Kaiko (March 24, 1964-March 26, 1989)
Miss
Nishikawa
The death of the poet Haizi will become one of the myths of our time. As the years go by, it will become clearer and clearer what a precious friend we have lost on the evening of March 26, 1989. To lose a true friend means to lose a great inspiration, to lose a dream, to lose a part of our lives, to lose an echo, to whom Haizi is a genius, and to himself he will always be a lonely "king", a "material lover", a "rural intellectual". Haizi only lived for 25 years, his literary creation lasted only about 7 years, and in the last two years of his life, he was like a young star, burning like a young star, racing against the clock, and then suddenly exploding.
On the night after Haizi's suicide, I got this incredible news. How can it be so violent? He should be alive! Because just two weeks ago, Haizi, Luo Yihe, Lao Mu, and I had talked in my home that Goethe should not let Faust translate "Taichu Youdao" as "Taichu Youwei", but should translate it as "Taichu Yousheng", and also talked about the desolation after the harvest of the earth and the heroic two-line of Alexander. Haizi's suicide on the track was on a slow train track between Shanhaiguan and Longjiaying. He committed suicide with four books: the Old and New Testaments, Thoreau's Walden, Hayyard's Raft, and Conrad's Selected Novels. In his suicide note, he wrote: "My death has nothing to do with anyone." Yihe told me that they came to see me at my house two weeks ago out of Haizi's proposal.
There have been various rumors about the cause of Haizi's death, but most of them will prove absurd. Haizi has left nearly 2 million words of literature behind him, including 3 diaries he kept only in his lifetime. As early as November 18, 1986, he wrote in his diary: "I almost committed suicide,...... But that's another me—another corpse... I ended his life in many ways, but I survived... I live in holiness again." This young poet who wrote Goethe's psalms with Hölderlin's enthusiasm, his holy stupidity, his stupidity brilliant! As Van Gogh said, "Everything I create towards nature is a chestnut, taken out of the fire." Ah, those who do not trust the sun are those who have turned their backs on God. ”
After Haizi's death, Yihe called him "Naked Son"—Yihe was right, for in Haizi's autobiographical poems we can indeed find a Haizi who is simple, sensitive, creative, and at the same time impatient, vulnerable, obsessed with desolate dirt, concerned and convinced of things that are dying and will radiate golden light at the height of eternity. This concern and conviction contributed to Haizi's lifelong career, although it was not yet completed. He chose us to succeed him.
When I entered his residence in Changping for the last time to sort out his belongings for him, I heard my own heartbeat. The master I was familiar with was gone, but the two houses were full of the master's character. In the foyer is a copy of a Van Gogh painting "The Courtyard of the Al Sanatorium" on the face. In the room on the left was a floor under the window, on the table against the south wall were two reliefs of Lamaist stones he had brought back from Tibet and a picture book by the Spanish painter El Greco at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the room on the right was a row of three large bookshelves along the western wall—the other leaning against the east wall—and the shelves were filled with books. There are two tables in the house, and on the table by the door are the seven volumes of the Hindu epic ramayana that the owner cherished during his lifetime. Apparently, the two rooms had been cleaned before the master had left: clean, like a grave.
Al Sanatorium 丨 Van Gogh
This is haizi's residence from the autumn of 1983 to the spring of 1989, in changping, a small town more than 60 miles from Beijing (Haizi initially lived in Xihuanli and later moved to the new campus of Chengdongtou University of Political Science and Law). The small city of Changping is bordered by the remnants of the Taihang Mountains to the west and the Jundu Mountain of the Yanshan Mountains to the north. These mountains will not know that a poet faces them every day and writes a series of works such as "The Land", "The Great Zaza", "The Sun", "The Bow", "The Heavenly Messiah" and so on. Here, Haizi dreams of wheat fields, grasslands, maidens, heavens, and all the distant things. Haizi lived in distant things, especially now.
You can laugh at an emperor's wealth, but you can't laugh at a poet's poverty. Unlike the Spanish poet Jimenez, who dreamed of heaven but found a place on earth, Haizi did not find a place in his life happily. This may be due to his bias. In his room, you won't find a TV, a tape recorder, or even a radio. Writing in poverty, monotony, and loneliness, Haizi could neither dance, swim, or ride a bicycle. In the years since he left Peking University, he has only seen a movie once — in the summer of 1986, I went to Changping to see him, and I dragged him to see the Soviet film "Idiot", based on Dostoevsky's novel, and except for two trips to Tibet and giving lessons to the students, Haizi's daily life is basically like this: every night until 7 a.m., go to bed all morning, read all afternoon, occasionally eat something, and continue to work after 7 p.m. However, Haizi is not an introvert, he will gleefully talk about how he stole the white in the field naked on a rainy day when he was a child, he will invent some strange slogans, such as "from good to good", he will tell you that Lao Tzu is blind, lei feng is a good person.
This man who longed to fly was destined to die on earth, but who could be sure that Haizi's death was not another kind of flight, thus freed from the long night, the deep-rooted suffering of the soul, and echoing the loud call of the Messiah in the dawn? Haizi, who once called himself a romantic poet, was crammed with illusions in his mind. However, it is different from the romanticism of nineteenth-century Europe. We can use the analogy of the two books of the Bible: Haizi's creative path was from the New Testament to the Old Testament. The New Testament is thought and the Old Testament is action, the New Testament is the head and the Old Testament is the headless hero, the New Testament is love, water, motherhood, and the Old Testament is violence, fire, fatherhood; "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" is different from "a man hits your right face, you have to give him the left face", so the human maiden in Haizi's early poem later became the singing bearer and Homer in heaven. I don't know exactly what made him make this shift when he wrote his long poem "The Land" in 1987, but this shift suddenly brought us new skies and earths. Haizi aspired to start lyrically, through narrative, to epic, and he was eager to build a vast poetic empire: from the Nile in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, to the Mongolian plateau in the north, to the Indian subcontinent in the south.
For me, at least, it will take a long time to talk deeply about Haizi and his poetry, and the significance and impact he has had on the poetry and society of our time as a symbol. Haizi must have seen and heard many things that I did not see and hear; and it was these things that I did not see and hear that made him one of the pioneers of our time. In a poem about Rimbaud, Haizi called the French psychic a "poetic martyr," and now he joins the ranks of the poetic martyrs of loneliness, pain, revolution, and bloodshed. The prophecy of his life became his call to himself, and we will benefit from the clarity and determination of his life and art, facing the dawn of the new century.
Haizi and I met in the spring of 1983, and I remember it in an office that doubled as a dormitory in the Youth League Committee of Peking University. Haizi came, small, round-faced, big-eyed, and a complete child (bearding was a later thing). He was only 19 years old and about to graduate. I can't remember exactly what that conversation was, but remembering that he mentioned Hegel gave me a blind admiration for Haizi, who probably began writing poetry in her third year of college.
Speaking of Haizi's talent, it cannot but be sincerely admired. At the age of 15, Haizi was admitted to the law department of Peking University from the countryside of Anqing, Anhui Province, and after graduation, he was assigned to work at the China University of Political Science and Law, first in the school journal, and then transferred to the philosophy teaching and research department, and successively taught students courses in cybernetics, systems theory and aesthetics. Haizi's aesthetics class is very popular, and when talking about the problem of "imagination", he gives an example of the casualness of imagination: "You can imagine that seagulls are God's swimming trunks!" The students, who knew he was a poet, asked him to spend 10 minutes before each class to recite his poems. Oh, blessed are those who have listened to His recitation!
Haizi has loved 4 girls in her life, but each time the result is a disaster, especially the girl he first loves, and it is more related to his whole life. However, Haizi wrote many moving poems for them. "Four sisters stand on a desolate hill / All the wind blows only to them / All the days are broken for them." ("Four Sisters") This is the same as the opening statement of the three witches in Shakespeare's "Macbeth": "Thunder and lightning are raining, when will the sisters meet again?" Haizi had fallen in love with them with great sadness, and "These four confused sisters / One more than the goddess of destiny." "Oh, blessed are these four women!
Haizi had lived in the countryside for a total of 15 years, so he thought that he could write about the countryside for at least 15 years. But he left prematurely before he could write for 15 years. Everyone who comes close to him, everyone who has read his psalms, can smell in him the rotation of the seasons, the direction of the wind, and the growth of wheat. The light and darkness of the earth, the warmth and harshness of the earth, became the essence of his life, into his outstanding, simple, smooth and sonorous poetic language, as if the silent earth had grabbed him and turned him into the throat of the earth in order to speak. Oh, blessed are the vast barren countryside of China!
Haizi's final, fateful poem is an important part of his entire achievement. He uniquely experienced "the night rises from the earth / The sky that obscures the light / The desolate earth after the harvest / The night rises from within you." Now, when I come into contact with these verses, I am deeply struck by these verses that reach the element, knowing that this is real poetry, and now he no longer has to say the words of his poem "unchanged lead words become sheepskin", because his poetry will flow in our blood. Oh, blessed are the new Chinese poetry!
This article is selected from the Complete Compilation of Haizi Poems
Published by Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore
Editor of this weChat issue: Liu Yujie
Illustrations from the web