Bashō's Violets: A Turn Towards Aesthetic Life
Something as simple as the sight of violets can be enough. To bring delight, to still the din of incessant chatter, to stop wishing for something not. That very moment of wonder and delight: is enough.
Viola nutallii, prairie violet — Photo by Joshua Paquette
Coming along a mountain path
I find something endearing
about violets
Bashō
It may seem that finding oneself appreciating flowers is a quaint remnant of a simpler time, cute perhaps, but hardly revelatory. We are so accustomed to the dopaminergic WOW! of modern opulence that a glimpse of violets is likely nothing, a backdrop, almost an insult to what is possible inside a glow-screened world. I maintain that it is precisely the simplicity to which the poet Bashō points that holds merit for our times, acts as a remedy for manic distortion. We mustn’t forget that wonder needn’t precipitate from a device, nor ensue through the blast furnace of chemical euphoria – it can arise from something common, it can happen every day.
The Roman Stoics were fond of the term notitia. It indicated the ability to form true notions of things through the act of attentive noticing. We may consider that portrait artists like Rembrandt once apprenticed themselves to the long study of a human face, or that Rodin encouraged Rilke by suggesting he spend countless hours with animals at the Paris zoo. Rilke later described the technique as inseeing, a fluid state where the observed and the observer form a kind of sympathetic union. His “thing-poems” from that time—especially in the meter of his native German— resound with a resonance and depth of seeing. Japanese poet Bashō writing in the 1600s, saw keenly in this way and expressed it in haiku.
Carefully looking when
nazuna is blooming
beneath the hedge!
Bashō
The ability to be surprised by the goings-on around us can only occur if it occurs to us—we cannot force surprise. Nazuna is the Japanese name for shepherd’s purse, an inconspicuous weedy plant that grows all over the world. It’s tiny, white, cross-shaped flowers appeared to Bashō as dotting the shadowed under-neath of a nearby hedge, and as he focused in,—Ah!— there sat nazuna as if coy and hiding. The experience of this suddenness was enough for Bashō to write a poem about it, and to this day it remains widely appreciated in Japan. To think, something as discreet as weeds beneath a hedge!
It is difficult to admire things in vast groupings; large categories lack the granularity to delight. We don’t fall in love with “people,” we fall for this specific person, this painting, this dress. We can’t love it all, it’s beyond our human capacity and an affront to personal taste. If we claim we love it all then we do so as a kind of gloss; that glabrous pursuit is too cosmetic for my eye. Consider our basic view: tall, woody things with bark are trees; plants are green things that grow in forests or flower beds; weeds are pests. Without the necessity for nuanced distinction, these classifications function and we get by. To notice Bashō’s violets we need to go further.
The late psychologist James Hillman has suggested that the manic pace of modern life has deep roots inside inattention. It may be that events accelerate in proportion to not being noticed. There are so many things to inspect that we end up inspecting nothing with the intrigue required to gratify. Notitic beauty arrests motion. We are caught in wonder— stilled by the shape of violets, the flow of a woman’s hair, a horses rippling flank in the deepening light. The ah! of inspiration, an inward breath of air, comes suddenly as if being struck by invisible arrows. This very phenomenon is the root of the word aesthetic, from the Greek aisthesis, “ To breath in.”
It’s okay to be selfish at first, to make it about your desire. But to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard this misses the point. The world seeks to be admired by you, and in that admiration the objects of the world are lifted up, they become precious, special, something worth protecting. Few of us have been moved to action by robotic droning. Statistics didn’t seed outrage at the Vietnam war. Images did, specific images of the goings-on. This is what’s at stake: hyperbole aside, a turn towards aesthetic life can mean that we begin by noticing violets and end up protesting a war. “It’s not right! It’s just not right!” is an aesthetic valuation, something we experience as more meaningful than preference. It’s what Steven Harrod Buhner calls a “feeling for the right.” A true aesthetic event holds inside it a latent morality that includes rational judgments, doesn’t elbow them out. I am suggesting that the reclamation of aesthetic life begins inside aisthesis, the sudden inspiration accompanying shock, beauty, awe.
What we are seeking is a kind of remedial collyrium, a clarifying wash to brighten the eyes. We must begin by looking honestly around us, turning our face towards the faces of the world. We need eyes that can see things just as they present themselves: in suchness, beauty, uniqueness, and wonder. Then and only then will violets cease to be violets. Then and only then will nazuna be found.
The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
Bashō