Hammy
I am timid by nature, so I especially admire heroes.
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1967, I curled up in a mud house converted by Antang in Wu Shan. Ventilation all the year round, dark and humid, less sunshine. Fortunately, even in the hot summer, it is very cool here, far away from the crazy noise in the street. I used this rare silence to reread Julius Fucik-all other books were destroyed by the fire of the Great Revolution, but I was lucky enough to keep his. The more I read it, the more I feel that the personality charm of this Czech journalist, writer and immortal anti-fascist hero who embodies Prague spirit with his own life illuminates this darkness and warms my heart.
I want to hang his famous words on the wall. But in those years, "I can assure Chairman Mao" that no one would do this. But I have to do this.
The money saved for buying food bought paper, pens, ink and pigments, scrubbed three boards with thin black skin and half height, and painted a mud wall. I invited my old friend lujun (whose handwriting is good) and wrote a lot of quotations from Mao Zedong, such as "The road is tortuous and the future is bright" and "The people, only the people, are the driving force to create history", which were neatly pasted all over the room. At the same time, a whole pile of white walls was set aside, and Fu Qike's famous words written on light blue drawing paper by Lu Jun in official script were affixed: "I love life and fight for it. I love you, people, and I am happy when you answer me with the same love; I was sad when you didn't know me. Please forgive me who I have offended; Who have I made happy? Please don't feel sorry for me. Let my name not cause sadness in anyone's heart. ..... If tears can help you wash away the sadness in your heart, then you can burst into tears. But don't pity me. I live for happiness and die for happiness. It is unfair to put a sad angel on my grave. " I chose Liu Liaoyi's translator.
Then, I climbed up the mountain and picked the emerald cypress leaves, lined them in the lower right of the famous portrait of Fouchik by Swabinski, which I had treasured for many years, and put them in the original photo frame where my parents' wedding photos were stored (at this time, they had already gone to heaven prematurely) (the wedding photos belonged to the "four seniors" and had already been hidden elsewhere), and fell in the upper left corner of that famous saying.
Suddenly, the whole white wall looks bright and elegant. The dark room seemed to flash a ray of sunshine. ...
All this was done by our three brothers and two or three friends, and we quarreled for a long time. The revolutionary masses who only heard the sound but didn't see what we were doing have reported it.
As soon as my friends left, Comrade S, a registered policeman, came in with measured steps. His eyes glanced around slowly, didn't see anything unusual, and finally his eyes rested on Fu Qike.
For a long time, he said to himself:
"This man's hair is really beautiful!"
A few days later, a friend of a friend heard that such an "inappropriate person" lived on the mountain. He happened to have some film in his Leica camera when he went up the mountain. He took this shot for me in front of Fu Qike and his famous sentence (as shown below).
Because there is no flash, the photo is not sensitive enough, but you can still see the shadow of the sun in the small eyes of people in the shadow.
Nine years later, in October, the sun finally shone on the earth.
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Second, he was born in the 1960s.
Zhao Baitian
In a letter from Zhengzhou, Xu Hui talked about how easily people are deceived by appearances, and felt heartfelt "glad" that he and I were born in the 1960s. He talked about his work-"the power to connect generations and form a whole." In that short letter, Xu Hui recommended "Our Generation" by his good friend Li Wan to me, saying that the text he compiled and distributed was an excellent summary of "people born in the 1960s".
I am an enthusiastic reader of Li Wan's Cultural Music Criticism. He combs and criticizes the fashion in his ears, looking for a beautiful voice in the digital age where science and technology are supreme. However, it is precisely Xu Hui's Our Generation that I have never read. Open the sample issue of Oriental Art (No.6, 1996), and a striking title pops up: Portrait of a generation, written by Li Wan. In this article, starting with the description of Bob Dylan's concert in the 1960s in dickstein's Gate of Eden, Li Wan's music criticism conveys a new flavor. He is no longer just a voice descriptor and chaser, but his eyes turned to a huge social collective-what Li Wan called a "generation". What is a generation? Li Wan said that "a generation is the fate of a certain * * *", that is, everyone can't escape the experience of * * * ".
Different from the "Writers of the 1960s" published by a literary publication in the early 1990s, I realized that Xu Hui and Li Wan put more energy into the description of this generation's thoughts and the research on the cultural feelings and social life that produced this generation's unique endowment. The essence of naming a generation is to confirm the conscious identity of a generation and "form a whole force". This is the ambition of Xu Hui, who is located in the Central Plains (I wonder if his friend Li Wan thinks so), and it will be very exciting to listen.
In my letter to Xu Hui, I talked about my understanding of my birth time: "I was born in the last summer of 1960s. I think it is a pity for us who were born in the last few years of the 1960s: when we began to have memories, it was in the middle and late 1970s. The psychedelic passion of the 1960s is not our history, because we have no memory of it. The 1960s was just a symbol, a symbol of our birth. In the early days of my growth, I was surrounded by the laissez-faire and boring air in the countryside, the free-flowing sunshine and all kinds of insects flying in the countryside. Old, read a book, took part in a job. Money shows its omnipotent power, and the world is full of gray material bubbles ... Li Wan said that we are' adherents of the Red Age' (see Portrait of a Generation), which is true. Red came into our eyes, and it became a sad and charming fairy tale after a long time ... "At first, he seemed to tell us a love story:" This year, he was twenty-seven years old, but he has already begun to recall. ..... He began to recall, so nobody watched, so unforgettable, so sad. The singer cried, and he remembered what he and his girlfriend had carved on the tree in front of the Eighth Lieutenant Colonel. At this time, he is singing "Youth Without Regret". " (I remembered it so early, read 1997,No. 10)
It was Li Wan's judgment to "start remembering so early", but when he said it, it was more like expressing his surprise (he later used the heavier word "shock"). He was shocked by so many people. So young, I was "moved by the past" and entered the river of memories, from Dou Wei's Sunny Days to Zhang Peng's Walking in an Instant to Duk-chul Kim's Fantasy Pastoral ... Are memories branded with the emotions of this group of people? As a result, he once again entered the proposition of "the generation born in the 1960s", and his thinking on this continued his thinking since The Portrait of a Generation, and further advanced to the essence: "A generation is not a concept of time in essence, but a group of people with the same fate. From the beginning, I showed a kind of * * * experience, and later I showed helplessness to this experience, and my future life will be affected by this experience. " So, what is the same experience of this generation? Singing in the window of the westbound train, seeing the Big Dipper, it's still early to get on the train; It's too late to watch the stock market on Hanxian BP machine while listening to teacher Baifa's talk about customs exchange. Xu Hui, whom Li Wan called "a theorist who has a deep understanding of this generation", quoted a passage from his alienation here. This passage reveals the life image of this generation, which is strikingly similar to what I thought in my letter (we all mentioned the word regret). The difference is that there is a mature atmosphere in expression. Xu Hui said, "I once put forward the concept of' people born in the 1960s'. When the world is in a moment of upheaval, we are still ignorant. When we grow up, we hear and recall all kinds of wonderful deeds and scenery of that great era, and our regrets are so great. We were easily thrown out of the sixties and became its insignificant ending and a feather. "
Just when I talked with Xu Hui that the 1960s was a "symbol", Xu Hui had given this generation an ironic definition by an album published by Cui Jian 1994: the egg laid by the red flag, but it was laid too late. This is the fate of this generation in Xu Hui's eyes, unwilling to be mediocre because of catching up with the end of the great era, and difficult to make a difference because of the increasingly standardized and organized environment.
Can a group of people born in this decade be named as a whole? Perhaps it is an extension of Zhang Chu's "I grew up in an ideal broken age", and Xu Hui gave a "genius generation in fragments" (he practiced this idea in a young academic journal and tried to describe it). This is not without self-confidence, but it also acquiesces that singing in memories is the only way to save this generation of elites? Because the singers represented by this generation tend to focus on the experiences in the early years of their lives, Li Wan is labeled as an "ambitious but talented" generation (this may be a kind of self-mockery? He pointed out that the biggest symbol of this generation is: experiencing brilliance in imagination.
Of course, Li Wan also described some other more profound signs: fantasy and even sleepwalking temperament, natural sense of distance, extreme contradiction, unclear expression, marginalization, waiting and seeing (he was born outside the body, revolution outside the body), being born in the urban-rural fringe, natural sadness and so on. Li Wan said that distance is the core of this generation, and obscurity is a way for them to face the world. It is their habit to be sentimental about the past, keep their distance from reality, pour out their feelings to themselves and worry about the future. In the above description of Li Wan, I am more inclined to agree with his "fantasy" and "wandering" temperament found in Gao, Zhang Chu and Dou Wei. The combined meaning of these two words more accurately conveys the life and emotional forms of this generation. I think this form may be called: Wandering Generation.
Their childhood was wandering. Lonely rural scenery, kites and kitchen smoke occasionally catch the eye of death, crazy games and an event have aroused a small wave in their young hearts. These familiar scenes and the emotions they aroused in the 1970s became their first memories of life. In my previous poetry writing, I recorded such vagrancy: "In the 1970s, a child looked at the broken sun in a puddle; in the 1970s, two children made a bet on their way from school; in the 1970s, a group of young wild horses ran through a low and humid neighborhood, and the dust kept raising for three days; …/in the 1970s, the winter wind blew huge icicles/like shining nails/in the 1970s. When singing "The Age of White Dress Fluttering", it is more of a state of mind of remembering and recalling. They recognized and loved that era in their hearts, and a group of people refused to grow up? ) Boys, they believe that the best memories of life are always the first days (childhood and adolescence, pastoral and campus, childhood playmates and college girls). It is in the different attitudes towards the past that I suspect that that voice is simply another voice of this generation: "Once time passes, truth will be lost, and the past life is the most unreal life" (1970s). Later, this generation experienced an embarrassing voice change period. They study, go to college, fantasize or write poems, or continue their wandering in the streets, and at the same time start their wobbly first love, and write a girl's name on the corner of the textbook and the telephone pole in the corner. Later, as adults, they entered the society and started a new round of vagrancy, reform, opening up and marketization. All this flashed before their eyes like lightning. The acceleration of the world is almost unprepared. They work in a hurry, earn money, buy a house, get married and become a new generation of citizens. What makes all this not linger on the surface of life?
Daniel bell pointed out in his book Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that the 1960s was an era of global political and cultural radicalism. Radical and ideal dream, this is the gorgeous color of the sixties shrouded in material poverty. The generation born and raised in this environment (they have seen the red tail of their dreams) are not as heavy as those born in the fifties, but they are far less relaxed than those born after the seventies. So, what is the typical mood of this generation?
As a person who got on the last bus in the 1960s and is now almost 30 years old, I often feel embarrassed. In my letter to Xu Hui, I said that this feeling is particularly strong today in the 1990s: "Our previous generation had their heavy historical fragments to chew, while the younger generation after the 1970s kept pressing us, making people do nothing. Among them, light aesthetics prevails: adventure, games, mood, holiday atmosphere, Valentine's Day and birthday parties, curiosity, usefulness and desire for success. Therefore, they live better and more easily than we do. But we still have to carry it out reluctantly ... "This group of people may be the last generation with a sense of roots and history, and the group behind them dispelled the heaviness of history with light aesthetics. However, this generation has not given up the worldly interest and fun while seeing the world of God, which is different from their predecessors. Their spiritual "hanging in the air" made them the most inconspicuous and easily overlooked generation in the 1950s and 1990s. In this regard, Li Wan has a very good expression in the article: they are transitional bodies in the transitional era, with the characteristics of the last two generations and the next two generations, and they have become observers of both generations.
If people in an era are either burdened with the changes of their time or die in the wilderness under its pressure, the experience of the best people in this generation is reminiscent of allen ginsberg's first sentence in Howl: "I saw the most outstanding minds of this generation being destroyed by madness ...", and Saul Bellow's: "More people died of heartbreak."
As a transitional generation, the burden of the times has slipped over their shoulders and slipped behind them unconsciously. People born after this generation seem to be more in line with the trend of the times In the acceleration of social change, they scream and slide happily on the surface of the material world. They have more reason and talent to be the masters of the new world in the future.
Nevertheless, the generation born in the 1960 s came onto the stage. Although they are still "vague" and have not formed the "overall strength" that Xu Hui hoped, they have begun to show the excellent character of this generation. In the footsteps on the stage, this generation of standard-bearers and singers appeared at the same time. Some people say that their faces are still young and their mood is already very old. Now we know that their memory is due to their wandering experience when they were young, because they feel ... hanging in the air today. They will grow old when they wake up. Have they ever had a dream? They didn't really get old.
Xu Hui hoped that "a great opportunity has come". Maybe there will be a moment when the joy and tears we have accumulated day and night will come out freely in generate? But experience tells me that waiting is a dangerous word. If you experience glory in imagination, you will inevitably shrink back in action. There is no need to pray or lament. For this generation, it is more important to take down-to-earth actions.