Long Day's Journey On A Boat

Proem 2

Sad sits The Boulder

still without Internets – how

many LOLs unLOLed?

Throughout literature, the journey -- whether it be physical or metaphysical, spatial or spiritual – has been perhaps the most popular motif, appearing in works spanning cultures and centuries, from the epic of Gilgamesh to The Odyssey to The Love Suicides at Amijima to The Inferno. Though, thankfully, no where near as fraught with peril as these literary journeys, we embarked this Friday on a journey of our own. The class boarded a bus loaded with lunches (thanks to Steve, Trouble, and J-Weezie for helping out Brian!) and headed out on the arduous trek to Lost River Cave, during which J-Weezie proved that he could solve a Rubix cube in a minute and seven seconds.

Excitement upwelled as soon as we neared the sign and realized, with great wonder, that we were about to be On A Boat. Though several students wailed with regret over leaving behind their nautical-themed pashmina afghans, we departed the bus and entered the cave-grounds. With the help of a particularly wonderful tour guide, the class learned about karst, blue holes, Jesse James, and carbonic acid. Once the boat ride through the cave was over (on a side note – this was amazing. If you’ve never ridden in a boat underground, you really should), we took the long and treacherous trail down to the butterfly house. Careful to keep the airlock sealed and prevent any butterflies from escaping, we viewed their great beauty and wrote several of the haiku which would later become the basis of our haibun.

After a delicious picnic lunch, the students enjoyed a half hour of free time, during which they wrote haiku, played the elaborate and secret card game Mao, and wandered through the amply-stocked gift shop (complete with preserved butterflies and gloriously flavored rock candy). We then returned to campus and began our study of what is perhaps the most famous travel narrative in Japanese literature: Mastuo Bashō’s Oku no hosomichi, translated variously as The Narrow Road of the Interior, The Narrow Road through the Backcountry, or The Narrow Road of Oku. This piece is a haibun, which is a hybrid form combining prose and poetry. Unlike many other hybrid forms, though, the poem – in this case, waka or haiku – is what is important: the prose merely provides context for the haiku. The class discovered how, with his haibun, Bashō/Bono managed to put the “creative” in “creative nonfiction,” bending the facts in his narrative (as we know from a strictly factual journal

kept by his traveling companion, Sora) in order to tell a larger, transcendent truth. We discussed how this seemingly-simple piece actually present an amazingly complex spiritual journey through ideas about attachment, earthly suffering, and spiritual enlightenment – and how poetry has the power to allow us to transcend the limits of space and time in order to reach a higher mystical truth. The students then set out to write their own haibun, and, perhaps, transcend the limits of space and time to find a high truth themselves.

As it was a Friday, there was no study hall, and so the students journeyed to their first VAMPY dance while The Boulder journeyed home to reflect upon her own VAMPY dances of yore – and also to find that one of her housemates had found a kitten, who now proudly serves as the class’ mascot.

Stay tuned for next week as we utilize what we’ve learned about poetry and poetic language to begin our study of prose and playwriting – and look to the blog for student writing about their own higher truths!