Haiku Diary

Hokusai: Portrait of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

The other day I came across a diary I’d kept right through one of the most difficult periods in my life.

It was strange.

For one thing, I had absolutely no memory at all of having written it – no sense of connection with the person who’d made those entries, had all those perceptions she’d just had to share.

Even more bizarre, though, was the fact that it contained virtually nothing about what was really going on with me at the time. It was as if another self had taken over, on automatic pilot, whenever I took pen in hand – the same person, perhaps, who’d squirreled it away at the bottom of an old shopping bag, underneath a pile of other bags, at the back of a cupboard where I hardly ever look.

My first impulse was to throw it away: burn it, banish it – send it where so many other letters, memos, abortive stories and fragments have gone. Then I started to read it instead.

It was interesting.

Oh, not in itself. Heaven forbid I make any claims for it on that score! It was more self-consciously “written” than some of the other things I’ve done, perhaps because of the context, but didn’t differ from them in essentials. Straggly handwriting, poor arrangement of material, lack of attention to details …

Maybe it was because its author seemed such a stranger to me that I could appreciate some of what she wrote, fill in the gaps of what she’d failed to mention – what she’d wanted to say but somehow couldn’t bring herself to.

•

Thursday, September 8 – nine of us plus the roshi [teacher]. Guys all grouped together in the front row. Girls ditto in the back. Except for me:

ROSHI [Giles]

GUYS:RobJackGrantPhilip
(builder)(teacher)(artist)(student)

ME

GIRLS:MaryHeatherLizNancy
(teacher)(off to Japan)(Waiheke)

~

COURSE SCHEDULE

Session 1haiku8/9
Session 2haiku15/9
Session 3film22/9
Session 4tanka29/9
Session 5haibun6/10
Session 6diaries13/10


wabi / sabi
poverty – sadness
(the two great themes of haiku)

Apparently you don’t have to bother with the5
syllable count anymore:7
5

•

It was my friend Nancy who persuaded me to take a poetry class in the first place. The main motivation on her part seemed to be the fact that they needed more enrolments for there to be a class (which meant that she wouldn’t get to take it. It turned out she had a bit of a crush on Giles, the teacher).

She managed to convince me that it might do me some good.

I’d broken up with my husband not long before – maybe six months – and had largely given up going out on dates after a few disastrous encounters early in the game (one with a guy who kept on chewing gum all through the conversation, even while drinking a glass of wine. He looked as if he hadn’t washed his hair in about a year, too: cold wolf gleam in his eye).

“You’ve got to get out of here.”

Here was the pokey little flat which was all I could afford after Brian walked out, leaving me with a fistful of bills, no dollars to pay them with.

“Forget about guys for a bit. What you need is some me time. And what better way than by learning about poetry and nature and all that shit?”

That was how she sold it to me, in her most insinuating best-friend-of-the-loser manner.

“But what if it’s really boring or horrible?”

“Oh, it won’t be. Don’t be so melodramatic. It’s not as if you even have to think up rhymes or anything with haiku. Any dummy can do it. Even me, and that’s saying something!”

It took more energy to resist her than go along with her, so I found myself duly signed up for a six-week evening class in Japanese poetry.

•


Blue / red / blue chairs
Elmo on the OHP
looking both ways

Sent out of the room, then walked back in to see it afresh.

Trying to be clever, seeing the little drawing of Elmo on the Overhead Projector as related to our seating arrangements.

Giles didn’t get it at all.

~

Sent out again & told to come back with at least two haiku:

Nancy turns her head
towards the stage-lights
Grant walks up & down

Nancy used to be an actress, but now she’s a journalist. They were preparing an outdoor stage for some kind of play outside the classroom. I could see her angling around instinctively to check it out.

The cleaners leave
carrying vacuums
feet scuff on the ground

This was the only one Giles could see anything in.

~

In the bus going home:

Moon through the trees
can that be water?
streetlight filament hovers like a moth

•

Narrow Road to the Deep North. [1]

That was one of the titles Giles recommended to us. It was by a Japanese haiku poet called Bashō, he said, and was a kind of travel-book about various pilgrimages he’d made to holy shrines around Japan. The way it was written was very interesting (according to him): alternating passages of prose and poetry, a form called haibun.

It was a nice book. I enjoyed reading it, but what really stuck in my mind was the title. I guess it must sound pretty different in Japanese, but Narrow Road to the Deep North became like a mantra for me. I found myself reciting it every morning while I was trying to psych myself up to crawl out of bed.

That was how it felt, actually: a hard journey down a deep ravine, with the rock walls gradually narrowing in until you could hardly squeeze between them. Every step got harder and harder, and there was no end in sight.

“Narrow road – got to get up – narrow – kettle on, cup of tea – narrow road to the deep north – choke down toast – narrow road – get dressed, get out of here – narrow road to the deep north …” And so on.

Part of the problem was that I didn’t have a job. I’d been working as an office temp when I met Brian, and had been intending to apply for teacher training. But somehow all that started to drift when we got married. There always seemed to be so much to do, plenty of time to make decisions later.

And now ten years had gone by and I was nowhere.

Certainly I had plans: courses to find out about, jobs to apply for. But all I was actually doing was studying poetry.

That, and taking the narrow road to the deep north.

•

Saturday, September 10 – Car-trouble. They wouldn’t give it a warrant, and I don’t see how I can afford to get it fixed. I hate to admit it, but I think I might be stuck with buses from now on. Went for a walk to calm down after I got the news.

Better than a Boy
T-shirt
hung over the letter-box


Batteries
& bottle-tops
beside a missing bus-stop

It was literally missing – just a bare bit of concrete where it used to be.

•

They say it’s the ability to tell which is which that’s really important: hallucinations or reality.

I was having a lot of difficulty sleeping, and was gradually getting accustomed to seeing weird stuff in the middle of the night. Oh, it freaked me out at first: spiders crawling down my pillow, hands reaching out for me – a perfect sunflower unfolding its petals in front of my face on one occasion. They didn’t seem to be dreams. I felt perfectly awake each time, though I was generally lying in bed when I saw them.

None of them ever touched me, however much they looked as if they were going to, so I managed to wean myself off reaching up to ward them off or batting at them with pillows.

“Hypnagogic hallucinations” is what the doctor said they were. He recommended sleeping pills, and followed that up with an offer of antidepressants when I hesitated.

I’ve seen what those things can do, though. My mother used to need a couple of valium must to get out of bed every morning, and I can recognise too much of myself in her to start down that road unless I really have to.

Rightly or wrongly, I thought I could cope with the night-visions unless they got a whole lot worse and I started to actually feel them.

Little did I know.

•

Wednesday, September 14 – Couldn’t sleep last night. Finally gave up & sat reading the History of the Crusades through the early hours.

Pottered round the flat a bit in the morning but accomplished little, so caught the early bus to town.

‘If you need a
blood-test …’
– on a car


Wild Appetite
pulls out
impatiently


a multi-coloured van, jiggling with impatience in its lane

~

It moves like a turbulent liquid wind
& hits like a fluid battering-ram

– from a TV documentary about floods.

•

“So I went out with Giles last night. He showed me a bunch of his films.”

“That’s a new one. Did he show you any of his etchings as well?”

“It wasn’t like that. He’s a very serious guy – very spiritual.”

“What were the films like?”

“Oh, pretty intense. A snail crawling up the side of a letterbox, raindrops falling on a rosebush and running down onto the ground …”

Nancy was clearly getting into this exploration of her spiritual side. I remembered previous boyfriends who’d persuaded her to camp with them for months in the forest primeval, or the one who’d talked her into letting him tie her to the bed (“He didn’t seem to have any ideas about what to do once he had me all tied up …”), not to mention the one who used to smoke p and then run about the house jabbering like a monkey and striking at imaginary foes with a carving knife. Giles seemed a distinct improvement over them.

“Do you like him?”

“Well, it’s impossible not to like him, really. I don’t know if there’s any more to it than that, though – he’s not exactly dynamic when it comes to making passes at a girl.”

“Maybe I should be the one going out with him. I’ve kind of had it with guys making passes at me.”

“Too late, girlfriend. By the time you’d made up your mind to give him a try he’d be long gone … you’ve just got to go for it sometimes. Oh, by the way, he lent me his video camera.”

“His video camera? To do what? Doesn’t he need it?”

“He’s got two. He told me I should make a record of my day-to-day perceptions, and then we could look at it together.”

“Sounds like a real blast.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Unless he wants you to take some footage of steamy erotic writhings …”

“I kind of doubt that. It’s all a bit boring, actually. I have enough trouble trying to think up haikus without having to film every passing snail and raincloud … So what I was thinking was, how would you like to …”

“Make some little films for you.”

“Exactly. I mean, it’s not as if you …”

“Have anything else to do with all my free time?”

“Christ, that’s not what I meant! I just thought you might like to.”

Funnily enough, the idea held some appeal.

•

Thursday, September 15 – The fucking bus did not turn up. Went down at 5.40 p.m. (leaves the depot 5.42, due 5.47 down at the shops), & stood waiting till 6.07. The next one was due at 6.18, which meant I had to run up through the park in order to get to the class on time. As it was I was ten minutes late.

When the bus doesn’t come
tow-trucks pull out
in front of you

a succession of red lights, slow drivers, irritating delays …

~

We started off today having to write a response to someone else’s haiku

[Phil]:the moon hangs

in the branches
a leaf trembles

[me]:street-light

filaments
hover above

[me]:‘If you need a

blood-test –‘
on a car

[Nancy]:bubbling blood

sucks
into the syringe

A distinct flavour of pastiche about the whole exercise. It’s hard to say which of us is worse at it: Nancy or me.

•

It must have been sometime after that second class that I started using the video camera. It’s hard to be more precise than that, and the diary (as usual) is little help.

It was one of those handheld ones, with a viewing screen folding out to one side. Nancy didn’t know much about how to use it, and there was no manual, but I managed to work out the basics after a bit of trial and error.

I had in firmly fixed in my mind the notion that these were supposed to be Nancy’s films, not mine, which scotched my first impulse, making a detailed record of everything in the flat. It seemed too boring and dreary anyway to film all those unwashed coffee cups and stacks of library books.

So I went out for a walk.

It was funny. Now I had a camera in my hand, everything looked subtly altered, as if it was posing for a potential shot. Houses loomed up, cars veered by, even trees and bushes danced and curvetted in the wind.

And the people! They looked so strange, so alien – hurrying by in their outlandish garb, gobbling bagels, babbling into cellphones.

I found that the moment I lifted the camera they stiffened and reacted, but if I kept it casually by my side or (better still) balanced it on top of a rubbish bin or a telephone fuse box, they paid no attention to it – or me – at all.

“I’ve found my destiny,” I remember thinking, “born to be a filmmaker …”

The results, predictably, were disappointing. Piles of boring footage of people brushing by me, cars veering round corners, kids balancing on rollerskates. But one or two of my shots had a certain something: a kind of momentous, haunted air, as if there was more to them than was apparent on the surface.

My initial disappointment was so great that I put away the camera, resolving never to touch it again. Those strange little sequences kept coming back into my mind over the next few days, though. I found myself running them again and again.

Before long I was going out to look for more.

•

Sunday, September 18 – Saturday woke up with a headache & general disinclination to act. Spent a lot of time looking for a bank statement I’d mislaid.

Today felt even worse. Didn’t exercise – it seemed unwise. Instead went to the library to look for books about black magic and the occult:

Egyptian Book of the Dead
Dreams (C. G. Jung)
Book of Thoth (Aleister Crowley)
Aradia; the Gospel of the Witches
Book of Ceremonial Magic (A. E. Waite)
Tibetan Book of the Dead

~


A plastic bag
tied to a branch
No vacancy

outside the Vets’ surgery.

•

It must have been about now that I started to get aural hallucinations to go along with the visual ones. I guess everybody has those moments when you see LIFE SUCKS written on a shop window, and then look again and find out that it’s actually SALE BOOKS.

The scraps of conversation I overheard (in the bus, principally – always a good place for eavesdropping) now began to take on a sinister tinge, also:

“These boobs are taken!” one woman would shout loudly to another.

A shop assistant calculating my change would come across as “There’s something wrong with you …” or “You need to see the doctors down below.”

I knew I was mishearing them. I could still hold out the approximate sums required to buy things, ignore the shouting kids who abused me up and down the road, but it was getting harder and harder to pretend that everything was all right with me – that a little r ’n’r was all I needed.

And it was now, of course, that the video recorder started to come in really handy. If I could watch the footage back in the flat, I’d know what had really been said, what was really visible – the scarlet dachshund would transform itself into a scarf, the swooping seagull to a piece of rumpled paper. 

•

Monday, September 19 – Radio on in a coffee shop. Show called something like “Intelligent Life on Earth.” Suddenly started listening intently when the DJ said he was going to tell us the seven ways to achieve happiness:

7 am
visualise your day

9 am
let someone else go first in line

lunchtime
eat good carbs

2 pm
take a short walk

4 pm
drink a glass of water

home
write down 3 things you’re grateful for

9 pm
have a cup of tea with your wife

Fucking bloody arseholes

•

I didn’t have the equipment to edit my films properly, so I had to resort to writing complicated labels with timings for each sequence. I was a bit like that creepy boy in American Beauty, I guess. The one who’s so keen on spying on girls through windows, and who makes such a fetish of that sequence with the plastic bag dancing in the wind.

I’d made a lot of experiments adjusting the light levels, and was now addicted to filming in the dark. Any odd shape that loomed up at me was now going to be captured on camera whether it liked it or not. I felt as if there was a web of connections between everything I was seeing and experiencing, past and present, which was just on the point of declaring itself … I’d begun to remember vivid details of my past, my childhood principally.

I remembered Max the mouse, a little grey misshapen blur on the edge of my vision who’d accompanied me everywhere when I was about four or five years old. He couldn’t be seen directly, but if you looked intently somewhere else, he’d creep up as close as he could get, and tickle your cheek with his tiny whiskers. He disappeared when I was measured for glasses, but I was by no means sure that he hadn’t been, in some sense, real.

Ditto with the wallpaper in my room, which used to move about whenever I wasn’t looking. I used to tear at it with my nails to keep it away from me, a piece of naughtiness for which I was duly punished.

•

Thursday, September 22 – On the way to class:

Waiting for the bus
again –
people eye the stooge

The fucker did come this time – only seven or eight minutes late.

Does not compute.

~

the gap between
28 &
35
– You might as well
be 55

Don’t quite get this – overheard from the two girls sitting behind me.

~


‘Just letting you know
I’m more important
than anything you can buy …’
Girl behind me
on a cell-phone

After that her phone went dead, so he never got a chance to reply ...

•

I’d rather lost sight of the ostensible purpose of all this filming – to provide an alibi for Nancy. Now, however, she rang me up and asked me if I had anything to show her.

The question panicked me, as it was hard to see just how I could mix and match the footage that I’d taken into something she might have done. I stammered something about having a few shots of the flat mixed up with other things, and needing to sort it out before she saw it.

“But I might have come round to see you and filmed it then …”

“In the middle of the night?”

“What have you been filming in the middle of the night? Isn’t it too dark to see?”

She had me there.

Light experiments, that was the answer.

“Oh, just a few experiments with light levels …”

“My God, you sound like Alfred Hitchcock. You’ve really been getting into this film-making thing, haven’t you?”

“Oh well, if you’re going to do something you might as well do it properly.”

We agreed that I would try and run up a tape of suitably bland pieces of film to show to Giles, and that she would pay the bill for the editing.

I knew it would be rather a finicky job, but was confident that my notes were detailed enough for a professional to follow.

•

Thursday, September 29 – The 6 realms of Buddhism:

Gods
titans
humans
animals
hungry ghosts
demons

I seem to be stuck in the realm of the hungry ghosts.

~

We had to look carefully at the object we’d brought with us to class, & describe it:

The cover’s soft & padded, with the word LIBERTY in gold letters, on a background of intertwined flowers, red & green & blue. It’s slightly faded. A blue silk ribbon bookmark pokes out from the bottom.
The pages are cream-coloured & unlined. Most of them are written on & alphabeticised
The flower-stamens look like devil’s heads – buds like wheel-spokes.

~

Then again:

I came in a Christmas stocking – filler / surplus, something extra – empty till I learned my destiny – to be filled with lists of names (constantly updated). Now I live inside the pocket of a backpack, wrapped in plastic against the wet, with pen, eyeshades, bus-timetable as well. My endpapers are blue; inside me is my owner’s name with several superseded home addresses & phone numbers.

It was a present from Brian – back when we used to give each other extra presents at Christmas because just one didn’t seem enough.

•

Planning the Nancy tape was an unexpectedly fascinating diversion from my – mostly depressing – other preoccupations. I imagined a day in her life, a walk she might take, the various shades of perception she might indulge in, camera held casually in one hand.

One list of shots succeeded another, as I gradually got closer and closer to the right sequence of events to show her essence.

Who was Nancy, anyway? Vain, histrionic, but basically good-hearted. A bit neurotic at times, but not (unlike me) obsessed with shadows.

So much of my footage had been taken in the dark! So much of it was experimental, out-of-focus. I despaired at times of conveying anything of my vision. And it all took so long! every piece of film had to be run again and again, with increasingly frantic attempts to specify the exact second to begin and end the cut, to give it that sense of spontaneous, yet serendipitous observation.

I had a deadline, too. After the second-to-last class there was to be a ceremonial screening at Giles’s flat.

That gave me less than a week, and the technician would take a few days to splice it all together, in any case.

If there is such a thing as professional temperament, I guess I displayed it then … with icy efficiency I transcribed my notes into a single master list of shots, and established the arc of Nancy’s half-hour film.

All it cost me was being unable to sleep, or eat, or go out, or do anything but run sequences over and over in my head.

•

Tuesday, October 4 – Went round to Nancy’s (as per invitation). Not in.

Started writing the linked tanka series we’re supposed to produce for next class:

Time To Kill

Check out earplugs
at the Mega-centre
Take a walk
along the beach
Buy something

Fizzy drink?
Mars bar?
25 stubbies?
Filling gaps
in my address book

Go home
Turn on the TV
Play patience
(bus stops short
defend your bag)

I’d like to tell you
how I ended up
pricing those earplugs
(bought a baseball bat
instead)

•

The earplugs were (of course) to screen out the voices now whispering to me constantly from every corner of my room. I can’t remember the precise sequence of reasoning which brought me to the baseball bat, but I imagine it must have had something to do with self-defence.

Ghouls with half-rotted faces require a bit more than a cushion to poke at them ineffectually. I rather missed the days of my little grey friend Max. At least he’d been company. Some of the skeletons liked to talk, but what they had to say was not exactly comforting, to say the least.

It’s a pity I didn’t catch up with Nancy that day, actually. If she’d actually seen the film I was intending to show them in advance, it’d have saved us all a lot of pain and embarrassment.

I doubt it was her fault, though. Probably the appointment was for the day or the week before. I hadn’t so much lost track of time as gone beyond it. I could now stretch out an hour into an eternity, or run a day into the blink of an eye.

I didn’t need the camera now to document my perceptions. I just needed to touch the side of my face to turn on my total recall facilities. There was no way, as yet, to transfer them from my head to the outside world, but I was working on it.

That was going to be my next challenge after finishing the course and screening my video.

•

Thursday, October 6 – “If you have to use words, make them living words”

~

coming up through the park:

a is red heart
b is two women
(both talking on
their mobile phones)
c is six Chinese

Sleeping rough
in Albert Park
under the lamposts
– orange light –
dancing down stairs

•

It wasn’t entirely my fault that it began so badly. People were tired after the session, and few showed any enthusiasm for an extra screening of haiku films. Nancy looked ready to let it go by default, but I succeeded in shaming Giles into getting them to stay by reminding him that it’d been his idea in the first place.

My main difficulty in giving an account of the scene that followed is that the videotape in question no longer exists, and my own recollection of its contents may bear little resemblance to what the rest of the audience thought they saw.

So, anyway, after a bit of muttering, the lights went down, the tape went on, & …


I suppose the trouble began about five minutes in. There’s nothing really wrong with long pans following pieces of string tangled in gutters, or deep-focus shots of the scummy edges of puddles, but the scene of a dog shitting and then coming back to gobble his own faeces seemed to have gone just a bit too far.

The murmurs of protest were just becoming vociferous when suddenly the screen went black, vague bumping noises were heard, and a voice (presumably mine) saying:

“Hang on, I’ll just try and see if I can film this, show you what I’m seeing …”


And that’s where coherent memory ends.

The next thing the camera showed was (depending on who you listen to) either the decayed face of a corpse whispering “Eat me, eat me, eat me,” while maggots dropped from its writhing lips; or a jumble of confused lights and colours, punctuated with vague moanings …

All I can say is, if it was the latter – just a few shapes looming up in the dark – why did so many people start to scream, and why were they so anxious to turn the damned thing off?


The next thing that I knew was waking up in hospital – with bandaged wrists, and anxious faces looking down at me.

It was weeks before I saw Nancy again, and even then she just dropped off some grapes, said a few words, and got the hell out of there. I gathered I’d gone running out of the room after the screening, and it was only by the merest chance that they found me hiding in a tree-bole across the street. Unfortunately I’d had a razor-blade with me, and had occupied some of the intervening time in redesigning the topography of my wrists and thighs.

•

Sunday, March 19 – Morere:


Nice walk back from the Nikau hot-pools (“Five minutes up the track”).

Three pools: 1 hot, 1 medium, 1 cold (& one small one for kids).

Two women, one seated in each – young blonde daughter reads a magazine in lieu of getting wet.

They wait for me to finish so we can walk down together through the bush, with the one leftover torch:

soft darkness pressing in on us
arc of electric light
glow-worms under banks of earth

•

This last entry comes from six months later, from a very different place.


It takes some time to pick up the wreckage, redesign your whole life. I’m not sure how far I’ve gone in that process even now – psyching myself up to read this diary, writing these notes, it’s all been part of it …

That Buddhist thing about the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts is how I read it all now, I suppose. Who cares if the ghosts are “real” or not? What difference does it make? And who’s to say? They certainly act as if they were real.

“The advice of the dead is unprofitable to the living.” I read that once in a children’s book. That about sums it up, I think. They’re always there, hovering at the edges of our consciousness, but it pays you to ignore them, to recoil from them: cute little grey ones like Max, nasty ones like the skeletons in my cupboard, the ones I tried to film.

When you go on pilgrimage they’re bound to want to come with you, nudge you to make the choices they miss making for themselves. Bashō knew that – Narrow Road to the Deep North, I now see, is basically about going out to meet your demons. But he was clever enough to make it an actual journey, get them off-balance, away from their home turf. All that monk’s training stood him in good stead.


Insofar as there was a moment in which I thought I might have climbed back out of hell, escaped the ghosts, I like to think it was then: walking down that soft bush track, the penumbra of light fanned out around us, a little group of strangers moving together against the dark.

---

Notes:

[1] Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

---

Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)


[4/3-1/4/04; 29/8-12/9/05]

[3973 words]

[Published in Kingdom of Alt (Auckland: Titus Books, 2010): 21-47]

•