Thank you to Tresblue for mentioning the Haiku 😉 Indeed, in our world of small chips and big data – Haiku are probably the perfect examples of condensed information transfer through language. The ultimate microchip!
Compared to 21st Century man’s obsession with manuals, theses and compilations, one of the first forms of Haiku – the Hokku – had a completely different approach to information transferance. Influenced by Zen philosophy, Bashō could be considered the Father of Hokku.
Hokku vs Haiku? Compare this 17th Century Hokku by Bashō:
Old pond
Frog jumps in
Sound of water.
To the more modern Haiku by Masaoka Shiki, the Revisionist who brought Hokku to it’s knees in the late 19th Century:
Looking through
Three thousand haiku
On two persimmons.
A snake falls
From the high stone wall:
Fierce autumn gale.
He washes his horse
With the setting sun
In the autumn sea.
Again and again
From my sickbed I ask,
‘How deep is the snow?’
Soon to die,
Yet noisier than ever:
The autumn cicada.
Snake-gourd in bloom:
On his way to death,
A man chocked with phlegm.
A crimson berry
Splattering down on
The frost-white garden.
As the bat flies,
Its sound is dark
Through the grove of trees.
I want to sleep:
Go gently, won’t you,
When you swat the flies.
So few the cicadas
This morning after
The autumn storm.
Nothing of Bashō’s Hokku remains in the Haiku – except for the seventeen syllable form. Masaoka Shiki paints a more elaborate and esoteric scene. Here one is taken on a 10 verse journey from where one progresses from reader (first verse), to spectator, to participant and finaly to sole survivor. Through this approach, we are emotionaly involved – above and beyond the impassive observation allowed by Bashō.
Funny how this shift from Bashō to Shiki reflects the shift in our societies. Where once we were able to learn all we needed to know in three lines – we now have more information than we as a species can cope with. We need more and more combinations of verse to understand the world within and around us.
Problem is: the production and discovery of new combinations of verse grows exponentialy to our ability to learn – which, in turn, is fueled by our need to understand.
Perhaps Solomon was on to something when he likened the quest for knowledge to chasing the wind.
What if everything is encapsulated in the origional Verse?
Three lines (in English – in the origional Japanese, everything is written in one line) that hold the answer to everything.
Sounds a bit like string theory, doesn’t it? However, if we were to move towards the string theory that is the Verse – what would happen to emotional involvement?
Aum
