Now that the leaves are falling, and the hills are splashed with color, I’m reminded of an autumnal poem by the twelfth-century Japanese poet Saigyo:
INSECTS ON AN EVENING ROAD
On the road with not a soul
to keep me company,
as evening falls
katydids lift their voices
and cheer me along
Uchigusuru
hito naki michi no
yusare wa
koe nite okuru
kutsuwamushi kana
In these lines the poet Saigyo, who was once a samurai and became a wandering monk, portrays himself as a solitary traveler. He takes comfort in the song of the kutsuwamushi, or giant cricket, which is known in Japan as the “bridle-bit insect” because its clacking sound resembles that of a bridle-bit in a horse’s mouth. Heard from a distance, the song of the kutsuwamushi makes pleasant company.
Saigyo was not the first Japanese poet to relish the sound of singing insects. As the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn observes in his essay “Insect-Musicians” (1898), night-singing insects occupy a place of honor in Japanese poetry, ancient and modern, where they are often associated with autumnal melancholy. “With its color-changes,” writes Hearn, “its leaf-whirlings, and the ghostly plaint of its insect-voices, autumn Buddhistically symbolizes impermanency, the certainty of bereavement, the pain that clings to desire, and the sadness of isolation.” Like his forebears in the Japanese poetic tradition, Saigyo finds solace in the song of the kutsuwamushi, which assuages his loneliness and draws him closer to the natural world.
Something similar occurs in “Song,” a poem by the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (b. 1939):
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
In the first stanza of this poem, Heaney contemplates two trees with resonances in Irish legend. In Celtic mythology the European rowan, whose leaves and berries turn red in autumn, is known as the Traveler’s Tree. It is said to offer protection to the traveler. It is also associated with druidic culture, being the wood of choice for magician’s staves, divining rods, and magic wands. Encountering the rowan, Heaney also encounters the alder, from whose wood the ancient Celts made ritual pipes and whistles. In Irish folklore, the trunk of the alder is thought to conceal doors to the supernatural. In some Irish legends, the first man came from the alder, the first woman from the rowan.
As Heaney dwells in this place of origins, contemplating the intersection of human, natural, and supernatural worlds, his attention turns to language and music. In the phrase “the mud-flowers of dialect,” he suggests an organic connection between human speech and the local terrain, the flowers of human dialect and the mud from which they’ve sprung. Likewise, in “the immortelles of perfect pitch,” he evokes an intimate connection between the sounds of the natural world and human musicians with absolute pitch, who can reproduce those sounds without external prompts. And in his closing line, he recalls the legend of Finn Mac Cool, who challenged the warriors of the Fianna—accomplished poets, all—to name the finest music in the world. The music of the lark over Dingle Bay, suggested one. The laughter of a young woman, suggested another. The bellowing of a stag, suggested a third. No, replied Finn Mac Cool. The finest music is “the music of what happens.” The function of the songbird—and perhaps of the poet—is to “sing very close” to the reality of that music. Or, as Heaney has said elsewhere, to “stay close to the energies of generation.”
“Nature,” writes the American essayist Edward Hoagland, “seems to me infused with joy. Even the glistering snow is evidence, though burdensome by March, and October’s dying leaves, parched by an internal trigger before the first frosts, turn gratuitously orange, red, and yellow, as beautiful as any plumage.“ To close the gap between the mind and the energies of generation, the alienated self and the joyous natural world, is an aim of the contemplative writer and the Zen practitioner alike. And it is also a general human desire, especially in our time, when so many people live lives remote from the rhythms of the natural world. Not everyone can express that desire in exquisite verse. But any one of us can restore the unity of self and nature. We have only to step outside, collect our minds, and listen to the music of what happens.
___________
(1) Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home, tr. by Burton Watson (Columbia, 1991), 79.
(2) Lafcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives, in Lafcadio Hearn, Elizabeth Bisland, The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Macmillan, 1922), 62.
(3) Seamus Heaney, Field Work (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976), 56. To listen to Seamus Heaney read “Song,” go to http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/song.php. For a discussion of the poem in relation to print and electronic media, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/aandc/gutenbrg/exchange.htm.
(4) Edward Hoagland, “Small Silences,” Sex and the River Styx (Chelsea Green, 2011), 29.
Photo by Jonathan Billinger
My favorite “insect poem” is a little different from these. It’s by Aram Saroyan and be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/historical/saroyan/18.html
“Immortelles” – what an incredible word. Is it English?
And is a katydid the same as a cicada? I’ve heard the summer cicadas in Korea – like being immersed in a roaring stream!
I’m gonna differ with Edward Hoagland, a writer I respect and enjoy. I don’t experience nature as infused with anything, including joy. It’s just the thing itself and in response to that thing, we can produce joy . . . or sorrow or any other kind of human feeling.
Laughed out loud at Aram Saroyan’s cricket poem – thanks, David! You, too, Ben!
Barry –
Yes, “immortelles” is an English word. It’s another name for the everlasting, an evergreen shrub. See http://www.ageless.co.za/herb-immortelle-everlasting.htm. “Katydid” is Burton Watson’s translation of kutsuwamushi, the “bridle-bit insect.” It’s not the same as the cicada, whose sound, according to Lafcadio Hearn, was regarded in Japan (in Hearn’s time) as rather coarse. To each his own, I suppose. You might enjoy Hearn’s essay, “Insect-Musicians.”
BTW, the characters for “kutsuwamushi”
are “kutsuwa” 轡(the bit attached to a bridle) and “mushi”虫 (insect).
Kutsuwa is a fun character. It is composed of the two threads (the reins), a vehicle, and a mouth.
I wish I knew the rest of the characters to the poem. Guessing, though (not being a poet), I would translate it as:
Keeping me company
On a road alone
As the sun sets
voices arise
Hmmmm, Bit-Bugs
I remember many summers feeling the haunting drone of the katydids, washed down with shōchū.
Agreeing with Barry, I don’t have the romantic temper to thing envision “the joyous natural world”, as I see the destruction, the apathy and the play all at once. Onr to I see a “unity of self and nature.” David Chapman has done interesting piece speculating on how German Romanticism may have crept into Zen. Hmmm, Bit-Bugs.
Sabio –
Thanks for the information about “kutsuwa” and your translation of Saigyo’s waka. Burton Watson’s is the only one I have found.
Your summers in Japan sound idyllic.What is shochu?
David, Barry, and Sabio-
Thanks for your links and comments.
@ Ben Howard(poz),
I am a pretty optimistic guy and my brain remembers pleasures much better than pain. Japan had many fantastic experiences — as does the USA. But in Japan I was spit at repeatedly, helped Korean students fight horrible racism. confronted Japanese business men (clients of mine) who went on sex tours in other parts of Asia, disgusted by the abortion industry in Japan and saw Buddhism used as superstitious nonsense over and over.
The architecture, sounds, smells, food and more still fill wonderful memories. For each of the negative (as in the USA) I have many positive stories too. So, “No, it was not idyllic. I leave that to the romanticists.” Smile.
As for “Sochu”, You can google it just as I had to google all the literary referrences you left on my blog — which I appreciated. Did you read David’s post, btw? I was hoping you would respond.