There is something in us which longs for the past. Whatever this is tugs us away from home every spring, out to the field. First we linger in the oasis of Damascus for a time; then, bags filled, we travel northwards, across the desert.
Tourist buses pass
unmarked mounds covered in grass --
caravanserai.
[Basho wrote "The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel" (Oi no Kobumi), an account of his journey from Edo to Suma in 1687-8. ‘The readers will find in my diary a random collection of what I have seen on the road,’ Basho said (in Yobuyuki Yuasa's translation). These Records of a Travel-Worn Dig-Bag are a poor imitation, haphazardly drawing on travels to the Near East for the purpose of archaeological fieldwork: the survey, recording, excavation and processing of faint material traces of past lives. Basho added that his Records were ‘little more than the babble of the intoxicated and the rambling talk of the dreaming, and therefore my readers are kindly requested to take them as such.’ The Student can hardly ask more than does Basho; indeed little here has the full grandeur of either dreams or drunkeness.
This mixture of prose and haiku is known as haibun.]
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