Liang Heng
Whenever the author completes a work, it is like a carpenter finishing a delicate piece of furniture, littered with shavings, wooden blocks, and sketches that have been sketched. Sitting down to smoke a cigarette, quietly facing the cluttered scene, reviewing the production process, is also a kind of enjoyment.
1What is Beauty? From an academic point of view, this is an esoteric subject, involving aesthetics, philosophy, psychology and other disciplines, which can be defined in many ways. But to put it bluntly, it makes people feel spiritually happy. The earliest origin of beauty is man's sense of matter to the outside world, the shape and color of vision, the sound and rhythm of hearing, the various tastes of taste, the pleasure of touch, and so on. Over time, this feeling is attached to the emotion and fixed to the emotional color, and then to the rational social cognition, there is a common concept of beauty. Therefore, in addition to the common beauty that everyone says about beauty, all ethnic groups, regions and even individuals also have their own personal beauty.
Beauty has three functions in the action of emotions: First, it makes people excited, the heart is beautiful, and the heart is like stagnant water, which is certainly not beautiful. Therefore, there is Su Dongpo's "Great River East", and there is Yue Fei's "Manjiang Hong". Second, beauty allows people to be quiet and soothed. Life is tiring, irritable, and there are many depressions, and there must be catharsis and comfort, there is Zhu Ziqing's "Lotus Pond Moonlight". The third is to make life associations, from imitation to association, forming the realm of Wang Guowei theory. The human soul always wants to jump out of the body and yearn for "poetry and distance". Paintings, songs, poems, and texts can all inspire associations and illusion the realm. The ultimate manifestation of beauty is harmony, dynamic and static, far and near, positive and negative, sad and happy, etc. in order to seek harmony and massage people's nerves. Chinese Confucianism says moderation, and ancient Greek philosophy says that "it is the unity of many mixed elements, the mutual consistency of different elements."
2 Beauty is a natural and reasonable natural existence. Darwin said: "There is an intrinsic tendency of living things to evolve in the direction of progress and perfection. "Even animals and plants are pursuing beauty, flowers attract bees and butterflies with beauty, animals use beauty to attract the opposite sex, let alone people? Man is made up of both material and spiritual parts. In terms of material life, the yearning is to eat well, dress well, live well, and play well; the spiritual yearning is the comfort of emotions, the joy and sorrow of freedom, and it is difficult to buy the mood of beauty. Comedy is beauty, tragedy is also beauty (there are cathartic theories and taoye theories in the academic circles), everything that can arouse people's reverie and express emotions freely is beauty, objective such as landscape beauty, artistic beauty, ideological beauty, social beauty, subjective beauty such as visual beauty (such as painting), auditory beauty (such as music), tactile beauty (such as plush toys, hand-held jade pieces), taste beauty (such as food, wine) and so on. The language itself has no sense of sight or smell, but its magical function is that it can refract all kinds of beauty. Thus a new form of independence emerged—the beauty of language art. Originally, the composition of Chinese characters, each word has its own form, sound, and meaning, which can mobilize people's visual and auditory beauty. Not to mention words, sentences, poems, and articles made up of words.
3 Beauty is in truth and goodness, making people return. The purpose of beauty is to bring people back and awaken the true and good side of the human heart. Thus to go to falsehood, to falsehood, to ugliness, to evil. Let you have a calm breath in everything you come to, and go from evil to good and return to simplicity. Aesthetic with a true and good heart, in turn, beauty and perfection of the human soul, that is, aesthetic education function. Hegel said that man was transformed from animals and remained animalistic. Man has two relationships with the external world, one is to destroy the object for survival and satisfy himself (animal desires); the other is not to destroy the object, to appreciate it in the air, which is aesthetic (the evolution of human nature). The same is when facing an apple, the first situation is to eat it and satisfy hunger and thirst; the second situation is not to destroy, quietly appreciate its arc, color, shape, etc. Hegel called art "the use of kind hands to free man from the bondage of nature." I once wrote an article called "The Beauty of Lines" because I saw a beautiful packaging bottle. This bottle has completed its packaging function, neither edible nor used, but very good-looking and has an aesthetic function. I respect it with a heart of truth-seeking and offer it to be admired on the table. So beauty is a special education - aesthetic education. All beautiful things, beauties, beautiful scenery, beautiful things, beautiful art, can wash away the evil of human nature, let people return to a blank piece of paper, back to the true self. "Meet a stone tiger" in the book makes us immediately return to the innocence of childhood; in "Deep Mountain Night Talk", the monkey people play, endure hunger and eat with monkeys, and make people feel good in their hearts. Truth and goodness convey beauty. And a few things in "The Ugly Monument" illuminate the evil of human nature, reflect on themselves, return to truth and goodness, and re-enter the beautiful realm. The beauty of tragedy is a reminder of truth and goodness, and it guards justice. "Here's a Crooked House" is a diagonal metaphor.
4 Beauty is around, just pay attention. Beauty is distributed in the corners of our lives, just like the cute children on the side of the road raising their smiling faces and waving their small hands, and those adults who are tired of running for life always have no time to take care of it and rush by. It doesn't cost much to enjoy this beauty, you don't have to be painstakingly created by artists or collectors to spend a lot of money to buy, as long as you are in a hurry to walk with the afterglow of the corner of your eyes to gently sweep into the heart. This is also a kind of leak picking. I often had this kind of "sexual encounter" during the long walks of my journalistic career. "Bugs and Leaves It Eats" is a sea potato leaf in the deep mountains of Hainan, which is covered with extremely regular and reasonable wormholes, a geometric beauty. Is bug eating also planned and calculated? In "A Banana Flower on the Side of the Road", the green pole and red head are very much like a large brush dipped in red paint, a kind of pictographic beauty, Plato and Aristotle said that beauty is imitation, will plants also imitate shows? "Persimmon In the Mountains No One Harvests" is on the rugged path of Taihang Mountain, looking at an old persimmon tree on the cliff, ripe persimmons like a red lantern, dancing alone in the autumn wind, a kind of freehand beauty, much like Wu Guanzhong's freehand ink. In the jujube forest in northern Shaanxi, a soft and tender green new branch suddenly appeared on the rough and cracked trunk of an old jujube tree, and a large red jujube was hung, a contrasting beauty, the beauty of alternating cycles of life. The above is seen on the island, in the mountains, and in my yard, the autumn leaves are full of walls, one is full of thick oil painting beauty, and the other is lightly dyed and lightly painted watercolor beauty. It is "the breeze and the bright moon are priceless, and there are feelings near the water and distant mountains.". There is really no price, no need to spend money, just need you to have love and always pay attention. As the entomologist Fabre said, there is always a prepared mind. Artists work hard to sketch, Liu Haisu ten on the Huangshan Mountain to draft, that is for creation, we ordinary people do not want to be so specialized, do not want this much bitterness, let it go, with the fate of the harvest, there is always a beautiful scenery into the heart.
In the primeval forest of Heilongjiang, the dead wood on the ground is all wrapped in fresh green moss, and the cycle of life in nature is endless.
5 The beauty of the three realms, from the surface and the inside. Man's perception of beauty is from the surface to the inside. "Table" refers to the beauty of the appearance that is immediately felt by sight or hearing, "inside" refers to the reasonable beauty realized after feeling; "table" is the real scene, and "inside" is the artistic conception. During my walking in the interview, I often inadvertently encounter a scene, and my eyes light up; when I hear something, my heart moves, which is the first touch of beauty, and it is the "appearance" of the sense. "Parking and sitting in love with maple forest at night, frost leaves red in February flowers", good scenes and good things are always unforgettable, but it is necessary to further abstract the artistic conception of "feeling" and "reason" from "shape".
The beauty of the mood can be divided into three layers. The first layer of beauty generated by objective objects is what I call "the state of form"; the beauty of emotions generated by form is "situation", and Wang Guowei's so-called "all scenery language is love language"; the rational beauty produced by form, event, and emotion is "rational state". When you look at the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible, the Analects, and Zhuangzi, the purpose is to reason, but it is all to tell stories. This is the beauty of the three realms of "form, feeling, and reason" of the article or all the image art. Above the "realm", there will be a kind of "fun", and it is another kind of beauty.
Beauty always starts from the "shape", and because of the beauty of the shape, it derives the beauty of love and reason. For example, "Meet a Stone Tiger" The cute and cute form of the stone tiger triggers naïve feelings; the strange leek flowers on "Alpine Leek Ping" tell the ecological reason. This is all from the beauty of form into the state of beauty and beauty. Starting from "things" can also derive the beauty of reason. "A Tree Into a Bridge" tells that a tree that accidentally fell to the ground became a bridge for people to cross the river; "The Book of Six Tastes" uses the principle of food seasoning to talk about the truth of life in the world. This is all derived from the beauty of things, the beauty of feelings, the beauty of reason. Form and matter are real, and feelings and reason are false. Through the real beautiful things, and then abstract the beautiful feelings and reasons, to create a mood in the heart, only to be beautiful for a long time, can be repeatedly played.
6What is Fun? Beauty also shows a kind of fun in addition to the "three realms". This can be traced back to the function of the human sense of taste. Elevating the physical sense of taste to the psychological sensation is the "taste" of the mind. Xin Abandoning Disease "Teenagers don't know the taste of sorrow", an emotional aesthetic. Li Zehou said in "Chinese Aesthetics", "In China, the word beauty is also associated with the pleasure of taste. For example, the works of Zhong Rong and Sikong Tu on poetry often associate 'taste' with art appreciation."
Fun is something that is born outside the subject, a stream overflowing the river, a dark fragrance around the flowers, humor in people, subtlety in things, bixing in poetry, freehand in painting, and fun in articles. If a thing is always ruled, it is boring, a person is always sitting in a precarious position, and people and things always have to give birth to something other to be cute. Su Dongpo said that "it is better to tilt a branch outside the bamboo", and Li Shangyin said that "it is better to stay dry and listen to the rain", which are all things outside the normal state of bamboo forests and lotus leaves, and they are the beauty of the side. Fun is the sound of the strings, the inadvertent expression of beauty. In the book, the mistakes of "A Tree into a Bridge", the mysterious fun of "Devil and Lao Tzu", the subtle fun of "Sesame Opens the Door, Persimmons Become Soft", the innocence of "Meet a Stone Tiger", the contrasting fun of "Here Is a Crooked House", etc., are all the fun that spills out of the subject. Liang Qichao's life's career has been magnificent and his writings have been magnificent, but he said that if he is put in a chemical beaker and melted, there is actually only the word "interest". The prologue says, "Things are speechless, they are all in human enlightenment, enlightenment is beautiful, and enlightenment is interesting." Fun is the beauty that people interpret from things by their own understanding. For example, few people pay attention to the lowest life of moss, but in the eyes of the author, it is a soothing and full of interest for people's hearts. "It caresses the past, covering every old thing with a layer of tenderness." A meadow on the outskirts of Guiyang, the author thought of the grass boat borrowing arrows, and thought of Dai Wangshu's "Rain Lane" ("People and Grass Colors Are Romantic"). Calligraphers can sense the meaning of the brush from the leaks of rain on the walls. Only those who are interested in life can perceive the beauty of fun.
7 The relationship between fun and mood. Beauty has reached the three realms of form, emotion and reason, which is already beautiful enough, why add another dish to the feast of beauty: fun? The realm is virtual compared to the physical object, and it is a hypothetical cradle for people to leave the entity to place emotions. It's a bokeh place. We often say that the wonderful realm, the fairyland, the dangerous realm, the desperate realm, the illusionary realm, and so on, but no matter how imaginary, it is still a "realm", an environment. And fun, even this situation is gone, further blurred into a kind of "taste" - fun, or light or thick, uncertain, can not be fixed in one place, can not stop at a moment, this sense of beauty can only be compared with "taste". The realm comes from people's aesthetics of physical objects, and the fun is born from the realm. The realm is also the beauty of fiction and reality, if we feel that it is virtual, it is further abstracted into "imagery" (such as the "Midu" of "Finding Ferry in Changzhou City" in this book), the image is the freeze frame of the beauty of the realm, which can be played slowly and virtually; if we are true, it can be abstracted as "fun", and fun is the divergence of the beauty of the realm, which can be virtually closed eyes and tasted. If the artistic conception of the aesthetic object is compared to water, the water condensation is ice, ice is pure and jade, a beautiful image; water steaming is gas, steaming, a kind of fun that envelops the surroundings.
A residential building in Beijing wrapped in autumn leaves:
See all the flowers in the north and south, it is better to be quiet on a courtyard of autumn.
Fun can be divided into fun and reason. The heart born of emotions ripples, and the beauty of imagining is fun. The heart of research born of thinking and the beauty of curiosity are the reasoning. Whether it is interest or reason, it is determined by the aesthetic object. For example, a banana flower protruding from the wall is very much like a large colored pen, which is a pleasure. It's inherently peculiar, and there's no need to ask why. And a sea potato leaf, so that the insects eat very regularly into a sieve-shaped, on the physiological interest, people can't help but think about the reason. "Lonely boat, fishing alone in the snow of the cold river" is a pleasure, "asking where the canal is as clear as promised, for there is a source of living water" is a sense of interest. Tables and stools may be uneven on all fours, and it is common to use small wood chips to cushion them. However, the Song Dynasty poet Liu Ziyi said that "it is not a good rope ink, the earth is uneven in the world", which is reasonable. Nature is fun everywhere.
Fun is divided into high and low levels, which is related to the intellectual and moral cultivation of the aesthetician. Sometimes the name is aesthetic, but it is actually ugly.
8 vision first, association is beautiful. The eye is the most important of our facial features, and it has been studied that more than 75% of the knowledge we gain comes from the eye. Then people's beauty should also be obtained by vision. In addition to the beauty of sound by the ear, painting, sculpture, drama, film, acrobatics, modeling, bodybuilding and all other performance and performance art rely on visual experience. The lake and mountains are even more eye-catching. Wang Bo's "Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion" expresses his sorrow through the scenery, leaving behind the famous sentence that "the sunset and the lone bird fly together, and the autumn water is long and the sky is colorful". Fan Zhongyan's "Record of Yueyang Lou" is a great truth about worrying about the world, but it starts from a large section of scenery description. "Spring and Jingming, the waves are not alarming, the sky is bright, and it is a million acres." This shows that the brewing of feelings often begins from the scene in front of you, that is, Liu Xun said in "Wenxin Carved Dragon" that "the eyes are still in the past, and the heart is also tuna", from "form" to understand the feelings and reason.
I recall that my first aesthetic enlightenment was when I saw a large album of exquisite jade crafts at an old book stall when I was a child, bought it home and looked through it tirelessly every day, and since then I like to collect eye-catching things. Lu Xun presented Xu Guangping with the inscription poem "Mustard Garden Painting Notation": "Talk about borrowing pictures to get tired of your eyes". It can be seen that a good picture can soothe the tired eyes and please the mood of the person. The book uses a large number of pictures, 152 pages, and a total of 69 pictures, which is to increase the visual impact. Although you can't see the physical beauty of the scene, through the conversion of pictures, you will still "see the past, and the heart will also be absorbed", which will naturally produce beauty.
Beauty arises from the associations of various sensations such as sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. According to the principle of similarity, there are similarities between things, which is the basis of rhetorical metaphors and the premise of aesthetic associations. For example, "She smiles like a flower", people laugh, and the line of the face is indeed similar to that of a flower. The pictures received in the book moved me at the first time. "Autumn Color Drunk, Travelers Don't Have to Return" is an autumn morning in Wuyuan County Hotel to see the colorful leaves on the ground, I immediately thought of Du Fu's poem "This song should only be in the sky", this "carpet" should only be in the sky. This is the association between vision and hearing, and it is also the association from scenery to poetry and painting. When the book was about to be printed, I saw a waist-high stalactite in a cave in Guizhou, which turned out to be 400,000 years old, and immediately remembered that I had seen a bamboo shoot of the same height in the bamboo forest in Jiangxi six years ago, but it had grown overnight. This is an association across time and space, so turn out the old photos and publish them in the same frame, this visual impact should make people feel the magic of time, the eternity of the universe. The beauty of vision, from the eyes and ears to the brain, such as seeds landing on the ground, ten years, decades, sometimes a lifetime will not be forgotten.
Of these 69 paintings, apart from most of them photographic, two are my paintings. In the wild, you often encounter such embarrassment, originally seeing an exciting tree, a scene, but receiving the camera is very flat. Because what the human eye sees is filtered by the gaze, the image processed by the brain is superior to the mechanical grasp of the lens. At this time, it is better to draw one yourself. For example, "An Old Camphor Tree That Rewrote History", in the photo, the tree is as tall as the house and connected side by side, while in the painting, the ancient tree is born, showing its tallness, while the house is very small, not to mention the people in the house. It is to interpret the greatness of nature, and even the greatest figures cannot escape the protection of nature. Painting can express ideas more freely than photographs.
9 articles literally musical beauty. Articles are not direct visual and auditory, but can only indirectly transform their beauty. As a print medium, visual beauty can be helped by illustrations, while hearing can only rely on the pronunciation of words. Therefore, reading should be read aloud, and poetry should be recited. As mentioned earlier, Chinese characters are composed of shapes, sounds, and meanings, and this "sound" is the musical beauty of the article.
The embodiment of musical beauty in words is rhythm and rhythm. In addition to the beauty of the sound, the rhyme of the poem also has a rhythmic effect, just like the drum beat in folk music and the zizi in the drama. It is sound and beat at the same time. The rhyme of a sentence, an interval sentence or a long short sentence divides the length of the rhythm and produces the urgency and soothing of the tone. The book is mainly textual, but mixed with poetry and song, that is, to express different emotional rhythms. The ancient poem is full of emotions and rhythmic: "People want to be slightly drunk with half a glass of wine, and the heavens and the earth must be drunk for one night and autumn." The forest is dyed with five flowers and horses, and the autumn leaves are draped with hundreds of buildings. ("It's better to be quiet than to a courtyard of autumn") The words are free to stumble: "Erected as a tree, it is a bridge, and the water under the bridge goes east, and the pedestrians on the bridge are early." A crowd stepped on it, wordless and annoyed, and new branches were raised to support the green umbrella, and children ran under the umbrella. "('Bu Operator: A Tree into a Bridge)" And the song comes from the singing of the stage, the rhythm is colloquial, more natural, witty, and lively." The fruit, like a lamp leading the way, shining, the leaf, like a willow eyebrow hanging low, shy answer. Silently, how many cars and horses have been stopped. ("The Nail Fruit on the Side of the Road") As for the fu, it is a transition from rhyming to non-rhyming, and the rhyming feet have become arbitrary. The loops of rhythm and the alternating rhythm seem to be broken, and there is a vague beauty of music. "Although the military situation is in a hurry, the courtyard door is creaky, and the landlord is not abolished; the commander Ruoding reads the strike report, and listens to the sound of grinding outside the window." Between the conversations and laughter, liaoshen was taken in the first world war, Huaihai was collected in the second world war, and pingjin was brought down in the third war. The whole country has been liberated, and the overall situation has been decided. "(Xibai Pofu) In general, the musical rhythm of various genres is in this order from strict to loose, gradually becoming soothing and casual: old style poetry - words - songs - new poems - fu - text. Wen Yiduo said that poetry is dancing with shackles, and this "shackles" is the rhythm of music. Vernacular texts are completely without shackles, and there is less musicality, so sometimes we are still willing to wear "shackles" again, and find a little sense of music with the help of poetry and music. As long as you pay attention, that is, in the vernacular text of prose sentences, the language can still use sound rhymes, and use methods such as adjusting monophonic or two-tone words to suppress ups and downs, ups and downs, and secretly store a sense of music. This shows that the article still has a natural connection with music.
I once said "articles are written for ideas, for beauty", and this book is written specifically for beauty.