The only substantial
collection in English
of Basho's renku, tanka,
letters and spoken word
along with his haiku, travel
journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time
literature who paid attention with praise
to ordinary women, children, and teenagers
in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works
(mostly renku)about women, children,
teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better
understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt
(not scholarly and boring)
for anyone concerned with
humanity.
“An astonishing range of
social subject matter and
compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power
of the feminine emanating
from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming
messages from one of
the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters,
we travel through his mind
and discover Basho's
gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in
finding a person or group
to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material,
to edit and improve the material, to receive 100%
of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide
and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are
guests passing through eternity.
The years that go by
also are travelers.
The mountains in silence
nurture the spirit;
the water with movement
calms the emotions.
All the more joyful,
all the more caring
Seek not the traces
of the ancients;
seek rather the
places they sought.
Here is a unusual bit of Basho renku which takes an intimate look into the life of Japanese women, and
leads to an understanding of how the human brain may have evolved. Kikaku wrote this passage of woman-centered anthropology, then Rosen followed and Basho concluded:
The ama of Ise dive to gather shellfish, leaving babies on the boat with a man at the oars. When one at the bottom hears her infant cry for milk, she rises to the surface and, still gasping for breath, one hand holding on the side of the boat, pushes her nipple forward to the child.
Floating grasses in a bundle, her pillow firm and steady
Child of a sea diver breastfeeds on the boat
Floating grasses rooted in the sea bottom float back and forth on the surface; others without roots go where the waves take them – they symbolize human life carried along like a floating weed, and more specifically the inconstancy of the indentured play-woman (also pronounced ama) who each night vows her love to another man, all in pretense, for she can never leave the brothel.
Rosen shifts from ephemerality to the stability of a headrest in sleep. The famous ama, or woman divers of Japan and Korea carry on traditions recorded for 2000 years, diving without air tanks, staying down for over a minute, relying on the diving reflex which humans have evolved to preserve oxygen when we are underwater, they gather abalone, snails, and other edibles rich in vital nutrients. In olden times they wore only a loincloth, but nowadays the remaining divers wear a white cotton suit – for sharks dislike white – and some modernize the tradition with a wetsuit.They dive only from March to September, but still the water is cold – yet these women commonly dive into their seventies. “Women stay warmer and tolerate the cold sea much longer than men” – because they have more insulating subcutaneous fat. Diving is a way for women to get out of the house and make an income while being together with friends who have dived together since childhood.
“The secrets of our happiness are that we gossip with friends,
laugh a lot, stay physically active, and live with the ocean.”
Another reason, I suspect, for their long healthy lives is the rich supply of omega-3 fatty acids in those sea creatures they roast over an open fire.
You can read more about them in Yukio Mishima’s novel The Sounds of Waves.
Subcutaneous fat and the diving reflex are just two of the dozens of adaptations common in sea-going mammals, but among land animals unique to humans, which suggest (or prove) that a million years of living near the sea propelled one group of apes to evolve into humans, according to the theory of the late Elaine Morgan which she elegantly and persistently presented in The Descent of Women, the Aquatic Ape, and other books. Aquatic adaptations include our upright posture, hairless body, nose shaped to deflect water while diving, webbing between thumb and forefinger, voluntary control of breathing, speech, tool use,
front-to-front sex, sweating, a well-developed diving reflex which optimally distributes oxygen to the heart and brain enabling submersion for an extended time, the prevalence of boat-building in every coastal
culture, the prevalence of mermaid legends across the world, and the woman divers of Japan, South Korea, and other coastal regions.
Following Kikaku’s observation that divers bring their babies onto the boat, in contrast to the “floating” in Rosen’s stanza, Basho presents the most substantial of all human relationships, that between milk-giver and milk-receiver, and specifically between an ama and her baby. What does the “child of a woman diver” receive from her breast milk? Divers gather abalone, snails, and other sea creatures which Westerners may not consider edible, but Japanese and other Asians enjoy.
Brain and nutrition researcher Michael Crawford notes that these shell fish are rich in Omega-3 fatty acids which are the “primary structural components of the human brain, cerebral cortex, skin, and retina,” but cannot be obtained from most land-based foods. He concludes that the abundance of these fatty acids in sea creatures was the “driving force” behind the expansion of the ape brain to human size and complexity. Ape-women living near the sea in Africa millions of years ago and diving for food (not ape-men hunting) were the forerunners of human evolution. The Omega-3 fatty acids in the sea creatures entered the divers’ breast milk to enlarge their infants’ brains, and these children survived and reproduced, and so the human brain evolved. A woman today can follow evolution by enriching her breast milk with “brain food” from the sea.
Child of a woman diver breastfeeds on the boat
Bssho combines 1) the tradition of women diving for food , 2) the child drinking milk from the breast, and 3) the rocking of the boat from the waves. In contrast to the floating boat, Bashopresents the most substantial and eternal of all human relationships, that between milk-giver and receiver, the bond or anchor that keeps the mind from flowing away. Basho always searchs for constancy amidst the ever-changing 'floating world.' The constancy of women diving into their seventies, the accumulation of Omega 3 fatty acids from a diet rich in these resources -- the “primary structural components of the human brain, cerebral cortex, skin, and retina” -- the flow of those fatty acids through their breasts and infant's mouth to the developing brain.
I plead for your help in finding a person or group to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material, to edit and improve the presentation, to receive all royalties from sales, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide and preserve for future generations.
The only substantial
collection in English
of Basho's renku, tanka,
letters and spoken word
along with his haiku, travel
journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time
literature who paid attention with praise
to ordinary women, children, and teenagers
in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works
(mostly renku)about women, children,
teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better
understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt
(not scholarly and boring)
for anyone concerned with
humanity.
“An astonishing range of
social subject matter and
compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power
of the feminine emanating
from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming
messages from one of
the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters,
we travel through his mind
and discover Basho's
gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in
finding a person or group
to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material,
to edit and improve the material, to receive 100%
of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide
and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are
guests passing through eternity.
The years that go by
also are travelers.
The mountains in silence
nurture the spirit;
the water with movement
calms the emotions.
All the more joyful,
all the more caring
Seek not the traces
of the ancients;
seek rather the
places they sought.
