Rain Falls - Filling the Ruts Via Japanese Haiku - Part I on Buson

rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart.

草の雨祭の車過てのち

Buson

Rain Falls on the Grass

A poet-painter of Edo period Japan, Buson was aesthetically-inclined in ways that bridged the ecological and the contemplative. An era now understood as a Japanese renaissance of sorts, Edo Japan saw widespread stability and flourishing of the arts, making it ripe with creative energy. In Buson's pieces, both painting and poetry, we often find minimalism packed full of complexity and nuance, vividly portraying the world in its process of continually coming into being.

Although not much is known of his early life, Buson likely lost both parents at a young age. He is believed to have ventured at age 20 to the then-capital of Edo (now Tōkyō) where he studied painting and poetry for six years with the famed composer of haiku, Hayano Hajin, until Hajin's death. Buson then wandered northward for ten years in didactic pilgrimage, documenting his travels in a journal that came to be known as the Narrow Road to the Far North (Oku no Hosomichi).

In many ways, Buson's life mirrors the mix of challenges and privileges faced by those of us living through the present pandemic, bearing witness to sickness and death while attempting to forge our way ahead. Buson enjoyed a life of contemplative arts, though not without enduring hardship, loss, and upheaval. Such themes are reflected in his poems, one of which we feature here for contemplation. Thus begins our short series on Japanese haiku.

Filling the Ruts

Though brief, haiku is an art suffused with meaning. Each syllable contains within it an entire world of subtle meaning and vivid nuance. Strung together, these bead-like syllables paint a portrait of society and nature at large.

In Buson's haiku, we are invited into the rain. Quite viscerally, the very character for rain, 雨, illustrates the formation of individual droplets that leak from heavy clouds overhead. Via haiku, Buson paints this rain falling onto the grass below, where instead of a smooth and even surface, we find gouges — ruts — carved into the earth, creating miniature channels, collecting rainfall.

Falling on the grass, filling the ruts, the rain offers an implicit metaphor for the functioning of the human mind, both individually and collectively. Some degree of previous scaffolding exists in the form of habituated patterns of cognizing the world. The coarse byproducts of these cognitions are our behaviors. Incoming sense perceptions, like rain, fill the ruts already carved in us.

The haiku, though brief, evolves in layers, turning momentarily to a portrait from the past.

Left by the Festival Cart

In this portrait, Buson paints a scene much different than the empty, grassy field receiving the rain. Formerly, the very same field was home to a bustling festival. The ruts chiseled into the earth, now collecting rain, were left by the festival cart as it made its rounds through this party.

Such imagery reflects the ways the earth has been scarred by human activity, particularly in recent decades. The fun and games humanity has indulged, including rapid industrial progress for the sake of comfort and convenience at the expense of the environment, have left their indelible mark. A character that in other contexts can connote sacrifice, 祭, is here used to refer to this festival, in some sense reflecting the trade-off entailed in industrial activity. As it weaves its way across the field to provide goods, luxuries, and other pleasantries, this societally-driven, on-demand festival cart presses its full weight into the earth. Its tracks serve as gouge-like imprints, so that as the rain falls, it disproportionately fills these ruts.

While this precise meaning may not have been Buson's intention while painting the scene, it nonetheless foreshadows the Meiji restoration that followed immediately after the Edo period, ushering in an era of industrialization that forever changed Japanese society. It further reflects our present predicament, characterized by the threat of ecological, economic, and epidemiological collapse. In order to disperse the rain evenly over the field, we must fill the ruts left by the festival cart to whatever extent is possible.

Re-Filling the Ruts

What might we do, or undo, for the sake of re-filling the ruts and leveling the land? While we pause here for the time being, our forthcoming explorations of Japanese haiku will further probe this question, among others. To be continued.