On Ways to (Not) See the Divine?
Four Experimental Sonnets with Chorus Framed by Five Haikus

(Spring)

Dense the scented air…
Animated in space through
Ten thousand petals….

Upon wild banks of Yoshino white trees
Are cherries thick with fragrant blossom clouds,
A swirling sight for gentle folk whose crowds
Have sought to deeply see what soon through breeze
Will be completely stripped… and lost… must seize
This sense sublime, vision divine whose chords
Are struck… as much that temple gong by hordes
Of  ‘ants’ amassed to see this fragile tease…

But, now, I laugh… my sight is but a screen
All painted out like all such works before,
The merest guide… to what is truly there…
Whose majesty inspires sweet poems from air…

And, so, should know what lives upon our shore
Cannot arrive, depart… be fleeting seen…!

(Chorus)

In rhythms of the year real things will know
Their rightful place, what time to see, be seen;
What need be said through silent signs to mean
No more, no less… what waits, anon, will show…

On Ways to (Not) See the Divine?
Four Experimental Sonnets with Chorus Framed by Five Haikus

(Summer)

Nothingness is seen
Hanging in ripening fruit…
Purchased through more sweat….

A heated midday sun refreshed with rain
Leaves verdant green on rugged heights above,
Backdrops a sea of flesh, each hand in glove,
A burnished bunch of fruit to hang again…

Such promise made, a twist of time, a chain
With link that soon returns, a bit desired
Or not, upon one’s touch, that spice acquired,
Indeed through grasped intent to taste… abstain…

Beneath the trees a restful shade is found
For takes some time to climb, to walk thin tracks
That drag us up through mud, now dank with packs,
Ourselves all laden up, all weighted down…

This simple tale of life… restored and bound;
Mere burden took upon a trail profound…?!

(Chorus)

In rhymes so sweet of day our love will sow
Its fruitful seed, what time to rise, and fall;
What need be said through longing sighs that call
Across our space where soul is found to grow …

On Ways to (Not) See the Divine?
Four Experimental Sonnets with Chorus Framed by Five Haikus

(Autumn)

Secretly we met...
Shared a long kiss on our cheek 
In the falling mist….

A twinge of dull regret that Summer’s been…
In first, few falling leaves a grieving tree
Has felt my tearful thoughts, soon echoed seen
In whispered crunch from traipsing starry sea…

But habits paint a world, personify
An agent soul all clad as if in dress,
Disrobe this strange desire, and boldly spy
That even we, when naked be, be less…

Yet find no dreary dream, one must take heart,
Without a weighty soul we now be free,
Enjoy the moment had and love thy part
Upon this empty stage – mere masks be thee…

Such deep delight is found in loss of fear…
How great the flaming reds as painted here…!

(Chorus)

In verses of the hour no things are known,
Without our holding hands no songs are sung,
Without desire no truthful bells are rung;
Give up, why wait, for all will now be shown..!

On Ways to (Not) See the Divine?
Four Experimental Sonnets with Chorus Framed by Five Haikus

(Winter)

Snow is bedded down…
Only a full midnight moon
Wants to party on….

Stark branches interlock, and rasp through bark
Damp black against the snow, here congregate,
Try not to shiver so, in huddles wait,
A treasured sight left safe, locked up in park…

The world is watched, beheld as if a glass…
A museum case with sorting shelves of fate:
What works no more is dropped, without debate,
A falling leaf… then toppled trunk, alas…

But, no, each thoughtful sign is formed and traced
Upon a shroud of time, sown words are wrought
And etched, each letter one by one… once placed
Such shape cannot be lost… this book is sought
And seen when touched within its tidal flow
Whose surface sheen alone must come and go….

(Chorus)

To question how without an answer why, 
Through belonging my Lord can never die…!

Shadow without sound…
Flying without a footprint –
The squawking blackbird….

					…. Sydney, 24.4.10.

Commentary

	Commentaries come in various styles with a variety of objectives. In effect, though, all commentaries are meta-textual in orientation, i.e., deal with the text or set of texts they are constructed to comment upon. In this commentary I will be looking at the poetical and religious aspects of this religious poem. Moreover, I will also like to look at this text through rhetorical, metaphorical and existential lenses. Lastly, I will adopt a close yet open stance toward the text (rather than a non-close, closed stance). (0)

	Titles by the very nature are misrepresentative of their texts being meta-textual, i.e., a title used to refer to a text or set of texts and being ‘about the text’ cannot be quite the text per se even if appended to that text as ‘a part’ of that text. Hence this tension between being ‘a part’ and being ‘apart’. However, when forms of misrepresentation are pointed out, through noting ironies, accommodating various tensions, accepting deconstructive tendencies, permitting degrees of ambiguity, etc., then we gain a deeper level of meaning into the nature of the constitution of that text. We are told in the subtitle that it is four sonnets with a chorus framed by five haikus. However, correctly, to some extent, the chorus is a fifth sonnet albeit truncated between the four sections of this poem in their evocation of the seasons (being divided into three quartets and a couplet). (1)

Furthermore, on this topic of misrepresentation, in the title to this text, we are told that it is “on ways to see the Divine” and this is also contradicted with the negative “not” in brackets. This is illustrated in the first section, Spring, where the conclusion of the sonnet deconstructs the numinous nature of the cherry blossom viewing by noting that the Divine cannot be by nature fleeting, that if it lives with us, as it must to be there-for-us, it cannot be fleeting and located on some other shore. This word ‘shore’ is invocative of classical Buddhist thought where nirvana is defined as that other shore. In this poem, then, we are told, more or less, that the Divine should be seen all year round in the cherry trees and this is what this poem attempts to achieve by seeing the beauty of the same throughout the year from blossom to verdant green leaves with hanging fruit to painted autumnal shades to the bare, stark shapes of trees in the cold depths of winter. From an existential, religious point of view, enlightenment, that of which we are to be enlightened about, is there forever with us, now, in the living present! In effect, in the fleeting, but, not of the fleeting…. (2)

	Haikus are apparently informal like texts yet they do follow a number of formal rules. Here twenty-one syllables are arranged between three lines of five, seven and five in length, season is invoked, time may be suggested and with a twist in meaning being arrived at and realized through travelling through the poem. The ‘twist’ in this haiku is that the air, indeed, is dense through a cloud of petals, the same being symbolic of the ten thousand things, i.e., the entire catalogue of the world, being scattered through space yet permeated with perfume of this scent. What the “scented air” might represent is up to the reader to speculative upon and identify…. (3)

	The chorus is a quartet whose basic outline is minimally repeated in the next two quartets and marks an end to each seasonal section of text. (4)

	In the sonnet, ostensively on Spring, there is a dialectical tension between ‘seeing an actual landscape’ and seeing only a ‘virtual representation of it’ on a screen. The division between the octave and quartet embedded in the sestet marks this transition between the non-virtual and the virtual. The latter is suppose to represent what is “truly there” but the poem later suggests that there is nothing there, through emptiness. What is there, non-absolutely, or phenomenally (and hence phenomenologically for-us) is a textured surface or surfaces with depth (but with no absolute substrate/s!)! A ‘fact’ for all eternity whose mix of phenomenal richness and intensity give to it its ‘sense of reality’ for-us. A landscape on a Japanese screen is just as real as that of which it depicts, if it be a depiction… like the cherry blossoms on the banks of the Yoshino River. Unfortunately, painted blossom cannot be smelt (except in our imaginations) (and hence these ‘textured surfaces’ or ‘depths of surface’ as suggested later in this poem). By “experimental sonnets” is meant a playing around with verse structures while still adhering to iambic pentameter, fourteen lines, a formally describable rhyming scheme, twists or voltes in final meaning, etc. (5)

	The chorus alludes to how various things arise according to their season. Moreover, things are actively seen or passively being seen (although, correctly, I would argue that no absolute difference can be drawn between these two polarities ‘in seeing’?). (6)

	We now move on to the season of Summer. Subtitles are in brackets and need not be stated in declaiming this text. (7)

	This second haiku is set in Summer as symbolized by “fruit”. From nothing we get something, something that we also have to sweat for in some form or other… so we don’t get something for nothing even though it might come, effectively, from nothing. (8)

	We have a pun in “leaves”. Time is alluded to as both linear and circular. In what sense is “restored” meant? Or is being restored and bound a simultaneous, re-iterated process… intimating an existential sense of freedom in the midst of non-freedom…? (9)

	In the chorus it is suggested that soul grows in a relational space through relationships and, therefore, is not immanent to the embodiment of the mere actors concerned. That existential space and time is embedded in phenomenal space and time, and v.v., but, through emergent growth, cannot be reduced to the latter. (10)

	In the third quarter of this poem, Autumn, the haiku continues the erotic allusions with a secret kiss… but one must wonder if that kiss is real… or super-real… or just an illusion…? “Mist” evokes a sense of Autumn, a “falling mist” (rather than a summer mist). I am currently reading the Meghadutam, a Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa where a yaksa, a spirit, as a husband banished from his wife for a year, asks a cloud to send a message to his grief-stricken wife. Not the same idea… but in the same vein…. (11)

	Emotions are personified. Echoes are seen and also heard… in time the fallen leaves look like a starry sea that is crunched as we walk across it… as if we could walk on water… a melange of mixed metaphor to further illustrate this feeling of sadness “that Summer’s been”. At the same time this sadness is more melancholic rather than depressing – the autumnal leaves look as if they were painted (so should we ask by whom?)? Are we still looking at a screen – or is this bad habit of personification rearing up again? A Buddhist vision of reality is alluded to, our identity is not beneath a mask only a series of masks! In this I am suggesting a concept of surface-depth but no absolute substrate/s since identity emerges and is lost through reduction, absolutely lost through absolute reduction! In effect, identity emerges through the interaction of these masks as we relate to other things (masked and unmasked) and other persons (in their variety of masks). (12)

	The chorus states that things are never initiated purely in and through and beyond those things-themselves (as if in-themselves) as “no things are known”. Furthermore, there is a place for desire even though the same should also be suspended… “give(n) up, etc., that by doing this there is no waiting… through our entry into the eternal now! But what is revealed?!(13)

	Sleep comes to all things even, eventually, a drunken moon… we party on but only for so long…. (14)

	Deciduous trees in winter look dead! But have a stark, profoundness of beauty revealing the beauty of the cheery trees that persists all year round. Although vulnerable to storms, generally speaking, these cherry trees are now “locked up in a (national) park”. Parks are areas of preservation just like museums, however, thesse institutions can be creatures of fashion like all human endeavours. Then, nature does take its course: leaves fall and finally the trees themselves… phenomenally/phenomenologically that is the case, but, transcendentally, as a fact in the ‘book of time’, it is there for all eternity despite the glossy “surface sheen” that “alone must come and go”. Here we have an echo of the argument in the first sonnet over the non-fleeting nature of the Divine even if sometimes it is beheld in the sublime midst of the fleeting. Do we have a contradiction here? “No things are known”/”mere masks be thee”? The book is seen when it is touched – intimating an existential form of transcendental access to the factuality of facts/the reality of relationships..! Where sacred and secular overflow into each other… embrace each other… whilst still maintaining a distinctive sense of identity…? (15)

	The chorus is a bold couplet conclusion (to the fifth sonnet). Italics are used throughout the poem to suggest verses within verses, allusions, quotations either real or suggested, points of ambiguity, etc. A theology is suggested where value is realized through belonging, belonging created in a relationship, in and through and beyond the same. The expression “Lord” is symbolic – somewhere in and between the erotic to the political to the theological but a theology where the Divine is dependent upon a relationship of experiential belonging [be longing]… a state that “can never die”…! (16)

	The poem concludes with a second, bleak Winter haiku. Intimated is the existential fact that all intentionality leaves a textual trail, a trail of texts. Shadows may leave no sound, and flying birds may leave no footprints, still, in the sight and hearing of the squawking blackbird a trail of texts are emitted and received. Everything leaves a trace, indeed, a set of parallel traces… and through the interpretation of traces we intuit the world, the Divine, divinity-in-the-world… that emergent numinous residue that cannot be reduced to mere things… neither to mere shadows nor to mere footprints…! (17)

	A poem, like all vessels of meaning, can never be perfectly understood. This poem is no different… ultimately the world is a mystery… a “deep delight” when all finite senses of self are shelved, put aside, disrobed… that by such positive means we see the Divine and by such negative means we also see the Divine… when “we now be free, (can) enjoy the moment had and love thy part upon this empty stage”… a stage filled and overflowing with existential value… “where soul is found to grow”! (18)

	This type of commentary is relatively close but not closed; in that I have followed the text and noted key points within it. Whilst on the other hand, leaving it relatively open; an argued commentary that is also more suggestion, a hinted series of implications reinforced through re-iteration of metaphors and rhetoric that keep heading us in the same direction… more or less, hopefully, in the spirit of this text..?

And, so, should know what lives upon our shore
Cannot arrive, depart… be fleeting seen…! (19)

							           Noël Tointon, Sydney, 3.6.10.