Haibun: Change and More Change
Launching out to explore causes us to reflect and then to tell. The French thinker and patron saint of &Haiku, Jacque Ellul, says the telling our experiences around the campfire was how we preserved our humanity. Think about it, the details of what we withhold and what we reveal all come from our most human parts: our experience passed into words to recreate the world for someone else. There’s a creativity an excel macro or a billion lines of python cannot recreate because it hasn’t lived it.
My haiku are the way I tell you about my experiences and my thoughts. Each week a collection of you arrive and read them, some of you even comment. Over the years the collections have changed. Some of the earliest members have passed on and some of the others have stopped reading. In fact, in the early days it was just my friends and family on Facebook, now most of my audience is Twitter and the website with some Instagram and Facebook now making up a small fraction of the readers.
And it will continue to change, but our humanity won’t. In the age of automation, where robots can write for me and you, this source of reflection and creativity is the irreplaceable human expression. Your words and mine, the way our words form while we type or write by hand, the way our eyes widen and our smile grows as we tell our story, the warmth our voice gives off when we give a detail, this is the world we have been creating and we will create our future out of.
Soon the cars will drive themselves and the ad platforms will write better copy than the professionals, soon, even the radiologist and the bank’s financial adviser could be out of a job. Yet, when the robot starts to write and copies Basho’s haiku style, I know I’ll get bored reading them. But when I read Basho, I want to be in the mountains like he was. Machines can’t replace the dreams we give when we share our adventures and get when we hear others share theirs.
dammed to deliver, summer
swelled from a sliver
