Form and Formlessness 1

On two haiku

A haiku by Basho (Michael Haldane’s translation):  

An old pond 
A frog jumps into 
The sound of water

(furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu 
mizu no oto)

What I intend to argue with this admirable poem is that poetry is principally a relation between form and formlessness. By “form” I mean the formal elements that constitute a poem (or indeed any work of art). In the case of the haiku, its formal elements are fixed by tradition: 17 phonetic units in arrangements of 5, 7, 5 (not reflected in most translations into English), a seasonal reference (the season frogs in the current example, I presume), and so on. 

Whatever formal elements are dictated by tradition, whatever traditional elements are resisted, the poem appears on the page as form. Before it is read, there is nothing but form. The words on the page, their arrangement into lines, into stanzas, even the typeface and the distribution of blank space, the slight rise of the ink from the paper—pure form. In this sense, a poem’s form cannot be said to have a counterpart called “content.” 

Note that I said “before it is read” in the paragraph above. I must mean that the act of reading, and by extension, the act of composition, adds something to form. Yes, but it isn’t content! It’s form once more, the form of thought, the form of memories, representations… logos all the way down. 

Where the poem is special, what makes it more than an accumulation of forms—an act of accounting, a mathematical calculation of formal regularity and perfect predictability—is its conscious relation to the formless. 

Take the frog haiku: 

The sound of water is a door to the formless. Indeed, sound itself is formless, and water is a well-worn link to the mysteries of formlessness. But most important is the fact that the frog, a physical being, somehow manages to cross the threshold of the formless. The frog jumps into the sound. In order to do this, the frog dissolves, unforms, winks out in a swirling mist beyond the reach of mental categories.  

In this way, a crack in the boundary is established, and the reader can hear a stranger wind just beyond, even if the landscape from which it emanates remains inaccessible.  

Poetry is a form deployed to peripherally glimpse the formless. The formless can only be approached tangentially, partially digested by form. It is this looking-toward-formlessness that distinguishes poetry—indeed all the arts, and a case could be made here for religion as well—from the sciences. 

Basho again: 

But a word
And lips are cold—
Autumn wind 

(mono ieba
kuchibiru samushi
aki no kaze) 

Logically (formally), we know that the wind makes the lips cold, but the way the poem is arranged irresistibly links the word to the lips. It is the word that freezes the lips, a mere sound exerting tremendous power over the physical world. And it is a single word… it could only have been a whisper, mere breath (the “wind” in the final line). 

What is the freezing word?