Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Wordsworth's Rainbow and Ours: A Kabbalist Understanding of Beauty -- Being is Believing: The Underpinnings of Walter Benjamin's Deconstruction of Historicism -- Dancing Cranes and Empty Mind: The Fusion of Wu-Chi and T'ai Chi in Ancient Chinese Mountain Poetry -- The Willing Subject and the Non-Willing Subject in the Tao Te Ching and Nietzsche's Hyperborean: -- Dances with Bears: The Beginnings of Western Art -- Vincent Van Gogh's Irises: Venturing upon Dizzy Heights -- Figureless Landscape: The Persistence of the Sublime in American Landscape Painting -- The Essence of Haiku -- A World out of Balance and in Balance: Urban and Nature Haiku -- Narratives of the Heart: Haibun -- On Defining Haibun to a Western Readership -- Tanka: Celebrating the Natural World and the Postmodern Condition -- Note on the Lectures and Essays -- Notes.