"the whole brevity thing"
A butterfly's wings—a single petal falls, revealing the sky -Hōsai Ozaki
Hōsai Ozaki (1885–1926) was a Japanese eccentric and writer of modern free verse haiku. During the last 10 years of his short life, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, a collection of which appeared posthumously in a volume called Daiku (Big Sky). A version was translated into English by Hiroaki Sato under the haiku title, Right under the Big Sky, I Don't Wear a Hat. Stanzas below are punctuated with selections from that book.
Dude of Japan “ . . . I have walked about, fluttering, yearning for the compassion of the sea and, at the same time, for this ambiguous, amorphous thing called the cloud." –Ozaki Hōsai With nothing much else in his closet, Ozaki the poet wore pajamas to work— those, or the tuxedo he was married in, deemed by him just fine (and why not) for selling insurance, him being no drunken poet in a mere Salaryman’s monkey suit, no nothing but that, demanded. The nails in the nail box are all crooked Let’s, then, call him Dude,* Dude of Japan, Dude in his pajamas rising to section chief, Dude running away to be instead a Buddhist Dude, a Dude monk now wholly devoted to the whole brevity thing,* shooting mere shots of sake, jotting mere haiku daily like mere raindrops, the Dude kind, without lines, syllables to count, or binding seasons. A late moon shut out of the town hangs about And let’s rise with our Dude each morning, first in Korea, then Manchuria, the temples of his wandering quest, searching every sky for the one cloud that would shimmer and shift just long enough to reveal all the laws there are of incertitude, the broken rules that lie beyond the wisps and whispers that rise from a morning dew. Unable to put thread through a needle, I look at the blue sky Too, let us see how goes the brevity thing, how it eventually came to press upon and enfold him: unfold the jobs and bottles, the marriage, the roving, the holy houses, one by one, day-long flies fleeting and flying about all the bells that ring, and the koans and the rising waves, and finally, to unravel all, the keen jabs to his pleuritic lungs— Even coughing, I am alone let's see in his throat’s catarrhal fire all his furniture and his fervid ‘no’ to any offer of healing, ‘no’ to just one more day of cloud fanning, that is, in every ‘no’ a ‘yes’ to life’s brief and sure writ, commanded. On a December night there’s one cold bed, nothing but *Dude: main character played by Jeff Bridges in the movie, The Big Lebowski. Quote: "I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing."
Nice. Never heard of this guy.
So lovely. So pleased to learn of Hosai Ozaki.
I'm a big fan of haiku. Also of The Big Lebowski.
Looking for Ozaki now, perhaps between sea and cloud.