Frog in a pond

One of the most famous haikus in the Japanese canon is this:

An old pond.

A frog jumping into

The sound of water.

That’s a literal translation, but (if I understand this right) the ambiguity of what the frog is jumping into (the water or the sound?) is there in the seventeenth century original.

The poem is partly famous because it epitomises the art-form’s focus on the single moment. It’s as though the poem is trying to give you everything you really need to know about one particular moment, without trying to draw out any lessons from it.

Just – there was a pond. A frog jumped in. Plop – the sound of water. No need for further discussion. That’s just how that particular moment was. A single significant moment captured with extreme brevity.

But …

Human minds don’t work quite like that and human language is the same. So, yes, a frog jumping into water is just something that frogs do, a perfectly normal observation. But a frog jumping into the sound of water – well, I guess frogs do that too, but it’s a very different type of thought. The frog becomes suddenly a thing of energy and movement and magic, not a small, cold wet thing you could hold in the palm of your hand.

And then again: we start with an old pond. I’m guessing we see something with mature weeds, an unruffled surface, a lack of movement. But then: a dart of movement and a very temporary sound. So something old still flickers with something evanescent and alive. Our sense of the pond at the end is changed from what we imagined at the start.

Now – haiku and novels: not natural bedfellows. Given that I tend to write long – my first novel was 180,000+ words – haiku are a very, very long way from my place of happiness.

But – it struck me that our books often contain secret little haikus of their own. Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. Handmade kitchen furniture in ivory. A range cooker in Wedgwood blue. More flowers. Venetian blinds, sofas and sunlight.
   
   
2. Behind us, a row of Edwardian houses. In front, a strip of grass. Then the river. The grass has been recently mown and the air smells of cut grass and river mud.
   
   
3. Summer-evening normality. A few lawnmowers still buzzing. Kids being ordered off their bikes into dinner. A couple of fat blokes with white legs and unflattering shorts talking rubbish over a garden fence.
   
   
4. Warm air and quiet streets. Daylight, or the memory of it, still alive in the sky. I’m feeling spacey.
   
   
5. Not mountainous exactly, but high moorland. No dead miners here, just sheep looming white in the tussocky grass. No cars. No buildings. No people.

• The grass around the car park is shorn so close that it’s burned and brown. Car windscreens catch the sun and throw it at me over the tarmac. Over the other side of the road is a field, spiny with marsh grasses and a board offering land for sale.

• Six days slide by almost unnoticed. Dark fish in an urban canal. Sleep and I aren’t best of friends.

• I see Brydon at table. White parasol flapping in the sea breeze. Shadows jumping to avoid the sunshine.

• Sea breeze. Gorse and broom blazing yellow in the hedges. Then a field of sheep and my first view of the lighthouse.

I hope you feel some haiku-ishness here. What I mean is fragments of text that

1. collect together a small handful of ordinary observations
2. Don’t especially try to connect those observations
3. Don’t especially try to comment on those observations.
4. Don’t feel like a sudden random jump into a completely different way of speaking or writing.

At the same time, you just can’t put things like this down on the page without the reader creating some kinds of connection for themselves.

So take the snippet about that suburban evening – lawnmowers and kids on bikes and men with white legs. Those are, in a way, just three truthful but disconnected observations about a sunny evening in outer Cardiff. But – they all have the smell of family and order and social connection. Fiona has none of that, or not in an ordinary way. So by presenting those images, Fiona is also offering us a little haiku that says something like:

Summer evening:

The sound of lawnmowers and children.

I don’t fit.

Or take the first example – a description of a rich woman’s kitchen. Partly that is just a straightforward way to describe a room (units = ivory; cooker = posh version of blue.)

But it ends with a tiny little haiku that seems to insert sunlight as part of the actual furnishing of the room. Something like this, in effect:

Venetian blinds

Sofas and slatted shadows

Sunlight.

Just as Basho’s frog was jumping into water and into sound, here the room is furnished with physical things (sofas, cookers, flowers) and also light, that’s been given a kind of order by the blinds. The purely physical melts a bit into something wider.

And sometimes the haikus just sneak their way into the text without needing much modification at all. Like this, for example:

Six days slide by

Dark fish in an urban canal

No sleep for me.

Now, I definitely, definitely don’t advise stopping your prose and just dropping chunks of (slightly weird) poetry into the gaps.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about finding ways to drop together a small collection of observations that make perfect sense in a purely literal way … but that offer something extra as well. Basho’s frog. A suburban world that excludes its observer. A kitchen that seems furnished in sunlight.

In one way, this is easy writing: you’re just making plain statements without any kind of rhetorical complexity. But it’s also subtle writing: you’re arranging things so that those plain statements amount to something more than the sum of their parts.

I’ve never really stopped to notice this before: it was a Christmas gift of a book of haikus that alerted me to it. But – it’s an easy technique, and it’s a powerful one. And fun.

New Year snows.

Pine needles on the floor.

The empty page.

Give it a go yourself – or, just as good, look back at your text and see if you do this already. And if you’re a Feedback-Friday-er, then give this week’s task a go.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / haiku

So: haiku

Find two or three short snippets from your book that feel a bit haiku-y, then actually rewrite them as haiku. So first give us the text as it is in your book, then the same thing in haiku form. (Or roughly haiku form: I don’t care about exact syllable counts.) When you’re ready, log into Townhouse and share your work in this forum.

I’m really excited to see what you come back with. Good luck!

Til soon.

Harry