Robert
Spiess
821
The best these Speculations can offer is possibilities.
[Gloss
on words of Nietzsche: Human-all-too-Human, ch. iii.]
822
Haiku is the combination of simplicity and subtlety, clarity
and profundity.
[Gloss
on words of R. H. Blyth.]
823
Intellective expressions are held in low esteem in haiku
because haiku aim to indicate the suchness or essentiality
of entities, and though, perforce, language is needed for
haiku expression, the suchness of things or anything that
is absolute (the universe, God, pure nothingness) is suprarational
and cannot be expressed in conceptual terminology. Therefore,
haiku needs another mode to indicate or express its aim,
and this mode must be the elicitation of an intuitionintuition
being logically non-linguistic, more akin to deep feelings
than to mental concepts, and it derives from the aesthetic
nature of genuine haiku, rather than from the words per
se. In other words, the aesthetic aspects of language in
haiku are far more important than the words' denotationdenotation,
again, being intellective.
824
A true haiku poet has no self, yet there is nothing that
is not his/her-self.
[Gloss
on a passage of Shitou's.]
825
Underlying all aspects of the structure and aesthetics of
haiku is the quality of one's heart.
826
Write your haiku for the ear, read haiku aloud. The word
is/was made for the ear more than for the eye.
[Prompted
by a passage by Juan Ramón Jiménez.]
827
Haiku are the charm of the ephemeral.
828
This passage has relevance for haiku poets: "We are
blind to reality because we are so accustomed to our surroundings
and to ourselves that we are no more aware of them. Once
we break the fetters of habit by the power of a paradoxical
situation or by a flash of intuition, everything becomes
a revelation and every day life turns into a wonder."
By ". . . the power of a paradoxical situation
. . . " we can incorporate into our haiku the aesthetic
juxtaposition of seemingly disparate entities that allow
us to have a revelation.
[Quotation
by Lama Anagarika Govinda in his Insights of a Himalayan
Pilgrim, Dharma Publishing, Berkeley, California, 1991,
p. 49.]
829
It appears that one "reason" why haiku poets should
feel rather than think when composing haiku is that psychological
research has shown that when persons are performing rather
subtle tasks, those who "feel" their way in regard
to the tasks tend to be more creative than those who consciously
try to think their way through.
[Prompted
in part by a passage of Huston Smith's.]
830
A haiku of true merit is almost always a defeat for the
ego.
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