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28th, woke up during a warm mid-day to find his students quietly trying to catch the many flies that had gathered on the room’s shoji-paper walls. He laughed, and said of the flies, “They seem happy about this unexpected gift.” The comment is characteristic. A few hours later, he died in his sleep.

    *

    His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer. As with so many of his images, the statement can be taken in more than one way. It can be read as a praise of uselessness, saying that poetry, like the bashō tree, is a thing to be loved precisely because it has no utilitarian purpose—by Bashō’s own account, that is what he meant. But the description can also be read as an advocacy of intensification: whatever a person’s experience, bringing it into a poem will strengthen it more. In some subtle way, these two ideas are not so disconnected as they at first may seem.
    What does knowledge of Bashō offer a contemporary Western reader? Foremost, the poems themselves. Bashō’s haiku, once read, stay in the mind and return there at odd times, bringing their unexpected expansions to moments of heat or thirst, of aging teeth or a sudden experience of coolness in mid-August, of the first wintry rains. Next, perhaps, there is the proof they offer that even the briefest form of poetry can have a wing-span of immeasurable breadth. Bashō’s seventeen-syllable haiku, looked at closely, are much like Emily Dickinson’s poems: they are small but many (both poets left behind over a thousand poems), and the work of each of these poets crosses implausibly variable and precise terrains of mind and world. Bashō’s haiku describe and feel, think and debate.  They test ideas against the realities of observation; they renovate, expand, and intensify both experience and the range of language.
    Bashō’s poems also instruct in an alternative possibility of being. One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

winter day:
on horseback,
a frozen shadow

fuyu no hi ya bajō ni kōru kagebōshi     

wild seas—
sweeping over the island of exiles,
heaven’s river of stars
               
araumiya Sado ni yokotau amanogawa
                              
New Year’s Eve year-forgetting party—
wondering what fish feel,
what birds feel?
               
uo tori no kokoro wa shirazu toshiwasure

the cicada’s singing
does not show its body
is already dying

yagateshinu keshiki wa miezu semi no koe

too ill to eat
even a rice cake—
peach trees in flower.

wazuraeba mochi o mo kuwazu momo no hara

mountain cuckoo,
sing my grief-notes
into sabi
     
uki ware wo sabishi garase yo kanko dori    

sea slugs,
frozen alive:
one body

i kinagarahitotsu ni kōru namako kana     

octopus-catching jars—
the summer moon’s
brief dreams

takotsubo ya hakanaki yume o natsu no tsuki
     

    These haiku bow to what lies on both sides of the skin’s millimeter-thick boundary. The reader who enters Bashō’s perceptions fully can’t help but find in them a kind of liberation. They unshackle the mind from any single or absolute story, unshackle us from the clumsy dividing of world into subjective and objective, self and other, illness and blossom, freedom and capture. Some haiku seem reports of internal awareness, some seem to point at the external, but Bashō’s work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all. Awareness of the mind’s movements makes clear that it is the mind’s nature to move. Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all. First comes the sight of a block of sea slugs frozen while still alive, then