Before the Garden
Cockscombs…
Must be 14,
Or 15
—Masoka Shiki,
(trans. By Janine Beichman)
One day that first autumn my wife came home from the Korean market with a large bunch of very unusual flowers—if you want to call them that. They looked more like bunches of stiff red velvet folded over many times and affixed to the tops of greenish-purple rods. When I tried to arrange them, the stalks were difficult to separate. I had to bear down hard with the knife, using both hands on the blade, to cut through them.
"What are these?" I asked.
"Cockscombs," she replied.
I was astonished. In that moment I realized that I had missed everything about the poem. I hadn't understood Shiki's flowers at all. Not their weight or texture. Not their color, or the firmness of their stalks. Nor the way they clustered together, making a precise count of them difficult from whatever angle, and impossible from any distance at all. I think it was then that I began to realize that Shiki's counting had been entirely without design. In his mind there had been no impulse to acquire or to assign any value over what was there before the eye.
What I had missed about the cockscombs all those years was the feeling of their reality, of their being fully present in the world. And connected, to every other life, by the season and the feeling of a single moment happening now.
I knew then for the first time that the true significance of Shiki's cockscombs lay in the flowers themselves, and not in the some other, metaphorical meaning, however apt or true. It may take a lifetime to come to an understanding which is clear, direct, and very simple. But the primary work of haiku is always a restoration of the world.
The famous modern critic Kenkichi Yamamoto once wrote:
Every masterpiece is a flower on a precipice… It is a tremendous assertion for the poet to have said, 'There must be fourteen or fifteen stalks of cockscomb.' After we read this poem we cannot imagine the possibility that there could have been more or fewer cockscombs than fourteen or fifteen.
For some time I was very impressed with this statement, but it now seems to me that the American scholar Donald Keene may have come closer to the truth of Shiki's poem when he wrote, "Probably Shiki composed the haiku easily, even artlessly, as he looked at the garden, unaware that he had created a masterpiece of haiku…"
All that was required of the moment spent looking at cockscombs was a simple, artless exclamation on their number. The failure to assign one value over another gives the haiku a spiritual clarity and justice that transcends a mere accounting of the world. Moreover, the statement of a second number does not indicate indecision, but an extension and intensification of simple wonder by the interval of one stalk.
The real power of the poem, then, lies not in the fact that it is a "tremendous assertion," as Yamamoto has said, but that it is a very small one. In it there is no violence to the spirit or to the world. Ultimately, the number of flowers cannot be precisely reckoned. And it is this slight element of uncertainty—of humility, or simply play—which brings the moment to its peak and, with the smallest adjustment, aligns the human heart in friendship with autumn flowers and all the many beings of this world.
Clark Strand
