Poetic Musings: Spring Cold Haiku by Kawahigashi Hekigodo

春寒し/水田の上の/根なし雲

(河東碧梧桐 1873-1937)

haru samushi / mizuta no ue no / ne nashi-gumo

(Kawahigashi Hekigoto, 1873-1937)

spring cold:

a cloud without roots

over the paddy field

Comment:

I like the way Kawahigashi juxtapositions the cloud, ready to be blown in who knows what direction by the cold spring winds, with the fixed paddy field, going nowhere. The cloud is ready to move, and it will move, but this transient moment of it hovering over the field is captured in the haiku's word picture. So there's a tension (which I suppose is part of the haiku spirit) between the fixed words of the poem, and the impermanence of the moment. -- excerpted from Bernard Soames's "Haru samushi", Japanese Poetry: Filling in the Gaps, 23 April 2008

Technically speaking, the type of cutting  Kawahigashi employed in his haiku belongs to Type II Formulation (Mark Morris,"Buson and Shiki: Part One," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 44:2, pp. 410-11) (For more information about Kawahigashi's view of haiku, see "Dark Wings of Night: Kawahigashi Hekigodo and His New Trend Haiku")

Later in the seventeenth century when Danrin poets formulated their ideas about kireji, the discussion might be presented in terms of Yin-Yang metaphysics or simply in terms of a discrimination set up within a hokku between a "this" opposed to a "that." A work from 1680 put it in a refreshingly slangy way:

The kireji is that which clearly expresses a division of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang mean the existence of an interesting confrontation within a poem (okashiku ikku no uchi ni arasoi aru o iu nari). For instance, something or other presented in a hokku is that?-no, it's not that but this, etc. 46

Eisenstein, circa 1929, would have replaced Yin with thesis and Yang with antithesis and cast the whole matter in the mold of his peculiar dialectic, but he would certainly have gone along with this Japanese poet's notion of arasoi, "confrontation." "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell -- the shot?" he asked himself in "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram." "By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision." And the phrases of hokku were, he insisted, "montage phrases," and hence they generated their meaning by a like dynamic process. 47 (For more information about the types of cutting, see "To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting" )

Eisenstein's concept of  a "haiku as montage phrases" in relation to the Japanese notion of arasoi, "confrontation," is further explored in my Haiku Reality essay, titled “Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective:”

In his one of most famous film essays, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein stresses that the Japanese written language is representational and made up of various hieroglyphs, and he states that the hieroglyph is “the naturalistic image of an object as portrayed by the skilful hand of Ts’ang Chieh 2650 years before our era.”16 More importantly, for him the “copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs… is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused – the ideogram,”17 the picture of a concept. For example, the picture of a bird and a mouth signifies “to sing,” while the picture of a child and a mouth means “to scream.” A change in one object, from bird to child, creates not a slightly variant of the same concept, but a totally new one.18

Eisenstein’s understanding of the signifying function of ideogram is similar to that of Fenollosa and Pound, yet placing an emphasis on the consequence or product of the combination of two separate hieroglyphs. In this linguistic characteristic of the Japanese written language, he sees the basis for cinema dynamics: that is the principle behind the process of combining hieroglyphs into ideograms is applicable to the cinematographic method of montage he envisions -- “combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neural in content into intellectual contexts and series.”19 He regards film as “a kind of language and, in particular, as a kind of Imagistic picture writing composed of hieroglyphs,”20 and he goes further in claiming that “the film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning ideogram. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyph.”21

Equipped with his inspired learning of the ideogrammatic nature of Chinese and Japanese written languages, Eisenstein adopts an organic view of the shot as a montage cell.22 “Just cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.”23 For him, the individual ‘cells’ become a living cinematic whole through montage, the life principle giving meaning to raw shots.24 Confronting Pudovkin ’s view of montage as a linkage of shots, Eisenstein emphasizes that montage should be viewed as a collision of shots, a view “that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept,”25 and that among all of these collisions, the weakest one, in terms of impact, is “degraded to an even movement of both [shots] in the same direction… which would correspond with Pudovkin’s view.”26 According to Eisenstein, “linkage is merely a possible special case.”27

Utilizing the fact that the human mind is highly capable of associating ideas or images in a way that the “senses overlap, subconsciously associating one with another to produce a unified effect,”28 Eisenstein argues that film can communicate by a series of juxtaposed images that do not need a linear, narrative or consequential relationship between them.29 In the mind of the viewer, shot A followed by shot B will create a new meaning C, one that is greater than the sum of its component parts, A and B.30 For a cinema “seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts,”31 the employment of montage as a collision of shots is a “means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition…the starting point for ‘intellectual cinema.’”32.

Dark Wings of the Night: Kawahigashi Hekigodo and His New Trend Haiku

Kawahigashi Hekigodo (or Hekigoto) (Feb. 26, 1873 -- Feb.1, 1937) was born in Matsuyama city in Iyo province (present day Ehime prefecture) where Masaoka Shiki and his most influential disciple, Takahama Kyoshi, had lived as young boys. He became Kyosh's classmate at middle school and remained close to him throughout his life. Hekigodo was a well-traveled man with many talents. He visited Europe and North America in 1921, China and Mongolia in 1924, and wrote many travel sketches (Ueda, pp. 49, 61).

In the first few decades of the last century, Shiki's legacy was split into two factions: one led by Hekigodo, who "advocated haiku written in a free meter format," the other led by Kyoshi, who "defended the traditional diction of haiku with its fixed syllabic 5-7-5 pattern, season words, and fixed topical themes" (Cushman, p. 751). Hekigodo's main contribution to modern haiku was that "he extended, or tried to extend, the borders of haiku far beyond what had been thought possible or legitimate" (Ueda, p. 9). Basically speaking, he was restless and interested in artistic experiments. His two most controversial experiments were those on "haiku without a center of interest" and on "haiku in vers libre" (Ibid.).

In 1910, Hekigodo started to advocate his idea of haiku without a center of interest, which was based on his belief that "a poem should come as close as possible to its subject matter, which is part of life or nature" (Ibid.). In his view, creating a center of interest would "inevitably have to distort [the] subject matter for the sake of that interest" (Ibid.). He insisted, "To do away with a center of interest and to discard the process of poetizing reality would help the poet to approach things and phenomena in nature as close as he can, without being sidetracked by man-made rules."

It was a logical step, then, for Hekigodo to discard one of the most important "man-made" rules about writing haiku: the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. By 1915 he had come to oppose a fixed form for the haiku, and his vers libre haiku "no longer had the familiar haiku shape, but tended to run on to prosaic lengths. He himself preferred to call them 'short poems' (tanshi)" (Keene, p. 112). He wrote in 1917: "Any arbitrary attempt to mold a poem into  the 5-7-5 syllable pattern would damage the freshness of impression and kill the vitality of language." As for the value of using the season word, his attitude is affirmative; in his view, "every poetic sentiment was imbedded in a season of the year" (Ibid.).  His idea of shinkeiko haiku ( "new trend" haiku)1, then, was a short vers libre usually with a season word.

Selected Haiku:

a fasting man

craves for water at midnight:

a flash of lightening

clawing the void

lies the corpse of a crab:

mountains of cloud

in the faint light of dawn

a tree blossoming in white,

the field sprinkled with dew

mountain roses bloom:

factory girls

at the windows

of a tenement house

after the riot --

such a perfect

moonlit night

spring cold:

a cloud without roots

over the paddy field

Note:  Below is a relevant excerpt from Joseph K. Yamagiwa's Japanese Literature of the Shōwa Period : A Guide to Japanese Reference and Research Materials, p. 26:

According to Hekigoto, it was necessary to devote oneself to objective imagery, but, in contrast to Shiki's impressionism, which almost any poet could imitate, Hekigoto's was one which was "rich in subjective taste." Hence, the poet is to "look at nature through the window of his own senses and perceptions," and his purpose is to express " a taste higher than for nature alone." For the Shinkeiko movement, Hekigoto took the following for a motto: "a dynamic representation depending on an awakened individuality." The tendency in Hekigoto was to progress from reality to symbolism, from declarative to more suggestive statements. It was Osuga Otsuji who first used the term shinkeiko to describe the new style. This came in an article published in the January-February, 1908, issue of Akane and entitled "Haikukai no shinkeiko" (New Tendencies in the World of Haiku)

References:

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West : Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
Joseph K. Yamagiwa, Japanese Literature of the Shōwa Period : A Guide to Japanese Reference and Research Materials, University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Haiku : An Anthology, University of Toronto Press, 1976.

Stephen Cushman (ed.),  The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth Edition, Princeton University Press, 2012.