-Also on Baoding's Poems
Shi Ying Street.
Time is a big word and an omnipotent behemoth. In front of it, each of us is like an ant rushing by. What is the era we live in? For this behemoth, we are like a blind man touching an elephant, and we can't find out what this era looks like even if we spend our whole lives. When you have to leave this world, everyone can only say a small and pitiful part that he touched, and it will never be the whole.
The world has prepared many things for you to choose from. Let us go from need to love, from love to love, and finally become our religion, our conversion, and also our grave and birthplace. Writing is like this.
Unique individual life exists between heaven and earth. We constantly ask and explore the truth and secrets of the times. We are always on the road, but we will never reach it. This is both a writer's mission and fate. This situation leaves the writer with only one forced direction, that is, to go deep, from different places, different incisions to the core.
Our times
Our times are extremely complex, contradictory and ambiguous. It is warm, cold, gentle and exciting. It seems to be squeezing, breaking, drifting, gathering and rebirth, but it seems not. The two go hand in hand and are inseparable from each other. In it, no matter curse or praise, there is no escape from the unpredictable situation.
The smog has shrouded our city again and again, and the subsequent integration of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei has made tomorrow full of variables. The land requisition, demolition and opening of the high-speed railway and the integration of the three counties into the urban area will make this ancient city surpass Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital, and become the second in Hebei, which once again triggered speculation of the capital sub-center. The network in the era of WeChat brushing seems to provide convenience and freedom. In fact, we were deprived of our freedom just after tasting a little sweetness. Just like boiling a frog in warm water, let us unconsciously obey him step by step and become his long-term workers and slaves. The optical cable was cut off during construction in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou a few days ago. Many netizens in the country reported that the mobile phone and computer Alipay failed and could not log in, causing chaos in life. The internet makes us willing to be dwarfs and puppets in front of this behemoth, losing our independent behavior and thinking.
As I said before, no one can tell everything in the face of the behemoth of the times. I have to describe our times through the following examples.
The history of mobile phones coming to us is very short. I believe that the invention and use of mobile phones is to facilitate communication between people. However, when we entered the era of smart phones, we found that the mobile phones originally used for communication made many people lower their heads, relatives and friends gathered together, and even the closest relatives of a family talked less and less. We gave the original opportunity to chat and communicate to this cold machine, which made us more and more alienated and lonely.
Xinye County, Henan Province is the birthplace of monkey opera. There are many folk artists who raise and train monkeys in Xinye countryside. The local monkey show has a long history of more than 2,000 years and is an intangible cultural heritage of Henan Province. Wu Cheng'en, the magistrate of Xinye County, was inspired by it and wrote the famous The Journey to the West. During the slack season, monkey charmers in Xinye County will take monkeys away from home and perform monkey shows all over the country. 10 years ago, there were tens of thousands of local monkey performers, but now there are only four or five hundred left. On July 9th, 20 14, four monkey jugglers in Xinye County, Henan Province were arrested and detained by Mudanjiang Forest Public Security Bureau on the grounds that they didn't have a Wild Animal Transport Certificate, which caused an uproar after media attention. Four artists were released on bail, but during their detention, the Monkey King, whom they regarded as relatives, died in Mudanjiang. Finally, at the appeal of the local macaque art association, four artists were acquitted by the judge in Heilongjiang in June+10 this year.
This public event provides us with a model of the times. We have many incisions to go deep into the times: from prosperity to atrophy, how should our ancient cultural heritage be passed down and protected? From criminal detention to voluntary release and finally acquittal, what is the final fate of the four artists without media and public attention? Is the law a rubber band that you can pinch whenever you want? Personally, I am more concerned about the inner feelings of the four artists in this incident. What was the mood of these artists who followed their parents to learn how to train monkeys when they left their hometown and came to the streets of Heilongjiang? When they were detained by the police, how did they feel when they saw macaques like their relatives being taken away rudely? How do they feel when they are trapped in the dark room of the detention center and face the uncertain fate tomorrow? What was their mood when they were released on bail and held the Monkey King's body?
Give another example. Football is the most fanatical sport on our planet. Its fanaticism transcends the country, race, gender and age, and has created thousands of followers of all colors and languages. However, now FIFA President Blatter and senior officials who decide the direction of football are mired in corruption. A few days before Blatter was about to participate in the new FIFA presidential election, the judicial organs of Switzerland and the United States simultaneously made efforts to arrest more than a dozen senior officials who had the right to decide the World Cup. They were arrested because these senior officials were suspected of extortion and corruption from the World Cup bid countries. I don't know how crazy fans all over the world should feel about their favorite football.
This is the complexity, contradiction and ambiguity of our time. What do we see when we raise the magnifying glass and aim at a detail? I think, if you are a real writer, you should go deep into the times from such an incision and ask some questions instead of staying on the surface of these black holes.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the complexity, contradiction and ambiguity of the times that Professor Zhang Qinghua of Beijing Normal University describes poetry in this way: the language of poetry must be dark, dark and unexplained, and at the same time it must be opposed, questioned or subverted, because it does not need exact or complete and ultimate rhetoric, but is precisely anti-rhetoric and anti-expression. This is its darkness, enlightenment, poetry and poetry.
The motive force of poetry
Survival and life, these two words will exhaust the poet's life. Good poets and poems need to be born slowly and quietly, but our times are constantly accelerating, splitting and developing. This speed-up is like a sharp double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has brought efficiency to life and work, on the other hand, it has destroyed our hometown in the spiritual world with unprecedented strength.
Huo, a famous poetry critic, has combed China's recent poetry circles and found that homesickness poetry has become one of the important writing directions of contemporary poetry. Why? Hometown is crushed into pieces by the accelerated era, and it is displaced, which forms fierce friction and reaction with the poet's heart, thus making homesick poems appear more and more in the poet's pen.
The poet's mission is to go home. Where is our home in our hearts? When our bodies are constantly comforted by rich and powerful materials, are we suffering from homelessness in our hearts? What is the motivation of poetry writing? Is to ask the world and explore the secrets and truth of the world. It is in the friction, contradiction and interaction between our heart and the outside world that we find the correct position to open the world incision. For the questioning of the times, it is not enough for us to only have and practice rhetorical imagination, but more importantly, historical imagination, which is an important symbol to distinguish coders from excellent poets. Language expression and rhetoric are like a container, whose function is to preserve the author's thoughts and present them to readers. What's the use of this container if we have no thoughts?
This Wednesday, when I was giving a lecture to Chinese students in Baoding College, a student mentioned a key word: "unclean". This word is almost an incision to open the truth. Is there anything clean in this world besides my body? There is nothing clean. No matter how many times you wash it, you can't change this fact until you die. If you don't believe me, put the washed things under the microscope and see what the result is. To say the least, even if what you see under a microscope is clean, it will still be dirty under any microscope that we haven't invented yet. What does this mean? This shows that the so-called cleanliness we see is the surface of things and the illusion of life. We have no means and ability to see clearly at a certain time and place.
So, is it clean? There must be, but it does not exist in this objective world, only in our hearts, and more often in countless moments. So we are contradictory, we will repent and we will struggle. Facing an unclean world, there is a clean life in our unclean bodies and in our hearts. In this context full of paradoxes, we ask the truth and secret of existence and life, which is the driving force of poetry writing. So the famous critic Chen Chao told her students: Don't be afraid of impurity, truth is the only morality of a writer. Impurity is the morality of life, but truth is the morality of writing.
Poetry is not news. They ask the truth in different ways. Poets are not journalists, nor peddlers of conscience and morality. He should try to turn public events into personal expressions. News questioning the truth is to let readers know the form, background, cause and process of the event, and it is a physical surface questioning. Poetry asks for truth, showing the projection and influence of events on the author's heart, entering the texture and cells of events, and showing the living slices of events.
Why do many poetry writers flood with ideas when they are young, but with the growth of age and the deepening of experience, they are discouraged from the predicament of exhaustion? I think, to a great extent, when they were young, they consumed the passion of youth. If they lack the motivation to write, or can't find their own motivation, with the disappearance of youth and passion, they will slowly disappear on the road of writing.
What is a poet?
For such a huge, complex and polysemous era, what should the poet do?
Time is like a surging river, but the retrograde boat can leave us a deep impression on the direction of the river. Don't go with the flow, don't blindly follow, and hold independent opinions. Although it will face greater difficulties and risks, such words will have a sense of the times and history.
Facing the complicated and ambiguous world, questioning is like a developer. If the writer keeps sharp enough questioning, his vague individual life will gradually become clear in the text, which will naturally give birth to a sense of the times and history. Why do you say that? Because questioning is like a beam of light, we can use it with readers on the curtain of the times to see the silhouette of our tiny body projected on it.
For example. I went to Zijingguan a few days ago and climbed the broken Ming Great Wall. After returning from Zijingguan, I wrote several short poems, which were affirmed by poets such as Han and Dongli. I wrote one of them: the broken Ming Great Wall/like a rusty saw, thrown in the mountains/-some saw teeth have been worn out for more than 600 years. What is more difficult to saw than him? //I suspect that the first thing that was sawed off was the gilded lightning/then the iron age, and finally sawed off the earth and the sky/at this moment, he is struggling to saw off my gray bones and dark heart.
At the end of 2009, the Writers Association called on everyone to write about their hometown. In this way, in the first phase of Lotus Lake 20 10, I wrote a set of "Baoding Scenery", one of which was "Zijingguan Great Wall". I said this: winding in the mountains, lingering/passing through love and hate/passing through joys and sorrows/passing through natural and man-made disasters//these broken barriers. The scars left by the war have long been erased. When two poems are put together, the difference between good and bad can be seen at a glance. I tried to write a sense of history in the latter song, because I lacked my own unique cognition and expressed ideas that everyone knew, so he was doomed to lack the value of existence, while in the previous song, I wrote my own personal pain. This kind of monologue pain based on the living environment can make readers look back at history in words.
Living in a complex and ambiguous era, a poet should be sober enough. Here, I want to ask you a question. What is the poet's glory? Is it published in a prestigious journal and won any prestigious awards, or is it the president or chairman? In my opinion, all these mentioned above are the aura given to you by the secular society. In another sense, these auras are lassos. If you indulge in them, you will be trapped by their fatigue until you are killed. The real strength of a poet should be that he chooses to sneak into the depths of the times and constantly ask the world. The brilliance of the poet is his courage and ability to ask about this era. This kind of diving is the process of exploring survival and life.
In this huge, complex and polysemous era, there will not be a universal standard answer. What we can do is not to provide standard answers to readers with our words, but to expand and deepen the doubts and questions. Someone once discussed this problem with me with such anxiety: without standards, wouldn't such writing fall into chaos and blindness? Writing is to present each individual's unique understanding of the world and express his own views rather than those of others. If we unify to a fixed standard, if we cover our hearts and use the megaphone handed over by others, is such writing still meaningful and valuable? It is essential to speak your true and unique thoughts. Those words must be your voice, not the voice of others, what you want to say, not what others want to hear.