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.
Basho Spoken Word
Only this, apply your heart to what children do
"The attachment to Oldness is the very worst disease a poet can have."
“The skillful have a disease; let a three-foot child get the poem"
"Be sick and tired of yesterday’s self."
"This is the path of a fresh lively taste with aliveness in both heart and words." .
"In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself. Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them. There was no passing through the things."
"In verses of other poets, there is too much making and the heart’s immediacy is lost. What is made from the heart is good; the product of words shall not be preferred."
"We can live without poetry, yet without harmonizing with the world’s feeling and passing not through human feeling, a person cannot be fulfilled. Also, without good friends, this would be difficult."
"Poetry benefits from the realization of ordinary words."
"Many of my followers write haiku equal to mine, however in renku is the bone marrow of this old man."
"Your following stanza should suit the previous one as an expression of the same heart's connection."
"Link verses the way children play."
"Make renku ride the Energy. Get the timing wrong, you ruin the rhythm."
"The physical form first of all must be graceful then a musical quality makes a superior verse."
"As the years passed by to half a century. asleep I hovered among morning clouds and evening dusk, awake I was astonished at the voices of mountain streams and wild birds."
“These flies sure enjoy having an unexpected sick person.”
Haiku of Humanity
Drunk on sake woman wearing haori puts in a sword
Night in spring one hidden in mystery temple corner
Wrapping rice cake with one hands she tucks hair behind ear
On Life's journey plowing a small field going and returning
Child of poverty hulling rice, pauses to look at the moon
Tone so clear the Big Dipper resounds her mallet
Huddling under the futon, cold horrible night
Jar cracks with the ice at night awakening
Basho Renku Masterpieces
With her needle in autumn she manages to make ends meet Daughter playing koto reaches age seven
After the years of grieving. . . finally past eighteen Day and night dreams of Father in that battle
Now to this brothel my body has been sold Can I trust you with a letter I wrote, mirror polisher?
Only my face by rice-seedling mud is not soiled Breastfeeding on my lap what dreams do you see?
Single renku stanzas
Giving birth to love in the world, she adorns herself
Autumn wind saying not a word child in tears
Among women one allowed to lead them in chorus
Easing in her slender forearm for his pillow
Two death poems:
On a journey taken ill dreams on withered fields wander about
Clear cascade - into the ripples fall green pine needles
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.
Basho Spoken Word
Only this, apply your heart to what children do
"The attachment to Oldness is the very worst disease a poet can have."
“The skillful have a disease; let a three-foot child get the poem"
"Be sick and tired of yesterday’s self."
"This is the path of a fresh lively taste with aliveness in both heart and words." .
"In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself. Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them. There was no passing through the things."
"In verses of other poets, there is too much making and the heart’s immediacy is lost. What is made from the heart is good; the product of words shall not be preferred."
"We can live without poetry, yet without harmonizing with the world’s feeling and passing not through human feeling, a person cannot be fulfilled. Also, without good friends, this would be difficult."
"Poetry benefits from the realization of ordinary words."
"Many of my followers write haiku equal to mine, however in renku is the bone marrow of this old man."
"Your following stanza should suit the previous one as an expression of the same heart's connection."
"Link verses the way children play."
"Make renku ride the Energy. Get the timing wrong, you ruin the rhythm."
"The physical form first of all must be graceful then a musical quality makes a superior verse."
"As the years passed by to half a century. asleep I hovered among morning clouds and evening dusk, awake I was astonished at the voices of mountain streams and wild birds."
“These flies sure enjoy having an unexpected sick person.”
Haiku of Humanity
Drunk on sake woman wearing haori puts in a sword
Night in spring one hidden in mystery temple corner
Wrapping rice cake with one hands she tucks hair behind ear
On Life's journey plowing a small field going and returning
Child of poverty hulling rice, pauses to look at the moon
Tone so clear the Big Dipper resounds her mallet
Huddling under the futon, cold horrible night
Jar cracks with the ice at night awakening
Basho Renku Masterpieces
With her needle in autumn she manages to make ends meet Daughter playing koto reaches age seven
After the years of grieving. . . finally past eighteen Day and night dreams of Father in that battle
Now to this brothel my body has been sold Can I trust you with a letter I wrote, mirror polisher?
Only my face by rice-seedling mud is not soiled Breastfeeding on my lap what dreams do you see?
Single renku stanzas
Giving birth to love in the world, she adorns herself
Autumn wind saying not a word child in tears
Among women one allowed to lead them in chorus
Easing in her slender forearm for his pillow
Two death poems:
On a journey taken ill dreams on withered fields wander about
Clear cascade - into the ripples fall green pine needles
