Haiku & Reflection

Dream architectures --
lighted, rhythmic, suspended --
melt in winter's heat.

...

Coming from a few inspirations, I am going to try to regularly write reflective haiku and post them on the tumblr. If I have the time, which is unlikely, and the ability, which is questionable I hope to provide short reflections on the subject of the haiku. To some of you, this may sound like something out of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which it is, though I only realized that after considering it this morning during sunrise. Paloma Josse has a related project having to do with moments of beauty in the world, especially if they have to do with people. Miss Lauren has also pledged herself to poetic responsibilities on the blog which she stewards, Space to Simplify, a project I endorse.

It has been a long time since I have written much in the way of poetry, and rarely with any particular focus. This initiative is in response to my own shortcoming in maintaining this blog or the tumblr especially well. The haiku format, though demanding, is brief in quantity but demanding of attention, concision, and insight. Therefore, I can allow myself a great deal of consideration but can manage to write the outcome from my phone or write it by hand and transcribe it later. In addition, I hope it brings clearer moments of beauty, awakening, and reportage to the Philosophy that Bakes Bread. Finally, my previous experience with haiku resulted in some, shall we say, problems and this, therefore, demands of me a certain reconsideration of the format and how I might use it. These are muscles underused and I hope that whatever can be crafted with them is at least pleasant to read.

...

Now, to the reflection: I have just finished my lunch, following a change after work this morning at the bakery, and am enjoying the crisp air and midday warmth. My awning is decked with long, skeletal icicle dangling from a slowly shifting curtain of snow that has been melting and refreezing for the last three weeks or so. Icicles are connected by the rims of now vanished curtains, and the icicles themselves suggest cavernous depths or inverted towers. Drops fall perpetually in a musical way that oddly reminds me of a BBC story from early this morning about a Norwegian crafter and performer of musical instruments made of ice. I am underdressed for the chill, especially as it is on the northwest side of the building and is in shade, but love the now fading delicious contrast of food-warmth in my belly with the lasting body heat of bakery work, with the wintertime ice show and cool air. Oddly, though, the icicles suggest light by their very structure the way they carry images in themselves, and the thinness of their bodies. I am also thinking more and more of the work I hope to do on my detective story with Lorenzo Vincenzi and the role of dreams therein, not to mention the difficult or altogether absent sleep of my own nights these days. Following the reading material of this past semester, and having quickly read Ursula K le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, I perceive dreams to be increasingly substantial, foundational, constructive; they are not ethereal or passing, but potent manifestations that carry with them some sense of the world that requires our attention, or some focus by which our attention can be guided. These ideas, though, clash or contrast at least with the melting, the dissipation of those icicle, their metaphors, and whatever it is we can glean from them. The respond demands immediacy, interpretation, and remembrance in no simple way.