HAIKU

In the apocalypse, culture and the continuance thereof may take a sideline to more important things (e.g. killing the undead, surviving the horror and rebuilding the human race). But we must not lose our history and heritage of creativity because this is what differentiates us from animals (as well as coherent speech, war, religion, the ability to write and opposable thumbs).

Creating art, however, can be a somewhat time-consuming and cumbersome activity, and we won’t all have time to sit and create a sprawling oil-painted masterpiece of the City of Naples at Night or devise a new musical based on the life and times of Barbra Streisand.

This is where the Haiku comes in. Short, snappy and to the point, they have all the beauty and meaning of any poem I’ve ever read but with the bite-sized readability of only being seventeen syllables long.

Learning the art of the Haiku also means that we will be able to entertain each other without the worry of being interrupted by the marauding undead and leaving a performance unfinished.

Take for example one of the most well-known Haiku, Basho’s Old Pond which goes like this: 

I’ll leave you for a moment to soak up the beauty and meaning behind these words – but now let’s run this again in a simulation situation.

As you can see from that simulation, the audience were not left wondering how your creative masterpiece concluded and also had time to escape. Imagine if you’d had to finish Homer’s Iliad with over 15,600 verses. I think we can pretty much guarantee you’d all be dead – either from the zombies or from boredom. So, to continue the art of culture and poetry into the post-apocalyptic land, the Haiku is the way forward (and limericks too).