With this poem Basho invented a new form of Zen literary art, and Haiku was never the same afterward. To write this kind of poem, the artist must completely disengage--if only for an instant--all his interpretive faculties. His mind becomes one with the world around him, allowing his craft to operate instinctively in recording the image he perceives. For a moment he is privy to the inexpressible truth of Zen--that the transient is merely part of the eternal--and this instantaneous perception moves directly from his senses to his innermost understanding, without having to travel through his interpretive faculties. Earlier Zen writings in both Japan and China had described this process, but none had captured the phenomenon itself. By catching the momentary at the very instant of its collision with the eternal, Basho could produce a high-speed snapshot of the trigger mechanism of Zen enlightenment. In a modern metaphor, the Haiku became a Zen hologram, in which all the information necessary to re-create a large three-dimensional phenomenon was coded into a minuscule key. Any interpretation of the phenomenon would be redundant to a Zen adept, since the philosophical significance would re-create itself spontaneously from the critical images recorded in the poem. Thus a perfect Haiku is not about the moment of Zen enlightenment; it is that moment frozen in time and ready to be released in the listener's mind. Haiku is the most dehumanized of all poetry. Instead of the artist's sensations and feelings, we get simply the names of things. By Western standards they are hardly poems at all, merely a rather abbreviated list. As the critic-poet Kenneth Yasuda has pointed out, a Haiku poet does not give us meaning, he gives us objects that have meaning; he does not describe, he presents.7 And unlike the poetry of the No, Haiku seems a form strangely devoid of symbolism. The tone seems matter-of- fact, even when touching upon the most potentially emotional of subjects. Take, for example, Basho's poem composed at the grave of one of his beloved pupils. _Tsuka mo ugoke _Grave mound, shake too! _waga naku koe wa _My wailing voice-- _aki-no-kaze _the autumn wind.8 No betrayal of emotion here, simply a comparison of his grief- ridden voice, a transient thing, with the eternal autumn wind. It is a Zen moment of recognition, devoid of emotion or self-pity, and yet somehow our sympathies spring alive, touching us in a way that the early classical poems on the passage of time never could.