Zōka Notebook

“To oversimplify a complex and important idea, the Creative (zōka) is a term for the world’s unceasing and spontaneous disposition to give rise to beautiful and skillful transformations throughout the natural world. True art is a participation in nature’s own creativity.”

— David Landis Barnhill, Bashō’s Journey, 146 note 9

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“Follow the Creative, return to the Creative”
-- Bashō, Knapsack Notebook

“Given this view of the creative, to “return to zōka” is not to dwell in the wilderness, return to country living, or go sightseeing in nature. It is a call for people to recognize and follow this natural mode of creativity. Great art is based on this creativity, and thus the true artist is a companion of nature’s transformations. However, the passage is not directed simply to artists but to all who would truly discern beauty. All of life is a manifestation of the creative and is therefore beautiful.”

— Barnhill in Matsuo Bashō’s Poetic Spaces, ed. Kerkham 45-6.

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Bashō

“Saigyo’s waka, Sogi’s renga, Seshu’s painting, Rikyu’s tea ceremony—one thread runs through the artistic Ways. And this aesthetic spirit is to follow the Creative, to be a companion to the turning of the four seasons. Nothing one sees is not a flower, nothing one imagines is not the moon. If what is seen is not a flower, one is like a barbarian; if what is imagined is not a flower, one is like a beast. Depart from the barbarian, break away from the beast, follow the Creative, return to the Creative.”

— Bashō, opening of Knapsack Notebook
     (Barnhill, Bashō’s Journey: The Literary Prose
     of Matsuo Basho, SUNY, 29).

Barnhill’s footnote to “the Creative” (151): “An important and complex idea in Bashō’s view of nature derived from the Zhuangzi and later Chinese philosophic and aesthetic traditions. The term refers not to nature in our normal sense of the world, but to nature’s skillful creativity that beautifully transforms the natural world.”

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Wallace Stevens

“How is one to restore savor to life when life has lost it? By making one’s self able to play the piano well? By restoring one’s self physically? By a gesture of the will? They are all absurd. All the same each one of us has (or probably has) his own personal absurdity, by means of which to restore the status quo ante: the state in which one once enjoyed the mere act of being alive. To allow that act to become an act of misery or even, eventually, of terror is easy; to do the opposite is no less easy.”

— Wallace Stevens, in a letter to Barbara Church
     (Lensing, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons, 190)

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Octavio Paz

“Bashō took it upon himself to turn these exercises (haiku by others) in clever aesthetic effects into spiritual experiences. When we read Teitoku, we smile at the amazing verbal invention; when we read Basho, our smile is one of understanding and—let us not shrink from the word—pity. Not Christian pity but that feeling of universal sympathy with everything that exists, that fraternity in impermanence with human beings, animals, and plants, which is the most precious gift that Buddhism has given us. For Basho, poetry is a path toward a sort of momentary feeling of blessedness that does not exclude irony and does not mean closing one’s eyes to the world and its horrors. In his indirect, almost oblique manner, Basho confronts us with terrible visions; very often existence, both human and animal, is revealed to us simultaneously as suffering and a stubborn will to persist in that suffering . . . .”

— Octavio Paz, “The Tradition of Haiku” in Convergences, 253f.