Yes, I know: a flat-out contradiction. How can space be eloquent? or speak at all? Space is a nothing, isn’t it?  An absence. A way of indicating a separation. The words around it speak, not the space itself.

But if you think that way, you’ll find yourself challenged to think otherwise by the recently published This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater. Ziobro and Slater have also provided two very helpful essays: a background essay on the Japanese monk and poet Ryokan (1758-1831) and an essay on some thematic elements of Ryokan’s poems. Added at the book’s end are copious notes on individual poems.

Let’s go to the first page of the translation itself.

In the top left corner, a haiku (note that the translators decided not to use the haiku form—five syllables, then seven, then five—for their English versions):

My life,
comes from…?
and when it goes… where?

Then there’s a large space until you’re rescued at the bottom right corner by another haiku:

                                                                                              Lost track and now     
                                                                                                       the year’s over
                                                                                             this morning: spring

If you wonder about the difference between the alignments of the two poems—the top haiku left-justified, the bottom one right-justified—that’s a pattern carried throughout this first section of This and That, featuring haikus, and also in the second section, featuring tankas (haikus with two extra seven-syllable lines). Only the longer, single poems in the third and final section, featuring translations of kanshis (poems Ryokan wrote in Chinese) are left-justified.

The authors don’t explain these typographical choices, but if, for starters, you sit with the two poems on this first page, you may get the sense that in the space between the two haikus a conversation is going on. The top left haiku asks two questions that the bottom right haiku waits to answer. The space between them marks the waiting. But during that space the questions aren’t answered so much as transformed.

Let’s see how this works with these two haikus. In this top left haiku, one question emerges right away, out of a statement that seems to dissolve even as it’s asked. “My life / comes from…?” Does the statement remain incomplete just because the answer isn’t or can’t be stated? The question mark indicates a hesitation, at least, a need to pause the statement’s confident rhythm. But then, bravely, the statement continues: “and when it goes…” But now the statement has to pull itself up short in order to interrogate itself again: “…where?” What began as the poet’s firm assertion about where his life came from and where it’s going gets progressively less firm as the statement moves along and ends on a note of what feels like panic, a little, but maybe just deep puzzlement. Something that had seemed solid when he’d begun the haiku turns out to be thin and wispy, a dream of a statement he’d had in his head while waking up and now can’t recall.

Too bad! What to do? Well, for the poet, it’s a matter of sitting and waiting for the next thing or thought to come along, because it surely will—of that the poet seems to be sure: there’s always a next thing springing out of the empty space of meditation. Or, in my case, sitting with this first page and considering the blankness between the left-hand haiku and right-hand one, I’m aware that the space gives me the chance to reflect on whether I myself could answer the questions posed in the top haiku. Will I hold myself still enough to try? What will I come up with? Will I be satisfied with the result? Where does my life come from? And where is it going? I find I can askthe questions easily enough—the words themselves come out of me as if pre-formed. Why can’t I finish them to my satisfaction? And why am I so bothered by my failure?

Maybe getting to a point of frustration is the best result of mucking about in that white space between the haikus. If I’m not feeling uncomfortable with the language I habitually use to talk about my existence—and especially if I tend to dodge wanting to talk about my or anything’s “existence” at all—, well, maybe I’m not ready for the other haiku.

But before I dismiss the whole project, I’m coaxed back into it by the bottom-right haiku. The poet seems to have come to a similar impasse himself. But instead of dashing off in a flurry of nerves, he sits with it until: “Lost track and now…” Whoops! He got distracted. Fell down from the cliff of abstraction into the present moment. “…the year’s over / this morning: spring.” So time and change, he finds, have the last laugh.

Or maybe not. Because if I flip to the next page and the next pairing of haikus, I’m not puzzling myself about existence. I’m on solid ground again, and starting out with it. Top left:

Faint spring rain
finger tracing
the cracks in my cup

All’s well, all’s firm, all’s lined up. Spring rain and cracked cups. No metaphysical angst possible here! The poet knows exactly what he’s talking about, right? Or does he? Go to the bottom right and see…

But I won’t follow this particular trail further. Let’s just say that the space between the two haikus exerts its magic again and the ground has shifted by the time you arrive at the bottom right haiku. From one thing to another. Yes, I could have guessed as much from the volume’s title, This and That. We’re told there where we’re headed, not only here but throughout the volume. As one of the translators, John Slater, explains, the title

refers both to the everyday quality of what’s depicted in the work… and to two contraries joined by an “and.” A dedicated student of [Zen master] Dogen, occasionally Ryokan writes in a philosophical vein about non-duality. More often he demonstrates the way it permeates everyday experience.

And Ryokan demonstrates it beautifully, by encouraging our own thoughts to quiet down enough to allow that permeability to happen in us, find tentative form in us, undermining our secure categories—those that separate spirit and body, one thing and another. But Ryokan does get great help from Ziobro and Slater, not only for their translations and commentaries, but for those spaces on the page where nobody’s saying a word—the spaces that invite an anxious, pushy reader like me to slow down and sit with Ryokan as the monk looks at reality from one side, then the other. Or as Ryokan models for the reader, in Slater’s words, a “practice of turning towards life as it happens, points of contact and spiritual connection.” Hard to dispute the healing power of such a practice to those of us buffeted by the swirl of wars and the threats of climate disaster.

Let the final word go to Ryokan. Of course, there is no such thing as a final word. But here it is anyway, appropriately from the final haiku in the collection, the right bottom corner one, and tentatively, like the falling leaf (or page?) itself:

                                                                          How the leaf displays
                                                                         now this side and that
                                                                              as it drifts to earth

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.

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