Part 15 (1/2)

The potter wants the Zen connoisseur to understand what he has done: to see the clay, to feel and admire its texture, to appreciate the reasons for the type and color of the glaze. 'The pieces are carefully contrived to draw attention to both their original elements and the process by which these elements were blended. For example, a bowl whose glaze only partially covers its clay provides a link with the natural world from which it came. Its texture springs out, like that of a piece of natural driftwood. At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. The secret lies deep in ancient Zen culture, which taught the Momoyama masters how the difficult could be made to seem effortless.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zen and Haiku

_Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory--

_Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley

HAIKU IS REGARDED by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of _koan _riddles, _sutras_, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional j.a.panese poetry--an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the j.a.panese of the early Zen masters.

On first acquaintance j.a.panese seems an unlikely language for poetry.

It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which j.a.panese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the j.a.panese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables--either five or seven--for each line. (This means that some lines of j.a.panese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, j.a.panese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was ill.u.s.trated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the cla.s.sical era. (The vowels are p.r.o.nounced as in Italian.)

_Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-do

Yu-ki su-gi ga-ta-ki

A-ki ya-ma wo

I-ka-de ka ki-mi ga

Hi-to-ri ko-ge na-mu

_

In his a.n.a.lysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repet.i.tions, which produce a p.r.o.nounced musical effect.1 The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of j.a.panese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to a.s.sonance, or the close repet.i.tion of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repet.i.tion of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive j.a.panese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2 Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.

Another clever device of the early j.a.panese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the j.a.panese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between h.o.m.onyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, ”My tonights hold thee more,” ”My two knights hold the moor.” If these were written alike and p.r.o.nounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.

The early j.a.panese poets overcame the limitations of the j.a.panese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of h.o.m.onyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the princ.i.p.al form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as the _waka_, became the j.a.panese ”sonnet” and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing j.a.panese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. The _waka_ became a cry of pa.s.sion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling of _waka _from the early cla.s.sical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.

_Tsuki ya aranu

_ Can it be that the moon has changed?

_Haru ya mukas.h.i.+ no

_ Can it be that the spring