, but the universal truths between people. This does not mean it will appear the same to all people, to a rain-forest dwellers and a desert bedouin: there are always points of view. But haiku express values beyond regional and economic differences, revealing the truth of things as they are, which is more at the core of how we feel most deeply as people. Haiku finds that which is not superfluous in the hearts of men, and expresses the values found there, as deep as that may go.

   Haiku, then, offer, moment to moment, the truths of the lives of  the poets who fashion them. War, beauty, nature, peace, ugliness, light and shadow--wherever insight is encountered, there the poet finds sustenance. These truths, when well expressed, are communicable to others without reference to political or religious affiliation, far beyond polemic or idealogy. For this is where truth resides, and however much it might have been misused for polemical purposes in the past, it has no place here, in the hearts of those who would seek and share the insight of such moments. This is what is indestructible in haiku, what has made it grow from one nation's proud cultural export to a world's form of choice to reveal the truth and beauty of the deep moments, the true moments, of our lives.