Skip to main content

Haikai and Zen

 
My relation to Japanese aesthetics began with a course in Zen that I took at the University of Buffalo, back in another lifetime, in the land of the Tonawandas. The teacher was a Korean ex-monk sent to the West by his master to spread Buddhism. I actually dropped the course during the first week, for the main book was Nature (yes, he wrote it on the board with a capital N), and I believed him. I invited him over for tea and discussed the Capture of the Ox, an allegory of the spiritual quest wonderfully depicted in ancient drawings on a book by Dasetz Suzuki. In those days, I still believed in the idea of finding oneself, as if I was a pair of lost keys in the sands of time, and therefore, in the idea of stages in an imaginary trip to the nowhere land of bliss and truth, precisely the theme of the Ox Hunt. I asked him in which of the 10 stations of the spiritual journey was thriving and answered -to my delight- that sometimes in 5, others in 10, but then again dropping to 1, and so on. We laughed for quite a while. I never saw him again, I did not call him or went back to his classes at the University, for I did not want to break the lightning clarity of that sparkling moment.
  As I understand the Haikai, they are about such lightning clarity, a rare phenomenon in the poetic arena that requires both effort and spontaneity, a combination that can only be synthesized in the limits of the human psyche.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibniz an
Post a Comment
Read more

An Epistemological Perspective of Individuation

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology
Post a Comment
Read more

Trabajar con sentido

  Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria. Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mirar al
Post a Comment
Read more