Southern Network News (Reporter/Zhou Cun) Yang Lan, a teenager who does not take the usual path, makes a living by cutting the piano and heals himself by playing the piano. He is also the author of the book "The Lyre Man".
The author dropped out of school because of his rebellion and love of music at a young age, left the normal track of life, and began a "off-topic" life. In the rampage of finding the poetic world, in the life encounter between life and death, the guqin has become an indispensable part of his life, and he has also grown into a unique piano person who integrates the harp, the piano and life.
In this autobiographical non-fiction work, the author presents a simple self-education and a period of youth with a restrained and tense text.
Life and death, loneliness and love, ancient and modern, are all blended and released in the author's simple, introverted, and incomparably true and powerful words.
If life is more important than the realm, then what kind of road can you choose to live the life you really want to live?
Not everyone has the courage to chase a seemingly illusory dream, such as going to the mountains on a snowy day to find a worldly master who plays the piano.
Not everyone has the courage to open their hearts quietly and calmly when the snow falls, when the fog rises, and when the night is late, not to beautify or delusional, and to disclose their lives that seem to be off-topic but have always been polished by ideals.
Guqin and music are the foundation of this book, and those relatives, teachers, and friends who have shone in the author's life are the soul of this touching non-fiction work. The folk craftsmen and pianists scattered in the ordinary corners of the city and the countryside are intertwined with the subtle and exquisite sounds of the guqin in the historical tradition, opening up to the reader the spiritual world and poetic way of survival of contemporary qin people.
Chapters are read for trial
Xi Qin, Youyou (Excerpt)
worried
I remember how I started practicing a lot. It was the spring of 2012, a specific moment, at a gathering of friends.
I have just moved to a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Hangzhou. Separated from the city by a large field, only one-third of the houses are occupied, and the rest are vacant rough houses. I rented one of them, half harp and half live.
Friends come to see me. It was a bright and dangling spring day, and the daylight slipped down, ending the bitter winter rain that lasted for two months. Like moldy plants, people evaporate water vapor and soften joints in the sun.
In short, it was a day of pleasure.
In the evening we ate Sichuan cuisine, and at that time I still maintained the eating habits of my hometown, and I liked heavy oil and spicy. After eating we walked back to my new house, where the lights were dim and the house was empty, and if we spoke louder, there would be a humming echo. There is a sofa in the middle of the living room, and the old fir wood used for the harp is stacked up in front of the sofa as a coffee table, and there is nothing around except the piano and the book.
There were about seven or eight friends, and after they went into the house and sat down, I closed the door and the last one went in. I walked in front of them, and before I could sit down, I looked at them and suddenly had a feeling as if I wasn't here. This is not rhetoric, but physiological feelings. I looked at them like I was looking at a scene from a movie. This scene has no physical connection with me, I'm like an outsider, they're just projected in front of me, not just them, but everything.
Maybe it's closer to reality. Think about it, our lives are just watching a movie, and all the senses work together to create those pictures and sounds.
I suddenly felt my heart pounding, my muscles tense, my sweaty back. Such a real feeling reflects the emptiness in the heart. Looking back, this experience never happened.
Emptiness and nothingness are two different things. Emptiness can contain all things, while nothingness is just air that floats without a master. I was well aware that what I felt was the latter.
Except for the heartbeat, everything else becomes very nothing, but the heartbeat is very real, and the sense of nothingness is also very real. I stimulated myself to make me react to the present moment, and the feeling became stronger. On that day, or a few days further back, there's no clue how this happened. Suddenly, the whole person was pulled out of the scene, and the surrounding environment and people had nothing to do with me. I don't know what's going on, I want to pull my heart back, but I can't find where it is.
I seemed to have suddenly lost my enthusiasm and reaction to everything, and I was still standing there, facing my friends. It may not be long enough for them to sense that something is wrong with me. But I felt like it was a long time and my body became numb. I wanted to wake it up, and the only thing I could think of was to play the piano, so I went to the front of the piano, sat down, and played "Fishing Tree Q&A".
For a long time afterwards, that feeling lingered, accompanied by a rapid heart rate. And as long as I read, the situation will get worse. Until then, I was with the text, and fiction interested me more than reality. I seem to have been living in fiction, a very complex and specific fiction, like the guqin is also a kind of fiction, I play the piano to make the piano, but never with the real guqin to connect.
To this day, I don't understand what happened at that time, just like the vague word that Ouyang Xiu mentioned: the disease of gloom. No one knows what it is, it just makes you feel wrong.
It was like seeing a huge void, and every time I felt like I was going to fall into that hole, my body and mind were fiercely trying to resist. Everyone has such a hole in their hearts, but we fill it with all kinds of things, or put something on it, as if it can be enriched or not existent. Until one day we looked directly at it. It's like dreaming that when you fall, you are no longer frightened to wake up, but dare to go to the bottom to see what will happen, and finally find that there is nothing. You won't fall to your death, and the hole doesn't exist. It was just a dream. What makes people uncomfortable is only the feeling of falling, and the fear.
It was April, and the warm wind flowed through the trees, blowing out delicate buds with a savage and jerky breath. Elliott writes, "April is the cruelest season," and it is the cruelty of hair growth and transformation.
heal
In the summer of Hangzhou, forty degrees, I was in a room without air conditioning, just like the ancient people played the piano with soybeans, I took some piano to count, played it again, took one from the left side of the reel to the right, and finished zeroing and recalculation. I feel time in this way, it flows under my fingers, it disappears, leaving some calluses and hard skin, and time passes with a sense of reality.
Playing the piano evokes my perception of the body. When I sit in front of the piano, I can't feel the passing of time. Fingers across the strings, there is a slight discomfort. The sound reached the ears, sometimes not very well, but it was a moment of complete concentration. Sometimes something else comes to mind, especially after mastery, but sometimes I can sit there completely, the movement of plucking the strings and the response of the piano to me. At least physically, this time is completely with yourself. It doesn't let go and chases my brain, but as it is. That's how playing the piano first gave me, it was like sports, it reminded me to care about my body. I did something else that summer, and for a while I went dancing, and I wrote for a while, and it felt very similar.
In the beginning, I didn't play the piano much and didn't have much to do with music, I didn't listen to music much, I didn't listen to the piano. Not only is the harp like labor to me, but even playing the piano is like a kind of labor. It's not about the musical outcome of playing the piano, it's just sitting there every day, the strings are set, and then playing. I used it to play with the string on my body, the string that was a little out of place, and I thought about how I could straighten it out.
Then I slowly forgot about my body and reached the music. I play some songs that everyone can play, such as "Fishing Tree Q&A", "Plum Blossom Three Alleys", "Flowing Water", "Xiaoxiang Water Cloud" and the like, compared to the original, my proficiency is much better, little by little to read the score and listen to the recording, it seems that I also slowly have some details. The guqin began to become three-dimensional in my world, slowly becoming a part of my body and curing my inexplicable illness. I began to feel the ease of playing the piano, which had nothing to do with playing well or badly, but only about myself. When playing the piano, you don't have to think about anything, the whole mind can focus on the sound, the body plays by its own instincts, and then feels the feedback back, triggering the next action, this cycle happens in a moment.
I also started listening to the piano. Every time I come back from the city to where I live, I pass through a large field on the road, listen to the piano, and imagine the world in the sound of the piano. Sometimes it feels like another space-time overlaps into this space.
Listening to the bounce, I slowly returned to normal.
After one winter, it was New Year's Day, and it was snowing. On Mount Wu with friends, there is a piano in the house. During the day, people come and go, and words are not righteous. Someone asked me to play the piano. At that time, I was learning from scratch, I hadn't played a tune in a long time, and I was mechanically training my fingering every day, like a farmer who didn't know how to plough the ground. Just push back.
At dusk, the snow was melting outside, and the light became sluggish and cold. There was no one in the room, so I sat down in front of the piano and started playing.
One song after another, it's good to listen to, and it feels like freedom.