Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.
Viral 6.5
From Here On Earth
BY Judith Christian
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that star
seems close enough
to swim to
—Diane Gillen Lynch
We are, always have been, and always will be, among the stars. It was natural enough, pleasant enough, to choose this haiku by Diane Gillen Lynch. I first heard the rhythms of language in songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and I am dazzled by the images sent by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is also easy for me to travel off into intellectual musings about our relationship to stars. Why do we travel among them? Why do we want to touch them?
Ancient Buddhist cosmology asserted the existence of multiple, if not infinite, world systems. Then, as now, the light that travels from stars is what defines, what gives us the knowledge of those worlds. Epicurus, about 23 centuries ago, wrote, “There will be nothing to hinder an infinity of worlds.” Is it that the light of our minds knows that the stars will never end, and so to be among them means that we, too, have no beginning and no end? Modern astrophysics edges closer and closer to the ancients’ belief in the coming into being and passing away of an infinite number of universes, the system itself having no beginning and no end.
But wait . . . Basho is shaking his head and warning me away from such musings. Look at the first line of this well-tempered haiku. That star . . . of course. One star, the particular (Venus?), shining in the night sky, and from its light, the coming into existence of the observer. From our position on the Earth, with the naked eye we can look at only one star at a time. We can see many, but to really look, to discern the color and brightness with the naked eye, it’s one at a time. It is that particular star, and this particular poem, we are to look at, with the same intense gaze that is required to look at the night sky.
Where is the star and where is the observer? I see the star on or near the horizon, and between that star and the observer is a lake, or more likely, an ocean; but even if there is no intervening body of water, the night sky has its own horizons, and its own endless black pool. And, yes, the star seems close enough, but to swim to? There is a longing set up by the word seems, and the wistful desire to rejoin our eternal star selves is mediated by that word. We are firmly on terra firma, we are, alas, stuck here on Earth, which is exactly where a haiku should be. There is a beautiful hesitation, a gap between the second and last line, a place of expectation. I’m hooked. I’m there gazing into the distance for a moment, until the wave comes in and wakes me: to swim to. There is a dark danger in the last line. Overcome by longing for the eternal, desperate, or just impulsive—there could be many reasons for a night swim to a star; but like a hand grabbing one’s elbow, “seems” keeps us safe. There will be no swim. There is only the wonder, the inscape, the lapping water, and the lasting light of this poet and this poem.
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As featured poet, Diane Gillen Lynch will select a poem and provide commentary on it for Viral 6.6.
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• Viral 6.1 (Metz ➝ Robinson)
• Viral 6.2 (Robinson ➝ McClintock)
• Viral 6.3 (McClintock ➝ LeBlanc)
• Viral 6.4 (LeBlanc ➝ Christian)
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Peter’s revision strikes me as interesting and instructive, in that it reveals much about different possible approaches to haiku. By incorporating a recognition of possibility into the original poem, its author made an aesthetic choice that colors the haiku a certain way. Personally, I wouldn’t necessarily equate that choice with “loss of nerve”, but it does have certain consequences. Peter’s “raw, direct, irrational” “version” becomes more an illusionistic poem, in an august tradition of such.
bass
picking bugs
off the moon
(Nick Virgilio, AH 1.2, 1963)
It’s possible to read haiku principally as a form of symbolic poetry; but that’s not how I read, understand, or practice it. I feel the most important figurative aspect of haiku is synecdoche.
that star
seems close enough
to swim to
—Diane Gillen Lynch
Responding to Peter Yovu’s suggestion
a star
close enough
to swim to
While I agree with you that the word “seems” projects some of the poet onto the reader, there may well be redeeming aspects of it and it’s not clear that such a projection is bad or loses the “nerve”.
Starting first with the idea of rawness and perception, Mizuhara Shûôshi wrote about this and haiku:
/// “Truth in Nature, Truth in Literature” ///
“Nature’s truth” is an ore for good haiku. In contrast, for the writer to remain in a passive position—to describe what he saw as he saw it—is, strictly speaking, an attitude that can be named Natural Imitationism. A true artist takes a more positive attitude. He tries to add forging to the ore, to add creativity to it, and to produce something delicate and profound.
/// Mizuhara Shûôshi, trans by Hiroaki Sato ///
More to the point, I’m a little troubled with the idea that a “poet’s perception” is somehow not a part of the “first hand perception” of the object, that it’s somehow secondhand and therefore second rate. That it’s not truth because it’s not Nature’s truth.
There just isn’t perception without subject and object. The idea that traces of the author and the author’s reaction to stimuli, whether conceptual, intellectual, visceral, or otherwise, should be eliminated from haiku to give all space to the reader, well, I don’t actually think it’s possible. Even the author’s decision to attempt to remove these things is a telling decision and it often leads to sterile haiku.
Besides, as a rule, wouldn’t removing elements of the author’s reaction, or “second hand perception” as you call it, eliminate allusion? Allusion exists between the reader and author rather than the author and inspiration. There’s no rawness there. And never mind allusion, even direct references fall if elements of the poet’s (internal) perception are disallowed as they seldom involve raw external stimuli. A sidewalk is real and raw, New York City is a concept and abstraction brought by an author that hopes the reader shares the reference in some ways.
Take for example Bashô’s
“Early spring in the mountains of Iga Province”
in the mountain village
Manzai dancers are late–
plum blossoms
(tr. Ueda, Bashô and His Interpreters)
Since the dancers are not there, are we left with
mountain village
quiet and still
plum blossoms
?
By the way, there’s a fascintating overlooked work on references in Bashô by Earl Miner: Naming Properties: Nominal Reference in Travel Writings by Bashô and Sora, Johnson and Boswell. Miner compares the factual diary of Sora to the fictionalized account of Bashô. Of course, when we start changing names we’re getting much further away from raw experience and much deeper north into crafting poetry.
Now, one could say that Bashô didn’t say “seems late”. True enough. However, I absolutely agree with Judith Christian that “that star” is crucial and then, when you add “that” back to the original haiku and leave out “seems”, the haiku doesn’t read as well…it seems to need “seems” “is” or something there. At least when read aloud.
And that was my initial reaction and now my final thought….the haiku as written reads as if you’re wading into the lake and a friend points and lets you know about *that* star. So, could the “first hand perception, structured as a poem”, perhaps be the poet hearing
“that star
seems close enough
to swim to”
and then the poet looked, at the finger first of course, and then at that star?
If so, isn’t the “rawness of its origin” captured by Diane Gillen Lynch?
Pardon my ramble…
Mark
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, there are references to what is called the ship of Ra (the most quoted reference being “there is no rest on the ship of Ra.”); the ship has generally been understood to represent the earth and those on it. Closer to home, we have the Pequod, Melville’s representation of the world floating in the cosmic sea populated by the people’s of the world.
I have experienced many times-as I’m sure many others have also-a sense that the night is a great expanse of sea.
So, Lynch’s experience of being able to swim to a star she sees is visceral and true (as the imagination is true).
I have to agree that I think she weakens her own sense of truth by adding the word “seem.” Perhaps, the conflict between the imagination and reason as sources of truth adds dimension to the poem. This would be another way of looking at it (the star?).
I once wrote a similar poem,which I’m afraid I will have to paraphrase, since I no longer have it available.
That mountain
one day I’ll climb it
and leave my light there
Which leads me to say that it doesn’t really matter what mountain it is (it represents the height, the end, death, what has been always sought after).
And, I don’t think it matters what star Lynch saw that night. The star is also something long cherished, sought for, and end to separation of self and other, self and world.
And, the way to achieve this is the truth of the imagination, which recognizes that the night is an ocean and reservations about this keeps her from touching that star.
For me, the charm of this poem lies in the proximity of *star* and *swim*, of fire and water (vivid elemental presences) and all the immersions they present. I have a different take on the word *seem*, however. For me (to repeat myself) it drains the poem of its energy, puts it into a mental space that tells me where the poet went with her perception, but leads me away from the rawness of its origin. The perception becomes second hand.
My guess is that the first hand perception, structured as a poem, could go something like this:
a star
close enough
to swim to
but we may not always trust such raw, direct, irrational perception. A haiku, it seems to me, does well to have a nerve running through it; I don’t exclude my own work when I say: nerve is something which is frequently lost in poetry.
Some readers here may feel uneasy about posts like this, and this is the second poem recently which I have “criticized”. But it felt wrong to say nothing, and not because I feel I am “right” in my observations and have to offer a corrective. What feels right is simply offering my perspective. I’m interested in what others have to say.
“I don’t think ‘which star’ matters.”
We can’t know absolutely, of course, but I do think the haiku invites educated guesses–and the fact that a number of commentators here have offered those (starting with Judith Christian herself) seems significant. This business also raises some interesting issues about both specificity in haiku and how we read haiku.
My point, really, is that if we interpret “seems close” to indicate an outstandingly bright star in the night sky (and that is how I interpret it), then the possibilities, in a given hemisphere, at a particular time of year, will be pretty limited.
I’m glad, Lorin, that you agree with my “summer” interpretation. If it is the northern hemisphere, then the poet-speaker is probably looking to the east–at least if it’s a true star and not a planet.
Does that distinction matter? I think it does. Stars look different. They twinkle. So that’s part of my experience of the poem. They’re also, of course, many orders of magnitude both larger and farther away than planets are. My sense of the “longing” (to embrace the infinite or unbounded) that Judith Christian mentions is enhanced by the idea that it’s a star.
I say east, then, because there are no outstandingly bright stars in the summer evening in the west in the northern hemisphere. The faint ones that are there remain obscured by the light of dusk for some time after sunset.
If you look at the entire night sky in the summer (in the northern hemisphere), the first star that will become visible is Arcturus, because it is the brightest. Next will be Vega, the second brightest–and both in the east. Those two really dominate the summer sky (here)–but also prominent are the two other stars forming the Summer Triangle (along with Vega), Altair and Deneb. Beyond that, the choices would be pretty limited.
And stars have definite “personalities”–specific brightnesses, colors (Arcturus is orange whereas Vega is white), times of appearance in the year and in the evening, cultural/mythical associations, and so on. In these ways, “which star” might matter as much as, say, “which bird” or “which tree” and so on in other haiku contexts.
Which does bring it back to how one reads haiku. For me haiku is a poetry of reality, so that these specificities, and speculating upon them, do matter and affect how I interpret and “enter” the poem. Even if a haiku leaves the door open to a few possibilities, I can find it pleasurable to consider each in turn. I certainly realize, though, that other readers might feel differently and might be focused on different aspects of composition/interpretation.
Whichever star it might be would depend not only on which hemisphere one was seeing it from, but which direction one was looking towards. If it was early evening and one was looking West, yes, it could be ‘the evening star’, Venus. At some times, it could be Jupiter, which can be quite bright. Or it could be many of the ‘real’ stars, if we want to make that distinction. I don’t think ‘which star’ matters.
‘swim’ does seem to conjure up a summer night… my own reading (due to my own experience, of course, since we bring to haiku our own experience) sets this haiku by the sea/ ocean. At night there is no visible horizon when looking out over the ocean, no marking line between dark sea and dark sky. The eye can’t assess distance well, either. We ‘know’ that the stars are in the sky, but it can seem as if some of them are on the sea.
The star seems close, within reach of a capable swimmer. Ah, the sense of closeness is there, but the knowing reminds us of the distance between ‘seems’ and ‘is’, whilst the ‘not knowing’ lets us experience, momentarily, that all things are possible.
‘beginner’s mind’?
Lorin
If a true star and not a planet such as Venus, one candidate would surely be Sirius, the Dog Star, of Canis Major, the brightest star–besides the Sun, of course!–from the perspective of the Earth. Then again, Sirius is visible in the evening in the northern hemisphere only during the winter (look for its brilliance below and just to the east of Orion).
Whereas “swim” conjures a summer setting–so, if this is a haiku of the northern hemisphere, my notion of the star in question will be Arcturus, our brightest star of the summer evening. But 37 light years is still a long way to swim! Thus, “seems”–which, yes, “keeps us safe”.
Polaris, by contrast, is actually the most famous of the dimmer stars–ranking only 48th in apparent magnitude. Its importance as the North Star can obscure the fact that it’s actually fainter than, say, Adara, Gacrux, Miaplacidus, Alioth, Mirfak, Wezen, Sargas, and quite a number of others that are hardly household names.
Tiny quibble: Venus, of course, is a planet rather than a star–and yet we call it the morning or the evening star, so I guess you’re safe with that one! And it certainly seems closer (is indeed closer) than most stars.
A lovely analysis of a lovely poem. Both are fascinating–mostly because I don’t EVER think of stars as something I could swim to. Their beauty, their mystery stems from their untouchability. I guess “seems” says it all. Thanks……….
Or maybe Polaris? The North Star or Polestar.
My favourite multiple stars haiku has to be:
standing up
for a closer look
at the stars
Maurice Tasnier
From the Ninth Star on the Left
• Publisher: Snapshot Press (2000)
• ISBN-10: 0952677369
• ISBN-13: 978-0952677369
I love this haiku. As an artist I understand how seeing draws us to …perhaps into…the object we are observing. The light enters our eyes and becomes us…
Another reason I’m glad for this haiku is that so many times I’ve been admonished for statement haiku… where the insight is revealed in one statement without a juxtaposition. But “that star” sets a season. “That star” IS a juxtaposition to the observer. Often these subtleties are not obvious.
Thanks for this one. There is much to think about here.
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