Strand's poems are full of a feeling that individuals are powerless in the vast world of alienation, which is similar to Kafka to some extent. He is called "the most alienated mourner". He once said in an interview: "The world is unstoppable and people are very weak. A person doesn't even have the power to deal with his own past and his own history. " (2) A person's growth process is a process of constantly abandoning his own nature and staying away from the most creative source. The world dominates us in a condescending way, teaching us not to imagine and fantasize, but to be a submissive realist, that is, to die young. The poem "Terrible Things Happened" shows the process of the people in the poem killing themselves again with the encouragement of the adults around them (the world).
Relatives bent down and stared expectantly.
They licked their lips with their tongues. I can feel it..
They are urging me. I held the baby in the air.
Piles of broken bottles sparkled in the sun.
A small band is playing an outdated March.
My mother stamped her feet to beat the time.
My father is kissing someone who has been telling others.
A woman is waving. There are some palm trees.
The hills are dotted with orange buttonwood trees.
High, turbulent clouds swept over their heads. "Go on, young man,"
I heard someone say, "Go on."
I have been wondering whether it will rain.
It's getting dark. There was no thunder.
"Break his leg," said one of my aunts.
"Now give him a kiss." I did as I was told.
Trees bend in the cold tropical wind.
The baby didn't scream, but I remember the sigh.
When I reached for his small lungs, they were already in the air.
Shake off the flies. Relatives cheered.
It's about time I gave up.
Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
It's in the receiver. When I slept, his hair was curled up.
There is a familiar face hole around the pillow; anywhere
I can find his feet. He is my whole life.
("Something terrible happened")
Here, poets are both persecutors and victims. This duality of consciousness allows the poet to observe clearly from his own distance to the maximum extent, thus achieving the objective effect of photography and highlighting the cruelty of alienation. Poems such as "The Postman" and "The Tunnel" all show this discovery: the ego is someone else, even something else. The persecutor is himself and the victim is someone else. And the others are themselves. This holistic self-view of the same origin of all things casts a mysterious and mixed color on strand's poems, and finally realizes the cancellation of self. Ego is the deepest source of alienation. "Others are hell" (Sartre). In modern society, the incommensurability of communication between people has reached the point where it is difficult for people to have any other relationship except interest relationship. As long as the other exists, the alienation of self is inevitable. The other has the function of ossifying self into things and things, similar to Medusa's eyes in Greek mythology. When the existence of self becomes his existence, alienation becomes possible. People who indulge in this with others have lost their real existence. When they get along with others, they just want to treat others as things and things, and try their best to get rid of their objectified position in the eyes of others. Under the gaze of others, the pure subject will cease to exist. Heidegger described the mutual existence of human beings as "opposing each other, not taking photos with each other, ignoring each other and being irrelevant ... The above-mentioned last few incomplete and indifferent models can illustrate the characteristics of ordinary mutual existence." Ordinary people seek differences, and wise people seek common ground. The "ultimate self-cancellation" advocated by strand does not mean a metaphysical appeal to death, but a rediscovery of the essential identity of all things. He divided himself to observe and examine himself, and finally equated himself with the other. This change in status and identity makes his poems "fair" and "objective" in observation. Breaking self and privatization means betraying the "excuse of minimization", thus becoming a fair observer and witness of events and landscapes, and moving from "minimization" to "maximization" that is generally concerned. He uses personality to achieve impersonality. The "I" in his poems is neither a "personality", that is, the "I" representing everything, nor a complete confession. When the binary self formed by self-division (even the multiple selves that constantly surpass each other) recombines in the nightmare situation, it has actually led to the final cancellation of the self. The ego is others and other things, and others are not themselves. In this chain reaction, the self can never be condensed into an isolated fixed position, and it will wander and change endlessly. This kind of self-cancelling voice is helpful for poets to explore the composition and definition of individuals in the contemporary world. In this world, the "thrown" individual does not feel the real connection and function, except to become an empty filler. As he said in Keeping Things Whole: "In the field/I am the field/blank. /This is/often the case. Wherever I am, I am the missing thing. //When I walk/I separate the air/The air always/enters/fills my body/my former space//We all have reasons/to move. /I move/keep things intact. " (3) For a comfortable universe, people are redundant. The real job of the ego is to give up: give up this place, give up this companion, and give up all recognizable physical marks except beauty itself. This kind of abandonment has never been hindered by personality. This extreme abandonment should not be confused with humility or asceticism. In the process of deepening and transcending self-multiplicity, the poet gained what he called "the distance of sympathy". The individual "I" as the speaker in poetry inadvertently counteracts the intentional trend of the theme towards justice and objectivity. Therefore, in his poems, we can often find this dialectical deadlock, the intermediary between self and nothingness realized in simple language-"come here/be rewarded: nothing is allowed, nothing is taken away." /We have no heart or my saving grace,/There is no place to go and there is no reason to stay. " (Come here) There is a secret identity between people, people and society, and people and nature. There is a universal correspondence and real essence behind seemingly unrelated or diametrically opposite things, but things are separated from this overall identity because of the naming (civilization) of things by language. Therefore, life and death, high and low, past and future, imagination and reality, politics and art, subjectivity and objectivity are all special forms of a common problem, which is the state of human existence.
From a higher perspective, these binary contradictions will tend to disappear.
Strand was influenced by many factors, including Brazilian poets andrade, Wallace Stevens and, of course, Borges. His style is a wonderful mixture of psychological deviance and nightmare, and he intervenes in it from time to time with persistence and alienation.
Staring at nothingness means knowing it with your heart.
We will all be involved in everything and exposed to the wind.
I just don't think I can catch somewhere nearby.
(Night on the porch)
Although strand also wrote short stories, he was still most famous for his poems, and Borges' influence on him was most vivid in his earliest anthology. Among them, the significance that strand faces is that his ego is the nightmare of the other, and he often describes a dreamy and sometimes Borges-style compound cycle world, where "the worst has been waiting near the next corner, or hiding in the branches of a dry/shaky sick tree, hesitating/whether to. Strand's later works, the most famous of which are The Story of Our Life and Endless Stories, all bear a trace of self-reference, which is similar to the camouflage paper in Borges' short stories. They usually follow a recursive or circular mode of thinking, similar to the structure of the library of Babel. But Borges' most obvious and important influence on him can be seen in strand's early masterpiece Byakki Smoker. Mirror is one of Borges' favorite themes, which has both traditional and prototype other, narcissism and meditation significance. Biai casares said in his novel Chuang, Wu Keba, Obis Tius, "Mirrors and sexual intercourse are abhorrent because they have multiplied the number of people." (4) Similarly, in strand's poems, the speaker's self is doubled in the reflection of the mirror and becomes the second self, "a huge green moon/a bruise covered with light." Similar to Borges' other two novels Borges and I and1August 25th, 983, the speaker said to himself:
There you are.
Your face is white, curved and swollen.
A corpse with hair falling off
Dull and out of proportion.
Buried in the darkness of your pocket,
Your hands are still.
You didn't wake up in the West Lake.
Your skin is asleep.
Your eyes are lying.
In the deep blue eye socket,
cannot reach ...
Compare Borges' novels1August 25th, 983;
I met myself face to face under the ruthless light. On that narrow iron bed, I was sitting with my back to me, looking older, thinner and paler, staring at the plaster decorative lines at the height of the room. Then I heard a voice. That's not exactly my voice; It's the kind of unpleasant sound that I often hear on my tape recorder.
"That's strange," said the voice. "We are two people, the same person. But in the dream, this is nothing strange. " ⑤
Someone once asked strand if Borges was the most influential poet. Strand replied, "Oh, yes, but not his poems, but his novels. Borges is such an amazing writer, especially in some aspects. I especially like his Tron, Ukbar, Obis Te Tius. "
This plural writing is exactly the same as Rambo's "I am another person" and Jacques Lacan's "Unconsciousness is another person talking". This self is a dumb victim of social exclusion and has been sterilized. He calmly and desperately told us a story of alienation-how someone stood motionless on his lawn and upset him; The last straw, he had to dig a tunnel to the neighbor's yard. "I'm too tired to get out of the front of the house/stand there/can't move or even talk. I hope/someone can help me." /I feel like I'm being observed/Sometimes I hear a man's voice,/But I didn't do anything/I've been waiting for many days. "("Tunnel ")
We can also find this kind of self-replication and circulation similar to poetry in the woodcuts and lithographs of Dutch graphic artist escher. A core idea of escher's performance is self-replication, and the lithograph Hand-to-Hand Painting embodies this idea-the way of mutual painting is the way of conscious thinking and self-construction. Here, self and self-replication are interrelated and equal. Self-replication has a greater function-the principle of everything in the world is essentially self-replication. From the perspective of information theory, we humans are indeed established in this way, because every cell in our body carries the complete information of our individuals in the form of DNA. The whole is contained in each part, and some parts are expanded into a whole. At a deeper level, self-replication is the result of mutual reflection and interleaving of our cognitive world. Each of us is like a character reading his own story in a book, or like a mirror reflecting his own scenery. The interweaving of different worlds offsets the differences between them, so that things can be both themselves and other things, even anything. Therefore, illusion and reality, cause and effect can be superficial to each other and confuse people. The fictional nature of metaphysical opposition between the inside and the outside can be illustrated by the famous "Mbiusstrip", which was first created by the German mathematician Augustus Bius (1790- 1868). Mobius tape is easy to make. Just twist the paper 180 degrees and stick the two ends with glue or tape, and it becomes a curved surface with only one side and one side. This interesting property enables you to imagine an ant crawling along the Mobius belt, and then it can crawl all over the belt without crossing the edge of the belt. You will find that they are not crawling on opposite sides, but all crawling on one side. To prove this point, just take a pencil and draw lines continuously without leaving the paper. This transformation of spatial position makes a closed space communicate with the outside world, and it is impossible to tell which is inside, which is outside, which is front and which is back. Many interesting things evolved from this: 1882, the famous mathematician Felix Klein discovered the famous "bottle" named after him.
This is a closed surface like a sphere (that is, there is no edge), but there is only one face. We can say that the ball has two sides-the outside and the inside. If an ant crawls on the outer surface of a ball, it can't crawl on the inner surface without biting a hole in the ball. But Klein bottles are different. It is easy to imagine that an ant crawling outside the bottle can easily climb into the bottle through the bottleneck-in fact, there is no difference between inside and outside the Klein bottle!
193 1 year, mathematician godel put forward a radical "incompleteness theorem"-any closed system contains unprovable propositions within the system itself. This theorem explains why the recursive paradox of "this statement is false" can exist in a language system, but it cannot be satisfactorily understood within the system. To understand such a statement, we need to jump to a higher "meta" level outside the language system. The thinking mode of recursive network and meta-mathematics opens the door for computers and artificial intelligence.
In strand's poems, subjectivity is no longer a unified and metaphysical "self", but has fallen into a paradoxical "singular cycle" and been re-conceptualized. "Self" is now a by-product of a mechanical structure, in which an imaginary mind imagines itself, so endlessly. Stevens' later poems are also characterized by his "highest fiction" as an unattainable and idealized "meta" poetics. "Recursive self" cancels the existence of self, and not only subjectivity falls into the recursive cycle of mechanics, but also language falls into the referential cycle. In order to transcend these strange circles, we may turn to the state of music and integrate the lower limit of language with the upper limit of music. In this state, self and language are no longer referential and expressive, but expressive and self-identified.
In mark strand's The Mysterious Story of Our Life, the poet shows this strange recursive structure and super poor reasoning in the form of poetry, which is similar to escher's self-devouring painting. It makes us think that we are not only reading or checking our life stories, but also writing our life stories. We are both actors and audiences in the drama of life. It is not enough to know what we have done. In a very real sense, we must also write ourselves as being.
We are reading our life story.
As if we were in it,
It seems that we have finished writing.
This happens again and again.
In one chapter,
I leaned back and pushed the book aside.
Because the book says
This is what I'm doing.
I leaned back and began to write something about the book.
I wrote, I hope to get out of this book.
Get out of my life and enter another life.
I put down my pen.
The book says: He put down his pen.
Turn around and watch her read.
About her own love.
Books are more accurate than we thought.
Books and stories of our lives seem to have their own lives, which determine what the narrator does and writes. Moreover, this book seems to be self-limited, almost as if it had predetermined the narrator's life, because it is "accurate" and frightening. However, the author wants to get out of the book, perhaps from the past, and he seems unable to do so. The past binds us because it makes us possible.
People in the poem try to believe that life is more than what is written in the book, but when they disagree about whether life is more, they find that the part they disagree with is written in the book:
I woke up this morning believing.
We don't live much.
The story of our life.
When you disagree, I point out
The position of the part you disagree with in the book.
When you fell asleep, I began to read.
When they are written down.
The mysterious part you once guessed.
When they become part of the story,
I became uninterested.
Before we participate in events, they often seem attractive and even "mysterious", but once we experience them, they become dull and uninteresting, even though they are still a part of us. Only when you look at it from a certain distance, only when you are half forgotten, can the "book" become interesting again:
After you fell asleep this morning.
I began to turn to the front page of the book:
It's like dreaming of childhood,
A lot of things seem to be disappearing,
So many things seem to have come back to life.
I don't know what to do.
The book says: those moments are his books.
A cold crown was placed uneasily on his head.
He is a temporary ruler with internal and external disharmony,
Anxious in his own kingdom.
Obviously, because we have forgotten what it was like as a child, it is interesting to review that part of the book again. The cynicism that most of us brought into adult life has disappeared. From a distance, childhood seems to be a carefree and optimistic time.
Dreaming, like looking back on our childhood, is another way to go beyond "books", at least to escape from them.
Before you wake up
I read another part describing your absence.
It tells you how to reverse in sleep.
The course of your life.
I was moved by my loneliness when I was reading.
Knowing how I feel is often
A story that may never be told.
Rough and unsuccessful forms.
Dreaming is trying to regain control of your life, beyond "your life story" and become more than the sum of your past. It doesn't even need to be a literal dream; Personal desire, "an unsuccessful form of a story" may also be a way to surpass yourself. When we turn the page of the past, they illuminate everything we think and everything we will believe:
Every page is like a candle.
Move in your mind.
Every moment is like a hopeless reason.
If only we could stop reading.
He never wants to read another book again.
Unfortunately, just looking back on the past does not always inspire us; In fact, it just produces a sense of despair. What inspires us most is the future and hope for a better future.
One of the mistakes in this book is that it only reveals what happened in the past:
Books never discuss the reasons for love.
It claims that chaos is a necessity.
It never explains. It reveals.
Records of past events only reveal what happened; It doesn't explain why they happen. The event itself can't even really reveal who we are. Of course, knowing what happened is the first step of self-discovery.
As the poem unfolds, it is gradually obvious that the men and women in the poem have gradually stopped loving each other:
We can't stand loneliness.
This book continues.
They became silent and didn't know how to start.
The necessary dialogue.
The words that initially led to division,
Caused loneliness.
They waited.
They turned the pages, hoping
What will happen.
They will piece together their lives in secret:
Every failure is forgiven because it cannot be tested.
Every pain is rewarding, because it is not real.
They do nothing.
Although it is words that divide two people, only more words, words that have never been said, can bridge the gap between them. Because they haven't heard words from each other that can overcome their differences, they must "secretly piece together their lives." It is useless to look back on the past unless people are willing to do something about it.
Ironically, the people in the poem seem to be less real than those in the book:
They sat side by side on the sofa.
They are one of our own.
Replication is a ghost of boredom.
Their posture is very tired.
They stared at the book.
Because of their ignorance,
And unwilling to give up.
They sat side by side on the sofa.
They are destined to accept the fact.
They will accept any fact.
Books must be written.
Must read.
Besides, they are books.
They are nothing.
The people in the poem are no longer really alive; They turned themselves into a pure shadow of the past, frightened by their earlier naivety, ready to give up and accept the truth. If they are unwilling to accept failure, they now accept the idea that they are just their past and nothing more.
As a member of neo-surrealism, mark strand not only profoundly demonstrated the crisis of alienation prevalent in modern society, but also showed the courage to refuse alienation. Instead of going to nothingness, he had an endless dialogue between words and nothingness. The elimination of self is not only the reason for his mourning, but also the beginning of his celebration of the birth of a new life. Therefore, his elegy always reveals a touch of cheerful and bright color under the background of depression. As Pass said, "mark strand chose the road of negation, and he took loss as the first step to perfection." This kind of negation is actually a real affirmation, because it bears witness to the power of giving up-to gain life, you must give up life first.
(1) (2) See Important Foreign Poets in the 20th Century, translated by Wang Jiaxin, Henan People's Publishing House,1992,539, 54 1 page.
③ See Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry after 1940, translated by Ma Yongbo, Beijing Normal University Press,1999,437 pages.
(4) (5) See Complete Works of Borges, novel volume, translated by Wang Yongnian, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 1999, p. 73, p. 473.
6. See Postmodern Science edited by David Griffin, translated by Ma, Central Compilation and Publishing House, 2004, 93 pages.