Going to the Pine

This collection of essays considers the Japanese poet Matsuo Bash (1644-94) from four different and, in some respects, unconventional perspectives. It begins by likening Bash and John Keats as travellers, open to all experience and convinced that they must ‘annihilate self’ to achieve true poetry. The second essay looks at how perceptions of Bash’s famous ‘frog’ haiku have changed over time, and the contentious issue of how far it can (or should) be read in Zen Buddhist terms. The third essay, written from the viewpoint of a translator struggling to render Bash’s ‘cicada’ haiku into English, explores authentic issues of language and interpretation; at the same time, however, it is evident that something else is going on in the translator’s mind. The final essay revisits the ‘frog’ haiku, but now as a metaphor for a much larger philosophical question: why are we so intolerant of the unintelligible — of the very notion that the universe, and with it our world, came into being without reason, necessity, or purpose? Implicitly the four essays are linked by Bash’s injunction to ‘Go to the pine to learn about the pine’, that is, to try and get to the truth of things as they are, unencumbered by our own thoughts and preoccupations.