You observe the clouds up close.
Gu Cheng first came into contact with this poem many years ago. I think he was still in junior high school in his hometown. In a Chinese class, the teacher took out this poem and explained it to us. It took half a class to understand. I feel unhappy when I think about it now. Even an expert in literature, there are many poems that I still can't understand. How do a group of junior high school students know the general idea? Now I have forgotten what the teacher said, but although I didn't understand it, this poem left a deep impression on my mind. I haven't read poetry since I went to college. Not long ago, it occurred to me that I made a considerable study of the misty poetry movement in the 1980s, and this masterpiece of Gu Cheng was inevitable.
When I got this poem, I believe that, like most readers, my first feeling was that I didn't know what to say and was confused. I have a vague feeling that the author seems to want to tell us something, but I can't grasp it and I'm not sure. I have to turn to the analysis in the book. To tell the truth, what depresses me is that after reading the analysis, I still have a little knowledge, and I don't fully understand the author's motivation and emotion in writing this poem. Later, I went to look up a lot of information about the poet Gu Cheng and learned about Gu Cheng. Finally, one afternoon, when I was still in a daze in bed and the lazy sunshine hit the bedside, I became a Gu Cheng at that moment, and the meaning of this poem jumped into my head like a cricket.
There is no doubt that this is an excellent short poem, which leaves readers with such a huge space for thinking that the discussion about this poem has hardly stopped for many years. However, at that moment, I realized the relationship between "you" and "me", which has been ignored by people and is an important clue to open Gu Cheng's personal world. I put forward a hypothesis that if "you" and "I" in the poem are all reversed: I,
See you later,
Watch the clouds later. You think I'm watching you from a distance,
I see the clouds close to me.
Isn't this a familiar portrayal of Gu Cheng himself?
Gu Cheng spent his whole life trying to stay away from the "human society" he hated, and at the same time showed his infinite desire for nature. From his poem, "Wheels run over the grass of thyme and wild chrysanthemum/Crickets welcome me,/Shake the strings. /I melt my hope into the fragrance of flowers/The night is like a valley,/The day is like a peak. /Go to sleep! Close your eyes./The world has nothing to do with me. " (Life Fantasia) "My heart,/is a city,/the smallest city. /There is no messy market,/There are not many residents,/It's very deserted,/It's very deserted. " ("I am a small town"), so that I finally retired to Rapids Island and killed my wife and committed suicide. The author only implicitly changed "I" into "you" in the poem, forming a mode of looking at himself, not only wanting to discover himself, but also wanting to hide himself, alienating society and yearning for nature. I think this is the author's creative intention.
Anyone who has some experience in writing poetry must have experienced how poetry is created. I don't know the rest. I often hold two occasionally witty sentences myself, and then put myself in a confused state, feeling a bit like "drunk". I write a few inexplicable sentences to form a poem called modernism. Whether I am a pseudo-poet with a correct creative attitude or a pseudo-poet with a correct creative method, one thing is certain: my mind is often unclear during the creative process, which can also be said to be logical confusion. When Gu Gong recalled his son, there was such a passage:
"When my son writes poetry, it seems that he rarely drops it on the console table. Instead, he puts an original ballpoint pen on the pillow and turns it into a dancing shadow, scene, interpretation, thoughts ... combined into words and sentences. His hand touched the pen, touched the black (he often doesn't open his eyes when writing), and scribbled it down. Sometimes, the pen can't touch the paper (is the naughty little book under the bed? ) He carved this sentence on the wall beside the pillow. Alas, the wall where he sleeps is always covered with poems; There are also many cartoon figures, dogs and pigs ... His famous sentence "The night gave me black eyes, but I used it to find light" was smeared on the wall in such obscurity and illusion. " (Gu Shi)
So this feature of modern poetry determines that the logic of poetry is not very strong. Moreover, in many poetry reviews, critics often borrow quotations from others and analyze the whole poem word by word with eloquent theoretical knowledge. Take this poem as an example. Mr. Xiong Bingming used Sartre's exposition on existentialism to illustrate the theme of this poem in his "On a Vague Poetry-Gu Cheng's Far and Near". He thinks that "you who look at the clouds" and I have the same hobbies and are connected with each other, so "I think you are very close to me". When you look at me, you no longer belong to the object being looked at, and I am no longer a pure subject. Both subjects should strive for the status of subject, reducing each other to objects and turning them into tools. This is the basic conflict between people. While I deeply admire Mr. Xiong's profound theoretical knowledge, I also have a question: Does Gu Cheng think so? Will a poet with eyes open, dark and chaotic logic think of Sartre's existentialism? Objectively speaking, it is impossible, which can only be explained as a philosophical mind, but not as creative intention and motivation. Literary writing is a process of unity of sensibility and rationality, especially when poetry is created, sensibility often overwhelms rationality, so it is often disastrous to analyze the consequences of poetry with a purely rational eye in the process of making comments.
Personally, I think it is particularly important to understand this kind of lyric short poems and capture the author's mood at that time. Lin Daiyu sighed, "Flowers are flying all over the sky, and the red fragrance is broken." "Don't accept beauty bone, cover the pure land; At this time, Baoyu seems to be only an image portrayal of the fate of falling flowers, so he just nodded and sighed. The next situation is different. " Who knows when he buried the flowers today? "Let's look at the fading flowers in spring. It is the time when beauty dies of old age. If you don't mourn for me, I don't know that flowers will fall and people will die. " These poems let Baoyu connect the fallen flower with the poet, with himself, from flowers to people, from people to himself, and finally "unconsciously landed on the hillside." This is a typical process of poetry appreciation. Poets inject feelings into their own works, and readers can only re-extract such feelings from poems if they personally feel the author's mood and even become an author. But such an experience is hard to tell! Often only after reading the poem carefully, at a casual moment, I looked up at the clouds and looked down at the running water, and then I suddenly realized it, so I left with a smile.