Before starting:
(1) Please read the attached files Narrow Road to the Deep North written by basho)
(2) It needs to include the poetry (following by 5-7-5).
(3) When you submit your travel diary, including a floor plan or google map showing your route is optional but effective. You can focus on some places in California or any other place.
Mimicry Assignment Writing Your Own Travel Diary
Pretend it is a rainy day a year or two in the future, long after life has returned to normal after COVID, and you have a day to visit the place where you spent the pandemic. Perhaps it is your room in your parents’ house. Perhaps it is a dorm during lockdown. Perhaps it is somewhere else. Life was so intense and difficult during the extended period of isolation. On this rainy day, just to look at the chair where you zoomed, or the table where you ate, or the sofa where you texted your friends, brings back so many associations.
Alternately: Pretend you are home for winter break in the place where you grew up. Life was so intense when you lived here! Now that you are away at college, just to visit a certain street corner, a certain shop, a certain friend’s house, a certain traffic intersection brings up so many associations.
Alternately: (Choose any location that works for you.)
Your travel diary should have a total of 5 “stations” corresponding to five places in your pandemic place, or on your hometown map, etc. When you submit your travel diary, including a floor plan or google map showing your route is optional but effective.
For each station you need a title (usually the name of the place), a prose section, and at least one haiku. The total assignment should be 1000-1250 words.
In Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho offers vivid descriiptions of physical places and explains why they are dense with historical meaning. In his diary, historical density is often national and poetic: his sites are famous from Japanese history and literature.
In your diary, the dense associations of a place will come from a more personal history. What ideas blew your mind in this classroom or that zoom session? With what special someone did you sunbathe on this lawn? What papers did you struggle to write in this chair? What mind-blowing election news did you learn on this bridge? The trick is to choose places that have an accumulated history, to which, on account of your own strong emotions (and perhaps your own spiritual journey as a student, or a son or daughter, or . . .), you have an intense attachment.
At the end of your prose diary entry, use a hokku (or two) to 1) crystallize/intensify that attachment or 2) evoke a letting-go (!?).
Tips for writing good prose passages
Alternate specific descriiptions of the place and your journey with vivid references to the associations and memories it holds for you.
Give a time stamp (rather than a date stamp) for each entry. “At noon I took Langson Library as my aim.”
Actually walk the route! This will help you pick up vivid details.
Think about Shirane’s “four components” and find versions that correspond to your own inter-related journeys at UCI: 1) spiritual/ascetic, 2) intellectual, 3) poetic, 4) emotional /interrelational /social, etc.
Tips for writing good hokku (haiku)
Place it (or them) at the end or near the end of the entry.
You may honor the 5-7-5 meter or vary it slightly
Use the poem to introduce images and elements rather than repeat what you have already written in the prose section.
If possible, make one of the new elements allude to the name of the place/station, or the season or time of day, like Basho does with 3 March / Hinamatsuri, or like Sora does with Kurokamiyama / (No) Black Hair Mountain
If possible, make one of the new elements allude to a physical, sensory detail associated with the place, like Basho does with his “grass door” or like Sora does with his “changing to summer clothes”
If possible, evoke stillness or stopping: something that has been in motion stops moving. Or, alternately, you could evoke a never-ending motion, your singular, personal memory of this place shown to be part of some larger process still happening to other people (a new family living in Basho’s house).
Grading Criteria:
Interesting choice of titles/places
Good prose passages (following directions)
Good hokku (following tips)
Polished, grammatical prose with few common writing mistakes
An intensely personal story that relates an actual spiritual journey of yours
Honor the word limit (1000-1250 words)