Bashō, "Here, where a thousand captains swore"

Some topics overwhelm what few moments we have, making us bored, restless. There's too much of this; we're not sure how to proceed. Certain people harden, becoming the worst sort of idiot. Faced with terrible injustices, they need to know how the pain of others concerns them. A second of inattention threatens their survival. You're almost tempted to take them seriously until you see this behavior from no less than Elon Musk. I'll credit our techbro billionaires with this: they have shown how rotten some general attitudes are.

Certain people look beyond themselves. When I wrote on Seamus Heaney's "North" a week or so ago, I reflected on how a poet can position themselves in place of a nation. Not a nation in the strict sense of citizenship, nor wedded to a strict definition of identity. Just the idea that you're out there, looking, wondering why some organized into armies to raid your neighbors. Wondering how you gave to each other, consoled each other, and found a unity that was needed. A nation, I guess, of the thoughtful. Where anarchists and wanderers contribute in significant ways, if not the most significant way.

Looking beyond yourself inevitably confronts the question of legacy. Glory and honor are concepts we call imaginary, proclaim we can do without, yet inevitably circle back to. The techbros lust after these in the ugliest, thirstiest ways. Years of screaming an English major was worthless only to create a plagiarism machine in order to steal from English majors. You say legacies, glory, and honor don't matter, then spend your whole life trying to prove you're more useful and in command of everything. Is that an attempt to displace the fundamental concept? Or an attempt to say you're the only one who deserves anything?

I'd like to look at a haiku by Bashō to better focus on these issues. Yeah, they're repetitive. Yeah, we are in the midst of the overwhelm. Sometimes, that's the only place you can be. No favors are done for anyone–not even yourself!–by insisting everything orient itself around you.

"Here, where a thousand captains swore"
Bashō (tr. unknown)

Here, where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest…
tall grass their monument

"Here, where a thousand / captains swore grand conquest... / tall grass their monument." I'm thinking back to Heaney's "North" and his luscious phrasing of the romantic glory of Viking raids. There, Heaney spoke those voices "lifted" in "violence and epiphany," obsessed with "thick-witted couplings and revenges," "the hatreds and behind-backs / of the althing." Heaney makes his Vikings sound like the premoral heroes of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Heroes written to epic scale, with an honesty we may believe refreshing. Once, there was a guy who when you hit him, hit you back. He didn't stop and think about whether this was right or wrong; he was responsive to life and actually lived. Whereas we develop an anxiety over whether we have disobeyed a moral code set down by those who, in Nietzsche's eyes, couldn't take care of themselves. We're not living out their means of survival; we're living out their revenge.

Bashō takes us to a different vision of the same grounds. A "thousand / captains swore grand conquest;" did they want the same romantic glory as the Vikings? I imagine this differently. The thousand captains swear grand conquest; they make oaths, they believe themselves righteous, they believe themselves winners. They train, they plan. They want the monument but as a product of conquest; others will build it for them once subjugated. This is the same and not the same as the Viking raiders. Herodotus distinguishes those who raided from those who insisted another people bow down. It is somewhat a poetic flourish, to be sure–all the violence serves stealing–but it does make clear the specific evil of empire. Empire denies that all men are created equal.

Bashō is looking at the tall grass covering a former battlefield. There is nothing left but the grass, the product of a natural cycle. It's like humans weren't even there. What good are plans? What legacy can possibly be had?

The captains made it about themselves, you could say, and now have nothing. But Bashō's epitaph for them is also starkly impersonal, unless you consider it part of a larger poetic vision. And Bashō's vision is indeed large. Should we all be writers? One reason why I go back to Nietzsche is his insistence that we are the artists of our own lives. I believe he doesn't mean this to narrow art to our lives, but to expand the notion of art, even in ways he might consider objectionable.

Going back to the issue of legacy, we note that "tall grass" has occasioned many words, many tributes to its endurance. Below, William Stafford's lovely "At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border:"

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

The only legacy which matters is a space for others. This doesn't reduce cleanly to a selfish/selfless divide, as the consideration for others needed is too great to say that pure selflessness would suffice for provision. (I know, I made it sound a bit different when introducing the issue.) What matters, to echo another Nietzschean theme, is whether nature has a chance in your vision. You'll know you've created an essential space when people feel as free as birds there.