Fireflies. Luis Sagasti

zone of attraction that pulls the eyes to one side or the other. The gaze cannot rest on the present moment of the sentence because it seeks symmetry. Four words are two plus two, for example. The sequential character of language is an impassable barrier in our alphabetic systems. Only a haiku written in Japanese can halt the train of language and cast an anchor into the present, the motionless stone lit up by the sun in the morning and the evening. And as we follow the words with the gaze, how many words is it possible to read without punctuation marks? How far can we carry on before we lose the meaning or get lost in the meanders and have to go back? There, in the middle of the river, who is responsible for ensuring the ship does not get trapped in the weeds? The writer? The reader?

      How many words without shifting the gaze? Perhaps pairs of words that have been fused by their sound. What’s up? for example.

      A Japanese haiku comprises seventeen moras, which are something like the atoms of language. Phonemes are smaller still and have no real body to them, like electrons and other theoretical particles that vibrate nervously in the imagination. Pure formal abstraction.

      Are these seventeen moras the measure of the present moment?

      Etymology bursts with meanings. The word mora comes from the Latin for ‘linger, delay’ and was used to translate the Greek word chronos in its metrical sense.

      The seventeen moras are divided into three verses of five, seven and five. An expert calligrapher can lay down the Japanese characters in such a way that they are taken in almost at a single glance. Language and perception conjoined. So it is impossible to translate a haiku, to write a haiku. Our language dilates, delays, demurs what should be a clean tock! on the Zen wood. These three words that can be perceived at a glance: that is as far as the impossible translation of a haiku can go. Conventionally, versions of haikus in Western languages use three verses of five, seven and five syllables each. But this is a pretty poor and distant imitation of their true attributes, even though curiously enough they tend to be shorter when read out loud.

      In 1682, after spending two days shut up in the cabin his disciples had built for him on the other side of a raging river so he could cultivate his poetry in solitude, Matsuo Basho, the most celebrated author of haikus in Japan, which is to say the world, set it on fire. The only thing he had with him when two disciples helped him to cross back over the river was a sheet of paper on which he appeared to have written a haiku. No one verified the story. The fire was accidental. Around this time, Basho had received the news that his mother was dead. And it was believed that these two strokes of misfortune were somehow connected. But one of the twenty disciples let slip many years later, when Basho was more interested in frogs jumping into pools, that he had seen someone leave the cabin as evening fell, the day before the fire. And it was not just anyone.

      Matsuo Basho was born the son of a samurai in 1644 and lived for fifty years. The closest he came to his father’s destiny was joining the service of another samurai, with whom he would later write poems. His real name was Matsuo Kinsaku. He adopted the name Basho when his disciples planted a banana tree (basho in Japanese) beside his cabin. After the fire, Basho embarked on the first of his four journeys through Japan. He abandoned his disciples and all vestiges of social life and began an austere pilgrimage that steadily whittled away at his poems until they reached the most complex of simplicities. His final work is entitled Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and is a kind of diary of the fourth journey he undertook, with a disciple named Sora. Over five months they travelled more than 1,200 miles, visiting the furthest reaches of northern Japan. A pilgrimage where Santiago de Compostela could be found in the most unsuspecting cherry tree.

      At that time it was widely believed (and many scholars still believe it today) that Kioyi Hatasuko, a contemporary of Basho, was the greatest calligrapher of haikus. His lines were produced in a single motion, wrist and forearm moving to and fro like those of an orchestra conductor. Involuntary lashes of a whip; Jackson Pollock chasing a fly with his paintbrush. When Kioyi Hatasuko wrote his own haikus, he would spend almost the whole afternoon sitting facing a landscape. Then, with two or three gestures, he laid down the ink on the paper. What is curious is that his own haikus were not considered good enough. The meaning of the poems could be captured immediately, and in this sense his technique was astonishing, but the content, the poetic vision if we can call it that, was lacking. Hatasuko knew the value of his haikus; there was truth in the spontaneity of his lines, but sometimes truth can be a bit insipid. He never achieved the simplicity of Basho. His best-known haiku reads:

      Between the lightning and the thunder

      A bird

      Seeks refuge

      Basho took a different approach, in which perception and creation were almost irreconcilable. The sure hand evident in his calligraphy was the fruit of strenuous effort, and this wasn’t easy to disguise.

      If we ignore what the disciple claims to have seen the day before the fire, Basho and Hatasuko – who were nearly the same age – never actually met. But there is another version of the story. It is said that one day Hatasuko was so moved by one of Basho’s haikus that he decided to visit him, though he knew the poet rarely received anyone in his cabin. As for Basho, he admired Hatasuko’s calligraphy but knew that his haikus were less than brilliant.

      The poets met one morning beneath the banana tree. Autumn was in the air. Basho had been contemplating the river since the morning, wearing a simple tunic. They went inside the cabin. The host served tea. At some point, Hatasuko asked Basho for a blank sheet of paper, a brush and some ink.

      ‘I want you to show me your haikus. It is my wish to write my own haiku based on the impressions they evoke,’ he said.