Original subtitles

The popular common reference point for a haiku is a very short and kind of

opaque poem.

And that is not necessarily wrong.

The traditions of Japanese poetry leading back several centuries

are leaning towards a real emphasis on

concision. going back through the great collections from the earlier centuries,

the Kokenshu, the Manyoshu, where you're taking vast

complexes of emotion and interpretation

and scene and materiality and immateriality and body and

spirit and all of this.

compressing it into remarkably tight lines that just

evoke so much more than actually get said or written, that

is a consistent thread throughout. And you can see the haiku is just another

step in that progression where it becomes even shorter.

This can be confusing to a lot of people.

This can be very hard to follow because it's a very tough nut to crack,

especially if you're saying, well, okay, well, a poem has to mean something.

What is the meaning? And I'm going to open that up and there's going to be the

meaning. And that's not always the most fruitful way of approaching this stuff.

With Matsuo Basho, you get this wonderful talent that is

also kind of playful and fun.

And in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, this great collection of writings

posing as a kind of travel narrative. He writes this just a few years before his

death. He doesn't live a long life. I think he dies when he's around 50.

But at around 45 or so, he goes on this journey.

And this is supposedly a recording of that journey. It's not entirely

truthful in that. It is not necessarily a journalistic enterprise.

Subsequent scholarship suggests that he didn't actually do a lot of writing

while he was on this journey.

Like he explicitly says at times that he does.

He's fibbing a little there.

But a lot of the poems and a lot of the writing

comes actually afterwards when he is reconstructing everything in his mind,

which, let's face it, is what writing is.

Very few people have an experience and simultaneously write about it. If they

do, that writing is often bad. garbage and who the hell wants to read it? I had

cereal five minutes ago and now I am finishing a cup of coffee. You know, who

really needs to know all that?

But the process of time, the process of a little objective distance

allows you to sift through all that experience, to sift through all of those

thoughts and pick out the real Important ones and start

to thread all of those together. And that's what you get here in this

document where you get a mixture

of prose and poetry. Also not uncommon within the Japanese

tradition where you get fairly conventional at times, it

seems at least.

prose exposition, talking about going someplace, doing something,

and it all seems very real. And then all of a sudden they interject a little

moment of poetry.

I went to this place and I saw this and I saw that and then I was moved to write

this. And there's a short poem there, a short haiku.

And it's just another way of

bringing out the thought process that happens on the journey. It's another way

of documenting your experience.

And you can take it as that.

But that is a first -level reading, I would say. The more

significant thoughts tend to come from thinking about the

connections,

and the disparities between these two modes of writing, prosaic and the

And this book is a multifaceted exploration of exactly

that sort of experience, that experience of being between two

things, the in -between -ness of it, the liminal is the high -end literary word,

the liminal quality.

of the experience.

Where it is poetry, it is also prose, but the most significant

moment is the betweenness of them. Again and again and again, this

story, if you want to use that loose and inaccurate word here,

dwells on continuities and discontinuities.

It is, on the one hand, a journey.

Okay. He wakes up one morning, he says, and wants to go on a journey.

That's fine.

That's fair. That happens.

But you have two ways of looking at a journey.

Is it a journey from point A to point B, where the

important parts are, point A and point B?

Or is the journey itself...

The point.

Like the classic line, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

Those sorts of thoughts start to come up. And again and again and again, you

read through this, and you find moments where he's talking about history.

And the distant past.

And he's reflecting on the distant past as an analog of sorts

to...

The present.

So you get time collapsed like that, where you're considering not just the

distant past and the present, but the moments between, what happens in

Just like they use the present.

from time to time in the shadow of the distant past to try and predict the

future. They speculate on the future. The text speculates on the future. And

you are suddenly the present is between two things, between the past and the

future. It is a liminal space between them. It is a moment of uncertainty.

Significantly, Basho is going on this journey at age 45, which I got to tell

is... middle age.

And when you are middle age, you start thinking about the fact that, well, gee,

I got more time behind me than I do in front of me. I'm going to die one day.

And, you know, some people go out and buy a Corvette, and some people go out

a nice long walking journey and write poetry about it.

So he is between two things, between birth and death, and he is very much

of this throughout.

He is aware of the passage of time. There is a constant reference to

constant reference to the passage of time. The haiku form here

always has an element within it that tells you...

What time of year it is. What is the season? What is the climate like in that

season?

So all of these references are stacking up. The differences between art and

nature. He is walking through nature very frequently, but he is writing about

at the same time, producing art from nature. But it is not also...

the direct experience of nature because we know that he is reflecting on it at a

later date and writing it as if he were there.

So is that truth or is that fiction? Another bifurcation there. Truth and

fiction, art and nature, all of these little poles are pulling at him but also

joining together.

You find references to rivers, which...

Show a passage of time.

It is a constant reference. It is a deeply symbolic image in most Japanese

poetry, Asian poetry broadly, world poetry broadly. Time. You can never

your hand in the same river twice because it's always changing. But it is

constant continuity of change that is in itself a kind of stability.

He is always getting between these two and also finding it joined together.

A river divides two land masses, but it is also a place where they meet.

A line can join as much as it divides.

Another little way of thinking about all of these distinctions.

And when you start thinking about them, when you start considering them,

You see all of these recurrences stacking up, all of these instances

of distinctions that tend to blur together.

We like organized information.

We like to be able to say this is that and this is that and never the twain

shall meet.

But here we're starting to see that, well, it's not so simple.

And in that, you can see that same concern

with materiality and immateriality, body

and soul, that pervades world literature, world culture

of all time, quite frankly.

Waxing and waning through history, but it's always there.

The struggle to get a hold of it, the impetus to explore it,

is also part and parcel with the Age of

Enlightenment over in Europe. Because think about this. He goes

on this journey, and it might seem like just an

idle little stroll, a meander.

But still, he was impelled to go on it. He was impelled to know. He wants to

know something.

That's right out of the Enlightenment handbook.

So there is a kind of quest to know. There is a journey aspect

to this that is very much a goal -oriented...

He wants to know something. He may not know what he wants to know, but he is

driven to explore something.

And you see him again and again and again going to all of these sites, going

all of these places, and striving to know.

And it's not just looking at stuff.

going and saying, hey, wow, you know, that's a really cool beach. I'm going to

hang out there, watch the sunset, and, you know, order up some Mai Tais.

He's going to fairly specific places that have signs or

connections to culture.

They're often natural spots, often quite secluded, but with

connections to human civilization.

So again and again you see him say, and I was in this place where we, you know,

where this poet had written about that. And this temple is connected to that.

And all of these little marks of human civilization he is exploring and

writing about and commenting on very obliquely, but it's there.

This is an intellectual endeavor as much as it is a spiritual endeavor.

And that mind -body connection is just

like every other polarity that we see in this, where is it an intellectual

process? Are we reasonable beings? Are we thinking beings? Is there no spirit?

Or are we all spirit?

Or are we all immaterial? Are we all part of God or the divinity in whatever

version you want?

And the physical stuff we see is just an illusion.

These are the questions being weighed here. Along the way, it's a fun little

journey. Along the way, it's interesting.

Along the way, it is at moments really quite beautiful.

The months and days, the travelers of a hundred ages, the years that come and

go, voyagers too, floating away their lives on boats, growing old, they lead

horses by the bit. For them, each day, a journey, travel their home.

Many, too, are the ancients who perished on the road. Some years ago, seized by

wanderlust, I wandered along the shores of the sea. Seized by wanderlust,

wanderlust, that hunger to know, to see, to just go out and experience, to

leave the safe harbor of what you know and to forge

into an unknown world.

Then, and here we're back into prose.

Simple little switch. Is it a difference or is it just a continuation?

Then, last autumn, I swept away the old cobwebs in my dilapidated dwelling on

the river's edge.

River's edge, very symbolic.

As the year gradually came to an end and spring arrived, filling the sky with

mist, I longed to cross the Shirakawa barrier, the most revered of poetic

places. Poetic places?

Not just anywhere. Places of culture.

Somehow or other, I became possessed by a spirit which crazed my soul.

Unable to sit still, I accepted the summons of the deity of the road.

No sooner had I repaired the holes in my trousers,

attached a new cord to my rain hat, and cauterized my legs with maksa, than my

thoughts were on the famous moon of Matsushima. I turned my dwelling to

and moved to Senpu's villa.

Notice the switching back and forth between material concerns and poetic

concerns, between the body and the soul, between art and nature, between

physicality and spirits.

I repaired the holes in my trousers, attached a new cord to my rain hat, and

cauterized my legs with moxa.

All very physical, all very material, practical concerns. Then my thoughts

on the famous moon at Matsushima, and suddenly he's off on an aesthetic

Suddenly he's thinking about something that is more artistic, more spiritual,

more beautiful, and less practical.

And then back into a poem. You get a short haiku.

Time even for the grass hut to change owner's house of dolls, which you go

to the footnote, and it tells you that it is alluding to a particular time of

year, the doll festival, a sign of culture, a sign of passage of time,

a sign of civilization.

but that is compared to time even for the grass hut to change owner. A grass

is a very unsophisticated dwelling, a very uncultured dwelling. A grass hut is

very humble and has nothing to do, you might think, with the palace and the

culture of the palace.

Or does it? Is it all a continuum? We don't really know. There are these

and the lines divide, but the lines conjoin, and it is all uncertain.

I left a sheet of eight linked verses on the Pillar of the Hermitage. I started

out on the 27th day of the third month, connecting already the difference

between culture, between the art and nature, between...

spirit and body, between writing and experiencing, all of this is getting

pointed out again and again and again.

You just have to recognize it. The dawn sky was misting over. Another

reference to passing time.

The moon lingered, giving off a pale light.

Beautiful, but also a sign again of passing time.

The peak of Mount Fuji appeared in the distance.

I felt uncertain, wondering whether I would see again the cherry blossoms on

boughs at Ueno and Yanaka.

The experience of outside nature makes him think of his inside nature. He's

registering his emotional state as he is recording the outside environment.

My friends had gathered the night before to see me off and join me on the boat.

When I disembarked at a place called Senju, my breast was overwhelmed by

thoughts of the 3 ,000 leagues ahead.

And standing at the crossroads of this illusory word, I wept at the parting.

a reference to society, but still very vague. He's talking about friends coming

to see him, and yet it is a very internal thing. They don't register in

itself. We don't get names.

They have no snippets of dialogue or anything.

But it shows him in society, and yet at the same time, he seems very much alone.

He is registering all this and internalizing it and recording what is

internally, separate from society, even as he is in society. Even as he is among

friends, he is separate from the friends.

Is that really a thing? Who else can say that they do that? Have you ever been

in a crowd and suddenly felt like you're just sort of sitting there in your own

thoughts and, you know, you could be among your best friends in the world,

you're just sitting back and just lost in your own little ideas?

Spring going, birds crying and tears in the eyes of the fish.

spring going passage of time spring birds crying and tears in the eyes of

fish objectifying nature as a reflection of his own internal state you don't

have to break apart that little haiku and say well what does this mean what

that mean what does this mean sometimes

That's just not helpful. Sometimes just register, well, what are my first

impressions here? And this is it for me. It is the passage of time. It is a

reflection on the outside nature. And it is somehow connected to or

distinguished from the inside nature, the interior drama going on in this

person's soul.

Making this my first journal entry, we set off but made little progress.

People lying the sides of the street seeing us off, it seems, as long as they

could see our back. Making this my first journal entry, we know that he did not

necessarily write all this stuff as he's going along. Some of this was after the

fact, and most of it was after the fact, quite frankly.

So you can say that as him being a little disingenuous here, but this...

just points out again the difference between fact and fiction, between art

nature, between reality and imagination. All of these

things are meeting here, and it's telling us again and again that this is

we need to focus. This is that knot between everything else, this liminal

space between all of these polarities that we need to consider.

Because maybe there is no such thing as polarities. Maybe there is no such thing

as A and B. There is only the infinite space in between.

These are the considerations that the poetry is driving you to. These are the

considerations that the culture broadly is driving you to at this point in time.

And again, think in terms of the historic...

position of Japan at this time. Japan at this time was in a

mode of transition.

It was starting to open up to the outside world.

Portuguese explorers had stumbled across Japan some years before, and there was

this... kind of uncertain how much do we want to reach out to the world how much

do we want to retrench and focus on our own stuff and this journey around japan

is a way of saying

Well, you can read it as, well, he is focusing on Japanese culture, and he is

visiting all of these sites of Japanese culture. But at the same time, it is

also a journey. He is yearning. So he's going around. Maybe he wants to see

something broader, something outside himself.

He does not just reflect on his Japanese culture in his own hometown. He is

motivated to leave, to reach out. And so you can see this position. And the

whole idea of Japanese culture, in itself has a long history with Chinese

culture. China was always the big dog on the block. And Japan had a bit of

a colonial mindset for a long time. They took a lot of their early art, early

literature, early writing from China.

And so they have this somewhat

struggling sense of identity themselves so as you're reading this uh

this journal you can call it that uh this journal of one

person trying to find their way through the world you can see it as one person

trying to figure out an individual identity in opposition to so many

other identities

exploring that liminal space between the self and the other. The other could be

the broader outside world of European explorers or whatever. The broader could

be the experience of China.

The broader could be the experience of India when they talk about Buddhism.

Buddhism is essentially an import from India.

through to China, and then ultimately into Japan.

And that contrasts with the more naturalistic indigenous Shinto religion

Japan. All of these issues are being wrestled out, and they meet

in the mind of this traveler, of this

pilgrim of sorts, just trying

to make sense of it all. And who among us...

It hasn't been in that place where you're just trying

to make sense of the world. And sometimes you go on a journey.

Sometimes you just go out and go for a walk.

Go for a walk along, you know, go for a walk through the city streets. Go for a

walk in the park. Go for a walk on the beach. Go for just a walk. It doesn't

even matter where you're.

trying to organize your ideas a little bit, and you don't even realize it.

You just feel like you need to get out.

Maybe you're trying to escape something. Maybe you're trying to escape to

something. Maybe you're not even trying to escape, but you're trying to bring

what you had to someplace new.

It's all uncertain.

But in reading this, you do find all these little recurrences, all these

prods, all these little hints of time passing, of places, of art and nature

and soul and body and spirit and nature and

physicality and materiality. And all of this is being considered

again and again and again. And you can ignore it.

And just say, well, that's just the words that this guy is coming up with as

he's sitting there writing about, oh, and one day I went for a walk and I did

this and I did that and I did the other thing.

Yeah, you can read it on that level. And in that case, it's sort of interesting

because it does take advantage of some of the conventions of journalism,

to use that term.

which is a little loaded, travel narrative.

There is a long history of travel narratives, especially in the so -called

of Exploration, where people are just really interested, especially as the

printing press and popular literacy begins to spread.

People want to hear about other places.

Ordinary people who don't get out, don't get to travel very much, want to hear

about ordinary places. And it can be the place two towns over. It can be the

place on the other side of the world. They don't really care because they're

going to either.

They're going to be born, live and die probably in the same three square miles.

But they like hearing about other things because of that intellectual curiosity

that so fuels this era.

And you can read it on that level where you're just learning about, oh, and that

looks like a lovely spot. And hey, I wish I had a postcard from there.

And you can enjoy it on that level.

But if you just scratch that surface a little and start to think about, well,

okay, there are so many ways to tell a story of a travel, to tell a story of a

journey.

Why this detail? Why this detail right after this other detail?

Why the constant, and then the time passed, and then the day moved, and then

weather changed, and suddenly there was frost on the ground. Why all of that?

You know, why?

It gets repetitive.

It's annoying.

I don't like repetition.

But repetition is a very common poetic device, because it makes you...

see it.

It makes itself conspicuous.

Repetition is conspicuous. Repetition is conspicuous.

Repetition is conspicuous. And that is the writer, the text itself,

shouting at you to pay attention to this.

I'm repeating it because I'm trying to make a point.

The point might not be all that clear, but think about it.

That's what reading is.

It's not just taking in information.

Again, information is cheap.

Information is not all that interesting when you get right down to it.

But the way you shape that information can imply so much more.

Because by dwelling on the space between

the information, it's not A or B.

space in between, that develops a faculty of thinking that can be

so many other facets of life. Because A and B are

always going to change. They are variables.

But the ability to imagine the different relationships between A and B.

Imagine, well, you know, there is

an infinity.

between those two points.

You know?

The nature of infinity is that you can divide anything by it, you know, in half

again. You can keep subdividing something. So in between two things that

seem to be right next to one another, in between there is infinite space.

And understanding that,

allows you to think about things in a much more sophisticated way, a much more

subtle way.

And quite frankly, the people who see A and B and say, okay, I know what A and B

is, those people are great.

They're not necessarily going to change the world or anything, though.

The subtler thinkers, the people who can see A and B and imagine what's beyond

them,

What's between them? What's connecting them and what's dividing them? Those

people, those are the people that change the world. Those are the

people that imagine what is there when everybody else says there's nothing

there.

You can decide for yourself whether or not that is a skill worth cultivating,

I think the evidence of really successful people from

the beginning of time, successful in terms of cultural

relevance, successful in terms of cha -ching bank account, however you want to

measure success, they're the people who tend to see

between.

See that liminal space.

And see polarities as just progressions

that have extent beyond

those polarities, but also an infinite reduction between

them.

And that's more satisfying, ultimately.

It's more...

Interesting.

A and B is dull.

The infinity between?

That'll occupy you for the rest of your life.