“Wherever travelers carry stories from place to place there will be re-imaginings, translations, appropriations, and impurities.” – Lewis Hyde
Two men, both poets, set off on a journey together. Actually, not just those two, but another two as well. Two sets of two men, travelling, and now we two, travel too.
In the late Spring of 1689, Matsuo Basho undertook a journey from what is now Tokyo to the north of Japan, following a wish to visit locations made famous by a previous poet, Saigyo. “Drawn like blown cloud, couldn’t stop dreaming of roaming, roving the coast up and down”[1], he would be gone almost half a year, having covered almost 2,400 kilometers.
In 2010, on 16 May, the same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed Edo in 1689, Ken Cockburn & Alec Finlay departed Edinburgh. The road north is a record of that journey, a collaboration between these two poets, beginning “so, when was it/ I first had that dream/ of roving the glens/ up and down/ guided by Basho’s Oku “[2]. Published in 2014 as one part of a multimedia project still available online[3], the book deserves continued attention for its evocative concept, its manifest themes, and for its lyrical beauty.
Cockburn and Finlay are better known in Scotland where they reside than on this side of the pond. They are strong proponents of collaborative, community based, public art. (For Finlay, this is resonant with the shift his father, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s, made as he moved from poetry to landscape art, visible at such sites as Little Sparta, a garden in the Pentland Hills in South Lanarkshire.[4])
Basho’s original text is an organic outgrowth of several trends in Japanese culture, informed by both Shinto and Buddhism. Veneration of ancestors, sharp attention to place and landscape, and the practice of pilgrimage each inform his Oko no hosomichi, sometimes translated as “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”. Standing behind the haiku that comprise that work is the tradition of the renga, linked-verse poetry that was popular in Japan from ancient times. Just as haiku embodies the entanglement of the human with the natural world, so does the road north entangle us evocative possibilities for poetic practice.
Pilgrimage here consists of a journey on foot, where foot is the measure of contact with the earth beneath our feet, the very specific and particular earth that is the local, composed of geological, meteorological, and social of both human and other-than-human. The Scottish pilgrimage pays homage, mirrors, deepens and extends Basho’s. Both long poems wed language to landscape, and in so doing embody the pith of the heart sutra, central to the Buddhism of Zen: form is emptiness; emptiness nothing other than form.
It’s really not possible to do justice to this work but a few poems may provide some sense of what is offered here. For example (almost at random) here is the last half of “a walk part-way up, part way down, at the River Inverianvie, Wester Ross”:
. . . . . . . .
poetry is still beautiful
taking me with it
quiet but still something
ground, river and sea
my body my tree
after that it becomes simply
the world
accepting
the mountains
may remain
too high
reeling in the grip
of exhaustion
I nod to the two climbers
descending from An Teallach
as they pass
sullen with exhaustion
I ask
been in far?
four days
I’m too shy to say,
what did you see?
how bad was the
weather?
now I’ve to find
my way out of this glen,
back by the waterfall
leaving my wishes to
Walk on, walk on,
over the next rise
Walk on, walk on,
around the bend
to Loch a’ Mhadaidh Mur.
In this section, “leaving my wishes” evokes the practice of self-forgetting (cf. Dogen) that so deeply and subtly informs Basho’s oku. Nobuyuki Yuasa, a previous translator, noted that, “: "Bashō had been casting away his earthly attachments, one by one, in the years preceding the journey, and now he had nothing else to cast away but his own self which was in him as well as around him. He had to cast this self away, for otherwise he was not able to restore his true identity (what he calls the 'everlasting self which is poetry.'"
This next section evokes the power of the vernacular. (As a descendent of recent migrants from what is now the “United Kingdom”, I suspect that some of the attraction of work for me is the aural embodiment of my ancestors of Cornwall, Northumbria, and Stirling.) Diction, place name, and rhythm full of memory and heartbeat, as in:
. . . . . . . . . . .
for no northerly
can squeeze through
the birch notch
of the Mhuidhe
to chill the sheltered
slope
many milky torrents
feed Loch Eilt
deep as they are
these burns know nothing
of the tides ebbing
just a glen away
Allt a Choire
Bhuidhe burn of the yellow corrie
Allt Easain burn of the waterfall
Allt Dearg the red burn
Allt Raineachan bracken burn
Allt na Criche burn of the heart
And reading, I bear in mind the notion of the two – persons, voices, collaborating and resonating one with the other. One of the few times each poet speaks is at the end of the work, where each provides an epilogue. From Alec, these final stanzas:
only every now
and then we may
be brave enough to dare
a handstand
emptying out our
pockets, seeing
inside a world
turned upside-down
And from Ken, a series of “findings” that concludes with these:
finding that if the heart
is a valve
then the heart’s also a bell
finding a language
in which you feel
at home
finding a life
that fulfils you
and a death too
Writing about pilgrimage in Mystics and Zen Masters, Trappist poet monk Thomas Merton wrote that, “the external and geographical pilgrimage was evidently, in most cases, something more than the acting out of psychic obsessions and instabilities. It was in profound relationship with an inner experience of continuity between the natural and supernatural, between the sacred and profane, between this world and the next: a continuity both in time and in space…..It was a profound and existential tribute to realities perceived in the very structure of the world, and of man, and of their being: a sense of ontological and spiritual dialogue between man and creation in which spiritual and bodily realities interweave and interlace themselves like manuscript illuminations in the Book of Kells.”[5]
In what amounts to a conversation between cultures and across the abyss of time, these two journeys manifest poetry as a practice of embodiment, the entanglement of body, speech and mind, the marriage of language and landscape from which whatever meaning we can manage emerges. In conversation with Gavin Morrison of Atopia Projects, Finlay once suggested that, “I do not find the information that the activity is producing is really suggesting that we try to pin down authorship, and for me it has become increasingly clear that the material was shared consciousness, which is after all what all art is in some way about.'”[6]
The road north is an exhilarating and exemplary example of “place awareness and ecopoetics.” As we collectively overcome the denial of our entanglement with each other and the worlds in which we live may we continue to find such ways to inhabit and truly settle on this earth. In the end, it’s all about companionship, as Gary Snyder has it, walking on walking, under foot earth turns[7]. May we generate and maintain our rich and crazy diversity, this thick sediment of wonder and grief and beauty.
[1] Back Roads to Far Towns, trans. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu (1968), p. 15
[2] Finlay, Alec & Ken Cockburn (2014) the road north: a journey around Scotland guided by Basho’s oku no hosomichi. Bristol: Shearsman, p.11
[5] Merton, Thomas (1967) Mystics and Zen Masters. Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York p.97
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Finlay
[7] Snyder, Gary (2008) Mountains and Rivers Without End.
Scott Lawrance is a recovering therapist, poet and wilderness guide living on Vancouver Island. His most recent books of poetry include Little Guys and playg daze. He writes regularly for the online journal, The GTEC Reader.
