.
Crested Wood Partridges (Rollulus rouloul) (female with red wings, green on the body; male with red patches on head), under a small waterfall at Bristol Zoo, England: photo by Adrian Pingstone, August 2003
The multifarious incoherence of the various forms of Western culture gives them a kind of vitality and indeterminate direction of development which makes Eastern culture seem a little monotonous, a little lifeless in comparison. The truth is that the East knows how to live, but does not do it; the West does not know. As D. H. Lawrence said,
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
It is this natural curve which we see in the various forms of Eastern culture; this pointlessness is what we feel so deeply in both of them.
*
.........The grasses of the garden --
They fall,
.........And lie as they fall.
(Ryôkan)
Speaking of the necessity of death:
When Rôtan died, Shinshitsu came to offer his condolences. He (simply) raised his voice in lamentation three times and went away. A disciple asked, "Were you not a friend of his?" "I was!" "Then was it right for you to offer condolences in that way?" "Formerly I took him to be a Man; now (I realise) he was not. I went in and offered my condolences. Old men were weeping as though for their own children, young people were lamenting as if for their own mother. The reason for this must have been that he uttered uncalled-for words, wept uncalled-for tears. This was fleeing from Heaven, multiplying emotions, forgetting whence he had received (his nature).
(Sôshi)
Underneath are the everlasting arms.
(Deut. 33, 27)
His detachedness and his acceptance of something in destiny which people cannot accept. Right in the middle of him he accepted something from destiny which gave him the quality of eternity.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........The heavy wagon
Rumbles by;
.........The peonies quiver.
(Buson)
*
What is the most important thing that we possess?
Nothing is so precious that we cannot afford to throw it away.
(Lawrence, The Man Who Died)
*
Lawrence describes the poet in the following words:
A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame and straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one fixed automatic thing which he is now, grinding on the nerves.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
We may reach the same conclusion from the other end of the scale. In so far as a tomato exists, God exists. When a tomato rots, God rots.
*
Moments of vision come when least expected, unbidden, and in most men, pass into oblivion, unnoticed and unremembered.
.........Ah, grief and sadness!
The fishing-line trembles
.........In the autumn breeze.
(Buson)
This seeing into the life of things may come from the slightest of physical causes, for example, a mere touch, a faint sensation of warmth and resilience:
She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's arched neck. Dimly, in her weary, young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........The old man
Hoeing the field,
.........Has his hat on crooked.
(Kitô)
It comes from some primitive realm of sound, that calls us back to something we have lost, some recollections that have intimations of immortality in them:
When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another, darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her, and there she wanted to go.
(Lawrence, St. Mawr)
.........Night deepens,
And sleep in the villages;
.........Sounds of falling water.
(Buson)
R. H. Blyth: Haiku, Volume 1: Eastern Culture, 1947: edited excerpts
