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To raise fundamental questions about place, role and power of Man in the Universe, this is to perceive the reality as a dialectical opposition between subjectivity and objectivity for the western mind. The world affirms itself in his optics according to two different realities: consciousness on one hand and things outside reach of thought on the other. In this system thought exists in autonomy and things form the entity, that exists outside though. Traditionally, subject enters through its spirit in contact with the outer Universe, because it understands and reconstructs the Universe through consideration and language. Employing senses this same subject perceives the existence of things in connection with its capacities. This way of perceiving reality determines a hermetic line of division between what is internal and external to itself. In this thought, only the interiority creates certainty - we think about the famous " I think, therefore I am " ( cogito ergo sum ) of Rene Descartes - and thinks are pushed to the outer world, unreal and delusive. The concept of a strict demarcation line between two different spheres finds the most evident practical application in the field of painting. A very prosaic idea about line in the Art of graphics functions as " a positive atribute and propriety of the object itself ", says as philosopher Merleau-Ponty."A line, that is contour of an apple, he explains, or a border between the cultivated field and the prairie, which we accept as the reality of the word, where a pencil and a paintbrush only pass by." But Leonardo da Vinchi already expressed his doubts in this concept of a line. In his "Discusion about Painting" he invites " to discover in every object a special way in which a certain curved line moves over the whole of the area. This line is just like its generic axis". It is more an outlet of the energy than a demarcation line. Maybe it is none of the lines which could be seen in reality. In fact there is no line which could be seen itself alone. " Neither a contour of an apple, nor a border between a field and a prairie are here and there.../These lines/ should limit apple or prairie, but apple and prairie "create" by itself and appear in the world of visible as if they arrived from a "pre-univerzal world", answers Merleau-Ponty some centuries later. That is how a new way of perceiving this reality developes in contrast with a very schematic vision of perception - radiation of the visible, life proper to things, which a painter looks for under the name of depth, place, colour, and a poet in the dynamics of sounds, rythms of sentences, music of words. The way of seeing the world, which surpasses the preceding one, is inspired in the West by Husserl, Jean Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Subject is no more in a simple opposition to the world of objects, it is rather connected to these objects and to the world. Object, as appears to the consciousness, depends to the things and to subject, which percieves at the same time. To perceive, one should not be passive, since perceiving is not a state. One should look to see and listen to hear, becouse perception is action. Consciousness, discovery of the outer world, appear in connection with the others, is an interactive phenomenon, during which a subject constructs a structured and intelligible representation of the Universe of things. And the world is a result of a sensible construction of everyone's experience. The point is not in affirming certainties, based on the autonomous thought, which is concentrated in itself in a way Descartes did it; but in naming the world regarding the ties among individuals and things. The world exist as a phenomenon, perceived by the individuals in a certain culture, nourished by a personal story. Imagination of the individual does not oppose to the objective and independent world. The point is in exploring harmonies and encounters-awoken, multipled and celebrated, between man and the world, which he perceives and constructs at the same time. It's this audacious and inventive dynamics which made master Eckart say "God exists because the world exists". A contemporary painter Oliver Debre finds himself in this phenomenon of interaction between the sensibility of the artist and the reality: "When I'm like wind, like rain, like water which flows, I participate in nature and nature passes through me (...). I translate the emotion which is in me in front of the nature, but not the nature itself (...). I wished we rejoiced the landscape as a new form of a thought and not a natural landscape." Speaking about the same author, Toshio Yamanashi, a conservator at Kamakura Museum explains that "vaste space, which exist outside cadre originally, seems attracted by it and to provoke communication between internal and external space we have to cause the awareness of the borders." This new concept of reality and this relation towards the World seem to approach the eastern vision where everything exists in a subtle game of interdependence. If a painter Monet touched the hearts of the Japanese, it happened mostly because "tracing the light playing on the nenuphars in his garden, he somehow surpassed the impressionism", notes painter Yasse Tabuchi, and continues: " There was light and nothing escaped from it. Every being was nothing else but a game of interferences with light. And that made the nenuphars of our visionary painter float." A perfect connaisseur of the easter and western sensibilities, painter Tabuchi asks himself about two conceptions of the world: "Emptiness, voidness, nought: This is zone of a moving sable. The western representation of the world is here in opposition to the eastern one. Let's take a symbol of a circle, for example. Is nought inside the circle ? Or is it outside ? Is emptines inside or outside ? For the west this abyss is a terrifiying place of nonexistence." And western philosophers mobilized their energy to limit the consequences of this vertigo. The taoistic thought on the contrary inverses the logic of the symbolism. According to this thought all of the " 10000 beings" of the Universe are within this mystic circle. The Tao way, the energy of the emptiness, born out of primordial voidness " circles around these ' 10 000 beings' and prescribes them with the creative flux. In this case circle does not indicate the border between 'having' and 'non having' . The circle in this cosmical sphere is only a membrane, where 'having' and 'non-having' mingle mysteriously" explains Yasse Tabuchi. So, we can say now that our senses intercept "messages from the outside through rumors, which they rouse in us " as Merleau-Ponty formulated in his essay " The eye and spirit ". The frontier between interior and exterior is no more an obstacle, but a place of transition and exchange, a fertile tie between two realities. A painter interrogates light, reflection, shadow, how they arise suddenly, to teach us see, while a poet celebrates only a miracle always, this continuous transition between visible and invisible. A poet writes from dictation of his inner thought and word, while a painter tells that things are looking at him. The artistic expression becomes an adventure in which "thought doesn't want to frighten the visible, but decides to create it according to a chosen pattern instead ", says Merleau-Ponty. Artistic expression leads to a deposit of solidarity between a reader and a poet, a painter and an observer, a listener and a musician. There's no need anymore to speak about place, sound, light,...We should rather encourage, place, light to start talking, or sounds to resonate. The artist is born when the perceptible concentrates and become aware of itself. Apollinaire said that poems are sentences which seems not to be created - they were made by itself. Can
we compare this new concept of perception with a considerable development
of short poetry inspired by Japanese haiku around the world ? There's
no doubt that research of new expression modes corresponds to a new manner
of conceiving reality, to a true phenomenologic revolution. Recent evolution
of poetical dynamic inspired by haiku could be one of the manifestations
of this research.
In a recent essay, issued in a Japanese poetry magazine Ginyu ( The narrator ), a critic and a poet Toru Sudo reminds us of Masaoka Shiki ( 1867 - 1902 ), who played an important role when haiku adapted to a sensibility of its epoch. Masaoka noted two types of progressions in the art of composing poems. First, there is one connected with beginners who gradually achieve a satisfactory degree of mastery and then there is one of confirmed componists, who experience the domains, never before experienced by their forerunners. The second ones awoke the attention of Shiki, for whom Hekogoto Kawahigashi ( 1873 - 1937 ) was a true representative of these audacious and fertile explorers. In Japan from the beginning of this century the social and economic changes were rapid and irreversible. Shiki observed that a literary and artistic expression went through the metamorphoses caused by the evolution of a public taste due to a progress of the obligatory instructions. The same was true for haiku. It changed many times during these years. Despite convenience of this analyse, haiku has been driven far away from its neoclassical way of the beginning of the century. From this time on esthetical preoccupation of haiku remains the art of singing about " roses, birds, wind and moon ", and the development of a " croquis concept painted after nature " ( Shasei ) what Shiki stated to be a creative principle. The 5-7-5 syllables metrics, obligatory introduction with the season word and the presence of cutting words are still essential rules. After the successful experiences from the beginning of the century, haiku become boring and faint today. The " impressionistic " style, which haiku challenged, lost the inspiration. To look at the Universe from another angle, we need new tools. The Japanese haiku of the coming century must regenerate ( Toru Sudo ) and surpass conventional esthetic. To liberate haiku so that it would adapt and corespond new sensibilities means to give up all what makes it purely visual, inconsistent, superficial. With the internationalization of haiku we wittness undoubtedly a birth of new type of poetry -- haiku of planetary dimension, sucking from the human depth, rich in references which belong to all the members of the same community and reveal as a human and universal archetype at the same time in representing the world. Every poem - haiku becomes a condensation of energy, which breaks the conventions and supports new organization of the world. The non-Japanese contribute to the renovation of haiku and often their inovanitions break the sacred rules of haiku, whose traditional sources of inspiration become extinct. All around the world the gifted haiku writers learned to catch in some words, on the surface of reality, the trembling of the depth. The
present anthology is without doubt an important step on the way towards
a new, different haiku. Its contributions to the renovation of this form
lies in the originality of its sources of inspiration, strong personalities
of both women and men who express the parts of themselves in this book,
in their sharp talent provoking a slight lose of the balance which shakes
every certainty, every indifference, every conformism.
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