The Superiority of Haiku Over All Other Art

All of our lives are intertwined. I mean this in more than just the economic sense. Yes, the pencil on your desk took thousands of men to make (the man who chopped down the tree for it's wood, the man who mined the ore for the steel in the axe of the man who chopped down the tree, the man who mined the graphite in the center, etc)... but more than this, we are connected by the actions we take (or do not take) in ways unfathomable to us, unless we're able to step back often and see the mosaic of life for what it truly is, a complex system of connected beauty.

If you browse this blog you'll find a fair number of names mentioned; including, but not limited to: Prince Lupus, Captain James Barlowe Massimo, Ishii Ro-eem, EEU-500, The Good Doctor Benjamin Redstone, an unnamed robot solider (who was numbered 3432), Ben Jackson, Cáo Cāo (the great and honorable high Chancellor of the Eastern Han Dynasty and Emperor Wu of Wei), Lt. Peazer Rice, The Redooa Brothers, etc etc. All of these beings and their fates are connected by a single cosmic thread.

Now, what does all this have to do with Haiku? Well, I've had the pleasure of living quite a charmed life, an extraordinary life. I've traveled through both space and time, seen great wonders, etc... all generally by virtue of my strange luck and the extraordinary people I have met... not really by any action of my own. Still, I've seen and heard a great many interesting things, and absorbed a great many interesting opinions. One of those opinions belonged to a man called Doctor Benjamin Redstone. Believe what you will, but the truth is that Doctor Redstone is a mostly formless, partially immortal, time-traveling podiatrist from one of Saturn's moons. He has seen quite a bit in his time, and we once had a conversation about literature. His opinion on it was this (I'll paraphrase):

Art...all art (and literature is of course an art form) is based on changing the perceptions of your audience; making them see the beauty in the banal, the strangeness in the familiar. Altering perception, he said, was the very definition of Art. He told me that writing lengthy novels... that was easy task for anyone with the ability to speak. But the capacity for language is not a unique skill. The skill, he emphasized, and the true challenge, was in conveying something vast... perhaps an emotion that has no definition in the common language... and by doing that as simply as possible. To cause the reader to realize some deeper meaning which has been left unsaid, and to impose upon the reader some emotion with perhaps a brief sentence, or with a single line. With a word, even. This is the most difficult Art. The Doctor said that with Art, much like with the expression of Love... the more verbose, the more muddled the truth becomes. The truth of an emotion exists in its purest form only when stripped of all the unnecessary pretense. And truth, real truth, allows one to see the beauty of the connected world.

Or so the doctor said.

The Good Doctor then quoted a particular haiku to me... one of his favorites, he said. It was written by a man whom he knew personally, an 18th century Japanese poet named Kobayashi Issa. The haiku was this:

Don’t weep - Insects,
Lovers, Stars themselves
Must part

The Good Doctor Benjamin Redstone was a fine man. He still is, most likely, although I have not seen him in some years.