I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions ...
Why does Basho travel? To spread word of his style, his aesthetic and his own reputation - he needed disciples as a poet master. Then there is the desire to visit beautiful scenes - Mount Yoshino, Sarashina and the islands of Matsushima which had, of course, been written about by other poets. Nature and culture thus come together as one, as David Barnhill notes in his introduction to his indispensible edition of Basho's writings which I am paraphrasing here; the Japanese have a word - utamakura - for those places that have associations with literature.
Basho - an ancient to us - also sought to bring himself into contact with the ancients. But then, more than literary, Basho's journeys were religious, and his poetry was part of his religious life. To travel means to leave behind attachments, and to cultivate that desirelessness that is the goal of Buddhism. Wasn't life itself a journey? And each day? After a sleepless night, Basho writes in a travel journal, as Barnhill quotes,
My distant journey remained, I was anxious about my illness, and yet this was a pilgrimage to far places, a resignation to self-abandonment and impernanence. Death might come by the roadside but that is heaven's will.
A journey then, is a way of experiencing life in its transience, to welcome the uncertainty of fate, of heaven's will.
Barnhill reminds us of the East Asian view of nature with great elegance.
What is natural is what exists according to its true nature. It is an 'adverbial' sense of natural, since it refers to a way of being. Humans are fully a part of nature: essentially we are natural. However, we have the distinctive ability to act contrary to our nature: existentially we usually live unnaturally.
Basho's asceticism, then, the desire to cultivate and discipline himself through journeying is an attempt to rejoin nature. To create poetry is to partake of the greater creation that is nature; one must not strive to write poems, acting according to the desires of the self, but let them arise. Culture and nature are not be thought in opposition in Basho's poetic practice. Just as the notion of utamakura joins a place of natural beauty celebrated in literary history, his poems and travel journals are both part of a long literary tradition and its reawakening in the face of a fresh encounter with the natural world.
Barnhill teaches us another word - zōka, the Creative as a term 'for the world's unceasing and spontaneous disposition to give rise to beautiful and skillful transformations throughout the natural world. True art is a participation in nature's own creativity'. We should note, too, that Basho took his name (how wonderful, the idea a poet should take a name - or was he given it? was it what he received from nature's zōka?) from the banana or plantain tree 'precisely because it was so vulnerable to nature elements and "useless"'.
A secret: I enjoy reading of a poet's literary philosophy as much (more than?) as reading the poems themselves (if there is such a thing: the poems themselves). Basho was a great master of haibun, haikai prose, which usually include a hokku poem, but can be considered as a form of prose poetry. Can't commentary on poetry, on another's poems become a similar form of poetry, partaking of the same creative act - or is it upon the Creative itself, zōka that they would both draw?