Between the Smiling Two and the Quiet, Roaring Pond

Aesthetics of Nature and the Human 

A Picture of Adeyinka Olarinmoye and Her Son Gboluga

In Dialogue with Matsuo Basho's Poem of the Pond and the Amphibian

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Adeyinka Olarinmoye : Aesthetics, Thought, Action
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"Celebrating Human Splendour"

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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
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The Two Smiling Ones

What could the two people in the picture below be saying to each other as they smile so richly ?

We cannot hear them speak, but we can experience their communication beyond words.

We can do this by sharing imaginatively in the ripples of joy that radiate from them.

Do we need to know what they are saying, in order to share that joy?

We dont.

A smile is the shortest distance between two people, it is said.

The brilliant smiles between Adeyinka Olarinmoye and her son Gboluga clearly speak to us in a universal language, transcending speech.(1)

A Frog Jumping into an Ancient Pond

Breaking the silence of an ancient pond

a frog jumps into water

a deep resonance

That poem above is one version of the English translations of a famous work by Matsuo Basho, Japanese master of the haiku, a form of minimalist poetry invented in Japan, here translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. (2)

It is my favourite poem. 

In all my excursions into world poetry, from the scriptural classics to secular poetry, this one resonates the most with me, having discovered it in Basho's book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, his most famous collection of poetry, at the then University of Benin bookshop, a wonderful place.

Robert Aitken presents thirty-one translations of the poem and a commentary describing it as "probably the most famous poem in Japan".(3)

The poem has attracted so much attention because it is rightly perceived as a great poem, particularly by those who understand the world of perception, the way of seeing the world, that it represents.

Correlating Poem of Frog and Pond and Watching Poet with Picture of Mother and Child and the Viewer of this Picture

What could a poem about a frog jumping into water have to do with the picture of Adeyinka Olarinmoye and her son smiling at each other with such glorious force, radiating joy with the intensity of energy transformations at the heart of the sun?

Why should such a seemingly mundane poem, in three lines or even one, if written at a stretch, be my favourite poem out of the glories of world poetry I have been privileged to read?

The answers to these questions are related and are not difficult to arrive at if one understands the world of that poem.

It is the world of that poem that links these two forms, a poetic depiction of a frog jumping into water and the picture of mother and child smiling to each other in a glow of love evoking the intensity of energy transformations at the solar core.

Linking Forms on Extreme Ends of a Scale in Japanese Gardening

The relationship between poem and picture may be seen as evoked by a description of the art of landscape design in a particular Japanese garden.

These gardens are created to evoke associations between the minutiae of human experience and the cosmos. 

One example occurs in the positioning of the bowl for washing one's hands preparatory to entering the chaseki or tea room for the aesthetically powerful and philosophically and spiritually rich tea ceremony, taking place within spaces the austere beauty of which evoke the correlation of minimalist power and infinite association in terms of which Zen Buddhism has influenced haiku, the tea ceremony and Japanese gardening.

The bowl is so placed that as one bends to wash one's hands, one glimpses the ocean beyond. 

That glimpse evokes the relationship between the water in the bowl and the ocean and between oneself and the cosmos. 

It is this unity evoked through associations of form, of the small and the large, of the finite and the infinite, that is the resonance between the picture of the mother and and child and the verbal image of the frog jumping into the ancient pond. 

How can this be?

Let us look in detail at the images at play in the poem

Ripples of Becoming : From Ancient Pond to Watching Poet

The pond is ancient.

Ancientness carries profound associations in various cultures.

One of those associations is that of a maturity emerging through the distillation of experience with time.

Another is the transcendence of the limitations of time through enduring for such a long period of time that those limitations become meaningless.

Silence, the condition of the pond before it is broken by the frog, is a peaceful state.

The pond can be seen as embodying silence, representing it through the calm of its surface.

Any action that breaks that stillness or calm of the surface will send ripples moving outward in concentric circles from the centre of the action.

The visual impression created by this action and effect can be associated with a broad range of possibilities in human experience and culture.

Poetry is centrally about association, stimulating the audience to think of other phenomena apart from what the poem states directly.

This capacity for suggestion is carried to an ethereal height in haiku.

To better appreciate the poem, however, one needs to understand aspects of the culture it is steeped in, from which it emerges. 

The images from nature which the poem depicts are universal.

Its ultimate associative potential is universal, evoked in many visual, verbal, religious and philosophical forms in many cultures. 

The specific body of ways of looking at the world that is able to perceive a universal vision in a frog jumping into water, however, is a quality developed to particularly exquisite pitch in an aspect of Japanese and Chinese culture, represented in Basho's work by the union of Zen Buddhism and his own haiku aesthetic. 

Within the specific associative universe represented by the cultural context of the poem, all the elements that make up the scene both within and beyond it, the poet watching the silent pond, the pond itself, the frog, the amphibian's plunge into the pond, all constitute one moment of possibility, a unity both metaphorical and literal. 

We are presented with a quite scene, a still, ancient pond.

Suddenly -action- breaking the quiet, a form erupts into action, breaking the inactivity represented by the scene. 

What is this form? A frog.

The frog jumps into the water.

What happens next is put differently in the numerous translations of the poem into English.

The Nobuyuki Yuasa translation I have quoted describes what happens after the frog jumps into water as "a deep resonance".

That is most exquisite.

Why?

It is not easy to put into words the integration of such far reaching correlations as those words suggest, even more marvellous in that their spare power has spoken for centuries to many people in different cultures who share to some degree in the world of suggestion evoked by the poem. 

Our focus, however, is not only on the poem, which is already well known to many, and which will continue to delight many, as long as there exist sentient entities with the distinctive cognitive configuration of human beings, shaped by the natural environment of the earth and the character of human biology to appreciate associations of motion, of relationships between stillness and action, between sound and silence.

Correlating Picture of Mother and Child and Poem of Jumping Frog Through the Concept of "the Deep Resonance"

Our focus is also on the picture of Adeyinka Olarinmoye and her son.

How can this picture, which is more immediate in its impact than the more reified associative world of that poem, facilitate our appreciation of the world of wonder the poem evokes, a world emerging from the familiar image of a frog jumping into the water of a still, ancient pond, and the well known image of a mother smiling at her son, where do they meet and what may this meeting suggest to us about the human condition in a way that neither the poem or the picture alone alone could have done in isolation?

Look closely at the Adeyinka Olarinmoye and Gboluga picture.

Can you see the space between them, between mother and child , the seemingly empty space?

That is the space of possibility.

The space into which the frog jumped.

It looks in the picture as if it is a purely physical space within a room but it is not.

In constituting the space of connection between loving mother and loving child it has been configured into something more than physical.

It has become a space of potential.

It is a space of transmutation, the pond of the jumping frog, the space from which ripples of possibility radiate in concentric circles of ever widening possibility, the space where the hearts of Adeyinka Olarinmoye and her son Gboluga have been dropped into, burning white hot with the fire of love, radiating outward in a blaze that lights up the faces of mother and child.

It is the emotional core that unites these two people.

It is the space into which the frog jumped because it is a universal space, everywhere and nowhere.

It is a space that emerges only when conditions for its existence come into being through the convergence of various factors.

The factors that converged in the scene described by Basho are the ancient, pond, silent in its stillness and surrounding environment, the frog, its plunge and the person watching the entire scenario.

The factors at play in the Adeyinka Olarinmoye and Gboluga picture are the love of a mother for a child she conceived in private and carried in a form both private and public for nine months while he fed on the she food she ate, breathed the air she breathed, was sustained by her blood, as he was growing from a fertilised egg to a human being constituted by all the forms of human biology even as she walked the hard campaign trail in the 2011 race for the House of Representatives for Ondo State, an inner companion, physical but unseen, felt by his mother and possibly known to himself and to his mother and to none other, that knowing differing between even mother and child, for no human being knows themselves fully nor is fully known by another, talk less a human being who is yet to emerge into the social interactions represented by being born into the world among other humans.

That space in the picture is an external, physical reenactment of the internal, physical space where Gboluga was growing in the years of gestation, a space physically external but integrating both internal and external spaces of possibility, biological, social and supra-material, a space that is now one manifestation of that fecundative space of his mother's womb, a space of possibility within which being undergoes becoming.

The space where the water of the pond went from being silent to generating sound, from being still to being disturbed, from calm placidity to radiating ripples of circles of becoming, the space where the frog becomes one in space with the pond, the space where the unity of being between Gboluga and his mother is actualised in the love they share, a unity realised in physical terms in his mother's womb but actualised after his birth, as expressed in this picture, in terms of the pulsations of love which unites the space between mother and child, the space where the watching poet becomes one with the action being watched, as he mentally plunges with the frog into the pond, and, for an instant, he becomes frog , pond, sound, ripples, the unity of the convergence of factors, the totality that makes up the moment.

That unity is the deep resonance. 

Associative Logic and Transformations of Being

I considered stopping here but but reasoned that might prove puzzling to readers.

It might be possible to explain the style of thinking at play here.

In this style of thinking, what is most important is associative not logical links.

In such a context, a pond can become a physical space in a picture and a frog jumping into that pond can become the hearts of a mother and child plunged into that pond to experience a unity within an ocean of love, the ocean of possibility, that, adapting one description of the Yoruba conception of the supreme creator Olodumare, the womb of possibility within which all that was, all that is and all that may be are constantly undergoing transmutation from one state of being to another, a transmutation enabled by ase,creative cosmic force, enabling mediation between forms of being and possibilities of being, between modes of being and modes of knowledge ,the zone where phenomena, their qualities and the relationships between them are one in a transformative matrix, "beheld in one simple light", to adapt the Italian poet Dante Alighieri's vision of cosmic centre in Paradiso, the culminating book of his Divine Comedy.

This effort to relate poem and picture may be amplified in terms of the Japanese concept of "Ma", as superbly described by Kemi Ajiboye.

She describes Ma as a philosophical and artistic concept indicating negative space, the value of empty space in relation to forms, understanding that emptiness as being 'like a holder within which things can exist, stand out and have meaning".

It is "the quiet time we all need to make our busy lives meaningful... the purposeful pauses in speech which make words stand out... the silence between the notes which make the music...Ma is what creates the peace of mind (called 'heijoshin' in Japanese) we all need so that, there is room for our thoughts to exist properly and to thrive".

This sensitivity to emptiness , to negative space may be "most evident when the space around a subject and not the subject itself forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape. Such space is occasionally used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image[being] a key element of artistic composition".

A great Hindu text , the Vijnanna Bhairava Tantra, suggests most evocatively a related style of vision, where a pond or the space between a mother and a child becomes the flow of universal love, of the depth of ultimate possibility through which what Dante calls "the love that moves the sun and the other stars" comes flowing through in the being of Adeyinka Olarinmoye and Gboluga.

Rounding off, in a style adapted from the tantra: 

"In the moment of the smile, as the spark jumps from face to face, the flow from eye to eye, see the space between as the All".

Adedoyin O'yomade , responding to this essay, complements this summation in an engaging mixture of Nigerian Pidgin English, perhaps the most unifying Nigerian language, Facebook shorthand, and Standard English, the second most pervasive Nigerian language perhaps, relating maternal joy to the transcendence of time::

"The smile....smiling rich so tey no price tag can label am......is costless or se na joy of motherhood abi? to me, is just that when you birth your joy, you will have peace within that ll radiate & glow in all time.......it ll stop the time because is timeless"

This may be translated into standard English as : 

"The smile, smiling so richly that no price can be placed on it.

Is it beyond price or is its significance simply best described as "the joy of motherhood"?

To me, when you give birth to your joy, you will have peace within that will radiate and glow in all time.

It will stop time because it is timeless" .

References

1. The picture is from Adeyinka Olarinmoye's Facebook photo album

2.in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Basho's most famous collection of poetry quoted in at "Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku" :http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm, 
Notes

Kemi Ajiboye presented these aspects of classical Japanese thought on the 

Nigerian Deep thinkers, Metaphysical/Esoteric & Creative Souls Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/137999869730130/)

and at 

COWACArt Facebook group: The Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/158308031011331/).
19 October, 2012 (Wabi-Sabi) and 11th November, 2013(Ma).