Basho, Robert Aitken and Haiku 7
In chapter 10, the reader finds Basho alone on the road, as translated by Aitken:
This road!
With no-one going –
autumn evening
Exploring various ways of reading it as about Basho’s need for aloneness are found falling short of Basho’s experience as Aitken understands it:
Whatever the experience, if it is pure there is nothing else in the whole world.
Thus Basho , according to Aitken, is describing an existential given – this is aloneness.
And Aitken reads it against the verse from the Mumonkan (if I remember);
The Great Way has no gate;
there are s thousand paths.
Once you pass the barrier
you walk the universe alone.
And Aitken completes the lesson for the reader: True aloneness is with, as well as in the universe.
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