The Knights of Mentis

I was speaking with a friend the other night, Bassist, Pete The Bastard, on the occasion of a small exhibition of his wonderful B/W photos of cameos around Oxford.

Pete, tho he looks like a Biker Hells Angel, has a real gentle all seeing eye for the "Moment", and i likened his work to "visual haiku's", if that is not a tautology, which took me afterwards to thinking about the very nature of Haiku's.

They are sociable but not a social form, and are almost totally unrhetorical, having nothing to say to the will. They do not have an agenda of social change, except possibly to persuade other people to write haiku in reply.

From all this flow the three classical haiku attributes; loneliness, tenderness and slenderness. They represent a sharing of a moment in a great loneliness; what is shared is centred on the feeling of loneliness itself, however much other feelings are involved with it. Loneliness is the gift the haiku poet prizes above all, because it is the loneliness of detachment, not the bitter isolation of frustrated desire.

Within detachment one's feelings can grow, not as the ravishers of virtue they normally are. Haiku poets call it tenderness, fellow feeling, a gentle acknowledgement that things exist outside yourself, which suffer and have their being in the Tao of enlightenment just as we do. And a haiku, like a great photograph, must be slender because it makes no claims upon you other than an invitation to share its moment.

I reflect on all this, as I sit here, on a rainy English Saturday morning, flicking through my moleskine jottings and haiku's from the hectic week, as I drink my mug of tea, and look out over the dog walkers on the park. A moment of Compos Mentis.

Mobile in right hand
She trades sweet-nothings
As her left scoops poop


--oo0oo--


On the road to Hay,
A truck loaded with
White roses.

--oo0oo--


First rain in weeks,
Slugs risk freedom
On the busy path


--oo0oo--


Behind the dog man
a-swagger with leash-
A damp Jack Russell

--oo0oo--


On the stairs at dawn
Deep inside the lobby,
A single leaf




Sir Dayvd ( who'll be back to being busy as a blue-assed fly, by the time you read this. ) of Oxfordshire.