More Silence

I write this as the Bloomington sanitation guys vacuum the leaves of summer that stood sodden and crusty in yesterday's snow. Not only that but roofers are pounding and scraping my neighbor's roof: bang, bang, scrip, scrape.

Maybe that's why haiku is such a difficult 21st century art to engage in for it's truly hard to slow down and really experience what you are thinking and feeling in our noisy, brash, far too-busy world. This short poetic form, I believe, requires both emotion and thought.

In researching the aspect of silence in relation to haiku, I discovered Canadian doctor and haikuist Eric Amman who wrote an essay in 1978 called "The Wordless Poem." Amman brought both his medical practice and training and his belief in Zen Buddhism into his poems and said in this essay that "The haiku is a point of intersection between man and nature."

In her analysis of Amman's work, critic Kathrin Walsch said that "Haiku poetry, like Zen, transcends words." Of course for someone whose bread and butter--take that back--soul food are words that's a hard concept to master, but she goes on the say, "Haiku focuses not on what the words mean in an abstract sense but rather the image the words are able to create... Zen practices hold that words are limiting and can be a distraction from which one should detach oneself."

And this discussion leads me to night, especially these long late-autumn nights when one is more likely to experience quiet and to reconnect with both nature and oneself:

night sky
the flaming silence
of stars