Hear those who can't hear
Li Li
Discover that artists will hear things that the average person can't hear.
For example, the Norwegian painter Munch recounts the inspiration for his masterpiece The Scream: "One evening, my friend and I were walking on the road, with the city on one side and the fjord at my feet on the other, and I felt uncomfortable. I stopped to look out over the fjord, and the setting sun stained the clouds as bright red as blood. It was then that I thought I heard nature screaming incessantly. So I painted this picture—painting the clouds like real blood, and letting the colors roar. ”
For example, the poet Li He has a poem "Ballad of Heaven", which consists of twelve sentences and is divided into three parts. The first two sentences write the Milky Way: "The heavenly river drifts back to the stars at night, and the yinpu flow clouds learn the sound of water." On a clear night, the poet wanders through space and is captivated by the brilliant stars. He heard the Milky Way in the sky still babbling in the night, the shining stars like tiny ships, floating on the surface of the clouds and swirling, and the clouds on both sides of the Milky Way were also mischievously imitating the sound of water. The poem depicts what the poet sees and feels when he stands on the ground and looks up at the starry sky, and the nebula is like water, flowing along the heavenly riverbed, listening intently, as if there is a murmur.
Why can't the average person hear these sounds? Maybe it's because they didn't listen. I think that the so-called listening is to "listen with all your strength." The word "pouring" here is similar to pouring out the nest, like pouring boxes and pouring boxes, like pouring down the country, like pouring rain... In short, it is painstaking and unreserved. Only by listening carefully can we have a more accurate perception of everything. Only by listening with your heart can you hear the snow melting in the Songtao tsunami, hear the smile of the ants and the sigh of the maple leaves, hear the affectionate call from nature, and hear the crisp sound of the heart-to-heart collision, like a wind chime.
The reason why the average person can't hear these sounds is because they think these sounds are irrelevant, right? I remember hearing a story related to the aesthetician Zhu Guangqian: when a student came to his home and wanted to clean the layers of fallen leaves in the courtyard, he stopped him, "I have accumulated so thick that I can hear the rain." Thickly pile up fallen leaves to listen to the sound of rain – whether this makes sense, I have personally verified. I found that where the leaves were thin, the sound of rain was crisp and short; where the leaves were stacked, the raindrops fell down and puffed, calm, thick, and indeed different. Thinking of Mr. Zhu Guangqian's year, open the window, concentrate on the rain, the thick fallen leaves to undertake the rain, he should taste the various tastes of life from the sound of the rain: from the pain and stiffness of the rain, the balanced moderation of the rain, the eternal entanglement of the light rain, to the hazy of the drizzle. Before the first autumn frost fell, he carefully protected the yellow leaves on the ground, preparing for the rain that was about to sound, this wonderful natural sound. Most people in the world cannot be such a subtle and elegant life aesthetician like Mr. Zhu Guang. For them, when they are hungry and sick, they do not want to listen to the rain; when they are worried and sad, they do not want to listen to the rain; when they are noisy and busy, they cannot listen to the rain; when they are lonely and afraid, they dare not listen to the rain. They may have to go through ten thousand rains in their lives, but very few of them actually hear about it.
And the artist's heart reverberates day and night with all kinds of sounds, mixed with the sounds of the universe, the whispers of the world, the noise of red dust, the trembling of the soul, this expanded and surging sound, always passing into their ear drums: whenever the attention is paid to the grass gently swaying, whenever the sap that lurks in the branches of the tree rises from the root system to the leaf vein, whenever the sea waves rise and fall, whenever the strong sunlight or abundant rain that gives birth to all things is sprinkled in the heavens and the earth, whenever the wind carries the seeds of life comes from all directions, Across tens of thousands of miles of space from far and near... They all heard it, the sounds that no one else could hear. Not only did they hear it for themselves, but they tried to share it with others, to hear it in the quiet of the night, to hear the sorrow of a cuckoo bird in the twilight of spring, to hear the sheep that had crossed the hillside disappear into the evening, and to hear the voice of the gods from the roar of the wind and thunder.
Tonight is Christmas Eve, the north wind outside the window is whimpering low, the moon is cold and clean and distant, and the stars are running quietly. Tonight at home, I prepared a small verdant pine tree with a small circle of colored lights. I sat under the tree until very late, and my ears were filled with the sound of falling, it was not a leaf, it was not a natural sound, a lot of sounds, it did not belong to anything. The voice was soft, but I heard, indescribably, the sound of time falling.
