From a Meditation of Philippe de Saint Maurice, une entité mystérieuse by all accounts, best known for his Meditations, selections of which I’ve been tinkering at these past years. This one skates the edge of profundity and platitude in characteristic, unsettling Maurician manner:
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On being conscious:
–We are dewdrops in the dawn
Of sunshine on the thirsty lawn:
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We are sparks that fly
Through deep and darkening night sky
Till rainclouds quench us.
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Having spent time recently in Thailand I was able to reconnect with Philippe de Saint Maurice and go through some of his Meditations.
These two haiku on consciousness are part of a longer sequence called revelation realisation, but they stand well alone.
I took the photo on Bang Niak beach on the Andaman coast of Thailand last month (December 2022).
For those interested in epic literary hauls, translations of the Meditations are coming along fine and will be shared in Book Seven of The Dark Gospel; I’m sharing the odd snapshot and highlight as I proceed.
A fitting pair of flitting haiku to capture our fleeting consciousness as this flighty new year begins!
Thanks, Scarlett.
Yes, the new year can help us folks refocus lives, as well as blurring them in flabbergasting flightiness.
Highly atmospheric words and photo
Thank you, Amaya. The picture is of a performance we saw a few weeks back in Thailand, dark beach and ocean close at hand, very atmospheric, uplifting
Deceptively double-edged, as so often with these haiku translations of Philippe de Saint Maurice’s “Meditations”.
I especially like the idea of “quenched” in the final line – the spark being put out by the rain, but also given a welcome assuagement of its thirst.
Cheers, James — if you quaff, you may be quenched.
“Deceptively double-edged” is good, perhaps flattering—I often wonder, in translating the “Meditations” whether they sometimes appear as worthy clichés, statements of the bleeding obvious or easy self-help uplift.
As Achyut Patwardhan commented here a while ago (on the poem “here”), the methodology of St Mauritian “Meditations” is to express a thought “condensed to its essence, cut down to essential size”.
Doing this may bring words close to cliché. However, where this happens, you always manage to leave the cliché sitting on sharp pins, so to speak: something that makes the cliché uncomfortable, uncomplacent, unconfined to the obvious, unable to sit still. So “easy self-help uplift” doesn’t really fit the bill—-nor does “bleeding obvious”, at least not in its conventional sense (in an unconventional sense, a cliché may bleed, when sitting on sharp pins!).
(For background: Achyut Patwardhan is the only person I know who has met and talked with Philippe de Saint Maurice, so he speaks with some authority on the “Meditations”.)
Thank you for this unwonted yet much wanted praise, and I did not know this about Achyut. The other person who knows Philippe de Saint Maurice and who occasionally appears here—albeit in continually transitioning forms—is my dear friend Yu Yan Yip.
great haikus!
Grazie, Luisa, and I hope you and yours are well!