"Haiku and the Aesthetics of Elegant Ethereality"
"Haiku and the Aesthetics of Elegant Ethereality"
by Adam Graham
The pantheon of Japanese poetic aesthetics, cultivated across centuries of court culture, is rich with distinct shades and tones of beauty. This nuance demonstrates how central beauty is to Japanese culture. As Donald Keene writes, it is “difficult to discuss any aspect of Japanese culture without alluding to the Japanese sense of beauty, perhaps the central element in all of Japanese culture.” It is from this deep cultural investment in the various modalities of beauty that Japan's remarkable vocabulary of aesthetic principles arose.
Among the more familiar of these aesthetic principles are sabi, the invocation of a somber, “pleasant loneliness,” and wabi, the modest “beauty of poverty.” Mono no aware (pathos of things), the “aesthetic sense of the deep poignancy of things of this world,” as well, yugen the aesthetic of “mystery and depth,” a dark “negative beauty.” And of course, karumi, the lightness of Basho's late style, a “gentle-humoured” aesthetic crafted with “light-hearted diction.”
In addition to these more familiar aesthetic modes of beauty there are those less familiar, such as yojo, furyu, miyabi, iki, yubi, okashi, en, hosomi, and yoen. It is this final aesthetic ideal, yoen, that most intrigues, and a closer look is required to savor its nuance. Yoen is:
the romantic idealization of a delicate, dreamlike
beauty—the beauty of a peony
or of an exquisite heavenly maiden descending to earth
on a
hazy spring night.
Such beauty was elusive, ephemeral, the stuff that
dreams
are made of.
