7.02 Grand Tours Pt 2:  The Bat on the Narrow Road

 

Where We’ve Been

Last week I told you about my crossing over onto Prince Edward Island and what awaited me: a large tourist complex of Anne of Green Gables souvenirs. From there we talked about the “tourist gaze,” how destinations design their spaces based on what they think visitors expect to find. There are some ironies in such geographical texts: the fictions overwrite the realities, it seems. We, though, as skeptical pilgrims to such places, recognize that this isn’t all good or bad, just worth inquiry, worth asking about. But while we might feel wise in our skeptical pilgrim posture, at least compared to all the other nose-runny tourists that get in our way, we have to remember that we’re still there participating right alongside them. I also left us with some exercises to get us into the right level of flexibility: one was the Gift Shop DeconstructionJacques Derrida is a founding voice. Since there is no knowl... More Challenge, where we identify in our homes objects we keep about exclusively for others to see. How did you do?

 

Field Notes & The East

It’s pretty easy to spot most of the designed tourist traps out there, despite the challenges and hard work of the laborers behind these attractions. The Sherlock Holmes Museum in London, the entire village of Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon with its endless “Alas Poor Yorick” mugs,” Juliet’s balcony in Verona, Italy, which is nothing of the sort, the historical birthplace of Vlad the Impaler who might have inspired Dracula and is now a gauntlet of balloons and sugar candies and poorly-slapped together horror film simulations. My own Waywords Studio where much of the book Unwoven was crafted: I will happily charge you $5 to visit this 10×12’ room. 

And I was not surprised to see PEI advertised as it was. Just about every website for Prince Edward Island along with any paper brochure I found made prominent mentions of all the Anne activities available across the entire island. There were musicals of the works in Charlottetown, wagon rides and stitching classes, special ice creams and costumed characters, the historical spaces and the produced spaces, such as Avonlea Village, a complete recreation of 19th century life with, of course, fully modern amenities. 

It’s those modern amenities that always throw us out of the space, of course, the clean restrooms and cashless cash registers and well-lighted Exit signs which we must have if we’re going to rough it somewhere far from home. Like the Winnebagos and AirStreams and EarthRovers that we take with us now to national parks. Packing and preparing for tours now is a bit different from Montgomery’s day. 

My fiance and I tried to pack light. We had a single small car with camping duffles in the back seats. Most of our stops, though, were at AirBnBs and local hosts, and we were never far enough from any civilization to feel need. Food and freedom from mosquitos was never far away, even on our day hikes. 

This wasn’t true of the 19th and earlier centuries travelers on The Grand Tour. Small mountains of steamer trunks were more the norm, holding entire wardrobes. Separately were the toiletry trunks for grooming, some handbags for shorter excursions, and of course acres of sturdy hat boxes to keep headwear fresh and clean. I am reminded of Montgomery’s use of these hatboxes, stacked in closets to hold her handwritten manuscripts. 

It wasn’t that Montgomery didn’t travel, though she seldom did for reasons of leisure or “tourism.” It was that, like us (or maybe not like us), she understood what she had close. I asked you last week to note your own public displays in your home. If you downloaded the other exercises from the Show Notes, there are some where I ask us to map the highlights of our own neighborhoods.

Doubtless if you’ve read any of the Anne books, you are caught by the rich tapestries of image around nature: PEI is a destination, I think, as much or more for these descriptions than it is for the character of Anne. 

In her autobiography, The Alpine Path, she writes:

Everything was invested with a kind of fairy grace and charm, emanating from my own fancy… the woodsy nooks I explored, the homestead fields, each individualized by some oddity of fence or shape, the sea whose murmur was never out of my ears—all were radiant with ‘the glory and the dream.’

And let’s notice, from this, that what she is doing is investing her own imagination into the objects and spaces around her, making them larger and more magical than they might be to a casual passerby. Anne’s character herself spends most of her youth doing exactly this, renaming every space and moment with a kind of faery-like vitality. 

And Montgomery does this in every one of her books. In her novel The Blue Castle, we can see the attention to this lush detail for a quite ordinary object, a dead branch:

Today the fir woods are a symphony of greens and greys… Grey trunk, green bough, grey-green moss above the white, grey-shadowed floor. Yet the old gypsy doesn’t like unrelieved monotones. She must have a dash of colour. See it. A broken dead fir bough, of a beautiful red-brown, swinging among the beards of moss.

In each case, and across the Anne books, too, it is a will to see and awaken the senses, to find the places of beauty not merely in nature or the homes and people she meets, but to invest in them consciously, to add to them the reading she imagines. 

And a small spoiler for what I found on PEI. Many of the travelers I eavesdropped on (all in the name of professional journalism) would look upon the actual Lake of Shining Waters or Violet Vale and wonder why it doesn’t seem quite so magical to them. And that’s because they traveled all that way to see the magic Montgomery described, missing her point entirely. They couldn’t “See It” like Montgomery did; they missed that the beauty “emanated from (her) own fancy.” What we do with everything we read.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and our Wanderings on Literature and Language offer plenty of room for Wayfaring, too.

 

Wayfaring and The Bat

Speak the name Matsuo Bashō and most people outside of Japan either scratch their heads or scream, “Oh, the haiku guy!” And it’s true, Bashō was master of the haiku in its many forms. I’ll explain what I mean in a few minutes, but in 1694 he was also the inadvertent creator of one of our first travel guides, most often translated as Narrow Road to the Deep North. Now I say inadvertent or accidental because describing his nine-month journey across Japan’s difficult backlands for others to physically follow was not what he had in mind when writing it. He, along with his disciple Sora, was seeking spiritual enlightenment, and he believed he might find it in deep nature, reflecting on the world that exists apart from the rest of humanity. It is a book of prose and haiku, and it is now considered one of the central texts of Japanese classical literature.

It has a number of English translations now, many of which are free downloads online. But if you’re looking for a good entry point to this kind of reading, try the Sam Hamill translation, which is solid for modern readers. If you’d rather dig into the literary power of the work, look for the Nobuyuki Yuasa translation, which includes lots of annotations, maps, and even some great commentary on the nature of haiku. 

I want to start with Bashō here because he understood exactly what we were just talking about with Montgomery and our own experiments in capturing our neighborhoods. We don’t have to travel somewhere to see what we need: beauty or meaning in the universe. We must, instead, look deeply, question richly, and discover that whatever we might reflect upon offers its significance. Bashō’s doing here turns out to be an undoing of the self.

Okay. That sounded a little too, I don’t know, sophomore-level clever paradox talk. (And no direct offense intended to any sophomores listening out there, but the word sophomore literally translates into “wise fool,” so there’s that.) (Wait wait wait: even that’s not true. Sophomore actually means something like “arguer,” {sophism}, which is what the English universities had the second year students do. For those of you following along, this is what Journey 5’s Andrew Marvell learned to do, and so we have clues to how to understand his poetry.)

But while we’re undoing things, let’s see if we can get to Bashō’s idea of how looking at grass or clouds or flies can undo us. 

It will help if we remind ourselves that like many in Japan seeking spiritual understanding at the time, Zen Buddhism was a powerful philosophy and Bashō studied it, though he never became a full monk, which would have required him to stop writing poetry. Rather he shaved his head, donned the robes, and as a lay practitioner, wandered, reflected, and wrote haiku. Good life. Without getting into the overlapping history of all the beliefs there, I’ll just say, too, that almost no one at the time followed a single tradition. Bashō was a Zen Buddhist but his writings also reflected the Taoist teachings and those of the early Japanese Shinto temples. He was interested in the universe and the self, not the prescribed rules of any single discipline.

But if we’re going to know the universe, this suggests that we must abandon those things which are not eternal, that hold or bind us to the daily grind of the civilized world. So Bashō left Tokyo (then called Edo) for the northlands, abandoned most of his material possessions (quite the opposite of our Western Grand Tour travelers, then) and, so much as he could, left behind his ego, his “I,” as well. After all, our human lives are kind of a blink on the time scale of universe; better to line ourselves up with the patterns and motions of the universe around us than hang on to our pettier, more brief, selfishness. 

And when we write haiku in this tradition, let’s give up any English-grounded conception of three lines of 5-7-5 syllable structure, okay? First, Japanese doesn’t even have a syllable structure like that; second, haiku is not a counting game. To write haiku, we do not write about something, an object to describe. Instead, that object itself becomes Subject, writes its own meanings, and the poet, egoless, is left behind, undone.

In thinking about Bashō, I kind of like how he described himself. Scholar David L. Barnhill tells us that Bashō described himself as a bat. He was neither fully a bird or a mouse, neither a secular man nor a full Buddhist monk. But he also said he was always in between places, too: always traveling, always moving from one to another, never making any place his home.

Now let’s think about this for a moment, then we’ll turn to the writing itself. I’ve been calling us literary pilgrims on our tourist trips so far, and this is largely because Nicola MacLeod, she of the Literary Fiction Tourism book, does. But that word, “pilgrim:” it comes with a fair amount of baggage in Western culture. When we go on a pilgrimage to a place, it is exactly that: we’re going “to a place.” We travel, itself an undertaking, that leads us to some kind of literal or metaphorical holy site; there we meet the thing we hoped to find, kind of the climax of the story, a climax which is built for us by religious rituals, tourist agencies, or large concrete bridges to Anne Land. Then we return home, much like Bilbo after Smaug and Frodo after Mordor, back to the structured and safe society. Pilgrimage. Fun fact: when I was brainstorming titles for this podcast, Literary Pilgrims was an option, but I rejected it in part for this reason. There’s nothing really climactically religious in our destination, and you can’t go home again.

So Bashō, he doesn’t think of his journeys this way. His word is closer to what we call “wayfaring.” He travels, he writes, and it is this very behavior, this journey, which itself becomes his concept of home, not a single stable place of predispositions and rest, but a constant, open-ended, noncompletion. Wayfaring is a wandering, a movement always between. Bashō the bat. 

But let’s see what he does with it.

 

Earth vs. World in the Haibun

So I’ve been saying haiku all along here because it’s a term we are more or less familiar with. But I also said “haiku in all its forms,” and this might have confused us. What I mean is that haiku traditionally appears in several different structures and strategies of traditional Japanese poetry.  It likely emerged from the earlier tanka form of poetry, a five line poem, which is usually written as 5-7-5-7-7 in syllables when written in English. Later, the first three lines of the tanka emerged as its own structure.

Also, though, haiku finds itself blended into what we can only call less poetic spaces. There’s senryu, which looks the same as haiku structurally, but is more about failing humans and humor. There’s renga, which is a collaborative series of haiku or tanka or both, with different poets taking turns writing different stanzas, even having conversation through them. Kuhi is when haiku are carved into national monuments and other permanent landmarks. There’s also haiga, where the poem is paired with a piece of art, and the two work together to form a mood or new utterance. And then there’s haibun, where prose and poetry interact.

Bashō’s work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is haibun. Some of it is prose, and then it turns to poetry. I’m going to suggest that Bashō is not writing this way out of whimsy, but that there’s significance in the choice, a significance even related to his “bat” persona. More importantly, I think there’s significance related to our thinking about literary tourism, of travel in general, and of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s works.

Imagine this section of Bashō’s book, for starters, the prose:

There was a huge chestnut tree on the outskirts of this post town, and a priest was living in seclusion under its shade… I took a piece of paper from my bag, and wrote as follows: The chestnut is a holy tree, for the Chinese ideograph for chestnut is Tree placed directly below West, the direction of the holy land. The Priest Gyōki is said to have used it for his walking stick and the chief support of his house.

Then the Haiku: 

The chestnut by the eaves
In magnificent bloom
Passes unnoticed
By men of this world.

In the prose, Bashō writes what we’ll call the “world,” as Martin Heidegger might think of it. Heidegger, besides some more problematic associations, thought most about how we connect to the world as it is. So his concept of World is the prose here: It’s the travelogue, the space of humans and making things and doing and everyday projects. In prose, nature is framed and measured by what humans do with it. Bashō will write about storms and history, language and traditions. Nature in the prose isn’t exclusively present for our attention. 

But the haiku here? The verse that completes the haibun? That’s quite different, nature on its own, the human world has been left behind. Nature, then, can reveal itself fully as “earth.” Listen to it again:

The chestnut by the eaves
In magnificent bloom
Passes unnoticed
By men of this world.

Nature is literally untouched by human action. Nature in isolation, pure and sublime. Nature on its own terms. Much, too, as Montgomery describes it (though with a caveat I’ll get to later). Notice, too, that our haiku has four lines here. It’s from Bashō, master of the haiku. Are you going to tell him he’s wrong?

Let’s look at another passage, one that makes this even more clear, I think. 

Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyōkyō among the wails of the autumn wind.

The Haiku: 

Determined to fall
A weather-exposed skeleton
I cannot help the sore wind
Blowing through my heart.

I like this one because we can see how both passages are about the difficulties of travel, the hardship and the reality of the physical journey. Pack little, travel far, live on the pure beams of the moon; but the haiku reality, the skeleton he might well become. Basho knows he might die on the road. But the tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More between that physical possibility and the terrible natural wind within him drives him forward. He might die in a field as wayfarer, his bones bleaching in the sun. But his own small hermitage had burned and he had lost his mother the previous year. Why stay? And where to go? It’s the going which is important, not any destination.

I’ll point out briefly, too, that this is only one translation of the haiku. Others approach it slightly differently. Here’s David Barnhart’s version of Basho:

Bleached bones
on my mind, the wind pierces
my body to the heart

The haiku itself, spare and skeletal, but rich in implication and tone. It’s this tiny utterance which breathes forth its significances. At its best, void of ego, allowing the natural world to speak for itself. And for those who are looking for them, yes, the kireji or “cutting word,” similar to the turn in a Western sonnet, which reveals. The passing by the magnificent bloom; the wind blows paradoxically through both future bones and present heart.

This marvelous tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More between Earth and World by Heidegger will be a terrific way for us to think about our travels: for ourselves in World or for place/experience/reality of Earth. But I want to mention here that bringing Heidegger to Bashō was not my doing but that of thinker and writer Dennis Skocz, who calls himself both an “underpaid philosopher and unpublished poet.” Better, though, he also works at the US Department of State, so cheers to those in politics who reflect richly.

And if you’re interested in a terrific travelogue that also offers insight into haiku poetry, consider Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. In it, she travels to Japan to various literary sites of its famous poets, like Basho, Issa, and Chiyo-ni. You may know her more famous book, Writing Down the Bones, a Zen approach to writing. 

And one more Basho haiku before we step away. Again, the impermanence of human life; the cool dispassionate work of nature, this translation by David Barnhill:

Summer grasses:
all that remains of warriors’ dreams

 

Reversing the Narrow Road

While Basho’s marvelous travelogue may offer us some philosophical understanding of our own journey ahead—and we’re just getting warmed up with these preliminary questions, of course—I would not be following my own nomadic frictional thinking if I didn’t mention that Basho has found himself referenced and reincarnated into more contemporary forms.

Richard Flanagan has written a novel called The Narrow Road to the Deep North which unveils a very different sort of wayfaring. Captured by Japanese soldiers during World War II, Australian POWs hope to survive the horrifying “Death Railway” in Burma, a 250-mile forced-labor construction project where over 100,000 died of work, starvation, and disease. You may have heard of one small portion of this project between Thailand and now-Myanmar, called The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the novel, Flanagan quotes the haiku master Issa:

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell
gazing at flowers.

No romantic tourist gaze here. Flanagan reverses Basho’s work, turning the idealism of Zen into the reality of militarism, racism, horrorism. And while I have not read Flanagan completely, yet, he’s now on my list, not because I want to think of Basho’s futility, but because I am imagining that the reversal is itself ironic. What other reasons would Basho have for leaving human society, when this worldly pain is both terrifying and fleeting? Note that even in Issa, the flowers are present and silent in the face of human cruelty. 

And not just Flanagan has used Basho, of course. Poet Thomas Merton will use the same format as Basho to struggle through his own travels in his The Asian Journals. Lesley Chan Downer will follow Basho’s journey 300 years after him, working to reconnect modern Japanese by writing poetry with them about their contemporary scene. It’s called On the Narrow Road to the Deep North. I mean, what do we want? There’s everything from Marxist plays on Basho to hitch-hiking guides and poetry lessons. Nothing about his own travelogue is solid, static. It has become what he perhaps understood: the earth keeps moving, with and without us.

But since I’m talking about Basho, I imagine it’s kind of a sin not to mention his enigmatic and even silly most famous poem of the frog on the pond, which goes something like this:

The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!  

What else need be said of it? Yet there are, of course, a thousand revisions. One that may be notable for us is this leap from nature to human truth, from our ideal hope in wayfaring and pilgriming to the reality we meet. 

But we can end today with Nick Midgley’s fun poem. He calls it “Miss Lilah Thoughtful Takes the Narrow Road to the Deep North Exit of Shinjuku Station (after Bashõ).”  And here it is.

A coin drops into
a makeshift cardboard box –
plop.

The world changes but we still wander, and our books lead us to travels we cannot predict. We’ve got a massively interesting journey ahead of us, with explorations more deeply into Anne and PEI, into other literary travels and travel-writing by folks in history and today, book towns, book trails, and campfire tales. It’s all ahead, and along the way, like Basho the bat, we may find ourselves caught up in spaces between. And what we come to understand from it.

Try out those first exercises. There’s a link in the Show Notes. Let me know what you discover. And then find something odd, a flyer, a lost cat poster, a piece of scrap paper blowing along the street. Decide spontaneously. 

Then read it.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

Barnhill, David L. “Bashō as Bat: Wayfaring and Antistructure in the Journals of Matsuo Bashō.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 1990, pp. 274-290.

Bashō, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Books, 1966.

Downer, Lesley. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan. Jonathan Cape, 1989.

Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Knopf, 2014.

Goldberg, Natalie. Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. New World Library, 2020.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala, 1986.

Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1973.

Midgley, Nick. “Miss Lilah Thoughtful Takes the Narrow Road to the Deep North Exit of Shinjuku Station (after Bashō).” Prairie Schooner, vol. 70, no. 2, 1996, p. 50.

Montgomery, L. M. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. 1917.

Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908.

Montgomery, L. M. The Blue Castle. 1926.

Skocz, Dennis. “The Narrow Road to The Deep North: Earth and World in Poetry and Prose.” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2, 2004, pp. 75-83.