Don't say what you see, but what you feel for a moment when you gather your voice and hold your breath in reverie. What is that? The beauty of sadness slides toward you silently like a cold, dazzling sleigh, as if from the Milky Way, for it brings with it a breath of heaven, or more precisely, the courage to hold one's own throat.
When I was eight years old, I was still in the Arctic village of Mohe, the northernmost part of China. The heavy snowfall sealed almost all my memories, but the fishing season that winter is still clear in the eye. When the winter fishing season comes, almost every family stays on the river all night. People brought dry food. Fire pans, fishing tools and cheap paper cigarettes came out from a wood-carved flute house. Milky vapor rose from a hole in the eye of the ice, and the hay beside the sled was piled up with fish of every color that had already been caught. Some of the dogs knew their master's mentality well; they wagged their heads and tails and when they saw that there was a large amount of fish on the line, and occasionally a stray fish showed up on the surface, they picked up the fish the moment their masters removed the hooks, and devoured it with a big mouthful of chewing. For those valuable fish, they have always been regular and loyal to the master, do not hear and do not touch. At the end of that year's fishing season, is dusk, low clouds, adults will fish together in a sack, set on the sled, withdrew from the Heilongjiang River to go home. It was a long snowy road, and it was gray-blue at dusk. The adults walked slowly behind the sled with their cuffs folded, no words were spoken between them, the world was so quiet. When I reached the door of my house, a great flurry of snow suddenly fell, and the view before me was so misty that all I could hear was the hot, swampy breathing of the dogs pulling the sled. The adults disappeared, the village disappeared, and I felt that only the dogs' breathing and the snowflakes accompanied me, and I had a desire to cry, and that was the initial experience of the beauty of sadness.
Growing older is a terrible process of deepening one's own mediocre behavior. Since then, I have experienced more of the chaotic smoke of the city. The narrow, vulgar streets, the quarrels between people, the betrayal of trust and even the spurning of each other, the kind of sad beauty that blends people, feelings and scenery into one seems to have escaped. Or perhaps the beauty of sadness is crying in a corner because of the disaster.
At the end of 1991, I finally revisited the beauty of sadness in a foreign country. It was in Hokkaido, Japan, and I left Sapporo for Noboribetsu, a famous hot spring resort. I had already experienced the beauty of the hot springs at Laminar Cloud Gorge. During my trip to Hokkaido, it was snowing heavily, the air was moist and fresh, and the scenery was marvelous. It was already dusk when I stayed at a quaint onsen ryokan (hot spring inn) located on the mountain, so I took a bath and put on a kimono specially prepared for travelers and went to the restaurant for dinner. When I asked what was so special about Noboribetsu's hot springs, my Japanese friend said with a wink that Noboribetsu's open-air hot springs had a longstanding reputation. In other words, people bathe directly in front of the cold December wind and sky. I spat out my tongue, a little excited and a little scared. The open-air hot springs were only open to women after three in the morning. I tossed and turned that night, fearing that I might accidentally wake up to the clouds opening up and lose sight of beauty. I arrived at the onsen area at 5 a.m. with a golden-colored towel over my shoulder. The following is an excerpt from my journal of my visit to Japan:
The onsen room was quiet, and the fog was still thick and white. I took off my kimono and stepped into the fog, at which time I disappeared. The natural skin color blended into the white fog. I walked through the fog almost by feel - first grabbing the nozzle and taking a shower, then slowly walking towards the hot springs. There were two other people besides me in the indoor hot spring, so I went in and looked around for the open-air hot spring. I couldn't speak Japanese, so I couldn't ask the two women, but when I looked around, I saw a door in the east of the hot spring with five big red letters: "Open-air Daikouro". I don't need to explain the Chinese character for "open-air wind", but the character for "lv" is a bit confusing. In addition to being a family name, the Chinese character "吕" in ancient times also referred to a musical instrument made of bamboo tubes, representing a kind of musical rhythm. By associating this meaning of "lv" with "open-air gale", the idea of "playing by the wind and calibrating by the lv" was born. In any case, I had to step up to the plate.
I stepped out of the indoor spa and walked toward the door facing east. I could feel the cold air as I stood by the door, and the other two women looked at me in amazement. Imagine going to an open-air onsen in Hokkaido in the middle of winter, it really takes some courage. I hesitated for a moment, but pushed the door open. This push I almost let the snowflakes take me by surprise, the cold air and the snowflakes converged on me, but I was naked. And I didn't want to look back, especially not when someone was looking at me. I stepped forward and closed the door behind me.
My whole body was breathing in the real wind, the wind of freedom. Snow fell around the pool. I walked towards the hot springs and I went down, slowly letting myself become part of the hot springs, bracing my hands out and stretching my limbs. Sitting in the hot spring was like sitting on the moss at the bottom of the ocean, slippery and warm, with only my head out of the water. I was the only one in the pool, and how quiet it was. The sky seemed to be bright, the day was a little blue, snowflakes towards me, while the hot springs are warm. There were a few trees around the pool with lights on them, so the snowflakes that fell around the trees were brilliant and gorgeous.
I think my pen pales in this moment. To this day, I can't accurately express what I felt at the time, except to remember that there was a mountain not far away, with pines and cypresses growing in a staggered pattern on the slopes of the mountain, and three springs pouring downward in a staccato stream. The spring in the center was straighter, while the two sides were larger, very much like a fisherman wearing a hat standing there. On one side there was snow, on the other side there was spring water, but on the other side there were icicles (on the rocks next to the water), which was a view of the three seasons I had experienced, and I saw them all together there. I breathed in the fresh, humid, and chill-soaked air and felt ethereal like never before. And only a human being can be moved by a view, a particular life experience.
What was it that I felt? Is it heaven's greatest song? O the beauty of that unparalleled sadness! I thought you had turned your back on me as a dusty person, but I didn't expect to be surprised to meet you in a foreign country, and after you took the beauty far away, I still look forward to reuniting with you in sadness.
In early September last year, I unexpectedly fell ill with tachycardia and dysentery. Lying alone in the autumn season, sad and desperate, the sunshine outside the window again feel superfluous. I looked forward to a chance to get out in the fresh air; I was exhausted in the city. On September 20, after recovering from a serious illness, I finally set foot on a luxury boat. The ten-day trip began. The leadership of the provincial people's Congress to inspect the river channel, plus the Xinhua News Agency, "Guangming Daily" two reporters and one of my leaders and colleagues accompanied, but twenty people. The ship is "Heilongjiang", neat and comfortable. During the day, we were on the deck looking out over the scenery and watching the silver-colored waterfowl circling on the river, and at night the ship was moored to the shore, so we stayed on board. The ship arrived at the border town of Fuyuan, stayed for a day, the next day at noon on the return voyage. At that time, the ship was traveling on the Heilongjiang River, the shore on both sides are two countries: China and Russia. Russia was in the midst of civil unrest, but Yeltsin quickly took control. It was dusk on September 25th, and after dinner I went to the bow deck alone. Autumn had cooled, the wind had hardened, the sunset was over, and the sky was swarming with roaring clouds of fire, reddening half of the river. At this time of year a flock of waterfowl suddenly appeared not far from the bow of the boat, and the flaming clouds made them a ruddy color. They flew towards the other bank with water vapor, I followed them, and suddenly realized that the red color of their bodies disappeared in an instant, and the sky on the Russian bank was moonlit and clear, where the waterfowl regained their pure color. It was incredible to see a gray-blue sky and a half-white moon on one side, and a red haze on the other. The captain spotted me in the cockpit and sent out a melancholy and haunting piece of music over the loudspeaker. I couldn't help but dance alone to the music. I twirled, taking in the strange beauty of the red and white world. My long hair flowed, and for a moment I felt like a witch. No one came to disturb me, and apart from the music, which was like being in a fairy world, I was accompanied by the river, the clouds, the moon and the boundless wind. The beauty of sadness suddenly crashed into my heart at this time, and it made me forget the vulgar and noisy city and all my own diseases. I would like to let it live in my heart, but it will be gone in a moment like a curl of light smoke.
Why is the beauty of sadness able to move the heart? Only because it is immersed in a religious feeling. A sacred inviolable beauty of sadness, is an empire of all the gold and precious stones are difficult to replace. I believe that every religiously minded person has encountered the beauty of sadness, and I am convinced that it will be one of the few times in a person's life when a precious slice of beauty can become a permanent memory.
Slush:
Early spring in the North is dirty, and this dirtiness is of course due to the pure and immaculate snow that we used to praise so warmly. During the long winter in the north, the cold gives birth to one snow after another, which stretches out its beautiful tentacles from the heavens and drifts down
slimly
onto the earth, sinking the whole north into a world of icy clarity. If you walk through the streets in the snow, looking at the trees whose branches are moistened with snow, at the snow on the roofs of the churches, at the silvery roads stretching on indefinitely, your heart overflows with a passion: for the incomparable magnificence or bleakness of it. And yet the spring breeze comes. The spring wind makes the snow melt, and in the process of melting they look old and haggard, like an old woman who is about to
to die: the snow exposes its duality at this time without reservation: its beauty is dependent on the cold, and therefore it is a kind of still beauty, fragile beauty; when the cold has become the sunset in the western sky, and the wind and the sun shine on them, and then its ugliness is hopelessly presented. There is no such thing as pure beauty, so I still love snow. I love its beauty and simplicity, but also its fragility and forced disappearance. And, of course, I love the unprecedented slush they create on this earth when they melt. The alleys are strewn with muddy water; the drains increase their flow because of the addition of sewage after the melting of snow, rattling; swallows nest under the eaves with wet mud in the humid air; chickens, ducks, geese, and dogs bring their paw prints from wandering the alleys back to their masters' yards, filling them with countless claw-shaped muddy stamps, like the huge projections of the pines in the moonlight; the old man accidentally loses his cane while walking, and the cane is picked up with mud! The child running in the alley accidentally dropped the candy in his mouth into the mud, he was lost in thought looking at the muddy water and whimpering, while the child's mother, who spied on the scene, laughed heartily ......
This is a scenario that I often experienced in my childhood, the background of which is a small village in the north of China, and the time of the day is, of course, the time of the muddy early spring. the muddy early spring time.
I love the natural mud. Mud often reminds me of the great nation of Russia, Lomonosov, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pernin, Pushkin is the mud step by step toward us. Russian art is full of a noble, generous, somber, indomitable spirit, can not be said to be related to this springtime mud. Mud gives birth to trekkers, it gives light and strength to the enduring, peace and courage to the suffering? A great nation needs mud to sharpen and exercise, it will make people's backbone never bend, so that people in the difficult trek to understand the land's lovely, broad and can not be lost, know the true meaning of the motherland in people: when we love the mud underfoot, that we have embraced a spirit.
The mud I feel in the northern cities today is not as deep as it was in my childhood: but when I walk down the dirt road at the farmer's market during the snowmelt, I still encounter that long-lost mud. Waste paper, grass clippings, rotting leaves, fish guts, and other detritus loom in the mud, and the smell of decay hits my nose. This feeling is of course not as pleasant as holding an umbrella at the shore of Xizihu Lake, which is always surrounded by green areas, in the rain and smoke, but it still makes me fall into another kind of nostalgia, remembering the mud beads spattered when the wooden wheelbarrow rolls over it heavily, remembering the backs of the people of the north who trekked through it with great difficulty, and remembering the sufferings and humiliations that we have experienced, and I feel relieved to still be able to touch it with my feet.
We will not always look back to revisit history, we will not deliberately create a kind of mud to let it appear in the future road, but when we are washed by the rain on the green stone road tired, when we face the boundless leaves at a loss, when our pen in the face of white paper no longer have a passion for pale, we are eager to trek back in the mud? For this, we should really thank the snow, which gave birth to the silence, pure, unobstructed beauty, but also gave birth to the dirty, make people wake up to give people the strength of the mud. That's why it's unparalleled.
Who killed the sorrow:
Modern people mention the word "sorrow", more with contempt. As if the material civilization is highly developed, "sadness" must be like the old times, like the long work, roll up the cover and go. So, we see is to promote a variety of secular desire of life, people seem to be unloaded shackles confined to their own thousands of years, forget to jump, screaming, such as stepped on the human nature of the free playground, seems to be so exuberant.
The sadness is gradually falling back like the tide. Without sorrow, people don't even have dreams anymore. The night without dreams is so chaotic, the dawn without dreams is so pale.
Perhaps because of my special life experience, I am so fond of sorrow. I have never seen sorrow as a synonym for decadence and decay. On the contrary, true sorrow is a kind of compassionate feelings, which can make people grow wisdom and strength.
The growth of sadness requires soil, and my soil is that piece of tundra. It is the kind of lonely place where a few wisps of cockcrowing, is reflected in the snowy ground of a beam of moonlight. Sorrow drifted quietly into my mind in such a setting.
I am familiar with an old man who is good at telling ghost stories in the spring light said no, but he smoked the pot is still there, how not to make people sad; lightning and wind destroyed a bright like a candle birch forest, since then there are fewer wildflowers bloomed, how not to make people sad; I look forward to a summer of the garden in the garden of the fruits and vegetables in the time it is about to ripen, but by the early frost killed the life, how not to make people sad; snow is coming, but it's a good thing that I've been waiting for a long time. I've been looking forward to the fruit of my garden all summer, but when it was about to ripen, it was cut off by an early frost, how could I not let it be sad?
I have heard and witnessed the folk legends, the bleak world events and the changing nature, they are like three strings. They are like three strings. They are twisted together and play the melody of "sorrow". Therefore, from the very beginning of my creation, my brushstrokes naturally reached out to this sorrowful sky, and I particularly appreciated those works that exuded the aura of sadness. I found that sadness especially likes to settle in Russia, where the forests and steppes seem to emit a yeasty smell, which can ferment the mediocre life and present a touching poetic luster, thus penetrating the world of the human soul. Their art, music and literature are all full of sadness. For example, Levin's "Volga Slender Man", Tchaikovsky's "Symphony of Pathos", Aitomatov's "White Wheelbarrow", Turgenev's "White Grassland", Astafeev's "King of Fish", and so on, which are broad and deep and bleak, such as the pastoral song of the ancient pastoral, biting and warm. So when I heard the news of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many people all over the world were worried about the future of this nation, I used to tell people that Russia is immortal, it will recover! The reason was: what a nation possessed of a great sorrow.
Human compassion is wrapped up in sorrow, and art that lacks compassion is not alive. Sorrow is the dewdrops on the flowers, a wet and brilliant sunset on the water, a sigh of contentment in the depths of love. But in this day and age, life is filled with either the howling of inflated desire or insensitive indifference. Sorrow at this time is like a bereaved dog straying. Life seems to be changing day by day, new information is coming in thick and fast, to the extent of explosion, people are afraid of being labeled as outdated and old-fashioned, and are tired of recognizing new things and coping with new trends. As a result, our feet become mechanical and slow between the glass walls of the rising skyscrapers, our eyes become dry and poor in the fireworks of all kinds of celebrations, and our minds become confused and thirsty when we are informed of the news in any corner of the world at the first time.
In such times, it seems, we no longer mourn. Intense life squeezes our dreams and the dog of newness chases us to exhaustion. We have realized our material dreams and gained dizzying so-called spiritual enjoyment, but our hearts are like a fruit fluttering in the autumn wind, gradually losing its moisture and sweet aroma, drying up and shriveling up. We fall into a spiritual predicament because of blind obedience, lose ourselves, and imprison ourselves in a cage and bind ourselves to a bed of corpses. The life of art, which reeks of sorrow, has left us.
Who killed sorrow? Is it the sound of the marketplace's hollers, or the flashing neon lights that dim the stars? Is it the psychedelic aura of increasingly dazzling high-tech products, or is it the rolling dust produced by nature's disasters?
We are blocked out of the green mountains and green water, do not hear the wind and birds, do not see the bright moon and colorful clouds, the soil of grief is so inch by inch loss. We have created those works that are labeled as art, either words are not material, empty and boring, or confused and elegant, pretending to be a ghost. Those who claim to be close to the bottom of the life of the seemingly full of things, but exudes a gallant vulgarity. We no longer have sorrow in our hearts, so that although we live a very lively, but the heart is empty; we seem to live in abundance, but we hold in the hands of, but a masturbation of the empty bowl is just.
. My tenderness for the darkness:
It was late fall when I returned to my hometown. Farmers were starting potatoes and cabbages in the fields, and mountain pickers were still trying to make a final gold rush in the mountains, clad in fallen leaves and searching for furry mushrooms. In the market of the small town, there are more people selling cotton shoes and hats, winter is coming to Daxinganling. Outside the window, below the river dam, the grass has withered. The wildflowers that shimmered like stars on the grassy banks of the river in summer are nowhere to be found. The flower beds that my mother tended to were in full bloom yesterday, but the night's frost has left them shattered, and the flowers have lost their color.
The season of nature is over, but the season of the home is still here. A few pots of flowers that my mother placed in front of the south window of my study are blooming in style. The bees have no more nectar to collect outdoors, so when I open the window to ventilate the room, they fly into the house, searching for it. I wonder if they favor the golden autumn chrysanthemums or the watery red lantern flowers?
The other afternoon, when I was closing the window, I suddenly found a golden bee. It was curled up under the window pane, as if it was tired of picking honey and was sleeping sweetly. I didn't even think about it, I grabbed it and wanted to release it. However, the moment I raised my arm, the thumb of my left hand suddenly felt a sharp pain like a pinprick, and I realized that the bee had stung me, so I hurriedly skimmed it out of the window.
The bee was gone, and what it left on my thumb was a bee needle. The bee needle wasn't long, it was thin, with white flotsam attached, and I pulled it out. When I was a kid, I was stung by bees more than once, and I remember once in the Arctic village, I hit a hornet's nest, and the wasps that poured out of the nest stung me with redness and swelling on my face, and it hurt so much that I rolled around on the bed.
Don't look at the bee's lifeless appearance, its energy is really big. My thumb swelled up in no time and the pain was excruciating. The bee must have thought I was going to kill it, so it used its weapon of choice. A bee that has stung a human being will die of gas, and even if I put it out the window, it will never fly again, destined to turn to dust. Me and it, a toss-up.
I thought the pain would fade like lightning, yet I was wrong. An hour passed, two hours passed, and by dinner time, my thumb was still coning with pain. Just as it was getting dark, I dove under the covers, thinking that I would forget the pain once I was in dreamland. However, after tossing and turning until late at night, the pain, instead of abating, came in waves like the rising sea. I had to get up from the bed, turn on the light, and inspect the injury. Thinking that the bee needles the bees had left in my finger must have been highly toxic, and that I had not used tweezers when I pulled them out, and that I had not done so thoroughly, I took out a sewing needle, struck a match, disinfected it briefly, and jabbed the needle into the sore spot in an attempt to pick out any that might be left. The needle went into the flesh, but the blood would not come out, as if the piece of flesh had become dead, to my horror. Thinking that cold water would stop the pain, I pulled out the needle, went into the restroom, stood under the faucet, and shocked my thumb with cold water. It worked, the pain subsided considerably, and ten minutes later I was back in bed. However, only after lying down, the pain that had just been relieved raised its head arrogantly again, so I had no choice but to get up. I tried all sorts of things, such as rubbing rubbing rubbing alcohol, toothpaste, and anti-inflammatory ointment, but the pain was still as cold and open as the snow lotus in the mountains. I was discouraged, turned off the lights, pulled open the curtains, and turned to the sky.
It was already midnight, and if the weather was good, I could look out the window and see the moon, the stars, and the silhouette of the mountains. However, it was cloudy that day, and it was pitch black outside the window, so I could not see anything. The human heart is really strange, the more you can't see anything, but the more you want to see. I pressed my face against the glass window and stared wide-eyed, but darkness is darkness, and it unambiguously wiped out all the sights I had seen during the day. I hoped that there would be a sudden flash of a fisherman's fishing fire down the hill, or an automobile driving by on the embankment, and then there would be light cutting through this darkness. Yet there was none, and the deep, infinite darkness remained before my eyes.
I had not experienced such darkness for a long time. In the city, there is no more darkness to speak of at night, due to the hauntings of the lights; and in my hometown, I can stand in front of the window at night solely because of the lure of the moon. Who would appreciate the darkness? However, this hurtful night, in the face of this virginal fresh darkness, I actually have a special kind of moving, body gradually flooded with warmth, as if in the ice and snow to see a fire. Nowadays can see the real darkness of the place, and how many places? Darkness in this sleepless world, torn by man-made light to lose their souls. The truth is that darkness is clean, and the bustle of the lights and the nightly music profanes the holy darkness. God gave us the darkness, is not it gave us the hotbed of dreams? If we give up our dreams, keep creating surly light to drive away the darkness, and indulge ourselves in the world, then what we are facing is likely to be a monochromatic world.
I am grateful to this brave bee, which, with a magnificent sacrifice, evoked in me a sense of pain and a never-before-seen tenderness for the darkness. Only this clean darkness will usher in a crisp, clean dawn, ah.