Writing, do you need a reason?
Li Xiao
The Eleventh National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the Tenth National Congress of the China Writers Association are being held in Beijing, and among my WeChat friends, there are several representatives of writers attending this grand meeting. As an old Wenqing, I paid attention to the circle of friends sent out by a literary friend in the middle of the night in Beijing, and I could see his excitement. In his circle of friends, I saw a photo of him taking a photo with some famous writers, and the photo of him was humble and joyful. These writers who appeared in his circle of friends were all great writers who had published the emperor's great works. I looked at these writers and treated them as part of my loved ones in a trance, because over the years I had completed the nurturing of my own spirit one at a time by reading their literary works, the encounter with their rich souls, the completion of what I sometimes fell into the furnace of exhaustion and paleness, and rekindled the fiery flame of life. The radius and diameter of my life journey are actually mostly small circles of life that are painted as prisons, but literature has made me recognize, understand, tolerate, compassion, love, and pity for the world, presenting a scene of life with continuous mountains, vicissitudes and seas, and thousands of weather.
I am grateful to the inventor of the written word, who is said to be cangjie, who has a strange appearance and 4 eyes on his forehead, which belongs to the kind of person who has heavenly eyes. Thus, these words left on the tortoise shell, animal bones, bamboo, stone, cloth, and paper allow the continuation of human history to show a clear vein and context, and its Chinese writing is the most important part of the historical manuscript. Today, a 3-year-old child can recite ancient poems such as "bright moonlight before the bed", which is the eternal charm and traction of literature.
Over the years, I have not given up on one thing, and that is to write continuously and intensively. I write about these things, and sometimes wonder if they're really literature. I write in a small place, these tadpoles floating in the words of the long flow, and the literature of those Yellow Bells, I understand the distance away. I am still only a member of a small local writers' association, and I have not yet had the courage to join the provincial writers' association. I didn't mean to be modest, I understood the weight a writer should weigh. In this era when most people hold mobile phone screens, literature is still sacred in my heart, still has a solemn temperament, and has a mysterious magnetic field. Writing is resistance to time and the rescue of memory. When people live, they are actually a confrontation with time, but life ultimately resists time that cannot win and end, and can only compromise with time calmly. Because no matter how high, passionate, and enterprising our spirit is, our body will eventually grow old, and our soul will eventually distance itself from the body. But the shiny part of the soul can be emitted through the burning of literature.
The flesh grows old, life withers, and through literary writing, it can maintain the texture and intensity of life. A writer writes for the times, in a sense, also for his own life, and once this writing resonates with the pulse of the personal heart rhythm, the pulse of the earth, and the pulse of the world, this is respectable literature.
I often ask myself, why have I been writing all these years, do I need to find a reason for my writing? Perhaps the source of my literature is caused by my youth. I belong to the typical anxious personality. The anxiety of being a teenager in the countryside was given to me by my father, this 84-year-old man, who had just died in the autumn, and I had been unable to complete some deep inner communication with him, and now, I have truly completed the reconciliation with him, and the many regrets left behind have made me deeply painful. As a teenager, I like to sit on the mountain pass in the countryside and stare in a daze, and the feeling of the darkness coming after the sunset sinks, let me feel the huge emptiness of life. One night, I sat on a rock and didn't come home, but my father led me home with a torch. Oh, this doll, how to ask for a bowl of rice to eat when she grows up, this long sigh of my father is still ringing on the sky of the teenager.
When I was a teenager, I was a particularly sensitive and wooden person, and just a few words and even a look made me hurt and crippled. When I was a teenager, I secretly swore that I would become a writer and give myself a mouthful of food and clothing and a job bowl through writing.
For more than 30 years of writing, in terms of the number of words written and published, there have been millions of words, but I am always dissatisfied, always anxious, and of course tired. But through writing, I let the dawn of life fade again and again, and crossed the gushing river of life with words again and again. When I say this, I am not amplifying the function and self-efficacy of writing. I thought I was sincere, and I still had respect and awe for literature. In my often anxious dreams, I became an unemployed person, a wanderer, but what made me breathe a sigh of relief in the dream was that I said to myself that there was still literature that the "old mother" could rely on. Dreams shine into reality, and I really think of writing as a root of life and tie it up in the soil. Although the meager income from my writing is not enough to support my material life, the writing in this soul lesson makes me digest loneliness, take responsibility, dissolve desires, and see the world.
In this winter, with frost hanging from my eyebrows, I think of a small city, which is the northernmost part of the motherland in the vast forest sea of Heilongjiang Province. In 1987, I published my first essay in a literary magazine there. I imagined that in that snowy town, the snowflakes fell from the sky, and my heart still had the affectionate gaze and excitement of ushering in the first snow of life.
(Author Affilications:Wuqiao Subdistrict Office, Wanzhou District)
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