Ultimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.1
In such a light, one can believe there are such things as colors, that objects really have colors, that one is at last seeing the objects true colors. The day is warm and bright for January. In the morning, I read a book of collected haiku. The author spent the foreword railing against Masaoka Shiki for conjuring the haiku tradition out of thin air, for ripping single stanzas out of long, serial poems, and then proceeds to fill a collection with just such trimmings. Some fantasies are more powerful than the truth.
On May 9, 1889, Masaoka Shiki began coughing up blood.2 In between bouts, he composed forty haiku to the lesser cuckoo, whose call sounds like a cough. Later, Shiki would describe his approach to composition as sashei, life sketches, under an indirect influence from Western art.3 (Think Degas and his many sketches capturing dancers in motion.) The sickness that began that day would take his life twelve years later. In his final journal, Shiki once more took up the theme of sketching, arguing that without it one is left with imagination. And imagination alone recombines familiar objects in familiar situations, so merely imaginative art stagnates. As nature is always in flux, so sketching from life revitalizes art.
It is a curious fact that Shiki, given his interests in direct portrayal of the world around him and in the new literary possibilities opened up the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s contact with Europe, nevertheless remained committed to traditional, Japanese forms: the tanka and haiku. Indeed, in certain moods, Shiki was pessimistic about haiku having any sort of future. In one essay, Shiki noted that, given the restrictions on content and syllable (morae) counts, only so many different haiku could possibly be written. Further, all or almost all of these had already been written.4 Nevertheless, Shiki found haiku inescapable. In particular, he adopted haiku as a natural expression of journey and observation, inspired by Basho’s haibun. The reverse was also true: the haiku poet must journey and observe closely.
You must not stop when you have managed to extract one or two poems from some broad view. Next you must look down at your feet and write about what you see there—the grass, the flowers in bloom.5
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under a lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.6
André Bazin, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” claims that the photograph is the modern equivalent of a mummy or a death-mask: a mimetic reproduction so good that it can satisfy us as a magical substitute for the real object. What makes it so for Bazin is not so much the stylistic realism of the photograph, the quality it might share with a Realist oil painting, as the unimaginativeness of the camera. Howsoever careful the painter is to capture things as they appear, each of their brushstrokes is an intentional act. The photographer, on the other hand, merely points the camera and shoots. After the finger releases, the machine does the rest: the photograph then is an industrial object, more Wonderbread than Michelangelo.
Haiku are decidedly more pastoral than industrial. Yet there is an obvious kinship in the (real or imagined) spontaneity of a haiku and a photograph. Shiki mythologized Basho’s composition of “An Ancient Pond” as just such an instant composition: Basho, he supposes, was sitting by a pond when a frog happened to jump in. That instant, the haiku arrived in a moment almost of enlightenment, one at least of unself-conscious awareness. Of course, haiku need not be composed in this way. They can be, as even Shiki’s haiku sometimes are, composed, falsified, imagined. But then so can photographs be posed, faked, doctored, distorted, post-processed. Now, in the world of AI, a photograph (or an image resembling a photograph) need not involve a camera at all. We are talking here in the realm of aesthetic ideals or aesthetic mythology rather than reality.
If you receive a basic instruction in art photography — I have taken exactly one photography class in my life, basic instruction is exactly the level of instruction I have received — you’ll learn a smattering of guidelines like the rule of thirds: the plane should not be divided cleanly in half, but unevenly into two parts, one one-third the picture and the other two-thirds. That is, the natural thing most people do in picking up a camera of putting their subject slap bang in the middle of the frame leads to boring, muddled shots. Get that shit off-center. In the same way, the basic form of the haiku also enforces something like a “rule of thirds.” Haiku traditionally contain a “cutting word” (think: a conjunction or even a bit of punctuation separating two sentences or phrases), usually at the end of the first or second line, dividing the three lines of the haiku into two uneven groups: one group of one and another of two.
From hence I got to the Parsonage a little before Sunset, & saw in my glass a picture, that if I could transmitt to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds. this is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty.7
Such rules of thumb are as much modes of observation as they are compositional suggestions. They cannot be otherwise, given the close bonds between observation and composition in both art forms. But, of course, one can observe one’s surrounding like a photographer or like a haiku-writer without a camera or notebook, on the lookout for a composition to emerge out of the blooming, buzzing confusion of the everyday. It is no great surprise that the rule of thirds emerged in the same time and place (England in the late 18th century) as the Claude glass which Gray totted around the Lake District. Despite the intersection of haiku and Buddhism, this form of aesthetic observation is quite distinct from meditation: it is attention turned relentlessly outward, roving and striving for a beautiful object.
The walk to Green Lake from my apartment is not beautiful. It takes you either across the Ballard or Fremont Bridge. Either one is surrounded on both ends by the kind of post-urban landscape that has taken America over like genital warts. Sidewalks on either side of the road suggest that walking is technically permitted here, but you wouldn’t want to do it. Not with the road noise of four lanes of traffic in your ear. Not with the constant breaks in the sidewalk for parking lots, which Ford F-150s zip in and out of without so much as a glance for the prey species, the pedestrian. The businesses themselves proclaim the dominance of driving: car washes, gas stations, auto-insurance complexes, paid storage facilities, ghost kitchens for delivery apps. It is not that aesthetic observation is impossible here, but it feels distinctly like misery tourism. I pass a bus stop and glance guiltily at the three waiting; unlike them, I don’t have to be here. By some act of mercy, I find a coffee shop along this ersatz highway. I can’t take pictures holding the Americano. I follow the lead of some enterprising driver and drop the cup over a storm drain.
Shiki frequently uses the terms refined (ga) and vulgar (zoku). In his attitude here, he is conservative: the refined is aesthetically worthwhile and the vulgar worthless. One might think that modernity would solve the mathematical exhaustion of haiku that Shiki feared. With new trade and new technology comes new things and new words for those things. Even a few new words, thanks to the explosiveness of combinatorics, would massively increase the possibilities for haiku. And yet, when considering such an influx, Shiki rejects this salvation.
And when one turns to the innumerable social matters to which this enlightened age has given rise, or the so-called conveniences of modem civilization, many are the epitome of the mediocre, the quintessence of the vulgar, and totally useless to a writer.8
Yet even Shiki could not resist the game of finding beauty in the trashpile of the everyday. It is unlikely that any person of sensitivity could. What is essential is that such play does not displace the deep ugliness of the world.
As it spills over In the autumn breeze, how red it looks— My red tooth powder!— Masaoki Shiki9
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53.
Donald Keene, The Winter Sun Comes In, 44f.
Charles Trumbull, “Masaoka Shiki and the Origins of Shasei.”
Masaoki Shiki, Talks, quoted in Janine Beichman, Masaoka Shiki, 35.
Masaoki Shiki, Random Questions and Random Answers, V. Quoted in Beichman, Masaoki Shiki, 46.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 67.
Thomas Gray, Journal of A Visit to the Lake District, ed. H.W. Starr, 1079.
Masaoki Shiki, Talks, quoted in Janine Beichman, Masaoki Shiki, 34.
Quoted and translated in Donald Keene, The Winter Sun Comes In, 4f.