I have imagined all the profound deaths
Whales fall
Van Dan flower
It foresaw death, but wanted to go
Earthshaking
So I jumped and then slowly sank in
This formalistic beauty attracts
Countless hagfish, sharks
Crustaceans
Swim towards it and nibble at the huge life plate
It constantly offers juice, crumbs to let
Countless new species were born
By feeding back, it's finally
Closed the valve of a lifetime of blood
Pessimists can often predict the outcome
But to this day, nothing has been given to the world
So, I always deal with it silently
Every sunset
I stared at the red flames in the sky
Watch the sun move down in it, a whale
In the middle of the sky, it jumped out of the sea again
Father and Son (I)
Thirty years had not been seen, and he hurried from the north
Rushed to the south
As the eldest son, he took the urn
He put it on his chest and put it into the tomb with his own hands
They are finally in a fight against time
A silent reconciliation was won
A father with an eccentric temper, a
People who are so desperate that they refuse to recognize each other
At night, he persisted during his lifetime
Slept on a plank bed for half a lifetime
The candles on the table make the portrait clear and legible
They look so similar. There was a moment
I passed by the door and saw him sitting unconsciously
Thought his father was back
In the middle of that bed
Father and Son (II)
A few days after the old father had gone, he sat in the room
Sobbing intermittently, never seen him so sad
For ten years, as the only son who stayed by his side
Whatever he tried to do
His father continued to insult him and reject him
Even hit him with a crutch
Occasionally, he also fought back loudly, more often
It was a scolding while laughing and giggling to clip the dish
Father's bowl
Maybe it went too suddenly, and it couldn't be stopped
weep
It also seems so abrupt
Like all unrequited love
Let out a low, metallic whistling sound
Multi-layered dreams
I walked from the rain to the cell high in the sky
I spied on the other one from the "other."
He wandered among the passageways of the hospital
He wept on the steps of the funeral home
The stars he saw died in an acute fall
I was with him in the night
The ashes were moved
I'm back in the dark realm of my sixties back in the moment
Look at the sound of the illusion perpendicular to the human world
Dreams moved away from the missing thirty years
All night I followed him, walking low
We've all just sent off our loved ones
Just like that, one after the other
From torrential rain to heavy snowy nights
"The end and the beginning are falling on me"*
*Quoted from Han Dong's poem
Summer Index
I felt a goose array between life and death
It was flying over some rooftops
Many feathers carry the air of farewell
Fall from a high place
My dead loved ones have been lying in the mountains for years
The things they loved were still swinging in place
The people they loved will follow
The different fates of human beings after aging
Many empty bones flipped incoherently in the crowd
Many tired skins are drenched by rain from the inside out
Between gain and loss
My face is half clear and half old
Side interpretation
It's been so long, I'm just like you
Pass through the side door of the human world
I was in high spirits, climbing from hill to hill
Cross the plains and cross the no-man's land
Approaching from different directions, an invisible lake
It's as if the only love that comes from here
No other emotions arrived
Those extraneous sounds
There was no more waiting for the ruins, as in
Pauses in each conversation are enough
We travel thousands of miles
The road was thinned into thin lines under the feet, flickering on and off
The pace dried up under the lamp, and the clouds drifted in
I know from the displacement repeatedly:
Starlight belongs to the distance, and there is no self in situ
Obsessed with the act of "traveling far" itself
"I leave anywhere like I leave you
Rushing anywhere is like rushing and passing through you"*
Underlying description
Those who know how to hide in the night, the echo of the body
Is flat
Like loneliness singing
The range under the song cage is getting smaller and smaller
Until the crowd in the black coat
Scattered by something
People who know what is left of them
On the brink of love and non-love
Maybe life needs to swing like this, abstractly
When he finally walked away
We were also relieved
It was as if the night had been hollowed out by something
The echo of the body is still flat
Formula
People should leave slowly, should
Go back to the present from that last moment to say goodbye
Some rituals are necessary and I don't like it
It's not going to work out like you
So I need to write many, many words
As I write this, I remember years ago
A handsome looking friend
He put the wire around his neck
His face was dark and thin before the cremation
Another friend was gone at a young age
I didn't even dare to say goodbye
I was afraid of all the sudden deaths
I need to say goodbye to myself step by step with words
I need you to be with me
Find it in the wreckage of the Great Waves of Life
The tacit understanding of being born as a human being
Running clouds
One day many years ago I was in the town of Muling
See large expanses of clouds
Run in the back
They are eerie queues
Staggered hierarchies
It was as if crossing heaven and passing through the earth
Rushing to the next stop
They bring gray waterfalls
Start overhead
approach
That kind of hot and desolate moment
It is still stuck in mid-air
That day was Tanabata
It was raining heavily in southwestern Jiangxi
A female colleague of mine rolled over because of a big car
Never come home again
Birch forest
Surrounded by the ridge of the plains, lover,
The last stele is left for you.
Write your predecessor on the armor,
The storm couldn't open it either.
Every body
Covered with snow marks.
Ren Chenxi was almost twilight.
Birds return to the forest,
Lover, I would like to die immediately,
Attract vultures, surrounded
The beauty of the firmament.
Wait until the cosmic flood,
A hundred years of loneliness left to you.
Final moments
At four o'clock in the morning, the men began to walk in and out
The man dressed in filial piety surrounded the coffin
Went three laps to the left and three laps to the right
Candle fires swayed in front of the coffin, light
Mapped to the remains, this one carried a grudge
An old man who lived happily for ninety-three years
Now calm and stiff, the paleness of the face
The husky that held the throat
He was in too much of a hurry. How many times
He had looked up at the clock hanging from the wall
Now I was looking back at him
Two hours later he was taken to the cremation hall
The building next door was burning wreaths, green smoke
Constantly floating into the air
After the send-offs cried, they all stood in the open space
Eyes occasionally looked at the rolling electronic screen at the door
It is displayed in red font: so-and-so has entered the furnace
Green: So-and-so is complete
To Louis Borges
I am convinced that no one can easily receive that darkness
That endless description keeps my eyes peeled
It is also trapped in an abstract line
I saw the streets of Buenos Aires
The dusky sunset shone on the back of his old age
Fumble forward with only a crutch of memory—
The body of language that shines behind the silence, that
Brightly colored arrangements, combinations
Like the sound of the first birth, touching the fossil of the lips
Travel lightly because of the richness of the soul
Sink early in the morning in the lost and regained library
Inside the closed eyes, again with some kind of forging
Give us the eternal night of splendor. Must be said
Through beginning, I've seen many births
All are higher than the illusion of repeating death every day
Between life and death
——Reading Fan Danhua's group poem "The Field of Life and Death"
Jiang Rong
The three ultimate propositions of mankind (who I am, where I come from, and where I am going) account for two-thirds of life and death. The writer may have no love, no impulse, no anger, but it is impossible to live and die. No matter how much it is forgotten and denied, it is there, waiting for everyone to realize at some point, face it and answer it. When the poet Fan Danhua composed the group poem "The Field of Life and Death", he was facing life and death, cutting into life and death, dissecting life and death, and trying to answer this question.
The question of life and death is a difficult problem for writers, especially those who aspire to interpret or dissect death. It is like an objectively existing one-way door, and only by walking in can you get a glimpse of what is inside, but once you see it, you can't turn around. An unproven abstract meaning behind the door is naturally an unverifiable proposition. No one can give an authoritative definition of the straight-forward style, so Fan Danhua chose another way of dealing with it.
This group of twelve poems, beginning with "The Whale Falls" and ending with "To Louis Borges", we can see this structural formalism. "Whale Fall" is a marine biological concept that refers to the fact that when a whale dies, it sinks to the bottom of the sea, and the huge corpse forms an ecological circulatory system that can support decomposers for hundreds of years. This phenomenon itself contains two extreme but interdependent and transforming factors of life and death. Fan Danhua uses this as the beginning of the group of poems, the purpose of which is to borrow the dualistic relationship between life and death contained in the "whale fall" itself, and to write the whole group of poems in a tone-setting manner.
Through the expression of many chapters of "Father and Son (I)", "Father and Son (II)", "Multi-layered Dream", "Summer Index", "Side Interpretation", "Bottom Description", "Way", "Running Clouds", "Birch Forest", "Last Moment", Fan Danhua presents a clear and distinct logical context, life and death is the main trunk of concentration, the value of survival, the elaboration of love, the thinking of death, the dissection of the appearance of life, etc. constitute the branches that diverge out, and the branches of this sophora are finally classified into the last poem of the group poem. To Louis Borges" The whole group of poems answers a clear question from all angles: What is life and what is death?
If death is simply seen as the end, the nothingness, and the sorrow, then such a death loses most of its written meaning. So, what exactly is life and death? In Fan Danhua's poem, we see the answer: life and death is an objectively existing, positive cycle.
In fact, as mentioned earlier, when "Whale Fall" is used as the opening poem of this group of poems, Fan Danhua has already revealed such an expressive purpose, and in the text, she once again expresses this cycle in depth, and it can be found that the key word of this poem is "back feeding": "Through back feeding, it finally / closes the valve of a lifetime of blood" "Pessimists can often predict the ending / But so far, nothing is still given to the world", she looks at the whale sinking to the bottom of the sea from a bird's-eye perspective in a language similar to a divine chant And conducts a calm analysis and interpretation, she extracts the combination and transformation of death and life from the specific objects of the whale falling, and places it between the sea and the sky. Death is a kind of feedback, this is the object of the whale falling to us, at this moment, there is no shadow of human society in the ocean, but in the second verse, the appearance of the narrative role of "pessimist" makes the ocean suddenly change, and quickly transforms into a microcosm of human society, so that "I always silently deal with / Every sunset", and at the last moment, I see "a whale / Jumping out of the sea in the sky". This is undoubtedly an illusion, but at the same time it is an extremely clever arrangement, and the whale that jumps out of the sea is undoubtedly a formalistic whale, a symbolic resurrection of a whale that has sunk to the bottom of the sea. This reminds me of the silverfish picked up by the kingfisher in the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver's "Kingfisher", and there is a certain intertextual commonality between the two at this moment, but the silverfish in Oliver's poem finally leaves a "broken red river" and "a sharp and brisk cry" for this "most perfect world" with a tragic death, and the formalistic whale in Van Danhua's pen gives birth to the illusion of jumping out of the vast sea.
But not all of them are full of symbolist expressions, and in two poems such as "Father and Son", "Multi-layered Dream", "Way", and "Running Clouds", Fan Danhua takes a more traditional approach, presenting the existence of death as an object with as calm brushstrokes as possible. She uses the narration perspective of a bystander as much as possible to avoid her own involvement in the event, and this careful approach can help her show the full picture of death, such as the two "Father and Son" songs, such as "Summer Index": "My dead relatives lie in the mountains for many years / The things they loved are still swinging in place." But sometimes involuntarily throw themselves into the arms of first-person narratives to show the thrilling and uproar of death hidden behind a quiet life, such as The Way and The Running Clouds. This is an expression that requires courage and self-confidence, and it is often easy to take on statements of abstract things in the first person, but Fan Danhua is very clever to let the perspective focus on herself, using herself as the point of occurrence of the narrative, linking death and life. For example, in "The Way", she clearly expresses her attitude toward death: "I imagined that all profound deaths / People should leave slowly, should / From that last moment back to the present to say goodbye / Some rituals are necessary, I don't like / Like you can't go out", and then use this as a premise, after experiencing death, give this positive expression: "I am afraid of all sudden death / ... / I need you to be with me / Find from the wreckage of the great waves of life / The tacit understanding of being born as a human being." ”
Talking about death is about knowing life more clearly, not staying in the midst of negative emotions and enjoying a carnival of painful writing. Heidegger said, "Knowing death, knowing life." In Fan Danhua's philosophical system, if death is a thing that has left its original place, "the state is clearly like the night is hollowed out by something" ("Description of the Bottom"), then life is the beginning of a long journey with one foot. In "Lateral Interpretation", she said: "I am full of interest, climbing from one hill to another / Crossing the plain, crossing the no-man's land / Approaching from different directions, an invisible lake", the long journey must have a purpose, whether it is a secular or religious meaning, or just the survival instinct of living things, Fan Danhua here chooses the emotional instinct, but unlike many writers in the direction of dealing with this subject, the poet does not confirm his choice and enshrine it. Instead, it is a highly recognizable deconstruction: "I know from displacement repeatedly: / The starlight belongs to the distance, and there is no self in the same place / For so long, I am just like you / Obsessed with the act of "far away" itself". It turns out that instinct is empty, survival is aimless, and the act of traveling far is just a noun like living, not an ambitious verb. However, does the reader think that at this point, everything is the author's expression? Not. The author then quotes a poem from Han Dong's "Between Round Trips": "I leave everywhere like leaving you / Running to any place is like running and passing through you." I am not advocating quoting other people's verses in my own work, except for the purpose of some intertextual connection with the original poem, which obviously exists here. Han Dong's "Between The Rounds" is a kind of life parting between the mountains and the sea, running to the unknown, where the unknown is the time dimension rather than the spatial level, and this is what Fan Danhua intends to elaborate: life is a long journey, then the future of this long journey is naturally unknowable, in this long journey, even if "you" travel with me, it is only a journey of overlapping trajectories. The future is unpredictable, the long journey has no purpose, and even "you" may not accompany me on the whole journey, so how should the long journey of life itself be treated? Poetry does not give an answer, but the inability to answer after denial is an answer in itself, so it is better to still devote "only love" to the "long journey" itself.
Fan Danhua is also good at storytelling, especially in the portrayal and refinement of the details of a certain moment, this kind of sketch-like expression has a unique effect in guiding the reader into the process of cutting into reality, especially in this seemingly calm mirror, her gaze will carry out some ingenious focus, this line of sight focus will not be abrupt and bizarre, but it must carry a specific mission of expression. For example, in "The Last Moment", the previous article has been describing the funeral of the old man, which seems to be a natural event that is too ordinary to be ordinary, and this is also the case, but in the end, her eyes are focused on the electronic screen that "after the send-off person has cried" - "it is displayed in red font: so-and-so has entered the furnace / Green display: so-and-so has completed". Seeing this, I can't help but marvel at her! This is not only a picture of life that is somewhat strange to ordinary people, but also has a special meaning because of the attention of the author's line of sight: red shows "has entered the furnace", which can be understood as entering the furnace of death, but because red is also the color of tension, excitement, and passion, it can also be sublimated to express that the furnace that entered the world at the beginning of the birth of this life began to melt and forge itself; the green display "completed", Both the cremation in the superficial sense has been completed, and because green is a calm and gentle color, it can be understood that the forging in the human world has been completed. In just two lines, the emotions and states of conflict, anxiety, fear, relief and consummation are fully presented when death comes.
The last poem in this group of poems is "To Louis Borges", as we all know, Borges was blind in middle age, but after this he wrote the famous historical masterpieces "The Book of Sand", "Brody's Report", "The Golden Yellow of the Tiger" and so on. In this last poem, Van Danhua does not talk about death, but about Borges's blindness. It's a deep sense of death, but at the same time it's a metaphor for the entanglement of life and death. Blindness was undoubtedly a setback to death for Borges, then director of the National Library of Argentina ("I am convinced that no one can easily receive that darkness"), but for Borges's writing, it was a cruel new birth, a nirvana in the midst of ashes, ("In closed eyes, once again forged /endowed with a brilliant eternal night") Finally, she said: "Through the beginning and through, many births I have seen are higher than the illusion of repeating death every day". As the end of the whole set of poems, it completes the series—in structure, logical self-consistency; in content, it gives its own answer to life and death.
Jiang Rong, formerly known as Zi Zhen (子衿), was born in 1988 in Nanchang, Jiangxi. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association. Poetry and criticism works can be found in "Poetry Journal", "Yangtze River", "Poetry Tide", "Mangzhong", "Xinghuo", "Creation Commentary", "Literature and Art Daily", "China Art Newspaper", etc., and there is a poetry collection "Homecoming".
(Image from the Internet)
【Personal Profile】:
Fan Danhua is a member of the Jiangxi Provincial Writers Association. A group of poems have been published in journals such as "Poetry Exploration", "Stars", "Caotang", "Works", "October", "Selected Poems" and other journals, and have been nominated for the 11th "Poetry Exploration Red Sorghum Poetry Award", and now live in Nanchang.