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Monday, February 1, 2016

Haiku, Zen & Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has the self in her poetry dissolve in the paradoxes she creates beyond which she seeks enlightenment. The haiku, which often relies on the teachings of Zen-Buddhism, lives on contradicting the laws of logic. Logical rules limit the scope of human understanding. Breaking those rules allows the mind to penetrate further into the mysteries of the universe. In Zen-Buddhism this is most often achieved by means of the koan, a riddle that must be solved beyond the boundaries of logic. Dickinson takes similar steps into the spheres of contradiction, as for example in the poems “I’m Nobody” or “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.” By transcending dualistic logic, the self advances to a higher level of understanding him/herself and the world. It also succeeds in empathizing with other beings and in grasping the mystery of existence as such. Transcending its own sense of limited self it expands itself into a sense of oneness with the universe. In this context the I is not transcendental in the sense that it constitutes the world. Rather, the world is internalized by the I or, vice versa, the I is absorbed by the world. There is no more dualism between the subject and the object, between the I and the world. - Gudrun Grabher