□ Huang Bo
The writing of the legend of Zhiwei has always been the back garden of the literati inkers, and in the late especially prosperous, from Zhang Dai to Yuan Ming to Ji Yun, collecting those or sinister or paradoxical stories, and then forming a category, to the Republic of China, Zhou Zuoren took this inheritance, rolled up his sleeves and took the Greek mythological knife, but the brother Lu Xun was not willing to follow, and the "New Compilation of Stories" was tiger and tiger. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, there are very few people who have become elites, and today I saw Xiangzi (pen name Nian Yuanhuairen) writing "Notes on Searching for God", and I also saw the legends of ghosts and monsters that came out of these old paper piles, which can be described as "ghosts running through China and the West", stewing all kinds of living creatures hidden in the darkness of ancient and modern China and abroad, with a huge field of vision, and they came to hand and clicked to the end.
Xiangzi said that "appreciating strange things is like appreciating flowers", and the "flowers" in the book are frames of ancient and modern Chinese and foreign sculpture paintings, which is simply the history of art of gods and monsters, but this "art history" is only a side note of the essay. Benjamin had ambitions and wrote masterpieces with quotations, but Shoko used annotations to construct a mythological universe. In the note, the sky goddess of Babylon and the Queen Mother of the West looked at each other six thousand years ago, and the next moment there was the connotation of the blackened fable of Captain America in Marvel... Only with a dazzling posture can it present a surprising ghostly face. The fun of reading notes is the fun of naturalism.
It was so much fun! Is it useful? useless! Gombrich said: Culture is useless, but it cannot be without, it is about innocence, it is about imagination, it is about us being spiritual living people.
The ghost did not stay in the fun back garden. Shoko said in the afterword that "strange" is a combination of "heart" and "holy", in different forms of civilization, the fear of ghosts and gods is the commonality of the ancients, and the apostle Paul describes in the Bible the bronze statue erected by the Greeks as "unknowned god", which is full of fear that does not dare to speak loudly. While in awe, he instinctively stared in a direction that the light could not see, imagining secrets beyond cognition.
Cangjie made a character, "Creation cannot hide its secrets, so the sky is raining, and the spirit monster cannot hide its form, so the ghost cries at night." "Words were created, secrets passed down by word of mouth were accurately recorded and disseminated, decipherment meant the need to bear a curse, so food fell from heaven, and ghosts in the spirit world cried out because humans knew their secrets and could not hide them.
Writing is therefore seen as a vehicle for mysterious powers, those who preach mysteries are shrouded in special auras and special shadows, and witches or prophets are professions. However, human growth is based on the known and speculation of the unknown, the more people know, the less the fear of the unknown, the more faith is replaced by doubt, the banner of reason leads the civilization forward, the "holy" is increasingly indifferent, only the remaining "heart", the content loses the effect of shocking people's hearts, in the dynasty for the "witch", falling into the field becomes a "play", pleasing oneself, the preacher becomes a clown, the holy fool or the bard, infiltrating into the novelist's speech, the theatrical stage, the script, the book, the grass hall or the night sailing ship. Aesthetics are unconsciously constructed, and "myths" jump out of religious or moral frameworks and become the source of art.
But what have people lost in the long course of history? And what did you add to your imagination? Humanity has indeed entered an era of "disenchantment", and after self-maturity, innocence has faded, and most people feel that those legends are either nonsense or unimportant. Myth removes the sacred, leaving only fun and excitement. I believe that outside of the hope and mission of adults, there is a part of everyone's body that never grows up, never loses the instinct to ask questions and seek a little stimulation, so people need to be "weird", need to tell weird stories of "weird".
The first time I met Shoko, I vaguely knew that he was such a person, with a strange and innocent smile on his face, telling some strange analogies, surprising stories, and you asked him "Is it really fake?" He would triumphantly say ,"Of course it's fake." This is a kind of cunning "child king", a kind of strength, who has both a curious nature obsessed with myths and a narrative ability to tell. I believe that if there were some tribe on the edge of the jungle, someone would point at him and shout, "Catch that sorcerer."
At the beginning of my acquaintance with Shoko, he introduced me to reading The Golden Branch, but I honestly did not like that, within the framework of the anthropological system, Fraser was methodically analogous to the myths of witchcraft everywhere, and I admit that he had given me an unprecedented encyclopedia of information, but those stories were no longer fun—as curious and energetic children, we needed to enjoy surprises and frights in listening to them, not under a microscope. Magic-loving audiences must hate "magic revealed", I would rather go to the broken temple to meet the fox spirit, wait for the beautiful snake on the wall, or imagine how the lotus flower opens up after Yuan Hong's head is cut off. Therefore, as soon as I opened the "Notes of searching gods", I seemed to see Shoko with a strange smile, telling one story after another by hand. That's what the "child" needs. In the Internet age, the focus of most people's life is not to "believe" what, nor to "love" anything, but "I can find anything". Does this show unprecedented wisdom? No, it's stupidity like never before. I would love to have a quiet place with no internet signals, and Shoko sits in the middle of a group of children and tells them the story of the Queen Mother of the West and the "Tiger Dragon".
I said Shoko's "Thirty-Six Horses", which wrote history as a myth, and "Notes on searching for god", he wrote the myth as a nursery rhyme, which is the fun, sensitivity, fear and excitement that everyone should not erase. It was some useless knowledge, but it allowed me to see instinct and lively vitality in this tasteless age.