fades natural y away toward nothing with no real pause or break, the listening heart shrinks with each dwindling minute and each waning second to a thinner forlornness. Like the beloved dying husband who yet does not die, the guttering flame that stil flickers on, this song racks my heart with anticipation of its end and holds within its melody al the bitter sorrows of the worlda€™s transient springs.
I have been listening from my bed, and as the song grows more distant, my ears ache to fol ow, though aware that they are being lured. With the dwindling of that voice, these ears long to rise of their own accord and fly in yearning pursuit of it. A bare second before the last pulse of sound must surely no longer reach my straining hearing, I can bear it no longer, and in a moment I have slipped from the bed and opened the screen doors to the balcony. The lower part of my legs is instantly bathed in moonlight. The tree shadows fal wavering over my night robe.
When I first slide open the paper doors, I notice none of this. Where is that voice? My eyes seek the place where my eager ears have already guessed the answer liesa€”and there it stands, a vague shadowy shape withdrawn from the moonlight, its back to the trunk of what, judging from the blossoms, might be an aronia tree. Before I have even an instant to try to comprehend what it is, the black shape turns and moves off to the right, trampling the shadow of the blossoms as it goes. Then a tal womana€™s form slides fluidly around the corner, and the edge of the building that my own room is part of hides her instantly from sight.
I stand entranced at the doors awhile longer, clad only in the single layer of the inna€™s night robe, until I come to myself again and realize that the spring night in this mountain vil age is in fact extremely cold. Then I return to the hol ow of bedclothes from which I earlier emerged, where I begin to ponder what I have just witnessed. I extract my pocket watch from beneath the pil ow. It is ten minutes past one. Pushing it back under the pil ow, I think some more. This cana€™t possibly have been an apparition. If it wasna€™t an apparition, it must be a human, and if human, it was a woman.
Perhaps it was the daughter of the household. But ita€™s surely rather unseemly for a woman separated from her husband to come out at night like this into a garden, and one that merges into the wild hil beyond. Wel , be that as it may, the fact is I cana€™t sleep. Even the watch under my pil ow intrudes on my thoughts with its ticking. Ia€™ve never been bothered before by the sound of my pocket watch, but tonight it seems to be urging and berating mea€”
If you see something frightening simply as what it is, therea€™s poetry in it; if you step back from your reactions and view something uncanny on its own terms, simply as an uncanny thing, therea€™s a painting there. Ita€™s precisely the same if you choose to take heartbreak as the subject for art. You must forget the pain of your own broken heart and simply visualize in objective terms the tender moments, the moments of empathy or unhappiness, even the moments most redolent with the pain of heartbreak. These wil then become the stuff of literature and art. Some wil manufacture an impossible heartbreak, put themselves through its agonies, and crave its pleasures. The average man considers this to be sheer fol y and madness. But someone who wil ful y creates the lineaments of unhappiness and chooses to dwel in this construction has, it must be said, gained precisely the same vantage point as the artist who can produce from his own being some supernatural landscape and then proceed to delight in his self-created magical realm. In this respect the many artists of the world are madder and more foolish than the average man, at least insofar as they are artists. (I say nothing of how they may be in their everyday guise.) While we are on our journey, shod in our straw sandals as of yore, we may do nothing but grumble about its hardships from dawn to dusk, but when we come to tel the tale to others, we wil never make a murmur of such complaints. No, we wil speak smugly of its fascinations and pleasures and even proudly prattle on about al those things that annoyed us so much at the time. We do so not from any intention to deceive ourselves, or to lie to others. Rather, the contradiction arises because on the journey we are our everyday selves, while when we tel its tale we speak as poets. I suppose you could say that the artist is one who lives in a three-cornered world, in which the corner that the average person would cal a€?common sensea€ has been sheared off from the ordinary four-square world that the normal inhabit.
For this reason, be it in nature or in human affairs, the artist wil see the glitter of priceless jewels of art in places where the common herd fears to tread. The vulgar mind terms it a€?romanticizing,a€ but it is no such thing. In fact, the phenomenal world has always contained that scintil ating radiance that artists find there. Ita€™s just that eyes blinded by worldly passions cannot see the true nature of reality. Inextricable entanglements bind us to the common world; we are beset by obsessions with everyday success and failure and by ardent hopesa €”and so we pass by unheeding, until a Turner reveals for us in his painting the splendor of the steam train, or an Okyo gives us the beauty of a ghost.5
The apparition I have just seen, if viewed simply as that, would certainly be rich with poetry for anyone, no matter who saw or spoke of it. A hot spring in some little vil age tucked away from the world, the shadow of blossoms on a spring evening, murmured song in moonlight, a dimly lit figurea€”every element is a perfect subject for the artist. And here I am, confronted with this perfect subject, engaging in useless debates and inquiries on it! Chil reason has intruded itself on this precious realm of refined beauty; tremulous distaste has trampled upon this unsought moment of artistic elegance. Under the circumstances, ita€™s meaningless to profess my vaunted a€?nonemotionala€ approach. I must put myself through a bit more training in the discipline before Ia€™m qualified to boast to others that I am a poet or artist. Ia€™ve heard that an Italian artist of times gone by, one Salvator Rosa, risked his life to join a gang of bandits through his single-minded desire to make a study of a robber.6 Having so jauntily set off on this journey, sketchbook tucked into my kimono, I would be ashamed to show any less resolve.
In order to regain the poetic point of view on this occasion,
I have only to set up before myself my own feelings, then take a step back from them and calmly, dispassionately investigate their true nature. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its il ness to the world. There are various ways to achieve this, but the most successful immediate one is to try jotting everything down in seventeen-syl able haiku form, with whatever words spring to mind. The haiku is the simplest and handiest form of poetry; you can compose one with ease while youa€™re washing your face, or on the toilet, or on a train. But thata€™s no reason to disparage the haiku. No one should try to claim that because the haiku is easily achieved, becoming a poet therefore costs one little, and since to be a poet is to be in some sense enlightened, enlightenment must therefore be easily achieved. I believe that the simpler a thing is, the greater is its virtue, and thus the haiku should rather be revered.
Leta€™s imagine something has made you a little angry. Then and there you put your anger into seventeen syl ables. No sooner do you do so than your anger is transformed into that of another. You cannot be angry and write a haiku at the same time. Or say you weep a little. Put those tears into seventeen syl ables and there you are, you are immediately happy. Making a haiku of your tears frees you from their bitterness; now you are simply happy to be a man who is capable of weeping.
This has long been my conviction. Now the time has come to put my belief into action, and I lie here in bed trying out this and that haiku in my head. Since I must approach this task as a conscientious discipline, I open my sketchbook and lay it by the pil ow, knowing that I must write down any poems that come or my focus wil blur and my attempts come to nothing.
I first write
The maddened woman
