Things on the earth
Wen丨Chen Yuanwu
A
Many times we forget about the land, and the concrete-covered area becomes almost a screen between us and the earth. The ground on which I stand is covered with thick cement, bricks or slabs of stone, carefully polished and cut into shapes, and in the city, my feet barely touch the dirt. And while the city is not without dirt and soot, the sky gradually loses its moisture in the early hours of winter, and that blue color seems to be sucked out of its soul by the dust haze, turning it into a deathly gray. I see the day in the pigeon's feathers, where the dust has infiltrated its black pupils into a cataract-like murkiness. The pigeon is getting fat because it has enough food, it doesn't need to fly in the sky all day long, its wings have lost the endurance of long-distance flying, and even, it doesn't want to fly a few more laps between buildings to make the sky a little more dynamic. Plump pigeons in the neighborhood low trees boring chatter, followed by some equally boring sparrows in the land grabbing. On the ground to pick up food falling anywhere, those human food leftover food looks so dirty and fat, pigeons can not eat the rest of the food on the ground, especially in the city pigeons, in addition to pet pigeons have a fixed corn crumbs and millet sorghum and other feed, square pigeons almost no such treatment. The pigeons I have met have adapted to such a diet without exception. On the roofs of neighborhood buildings, some people scatter grains to attract pigeons, while more often than not, pigeons fly over from other places after they have eaten their fill, chattering boredly, their voices monotonous and dull. The streets and alleys are always covered with odors throughout the summer, and the hot weather at the end of the rainy season gives off an unpleasant scent from the leaves of the trees that should be fermenting and the dust that accumulates on the lawns. Smoke and dust from the subway station construction site hung in the air, and there was a dull, constant roar from the twenty-meter-high screw jacks and buckets, the sound of machinery crashing and the wail of the earth tearing itself apart mixing together. Above ground, people walk like ants, and below ground, in the caverns, modern machinery is moving, and before long, the space of the city will undergo a new transformation - a structured city like a beehive replacing the single flat city of today. As Brodsky puts it in his poem: "In the city we walk through, there is no longer the secret of space; the land has disappeared and slipped into the depths of the beyond. We anted along like insects, unable to see the horizon."
The solidification and hardening of urban land makes it impossible for rainwater to return to the earth, so a slightly heavier rain turns the streets into rivers, and we fail to learn what fish can do. Sometimes looking at the knee-deep water in the broken down car scattered everywhere, desperate to flash yellow or red lights, the heart will have an inexplicable sense of guilt - is that we will turn their own lives into a kind of impenetrable pond, the sudden arrival of the water, so that all the joy turned into pain. The car struggles in the standing water like a fallen beetle, and the world becomes a blur in the chaotic mist of rain. Outside the window glass was a world of water, inside the window glass was a world of darkness, so confined and small that it could only accommodate one's own soul as it gasped for breath. Trees swayed in the storm, helpless and strong. Trees without support are broken or fallen, uprooted. The rain swept powerfully over every square centimeter of the city, and the streets and alleys looked so foreign in the storm that it was impossible to see where the earth was. A distant flash of lightning momentarily illuminated the emptiness of the city, and that gray, bleak, unrecognizable sky finally lit up for a moment, flickering like a flame or a blade. But it was, after all, a phenomenon of living life, and there was no reference beyond that. "The kind of place where softness spreads out is often a hotbed of life, and above the rocks, there are no flowers." We live among the rocks, weeds of despair.
II
The seasons are awesome laws of time division. At the beginning of spring, the earth is still dead; on the warm slopes that are slightly sunny, the treetops are already blossoming with delicate new shoots, and deep in the park, the mayflies are suddenly awakening and chirping intermittently. The trees in the neighborhoods look unchanged, half-dead from the winter winds, their leaves mostly yellow and covered in thick dust, while the deciduous trees look sparse and orderly. Winter in the south always seems less serious, like the continuation of fall, or a prologue to the long spring. It is not too obvious to see that there is a change of frost and snow. It's the drilling winds that make you think that this is winter, but then, suddenly, it's spring. The sun rises earlier, from the southeast corner of the buildings suddenly flashed a bright bright light, a warmth in a flash like a wave, the neighborhood air, gray haze gradually dispersed, chaotic accumulation of dust and smoke is blown away by the wind, the kind of slightly humid wind to the people's spirits. Spring has come to the South in the same not-so-subtle way. The words on the calendar remind me that spring begins today. "The first wait is the thawing of the east wind, the second wait is the beginning of the vibration of the stinging insects, and the third wait is the fish crossing the ice." The east wind comes visibly, the flowers and plants on the east window begin to sway like a celebration of some event, the mayflies begin to vibrate, mooching their wings and feathers, and at night, there are the soft sounds of insects, which gradually merge into a sea of insect sounds. The katydids, lacewings, and lacewings are coming out of their burrowing places. In the flower pots, a lacewing has come out, and with a winter's weariness, timidly climbs to the tips of the lemon blossoms and tries to flap its numb wings. The sound is brittle and shy, and only occasionally its bright and startling voice. By the time the sunlight reaches the balcony, it is nowhere to be found. The grasses in the pots were beginning to burrow out, too, and the clover clustered and snatched at the surface of the vacant potting soil. W.B. Yeats's poem, "Clover crowds the path, and spring knocks down the acorns for its companion." The year before last, I visited the city of Delft, Holland, where my daughter studied, a small village town with a dense river, peaceful and quiet, with a small population, and a Netherlander nature that loves nature, flowers and green trees. So, although here by the sea, often blowing more than seven winds, and the low-lying terrain here, the river all rely on windmill driven by the gradual inverted upward into the North Sea to the total drainage canal. Houses in Delft, except for churches, are basically the Nordic kind of three- or four-story buildings with high roofs. The streets are paved with black and gray stone bricks, leaving gaps where dirt and grass can be seen, and in the spring, grass can be seen drilling out of the gaps at any time, growing randomly into the landscape, and the cleaners usually do not pull out these weeds, except for the important streets, and always try to maintain that kind of primitive state of nature. The river is not too clear, but clean, and the citizens often organize events of one kind or another, and when Midsummer comes, besides the revelry of music and dancing, it is a race for swimming in the river, in which men and women of all colors and ages take part. On the banks of the river, there were Netherlanders and Germans in medieval costumes dancing the cha-cha-cha or the foxtrot. Men dressed as waiters walk through the crowd carrying beer steins and offering delicious fresh beer. At midday, taking a nap in a street-side chair by the river, under the shade of a tree, with a cool breeze, feels a bit dreamy here in summer, like spring in Fuzhou. The sea breeze is suddenly strong, and in the afternoon there is usually a shower. That day it was suddenly cloudy, the wind was gusty, and the river seemed to boil and churn. It rained like a thunderstorm in Fuzhou, with white arrows of rain that slammed into the ground, causing grass blades to tremble and tree leaves to flap. The trees here are mostly sycamores and oaks, and some are beeches and birches. All of them grew into umbrellas, and gave great shade to the sky. In contrast, there are very few trees near the Dutch church, only flower beds. The square is outside the entrance of the church, a sliver of which is a small market, a coffee bar or a small round stage for public activities.
From time to time, we come across ducks lined up along the river, crossing the street with aplomb, at which point all people, cars, and even trains have to stop and make way for them. The mallards have almost no fear of life here; there are no natural enemies, no hawks or sea eagles, no shotguns or nets, no poisoned baits or traps. Seagulls from time to time as the role of robbers, especially in the hands of the public carrying fresh fish and seafood just purchased from the supermarket, to pay attention to the robbers from the sky suddenly rushed down, those Arctic gray-backed gulls are extremely tough, often even with the fish with the bag with the grips, but also let you scared out of a cold sweat. It is not not proud to flap its wings, from the top of your head quickly swept away, to the distance flying. My daughter once came across a squirrel couple that took a fancy to the pine nut toast she was holding, and the aroma made the squirrels so anxious that they jumped on her bike, ripped a chunk of the bread right off, and made a quick getaway. My daughter photographed the antics of the squirrel couple, and for a moment, I could see how equal and close the relationship between local animals and people was. Holland's bridges are mostly movable bridges, without high spans, all flush with the road, only the middle of the bridge is a big turntable that can be rotated 90 degrees, when a big boat passes by, the bridge will follow the direction of the river to turn around and make a way for the boat to pass through. And all the cars and people would wait patiently at the bridge. Everything is slow, time flows calmly here, and you hardly see anyone anxiously snapping the horn to hurry the car in front of you. Bicycles are the main form of transportation here. During the week, the comfortable Netherlanders spend their free time at work riding their bicycles along the narrow path of the dam, listening to music or occasionally throwing food from their hands to the gulls, but only as much as is allowed by law to be fed. The dams are sturdy structures of steel and concrete walls, while the surface is a dirt box with flowers and plants. The water in Holland is saline, and only salt-tolerant water plants can grow in these clay boxes. There are gray thistle and mint, and Dutch parsley as well as verbena. On the inside of the dam is a sunflower patch, also salt-tolerant, and just outside the wild patchouli barrier is the regular farmland. It's all mechanized, factory-style production, with common plants such as fresh cut flowers and potatoes, endive and parsley, and only in some parts of South Holland, wheat fields.
The summer season, here is still cool as spring climate, the sky occasionally drifted through a shower, the clouds are scattered, like cotton as white as striking, and the sky has been wiped like a crystal as transparent, the blue is nature's most primitive color, as a child I was familiar with such a blue, just now, the summer sky is always filled with a layer of gray matter, so that the blue is always played a The first thing you need to do is to get a good deal on the price of the product.
Three
Autumn in the south, always in a kind of inexplicable silence quietly descended, the change of the season is not too obvious, the only change is that the sun and shadow to the south, the back of the shady places to produce some coolness, although it is very inconspicuous, but no longer in the summer time of the dreary and hot. The lingonberries will burst all over the branches, along with the milanias or nasturtiums, and the big-leafed ficus will occasionally blossom with new bud tips, making such an early fall ambiguous. In the countryside, this is the time to start making rice wine. The rice is harvested and milled into rice, and the aroma of rice wafts through the streets of the countryside. The brewing of winter wine is high on the agenda. New rice needs to be exposed to the hot sun for a few days, until the rice shrinks into a transparent jade-like, and then sifted in a mill for a few hours, so that the rice germs all fall off cleanly, the rice is simply a jade carving, a grain of translucent and lovely. The rice is washed in a bucket, steamed in a steam drawer, and then poured into the vat for initial fermentation, into the wine, after a night of fermentation, the rice gradually liquefied, the rich aroma of wine overflowing. After two days of deep fermentation, the vat is sealed, sterilized in a steamer, and then taken out of the vat and stored in a cool underground cellar until fall. During these next few months, the rice malt in the tank continues to ferment, saccharifying and transforming into alcohol, while the sake turns an orange-yellow color until all the rice malt has been reduced to liquid, leaving only a small amount of insoluble matter that settles at the bottom of the tank. The wine feels the external yin and yang changes in the dark basement, as the yin energy grows and the yang energy declines. On the day of the summer solstice, there will be a call of the Burrowing Bird outside the window, this bird is good at sensing the change of yin and yang, the summer solstice, the three signs: deer antlers unraveling, the deer is a yang beast, knowing the yin to the unraveling of the horns; the product begins to sound, the product, the submerged yin, out of the ground to sense the yin to the beginning of the song; half-summer born, half-summer like yin, the sense of yin to the beginning of the birth of the. At the beginning of Autumn, there are three more seasons: the arrival of cool winds, the descending of white dew, and the chilling of the cicada. The ground gas began to cool, and the west wind is born, the wind to the end of the day, the body feel cool, the rain gradually more, the dew is born in the grass, the color white, show the autumn for the gold, cold cicada, cold cicada, small and purple, class products, born in the end of summer, the sound of hissing and long and weak, like helpless, like to stay, the sound of the pathos to increase the autumn mood ear.
Burroughs in the eyes of the ancients is an ominous bird, called the shrike, "Poetry - Bin Feng": July shrike; Yuan Wu Cheng "moon order seventy-two wait for a collection of explanations" cloud: Cao Zijian "bad bird theory": hundred labor to May song, its voice shrike shrike sound evil, and its prey and exposure to the body, the call is unpleasant. However, the Burao is the most faithful messenger of the climate, chirping at the summer solstice and stopping at the winter solstice. It is a solitary bird that stands on the thorn bushes, and whatever it catches, insects, frogs, or snakes, it hangs on its spikes and exposes itself, so that no bird dares to come near it. Vast fields in the countryside, Burrows like a shadow like haunts, fly but the hillock, far but the river forest, the sound of the mournful and vigilant. Recently, the figure of Burao has also appeared in the city, because it is good at stealing the chicks of other birds for food. Bao, the first also, labor, force also. Rural people like it because it is good at repelling sparrows related to the figure of Burao in the rice paddies, sparrows are far away from flying away, and many pests on the fruit trees, step armor, drilling centipedes, grubs and products are the object of its prey, and even tiny fruit drilling wasps, small fruit moths and tortoiseshells it is listed as a recipe. Rural people call it a guest bird, because it is not seen in winter and spring. In the fall and winter, the fields are becoming deserted, and there are not many birds and insects to be hunted on the dead corn stalks, dry straw stacks and open fields. Burrows remain busy until the winter solstice, when they disappear without a trace. Horton's "Bird Miscellany" says: the existence of birds is actually another way of time. How terrible the world would be without birdsong, even if it doesn't sound very good, it reminds how important it is to have certain times of the day, like a rooster crowing to keep track of time. In winter, the fields have finally returned to quiet, like a man's winter rest for the year. And the rice wine in the cellar has been brewed, the opening of the winter festival is to open with wine. In some mountain villages in northern Fujian, winter does not just appear. The aroma of wine reminds us that winter comes in another way, the wine is full of fragrance, each family sends the wine to the village's grain field, and pours it into a big barrel to mix it into one kind of wine, and then each family retrieves the wine from the barrel and puts it on the edge of the grain field for people to taste it, and the festival for grabbing the wine is like a carnival in the countryside. The burgundy colored ground, flowing with spilled wine, is as bright red as blood in the sun. The aroma of wine is the passion of the villagers heating up until it boils.
Burrow through my village / The seasons are torn and strewn, like rushes drifting away / What heart is as strong as wine? / I pick up the fallen leaves and want to give them back to the earth / Like an ancient sacrificial rite / With my blood or flesh as mincemeat / To supply the earth
Red is a color of blood, a wound torn by autumn, a burrowing bird dismembering its prey, and deep in the depths of that open flesh is the silent note of the season. Therefore, the ancients called the seasons seventy-two orders, is an epic description. I believe that between each of the seasons are the footsteps of the silent stalking of the earth. Therefore, I am in awe of the red color of rice wine, as well as rice wine itself, which is an ancient ritual, a sad song of the seasons. When everything ceases to flourish, when the winds of autumn wither all life, I think of and revere the process, like the lament of the bowerbird over the carcass of its prey.
Four
I am in awe of all the phenomena in life, including life and death. The year before last, my father died after a long illness, and on the first night of his death we gathered around his bedside, where he lay half-recumbent, resting on a quilt. In the room was the hasty figure of death, and I felt its approach and its excited yells, even hand-wringing, as it looked forward to my father's last moments. My father had been gasping for short, sharp breaths, he seemed to want to say something, in fact, my father was usually not very talkative, he was always silent, watching the TV alone, with an inexplicable smile at the corners of his mouth. Father suddenly as if relieved as long as a breath, but no longer inhaled a little air, his hands soft down, hanging helplessly on the side of the bed, his head also hanging helplessly, tilted to one side. The air in the room also froze like death. We busied ourselves washing his body, there was still warmth in his heart, I put my face to his heart, but there was no more movement. My father was asleep; he was too tired and would sleep forever. It seems cruel to say goodbye like this, but I know that anyone has moments like this. I held my father's body so my sister could wipe it down, then put on his birthday suit, then lay him flat on his back, no longer tormented by his illness, no longer needing to fight the difficult breathing, he followed death, without a footstep, like a gust of wind. As I received the urn, my heart suddenly seized, heavy, black before my eyes, almost stumbling, that my father had become such a heap of dregs, it glowed softly in the light as beige as ivory. I gently covered the small brocade quilt and closed the lid of the altar. I carried the urn towards the funeral carriage.
The sky was still as blue as a wash, and the sun was so bright that it stung my skin. I held my father's urn tightly, and it was still warm from the flames. How rugged the road up the mountain, thorns piercing my flesh, I feel my father in my arms is very kind, he is still asleep, like a baby, he is going back, return to the earth, that is his eternal home, will also be my eternal home. One day later, with a friend on the drum ridge, found a coffin stone, called the coffin stone platform. He laughed and said, life is so silent, death should be returned to the stone platform, he took death as a sacrificial ceremony to the earth. I think of Ganzi Sedar Gyatso, I attended his uncle's funeral process. His uncle was bundled into a white pillar, and on the way home after the incineration, we chanted sutras and watched from the donkey cart the murmuring river at the bottom of the curving valley and the occasional eagle's silhouette on the side of the steep cliffs, as the sutra streamers hunted and rattled in the wind. The earth was so quiet that you could even hear the crunching sound of stones bouncing off the ground every time they were crushed.
We sat on the grass and sprinkled barley flour and dalung into the air, the chanting sounding like a humming mountain wind. White urns of ashes were placed behind the mysterious altar of another village of their ancestors. It had almost the same significance as our backcountry, the village where our forefathers were reunited once again. Under the dark blue sky, we became part of the rock in the sunlight, and after the silence, we said goodbye to them. The winds of the mountains were blowing, and the rocks, which had lost water for many years, were streaked with the tears we had just spilled. The earth stretches far and wide. Every time I touch the chest of the earth, I seem to be with a great mother whispering, that is where everyone comes from, is the place where everything comes from, and will be us, as well as the place where everything goes.
Everything is soft/deep in the earth/happens without a cause/the same as disappears without a cause/no need to explain/hope for an answer/no, everything is emptiness/all life and all death/all equally meaningless
I think of a clay ocarina, a musical instrument made of clay, able to turn my breath into sound, and it doesn't matter if I am mute or twittering. I want to sing a long song and play the ocarina once in a long time.
Chen Yuanwu: Writer. His works have appeared in October, Chinese Literature Selection, Mountain Flower, Tianya, Selected Prose, Prose, Guangzhou Literature and Art, Works, and other publications. It has been included in several annual anthologies of prose, and has won awards such as the Sun Li Prose Prize.
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