clear cascade stream –

              falling into the waves,

                            green pine needles

        —Bashō ( 1644-1694 ) 

                             from   
                                Basho's Haiku: Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho
                                  Translation and Introduction by David Landis Barnhill
                                   State University of New York Press (2004)

COMMENTARY

The haiku form as developed by Basho under the influence of Tang Chinese poets has two asymmetrical parts, and I believe it gives form to the perennial distinction between the universal and particular, which is essential to metaxological meditations on existence. A classic haiku, whenever and wherever written, inscribes the tensions of consciousness in compact and often touching ways.  

I have tested this hypothesis for about ten years now and it helps us chart the history of the form, including debased versions found, for example, in popular American “haiku.” These debased forms reflect a variety of modern corruptions, and can be analyzed in terms of Voegelin’s metaxological science of man. I have argued this thesis at The Haiku Foundation website  and would invite poets and scholars, esp. students in search of a PhD thesis, to contact me. T.D.

(See the contact link at the bottom of this page.)

"Of intentionality and mystery, we shall speak as ‘structures’ of consciousness with the caution, however, that they are not fixtures of a human consciousness in the immanentist sense, perhaps an apriori structure, but moving forces in the process of reality becoming luminous." “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” Published Essays, 1966-1985, CW Vol 12, 326.

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