CuiLiu Street | sheet of double: a lighthouse on paper

A lighthouse on paper

□ Zhang Shuang

Jiangxi has always been a fertile land for the growth of literature, the aesthetics of Song poetry and the culture of the academy born of mountains, rivers and lakes have nourished many literati and inkers, and the writer Fu Fei, who was born in Shangrao, is undoubtedly the "inheritor" of this very prominent literary context, and his works continue the sincerity and realism of the "Jiangxi Poetry School" and the bland and profound aesthetic situation. In recent years, Fu Fei has tirelessly cultivated his prose garden, "arriving in the morning and returning with the moon", and the solid and abundant output of works has made the prose garden present an increasingly vigorous literary landscape. And it is not difficult to find that most of this garden is based on the Zhengfang Basin where he was born and grew up in Sisi as the coordinate system, and the Raobei River and Fenglin Village are inlaid in a dotted manner, constituting the radius of the growth of characters and stories. The prose work "Minxiu's Dog" in the new column "Spirit Beast Record" opened in this issue is still a branch of Zhengfang's story, and it is also Fu Fei's fate with "Yangtze River Literature and Art" after "Yuan Lantern", "The Depth of the Basin" and "Si Xiang Lan xin", and these works have been included in his upcoming new prose collection "Yuan Lantern Like a Song", and the encounter and precipitation through time and space may make them have a more abundant and wonderful meaning.

As the name suggests, Fu Fei focuses on mammals in different subjects such as dogs, horses, monkeys, deer, bears, cows, foxes, etc., who are in close contact with humans and have a spiritual connection, and write moving stories between them and humans. "Minxiu's Dog" is the opening of a new column "Spirit Beast Record", where The good-hearted and indisputable persimmon bay villager Minxiu was accidentally killed one morning when he was shot in the head by a flying self-cooling arrow while brushing his teeth, and the only witness to this accident was a yellow dog that Minxiu had kept for many years. Clues are gone, the killer is gone, and solving the case seems out of reach. And the dog's innate loyalty, sensitivity and persistence make up for the ineffable deficiency, using its own wisdom and way to explore the clues of the truth, which also explains the question at the beginning of the article: "Minxiu's dog has been squatting at the intersection for several years, and it looks at the people who come and go, what is it looking for?" In Fu Fei's pen, the dog who spends time with Min Xiu seems to have surpassed the identity of an animal, and has a "humanoid" or even "superhuman" character and spirituality: the dog was fed by Min Xiu with fresh milk from childhood, and is a very sticky "little follower" who will catch pheasants and give them to Min Xiu as a gift, except for the feeding of Min Xiu and his family, no one else will eat without permission, even after Min Xiu's death. The emotional involvement of the dog and Min-so seems to have penetrated deep into the bone marrow and become an instinct, every year Min-so's death day the dog will appear on time in the cemetery to guard the spirit, and the unexplained spirituality is also reflected in the day when Toshihide's husband Dezhong died of gas poisoning, and the dog barked for three days in the direction of Dezhong's residence, as if anticipating the arrival of the unexpected. It was not until the same simple and kind old Sen who was as simple and kind as Min Xiu appeared, that the dog temporarily ended the lonely wandering life, and extended his feelings for Min Xiu to Lao Sen, healing each other and comforting each other, one heart accompanied by another heart, long and affectionate. Eight years later, when the dog captures the smell of the familiar and hated murderer with a keen sense of smell and a long-lasting memory, Fu Fei cleverly uses dramatization to make the dog complete the mission of revenge: the professional dog thief who shot Minxiu due to deviation was hanged in the rope ring of the dog killing lever device carefully built by their gang at the dog killing factory. The dog that completed his mission made a conclusion with the past and started a new life with Lao Sen, and "Minxiu's dog" truly became "Old Sen's dog".

This is the story of Min-soo's dog, and it can also be said that it is the story of our localized "loyal dog Hachiko". In addition to the twelve groups of animal narratives in the "Spirit Beast Record", the attention and writing of natural beings has always been a particularly important part of Fu Fei's prose creation in recent years, and has been given the label of "natural literature". As he held: "The noble aesthetics of living beings, the noble ethics, and the harmonious sociology of life are the moral law and revelation of life." We live with it and redeem each other. "All things are born with spirits, undisturbed poetic dwellings and equal coexistence of mutual integration are the proper meanings of our construction of the community of life on earth, and once these pure and long-lasting spiritual beasts are glued to human emotions, the meaning of existence becomes more solemn and far-reaching." Therefore, you can see in "The Death of the Red-billed Crow" a red-billed crow named "Widow" who has been guarded for life because of the life-saving grace and adoption of the shoemaker Old Widower Guangchun. Guangchun takes care of the "widow" as a child, and the "widow" regards Guangchun as the only one who is "birdborn". Until Guangchun died on his deathbed, the bird stood at the head of the bed and on the coffin, 'whining, whining, whining,' and the cry was broken. The corpse of the bird that finally appeared in the guangchun tomb showed wordlessly that the red-billed mountain crow fulfilled its vow to transcend time and space and live and die in the form of "decisive martyrdom". "The Knife and the Monkey" is a story about the "beauty and beauty" of man and monkey from killing to redemption. The butcher's father, who was afraid to kill monkeys, needed to take the monkey fetus from the live monkey and put it into medicine in order to save Wangchun, who was suffering from "disease loss", and had to do the business of killing monkeys. From killing monkeys to save lives to selling monkey bones for profit, the motives of deviations transform into invisible curses that haunt the entire family. "I" suffered from the strange disease of "sheep epilepsy" at the sight of killing, my mother was infertile for life due to an accidental miscarriage, and my father also habitually vomited and could not be at peace when he saw killing and even meat. In the end, the father put down the butcher knife, made friends with monkeys in the valley, accompanied by birds, protected cattle and sheep, ate vegetarian food and cultivated carefully, spent his life cultivating to wash away the sins of killing, and completed reconciliation with animals and redemption of souls. In Fu Fei's pen, the cause and effect of the human world also applies to animals: whether it is the instinctive retribution of the ugly person, or the "peach in return, the reward for the li" for the gentle person, the blessings and grievances of the animal and the person will be fulfilled at some point, and will become deeper and deeper over time like obsession.

Since his creation in 2002, Fu Fei has always regarded prose as the only text of his writing and has published more than 20 collections of essays. The source of living water that maintains such a high density and high quality of creation is everything on the warm and generous land of Zhengfang. He is like a creeping alchemist, his feet are deep in the ground, the roots are intertwined, and his body is stained with grass clippings and dew, immersed in feeling and recording the people, things, and things here. His prose subjects are diverse and varied, and he does not repeat others or himself. He was sincerely interested in writing monkeys, so he had new works about monkeys in "Spirit Monkey", "Knife and Monkey" and "Spirit Beast Record", but each article has a unique angle and emphasis, and "each" is a unique "this one". He wrote about the fate of the family in the smoke of history and the many sentient beings in the dust, they were countless volunteers who dedicated their lives to the revolutionary cause, they were the "Great Compassion" who inherited the Gan opera, they were the woodcarvers who were kind and generous and atoned for the sins of their ancestors, they were craftsmen who made clay pottery, they were the "Mo Li Masters" who danced before the undead, they never compromised on the fate of life, even in a desperate situation, they also looked up at the starlight, they were like "messengers of light" ("Wood and Knife") scattered on the earth. He wrote about the ancient objects of his hometown, "Every old object, there is a deceased person living in it." Every relic is a vessel that holds our past, present and future", focusing on the revitalization and development of the countryside with a compassionate eye ("The Immortality of the Past"). He writes about mountains and rivers, plants, flowers, birds, fish and insects, drawing on the dual nutrients given by John Burroughs, the father of American natural literature, in life and aesthetics, quietly observing the evolution of species and the transmutation of ecological diversity in the vast and claustrophobic countryside, trying to present the wild beauty of the four seasons of the basin ("Wind Over the Creek", "The Covenant of the Birds").

Most of these essays are more than 10,000 words long, and mostly use short sentences, and the sentence patterns are staggered, which means that higher requirements are put forward for narrative capacity. Starting from the unique and authentic individual experience, fu fei constantly activates the sense of depth of history, the sense of freshness of the story and the layering of objects with the help of changeable perspectives and multiple clues, so that the text in his pen is as simple and ingenious as the blue and white porcelain, and the texture is delicate and dense, so that to some extent, it has the texture of the novel, which is a unique existence of the current prose creation. His prose creation is not showy, not vain, but won with emotion, with sincerity and moving, or forbearance and restraint, or full of vitality, there is the warmth of healing and redemption, there is a straight and detached wind bone, there is the power to reach the heart, there is a rational and wise philosophy. With his understanding of prose and writing practice, he constantly approached and arrived at the Wenkelmann-style literary ideal of "noble simplicity and quiet greatness". Especially in the field of natural literature, Fu Fei consciously echoed the international convention on "ecological civilization: building a community of life on earth" in the new era with the holistic vision of "all things are vivid", and tirelessly practiced the call in Henry Bestton's "Distant House" to "touch the earth, love the earth, respect the earth, respect her plains, valleys, hills and oceans", and made an affectionate supplement to the text - "and all the living beings in it", and "coexisted" with man and nature" The two-way rush to capture the meaning of existence provides a forward-looking and missionary path for the theme creation of current natural literature or ecological literature.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 1, 2022

▲Zhang Shuang