Learning Loneliness, in three lines of Haiku

Three Lines by Anannya Dasgupta

Anannya Dasgupta

I

live by myself. I have lived by myself most of my adult life. But in the Covid-19 lockdowns since 2020 and especially in the ongoing one amidst the deadly second wave, I find myself grasping at straws. Sickness and death gripping family and friends, the daily onslaught of bad news, and the gnawing fear of what next has rendered useless a lifetime of skills and narratives acquired to live by myself in relative ease. A kind of sickness that ensures no friend can come to your side and that one cannot, in good conscience hold that expectation of anyone, has brought home a new kind of aloneness to my lockdown isolation. People are dying, people are surviving, even the ones that live alone but, it feels difficult to find solace in ideas of certainty, in possible futures of wholeness and wellness. Then there is the idea of dying alone, though that itself at this point feels less frightening than what might possibly precede it, but friends who live alone and got sick tell me that part is not easy either.

I find that I have fallen behind on myself. With extended time alone at home, one could really catch up, one would think, on all the personal and professional goals for work and life. Finally get one’s mini universe in order – desk drawers, clothes closet, paperwork, spice rack in the kitchen, sea shells on the sink, the external hard disk, stray files on the desktop, paying bills, old-old items on the to-do list, half-done writing projects, half-revised manuscripts. Really not that much, come to think of it. The material moorings of my life already streamlined to move from house to house, has still managed to become fully overwhelming. The details of what should be a manageable life are in disarray and I have let them get away, letting myself sink into a daze for most of the day, emerging to hold up appearances on the phone or online when I must. I am grateful for this bit of motivation and energy left for me to be able to do that at least.

What I thought I had all figured out – being by myself – is unravelling in this forced isolation of imposed lockdowns. Recently, a friend with whom I have been learning and practicing writing haiku for the past several months remarked on one of my haiku saying that it is full of sabi – loneliness. Coming from the Japanese root word sabishii, it is an aesthetic of aloneness in traditional haiku; she explained to me. The haiku she was remarking on is the following:

at your
fingers’ tips
a loosening grasp

I re-read the haiku and thought about what she said. Was I already beginning to reconfigure this new aloneness where I am no longer a physical part of anyone else’s day?

I had my solitary existence figured out with ample room and time with friends and family. My job as a college teacher has ensured that I am engaged with lots of people at work. Time to myself – reading, writing, photographing minutiae while taking long walks by the beach, making art –always felt like exactly what I wanted it for. In other words, even a few months ago, time by myself was comforting and sometimes, it felt like I didn’t have enough of it. And here I was, in the middle of the isolating second wave, held together in three lines of haiku even as I feel myself come apart.

One thing I have done regularly over the past few months is read and write haiku. That it is only three lines a-piece helped; I don’t think I could have managed more. My friend’s remark about the aesthetic of sabi made me curious, how had I missed it before? I returned to the classic Basho, the seventeen syllables of which in Japanese have seen over three hundred translations in English:

an old pond
a frog jumps in
sound of water

When I had first properly encountered these three sparse lines, as someone learning haiku, it had opened up immense spaces for me to inhabit. Newly armed with the formal rules of the English haiku, on a whim I had decided to respond to it with haiku of my own, paired up with images of water-colour washes I had done. I did about twenty of those. I see now that I had paused on every moment I could conceive of as a way of being by that pond in that moment of the haiku. As writers of fan-fiction are wont to do, I added creatures, events and moved along the timeline of seasons as my way of engaged, participatory reading.
It feels very noisy to read those haiku now; they read like the reality of a different person in a different time:

an old pond
in rains and tadpoles …
monsoon orchestra

Occasionally in a haiku or so I did pause on the stone-still heart of the pond, on how the widening ripples might quieten back to a stillness. But mostly I hovered outside, not seeing then that Basho’s haiku needs only a pond, a frog and the sound of the frog jumping in to be complete. I never saw the aloneness in Basho’s haiku like I do now. An aloneness that is an ordinary matter of fact in the existence of an old pond.
The experience of loneliness is a changing one among Basho’s haiku; creatures in different times and places experience being solitary in unlike ways. Here are two lonely creatures, a cypress tree in spring and a crow in autumn:

solitary now —
standing amidst the blossoms
is a cypress tree

on a withered branch
a crow has alighted
nightfall in autumn

The qualities of sabi change, become more complex with every haiku I re-visit. Coming into a new knowledge of its solitariness is a cypress tree, known to grow straight, tall and without frilly foliage. Here it learns, perhaps in surprise, the loneliness of being by itself among trees that have blossomed. A darker, more all-encompassing solitude awaits the crow whose aloneness is both amplified by and ensconced in its immediate surrounding. Did the crow just happen to find itself in a time and place of gloom? Did the crow bring the darkness of the night with it as it settled on the withered branch? The branch was not always withered was it, and more importantly, will it revive once the season of despair passes?

Living by myself, I have kept a home that can house a family (and have had a welcoming guest room for visitors) at the same time that I kept space for my solitary time. In a society that relentlessly assumes and upholds the idea of family by marriage, I figured a way, it seemed to me, that skipped over to the advantages of both living and not living with family. Time spent commuting to work and my frequent travels out of town made my alone time at home precious, enjoyable and sometimes seem not nearly enough. But since life as I knew has come to a grinding halt, and the dystopic devastation of our times is playing out the systematic failures of what we thought worked, it is time to re-configure what it means to live, live together, live by oneself.
As I am beginning to understand, the aesthetic loneliness of sabi allows room in haiku to take stock of loneliness. Loneliness that needn’t be occupied, distracted and filled up. Loneliness that can be dark and depressive. Loneliness that needn’t evoke pity or judgement in oneself or its fear from others. Loneliness that might be about reconciling to one’s inner life in its wandering, discontented yearnings:

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto. (tr. Jane Hirshfield)

In this haiku of lonely longing for the very thing one has, Basho lets a bird song trigger uncertainty in the certainty of the ground one has one’s feet on. I thought I had my solitary existence figured, turns out I didn’t.
Learning one’s loneliness is neither an exceptional life event nor one confined to me and those of us that live or have lived alone. Yet, its experience, as it must, feels uniquely solitary. It is not that all connections have ceased to exist but that one feels hollow in it, deeply distanced somehow. The interdependence we celebrate and rely on feels held out of reach. It is a desolate population of one:

in an old pond
a sunken sandal –
falling sleet

In this haiku, Buson, who idolized Basho and followed in his footsteps to the extent that he literally retraced Basho’s journey to the north, revisits the old pond. The matter-of-fact sabi of Basho’s haiku is compounded and deepened into unrelenting desolation. Instead of the frog, we get one sunk sandal out of a pair, and instead of a splash of water there is continuous sleet (not even snow). Buson is not just learning loneliness he is leaning into it as far as it will go.

As I learn my loneliness and lean into it, I am not sure where it will land me or how it will translate into future ways of living and making home. I am not sure if or when I will see the point of an organized desk drawer or wardrobe again. But I do see now that between the choices that are mine to make and the visible work of fate’s hand, there is a gap – a gap of unknowing and time-being of no control, a pause. It might be an abyss. The same gap is called up in the composition of haiku. How one reads and uses the kireji – cut marker, the gap between the two sets of images that make up a haiku – possibly invites a mental habit of trusting associative leaps where the visible road ahead ends:

this stone path –
a little light
from Buddha’s moon

This haiku, by Geethanjali Rajan, the friend I mentioned earlier, is held in the possibility of a little light on a stone path that is each her own. The sabi, the loneliness is held between the word “this” and the kireji in a long dash at the end of the first line. The Buddha’s moon of the next image offers not ready redemption from the loneliness of walking alone but a little light on the path.

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Anannya Dasgupta is a poet and photographer who lives in Chennai. She directs the Center for Writing and Pedagogy at Krea University where she is also an Associate Professor in the division of Literature. She has a book of poems Between Sure Places (2015) and a monograph Magical Epistemologies: Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern English Drama (2020). Some of her haiku, haibun and haiga can be found in Sonic Boom, Right Finger Pointing, Failed Haiku and some are forthcoming in Prune Juice Journal.