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.
There is such a special sweetness in being able to participate in Creation
Pamela S. Nadav
With iron bow go forth to confront a brutal world
Tigress at daybreak yearns to be pregnant
Kurogane no / yumi tori kakeki / yo ni ide yo
Tora futokoro ni / yadoru akatsuki
(BRZ 3: 100) The “iron bow” suggests the folk tale of Yuriwaka, a general and provincial governor betrayed by a subordinate and abandoned on an island. The subordinate took over his governorship and tried to take over his wife, but she －like Penelope in the Odyssey – stalled while praying to the Gods for Yuriwaka’s return. Her prayers reached a fisherman who rescued him, then Yuriwaka took vengeance on his betrayer with his gigantic bow. The story is so similar to the Odyssey that some scholars believe that Portuguese missionaries told the ancient Greek legend toJapanese who made it their own.
Kikaku expresses the masculine fighting for vengeance (or whatever men seek), then Basho reaches for the ultimate in female power．Since the iron bow suggests the Japanese version of the Odyssey, Basho's stanza may evoke the memorable scene in the 1997 miniseries where lonely Penelope (played by Greta Scacchi) lies on her back amidst the waves with her legs spread so the sea (containing the spirit of Odysseus) surges into her. Daybreak is the Sun-Goddess giving birth to the day and to life.
Both TIGRESS AT DAYBREAK and the following tsukeku were written in 1683, which was also the year Basho’s mother passed away.
Air shimmers building Lord’s mansion, the Sun-Carpenter
Brides blossom within brides a hundred years of grain
Kagerou no / gu tonoya tsukuru / hi no daiku
Yome ni yome saku / hyakunen no zoku
(BRZ 3: 134) The “Sun-Carpenter” is the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, Queen of Photosynthesis, who builds many things – such as all plant life – with her light. Shimmers - light refracting through moisture rising from the ground warmed by the spring sun - are the Sun-Carpenter building a mansion for the daimyo, or provincial lord, who gets to live in such a psychedelic house. The next poet goes deep, deep inside the bride’s body, into her uterus where millions of egg cells “blossom” – a positive joyful word – preparing to become brides (and husbands) in the future. Although none of the egg cells in the female fetus do any developing until this girl enters puberty, still their presence represents life carrying life forward, while Sun and Earth work together producing grains to feed all those children.
Village women go to the city to work, play and marry; pregnant they return to their native home so mother can help with birth and baby care:
Sister from the Capital here to have her baby
Weaving folded, at back door she lights flower incense
Miyako no imo ga / ko o umi ni kuru
Hata tatamu / tsumado ni hana no / ko o yakite
(BRZ 5: 66) Basho fulfils the theme of pregnancy with the specific actions of this woman with swollen belly. She weaves yarn on a loom, then folds the fabric neatly so later she can sew clothing for her baby. The kitchen in a wooden and wood-burning farmhouse produces and contains many odors, so she goes from the hearth to the back door with a bit of fire to light a cone of incense. Most men do not care about how home smells (unless it get really horrible), but the anthropologist Basho shows us that women in his time did care; the flower incense is her “air freshener.” Weaving fabric for baby clothes, spreading sweet aroma
throughout the kitchen, she generates positive energy for the new life: the ordinary but eternal work of women to keep children warm and home fragrant. How Basho must have watched his mother and four sisters – one older and three younger – to absorb their household feelings.
The first stanza is about pregnancy – when the cells of the embryo weave together into a fetus, which folds up into three, waiting to be born and sewn into an individual. Lighting incense is as spreading consciousness through the synapses of developing brain. Whether Basho thought of these links or did not, we can. He may have, by following reality, produced feminine truths he himself did not realize. Basho grew up together with four sisters, and one of them, Oyoshi, born when Basho was about seven, remained in her native home for her whole life, so Basho observed her pregnancy. He had access to feminine insights many other men lack.
Basho sees the pregnant woman in the place she herself was born, prepare her body and spirit for delivery through physical work; she moves her body back and forth, up and down, around her swollen belly. Dr. Yoshimura Takashi, whose birth center near Nagoya has delivered babies since 1961, concludes that the strength and flexibility Edo-era women gained from everyday physical work makes childbirth easy: he says, “When the muscles are strong and flexible, the baby just slides out.” Pregnant women gather at the traditional Japanese house behind his clinic to do work in the form of yoga – sawing wood, polishing doors,
building fires – moving their swollen bellies back and forth, then sit at the sunken hearth, eating rice and vegetables and sharing their experiences of pregnancy. When I showed Dr. Yoshimura this Basho verse, I saw tears in his eyes.
Maybe instead of just sitting there, the Mona Lisa should do some work. Lisa Gherardini, the third wife of an Italian nobleman. sat for da Vinci from 1501-05 when she was 22 to 26. Biographer Sherwin Nuland presents the theory of Leonardo scholar Kenneth Keele, a practicing surgeon (note that), trained to observe the human body, who looks at this woman and sees pregnancy:
“…the position of the hands and their apparent slight puffiness may explain the absence of rings on the fingers of a prosperous married woman. The location of the hands and the draping of the clothes suggest to Dr. Keele that an enlarged abdomen is being subtly obscured by both artist and subject.”
Also her breasts look pregnant. Behind those mysterious shining hands is a new life. The Mona Lisa being pregnant does explain the enigmatic smile, in Nuland’s words, “the smile of inner satisfaction
that the miracle of life is being created within her body.” Male scholars unable to see Mrs. Lisa’s swollen belly and pudgy fingers ― even after a surgeon identifies them, though this young married woman must have been pregnant in those five years－have invented an array of far-fetched male-oriented interpretations for Mona Lisa:
Sigmund Freud: “This picture contains the history of Leonardo’s childhood.” He does not see the woman at all: all he sees are his own theories.
Walter Pater: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits” WTF! She is not sitting among rocks.
Kenneth Clarke: “This picture is so full of Leonardo’s demons that we forget to think of it as a portrait.” Where? I see no demons; only a woman soon to give birth.
In contrast to this androcentric nonsense, Dr. Keele actually looks at the woman in the painting to see HER
reality, rather than the abstractions of male art critics, philosophers, and psychologists. Likewise, to explore Basho’s female-centric poetry, I forego the philosophical and religious concepts invented by scholars, to instead focus on Basho’s actual words, so simple, bodily, and sensory, telling the real life of women in
Japan.
For you, my dear, a red silk underskirt of crimson leaves
Vows made, in autumn she became pregnant
Kimi koko ni / momiji no futano no / shita momiji
Chigirishi aki wa / ubume narikeri
A woman is given a crimson slip to wear under her kimono – however this is her wedding night and the “red silk underskirt” her bleeding after first sex. In many societies, including Japan, vaginal blood is considered defiling, however Shinsho and Basho portray the bloody scene without disgust or contempt, as natural and life-giving. Both virgins and experienced women may find much to consider in the link between these two stanzas.
Calculating how to get through life in the Capital
They send no notice of daughter’s joyful birth
Sannyo ni / ukiyo o tatsu / kyou zumai
Mata sata nashi ni / musume yorokobu
Basho notes that from the villages where life goes on at a natural pace, young folk migrate to the Big City where competition and the high cost of living make life rough (but more fun than in the village) so they must “calculate” to survive. Yaba counters that city people, in their endless calculations, lose their natural feeling toward their young, so for a son they sent out a birth notice, but not for a daughter.
Showing no signs of being busy, the shop of a herbalist
Three years have passed yet bride has no child
Isogashiki / tei ni mo miezu / kigusuri ya
Sannen tatedo / yome ga ko no naki
(BRZ 10: 169) A rather laid back scene; the shop of a herbalist with shelves holding thousands of remedies and supplements – yet no customers. The place is so laid back that no one does much of anything. The oldest son, heir to the household and business, has not in three years managed to impregnate his young bride. This is serious business. Women in Japan might be divorced for not producing a child within three years – however the problem may be with his contribution. Why haven’t they used the right herbal remedies from the shelves to fix up him or her? Come on, you two! We need that heir!
Day in spring birth room attendants’ long tedium
One by one they eat warm water over rice
Haru no hi ni / ubuya no togi no / tsutsukuri to
Kawari-gawari ya / yu-tsuke kuuran
(BRZ 9: 247) As the sun returns to our side of the planet, the days grow long – as long as the interminable periods the birth attendants endure waiting for their mistress to give birth. As young Japanese women, they go to great lengths to accomplish perfectly the work they have been assigned. They remain in constant readiness to do whatever the midwife requires. They cannot go out for lunch, and even to prepare a meal here is unacceptable; it would show a lack of readiness and diligence. But after all these hours they have to put something in their bellies. So they pour hot water on rice and eat as is; because this involves no boiling, mixing, or seasoning, it does not count as “preparing a meal.” If one of them did anything to improve the taste, she would stand out, which is unacceptable in Japanese society. One by one, each woman takes a two-minute break to swallow her warm tasteless mush, while the rest remain on full alert. So the
spring day passes in tedium.
Visiting his hometown in 1687, Basho is shown the remnant of his navel cord, kept as a memento.
My native place over navel cord I weep end of the year
Furu sata ya / heso no o ni naku / toshi no kure
(Kon 346) This navel cord is the physical remains of his connection to mother. “My native place” suggests his
bond to the place on Mother Earth where he was born and grew up. “End of the year” suggests the passage of time in which his bonds to mother and native place dissolved in substance but continued in heart. The verse overflows with human sentiment, along with the physicalness of human reproduction and bonding.
Seeds start to sprout for our treasured grass
Giving birth to love in the world, she adorns herself
Sanae hajimete / eshi takara kusa .
Yo no ai o /umiken hito no / on-yosoi
(BRZ 3: 158) We go from rice sprouting to woman giving birth to the child she loves, then return to Mother Earth giving birth to countless billion plants. Woman merges with Earth, each making herself beautiful, and within her beauty is the power of regeneration, the power to nurture life.
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.
