Somewhere in the Mississippi River is the poet Yu Jian's latest long essay and his first photographic collection.
As the title suggests, this is a "scene writing" about the passage of the Mississippi River, Yu Jian writes about natural objects, writes about the red, endless storm-like trees on the banks of the Mississippi River, writes about the river that is dim, like an Indian face, and the emotions and feelings experienced somewhere in the Mississippi River will always hook up a distant memory, or a kind of poetry, and flow into a whisper that can freely travel through various time and space, across various genres.
At the same time, Yu Jian is more concerned about the civilization that the river waters and grows to make the United States the United States, and the author believes that "many designs in the United States were originally local designs, but eventually became a universal design," how do we recognize the American culture that eventually prevailed in the world? What is it like in the same context in which it is being produced? From the American fever to the shattering of the American dream, how should the narrative about America continue?
Yu Jian wrote: "Rembrandt is definitely a lonely and outdated old monster in New York. Coca-Cola is poetic, cars are poetic, computers are poetic, toilets are poetic, skyscrapers are poetic, glass, cement, and steel bars are poetic, and the white cuffs of capital, technology, and business giants with badges are poetic. Poetry is no longer the same as Whitman and Dickinson, not the starry sky, the wilderness, the blades of grass, the forest, the sunset, the fireflies, the moonlight... You have to live here, on this artificial earth, to nourish the nation. Confess your destiny, this is your paradise, heaven is not in the afterlife, it is in New York. In Somewhere in the Mississippi River, Yu Jian sincerely leaves words and images for the United States at this moment with a kind of presence, and also reflects on the United States in the textual sense.
Regarding the writing of Somewhere in the Mississippi River, Yu Jian responded: "This book began about ten years ago, I completed the first part, and I have been looking for directions ever since. Intermittently, sometimes write a poem, sometimes write a memory, sometimes write a reflection, a note. I don't want readers to think that this is just another American travelogue —it's a trendy subject. I was inspired by Kafka's America, which was really just a collection of Kafka's 'American mood' words, which had nothing to do with the United States, and he had never even been to the United States. ”
Recently, The Paper interviewed Yu Jian.
Book Shadow
Back to the text, a kind of holistic writing
The Paper: How do you define the book Somewhere in the Mississippi River? It looks like a travelogue, but also like a "picture of the picture" of photographic works, and it is also scattered with many comments on poets and painters.
Yu Jian: This book may be called a kind of "phenomenological" writing. Phenomenon, "What Manifests Itself in Itself" (Heidegger) My last decade of writing has been returning to "the text". The text is not classified, the text is to write everything. For example, "Zuo Biao", it is difficult to say that it is a historical narrative, a short story, an essay, an essay, or a poem. The same is true of ancient Chinese paintings, which have not only images, but also words (calligraphy, poetry). Literature is a kind of overall writing, and the weather is ever-changing. I once shook a rock niche there in the Xiangtangshan Grottoes in Hebei Province, and on an area, there are not only Buddha statues, carvings of landscapes, but also words, seals, weathering traces, water stains... Form a picture of the weather. In an essay, essays, essays, novels, lines of poetry, commentaries, images... Just the stylistic details in it.
Articles, with visible texts (language) to show the invisible way, with words to cover. I thought this was the essence of writing, the necessity of writing. Writing this word in Chinese is not typed. To write is to write everything. Write, place also. "Speaking of The Interpretation of Words" is composed, made, and also. The style of the Erya Commentary is only the material structure of the text, and the article is the combination and placement of the word material under a certain theme (not the main idea or meaning). This is the same as the writing of Chinese characters, horizontal and vertical skimming is only a material, a component, the author's handwritten writing is a work, it will never be the same, each hand is different. Writing is not writing meaning, it is writing. Writing is not a tool to reach meaning, writing itself is the placement of life, to cover, to phenomenon.
Xiangtangshan Grottoes
It's hard to say what the significance of Cézanne's paintings is, that is, something that looks like an apple, looks good! A real apple dwarfs this fake apple. The same goes for Somewhere in the Mississippi River, and it's hard for me to say what it was about, I can only say that it's a field of words I wrote called "Somewhere on the Mississippi River." Readers' comments on the book are often fascinated by my language, which is gratifying to me.
Writing is a meditation on language.
I've been figuring out how to write. Since the 1980s, I have been seen as an avant-garde poet with mixed reviews. Pioneer is how to write pioneer. Back to the text, this is my exploration in the last decade. Perhaps a bit postmodern, unlike the "futuristic avant-garde" towards the so-called progressive, futuristic (Baudelaire defines progress as "the emaciation of the soul and the gradual coming to power of the material"). My direction is backwards. Genre-based writing from May Fourth onwards (novels, poems, essays...). And so on, in fact, they have never been confused. For example, Wang Zengqi, Shen Congwen, Joyce, Proust... Whether their work is fiction or prose has always been vague and inconsistent, in fact, it is a text. Step back, go back to the text, a kind of holistic writing.
The Paper: The Book's first part of the book talks about Alan Ginsburg, kerouac and Bukowski, and it's easy to think that maybe this is a work influenced by On the Road? "On the Road" was written by Kerouac in one sitting on a 30-meter-long typewriter paper, without much word deliberation, almost like pouring out and releasing the passion for writing. In "Somewhere in the Mississippi River", you jump back and forth between the present and the fragments in your memory, and the whole book flows like a small river, with no fixed themes, no introductions, titles, or chapters.
Yu Jian: I read Ginsburg's poems in the 1980s and "On the Road" in the early 1990s, and I remember it as a local print. The writing of the Beat Generation seems to me to be nothing more than two words: freedom. It can be written any way, and it is important to make the reader feel and think.
To return to the text is to return to a kind of writing as you please. Of course, it's not that I can't understand it. It's trance, there are elephants in it.
The Paper: "Somewhere in the Mississippi River" seems to be a very "speedy" writing, especially into the depiction of Manhattan, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the eternal glass curtain wall and the flowing neon lights, it seems that there is no need to stop thinking and deep reflection, I wonder if your use of this kind of flowing writing that often reverts to reality and memory is also a kind of writing suitable for the times?
Yu Jian: Poets always realize the way of writing in their own time, although the way of writing remains unchanged, the current author still has to write in the same way as the author of the Book of Poetry (such as Xingguan Qun resentment, far-reaching, and multi-knowledge), but this way (do not learn poetry, there is no word. Confucius) can only be enlightened in his own time, and the era enlightens the author the way of writing, not the era. In this era, the great demolition has left the traditional Chinese living world in ruins, Marx's so-called alienation, Marcuse's so-called stranger era, globalization has arrived, everything that has been completed is falling apart, all values are being revalued, and the new world has risen and flourished. But there are also countless fragments left behind. It is these fragments that make me realize the possibility of the resurrection of the text, which is all-encompassing, and everything can be understood as fragments.
Yu Jian
The aura is not illusory, it is the details
The Paper: "Somewhere in the Mississippi River" wrote, "When I was a child, I often went to play in a monastery built in the Yuan Dynasty under the Yuantong Mountain in Kunming, and the scarlet temple was attached to the cliff, and there was a karst cave left over from the flood era on the cliff, which was sealed with wooden planks for many years, and every time we went, we had to peek into the wooden planks, and my cousin said that from this dark cave, we could reach the United States." ”
Regarding the architecture of Manhattan, you wrote that the traditional Chinese concept of living requires any building to be tightly held on to the earth, but the American spirit is upward, everything can be designed out of thin air, even today, Chinese still like land, like landscapes, and still feel frightened of all buildings that are too tall (such as the various discussions caused by Guomao's Chinese zun), which is so different from everything in the United States, and the two cultures are seriously colliding.
The "encounter" of the two experiences, in addition to the above-mentioned sense of grafting of some urban legends or the heterogeneous and grainy feeling brought about by the different histories of the two, will you feel that there can be a kind of integration at some moment?
Yu Jian: What I want to write about is some kind of universality, some kind of basic thing. Since the twentieth century, "living elsewhere" and "on the road" have become a common excuse and action for people to escape from this presence. Elsewhere is heaven, and others are hell. For the East, the West (the Like of the United States) becomes a different place, more so-and-so, higher. Even for some authors, it is a judgment of the highest value. And the hometown and the mother tongue have become backward and must be abandoned. "Going to the residence of the ancients" (Qu Yuan) has become a world trend.
Marx once prophesied: "The bourgeoisie has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relations where it has achieved domination." It ruthlessly cuts off the various feudal fetters that bind people to their natural dignity, and it makes no connection between people except naked interests, except for ruthless 'cash transactions'. It drowns the sacred attacks of religious piety, chivalry, and petty civic sentiments in the ice water of egoistic intentions. It transforms human dignity into exchange values, replacing countless concessional and self-earned freedoms with a freedom of trade without conscience. In short, it replaces exploitation covered up by religious and political fantasies with open, shameless, direct, explicit exploitation. The bourgeoisie has erased the sacred aura of all professions that have always been revered and awe-inspiring. It turned doctors, lawyers, priests, poets, and scholars into wage-earners it paid for. ”
Benjamin later called it the "Age of The Lost Aura.". Aura (another of its names is poetic) has no borders. I found that the aura of this era was fragmented, but it did not fade. The aura is not illusory, it is the details.
Yu Jian photography
I would say that life is not elsewhere, such as the now popular slogan "And poetry and far away". Life is life, it is only in language elsewhere. The highest value judges are not elsewhere, only in the mother tongue (the mother tongue is the swamp where the aura is conceived). One does not find a more so-and-so life in a foreign land, where there are no details elsewhere, and details are the product of time. This material of life is the same for everyone, and if you can't find life and find the aura in your hometown (the place where the details of the "Great Virtue of Heaven and Earth" are born), then you will not find it anywhere in the world. The hometown has provided the most basic experiential details of the birth and living world, mother, woman, man, child, salt, neighbor, well, eucalyptus tree... It's just about how you relate to them, how you live. There is no life that is not worth living, only how it is lived, not even Auschwitz. I've seen a story of a female prisoner who was transported to Poland in a stuffy can car saw a scarf-shaped cloud in the cracks of the train, and for years afterwards she thought about the cloud, and finally she came out alive. Rimbaud, who had said that he was "living elsewhere", had traveled the world to find other places, and both he and Baudelaire were tired of the "lost" life of the pre-industrial era in Paris, but the adventures on the road only disappointed Rimbaud. "I died of exhaustion." "Going to the dwelling place of the eternals" only makes people lose their aura more completely. Qu Yuan's despair was not to lose the official position of The Three Lu Doctors, but to "go to the residence of the ancient world" and "to go to Lu Xi, to go to Lu Xi, to be desolate" The loss of aura means that people fall and become one of all things, and the aura is no longer there. "If the qiang soul desires to return, why should it be humbled and forgetful?" Qu Yuan's anxiety is actually a common human condition. Nowadays, "to the residence of the ancient world", the large-scale disappearance of the aura has become the trend of the century, the homogeneous new world technology is developed, and things rule everything. Fetishism prevailed. Details are the natural enemy of homogenization.
Su Shi said, "This place of peace of mind is my hometown." I want to tell the reader something reassuring that is still living in the ruins, and to record the details that are still alive. Maybe it can evoke people's memories and contemplation. My ambition is that it may be possible to rebuild the aura. Those fragments are not only solid, but also deeper and more exciting than the whole. When you find a fragment of a splinter that makes you reminisce about it in a small town thousands of miles away from your hometown, it is really exciting.
Inside pages
A cult of life
The Paper: Have you repeatedly salvaged memories of the United States in the book, such as the jazz radio stations you secretly heard, such as the Beat Generation, such as Whitman's "Blade of Grass" that makes you "flesh and blood, out of your soul", and the imagination of the United States when you were "going abroad", have you shaped an America that is too positive and ideal?
Yu Jian: Those are some of the realities I have experienced, and may seem to the reader to be somewhat idealized, but this idealization is based on a medium-Chinese situation, "life" is a derogatory term in twentieth-century China, and its other name is living a life, mediocrity. I was actually writing about my surprise and touch of the banal details of American life that I encountered. Surprised by these details evokes memories of my hometown, not a "nother place." You can live like this without having to be "somewhere in the Mississippi River."
What impressed me most in the United States was a kind of worship of life. Life is unique. Everything (economic, political, ideological, artistic, technological, commercial...) It's all about living, and life is supreme. Wang Yangming regarded "lively" as "just like his river water." If there is a gap, it is not similar to heaven and earth. ”
The Paper: But the United States appears more as an overall image of freshness and hope than the old, old details of life in the United States, such as Humbert, who likes Rimbaud and Balzac, as presented in "Lolita", who is a microcosm of the old world in Europe, and Lolita, who chews gum and drinks Coke, is a representative of the living American spirit, and the former is also a political metaphor for the latter. Novels and film and television works are scattered with countless such "microcosms of American impressions", what do you think of these American impressions? Will this be overturned when you actually arrive in the United States again and again?
Yu Jian: In the era of economic take-off in the United States, even in the era of McKinsey, the most important and best-selling publication was Life magazine, which talked about eating, wearing and having fun. In China in the second half of the twentieth century, life was the object of revolution. When I was a teenager, ladies would be caught roaming the streets just by perming their hair, and I had never seen a lady wearing lipstick and earrings. The deepest impression I felt in the United States was that I came to an old world of life, not a world of ever-changing ideas (today, the pursuit of fashion in China completely obscures life. Life is obscure because of its simplicity, and it is very popular and fashionable. Whether it's Humbert or Lolita, they're all life,mediocrity or a little bit of a mediocrity, and they're all over the world. The difference is only in some languages that they are never mentioned.
Stills from Lolita
For me, the United States is not a "nother shore", and the other shore that some people talk about (in fact, most Chinese travelogues about the West in recent decades have this kind of other shore worship plot), that is just a life. This kind of life is not fundamentally different from basic life, but only the difference in the tradition and form of life. For example, they do not have the poetic architecture of the courtyard with carved beams, birds and flowers, and rockeries, but they also care about the natural connection between life and the earth rather than abandoning the earth.
Yu Jian Photography "A Blues Bar in Brooklyn"
The Paper: You also said that whether it is a skyscraper or an airport, the original local design of the United States has finally become a universal design, and we have accepted them, which is equivalent to accepting their discipline and design of our way of life, and the brighter and brighter lights have replaced the sunlight and can also extend the working hours indefinitely; office buildings are folded, all designs seem to aggravate alienation, and we have many urban diseases today, such as over-dependence on material culture, consumer culture, Should excess desire and the resulting infinite emptiness, inner volume, and ineffective self-consumption all be blamed on these overly clever designs? And if you go to the United States, which has developed consumer culture and this civilization of "design life" to the extreme, can you find a solution to these persistent problems brought about by modernity?
Yu Jian: It's all design, but the worldview behind the design is different. Chinese design lacks respect for Chinese traditions and the world of life, blindly imitating, innovating, contrived, and self-expression. Not from life, but from ideas. Tall for the sake of being tall. Tall is not home, just a symbol. I once asked a designer, such a wide road, can your eighty-year-old mother walk past, before the red light comes on? He was speechless. He obeys ideas, symbols, metaphors rather than concrete people. Any design should be suitable for life, not a metaphor for some value or meaning. But what is life? Face or inside? It's a matter of worldview.
The classical Chinese worldview is "hurtful, don't ask the horse." Many of the modern designs are quite hurtful. For example, the glass curtain walls of those metropolises are splendid, majestic, tall, beautiful, and magnificent, but quite hurtful. Why did the ancient courtyard have so many useless paintings and carved beams to raise people? The design in New York is fairly commercial, but the details are human in mind. Manhattan is a place to walk, there are many retail kiosks, freelance vendors, newsstands, coffee shops, tramps, hippies, tourists... Some places look dirty and messy, and Manhattan is more than just a hospital-like shopping mall.
Back to people, back to life, back to details. Back to "The old man, and the old man; the young man, and the young man." The world is in the palm of your hand. "Mencius Liang Hui Wang Shang". Back to the traditional Chinese "Taoist nature", simple, "perfect, and perfect". And not just "the adventure of ideas" (Whitehead). How to buy vegetables, how to retire... WeChat payment, which is popular in China, is quite advanced, convenient and hygienic but unkind. Many old mothers and old fathers have been abandoned. Only talk about technological progress, regardless of human complexity, eliminate details. Confucius said: "Perfection is perfect, and perfection is perfect." Beauty comes first, technology is good (right), but not beautiful. An unbeautiful life is similar to that of an animal.
The world as a material rather than a meaning
The Paper: It seems that all travelogues (for the first time, such a simple definition) face the problem that landscapes that have been beautified by literature and art and tampered with by imagination are disappointed when they are actually seen, and is the same with your experience of the United States? Or will the real landscape be sensory-richer or poorer?
Yu Jian: In the United States, I deeply feel the honesty of the authors of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost or Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, this is their life, the eternal life. They are not exaggerated writers, they have not tampered with and elevated their lives. I read a lot of American literature underground in my youth, and the United States was a taboo at that time. When I really came to the United States, the attitude to life implied by those works was revived, and my feeling was that this was America. This is not some kind of alien world. I met many friends who had seen each other at first sight, familiar furniture, like some kind of organ that could trigger memories, and America made me nostalgic.
I read Whitman's Blades of Grass on the Yunnan Plateau, and I was familiar with the kind of innocence, simplicity, health, spontaneity, and romanticism. The ethnic groups of Yunnan are very much like the Indians.
The Paper: This question can also be applied to the photo album published with the book, can you talk about the photos in it? What do you hope the photos inside present to the reader?
Yu Jian: An image is a site of time. It gives the viewer some kind of evidence —such and such illusions, they are actually fragments, and you can't capture the gust of wind that swept through the picture. What matters is how I see the world. Behind the fragments there is always a tradition of life, and this tradition is omnipresent. Images record phenomena at a certain time and place, and these phenomena imply a living tradition. I like that kind of subconscious photo, I don't know what I'm going to take, what's the point, I just feel the light, the composition, the details are beautiful, the eyes. Seeing something, this will have a long-term aesthetic accumulation. I always see something, like a glimpse of patches on old walls. I prefer prost and Woolf's view, which is more like a presence memory. A detail triggers the memory, presses the shutter, and time freezes. The world is, for me, an old antique full of pulp, and you have to respect it.
Chinese readers may be accustomed to some kind of salon photography, beautiful, luminous, curious... wow! I photograph the world as a material rather than a meaning.
Yu Jian photography
The Paper: In recent years, there have been many narratives about "America Sinking" and "American Dream Shattered", such as the novel "The Great Gatsby" and the non-fiction literature "The Sinking Age" are very popular in China. But in fact, it will also cause a certain degree of misunderstanding, such as "The Great Gatsby" behind the Fitzgerald's reflection on the American frontier movement, the novel has its historical background, and these may not be able to reach Chinese readers well, how do you think about the translation and attention of these works?
Yu Jian: For writers, the "shattering of the American dream" is not a disaster, but a subject matter. In the United States, there are many more poets and writers who write about backwards, cynicism, negativism, ridicule, and consistent correctness. Self-critical, the American Dream is a joke for them. The Beat generation is about to collapse from the American dream and return to life. Life is not just about being alive, life is the right way. They write about life not the American dream. This kind of writing is the same as Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Su Shi, and Cao Xueqin, and "Dream of the Red Chamber" is not a dream, but Cao Xueqin once lived like this. "Remembrance of the Lost Water Years" and "Ulysses" are also.
The Paper: These works actually have a certain time and space distance from the contemporary, and in the book, you also think that the American culture, which is strongly dependent on this material culture and consumer culture, "all kinds of creativity, used and discarded", "the past is always a ruin, only the future is constantly extending", the new urban rhythm has given birth to a certain kind of art and artists who pay attention to and interpret "rapid decay", such as Andy Warhol, such as Keith Haring, how do you think literature should deal with this culture? Whether it's from the subject matter or the theme?
Yu Jian: Underneath the contemporary era, there is something that the times cannot destroy, that is, life. Eating, drinking, and sleeping, living, peace of mind, eternal. All revolutions are about starting life again, aren't they? Without life, man falls into the darkness of material control, what Marx called alienation. Zhuangzi said: Things are not things. Materialism is the life of an animal.
"Rapid decay" is actually a world view, a style. That's why Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, still doesn't go out of style. Their pursuit of rapid decay is actually a bit Zen, and they are affirmers of the world of life. Coca-Cola doesn't seem like art in traditional art (like the Louvre), and Andy Warhol affirms it, and that's what life is like in our time. Life is art, painting is life, and so is movie star Monroe. Before the Tang and Song dynasties, no one thought that Taihu stone was art until it was moved into the garden. Life is art, which was once an ancient truth of the Chinese world, and it has only been obscured in modern times.
Immortality is a worldview, and Confucius advocated this worldview. Rapid decay is also a worldview, and Zhuangzi advocates this worldview.
Contemporary American literature is still more serious, classical temperament, a little conservative, avant-garde has become conservative. Not opportunistic, what goes viral and what writes. Lao Tzu, who is still expressing the so-called "Tao, the Tao, the Extraordinary Tao." I have a respect for American literature. Frost, Gary Snyder, and Stevens will remind me of Wang Wei and Su Shi. Needless to say, Pound drew inspiration from the worldview of old China.
Is Wang Wei obsolete? Never! There is no kind of earth that Wang Wei has recorded--"Bright Moon Pine Illumination, Qingquan Stone Upstream", that kind of world-"The good man Yule rides on a horse, and the maid jinpan carp." The painting pavilion Zhu Lou looks at each other, and the red peach and green willows hang down to the eaves. Luo Wei sent a seven-spice car, and the treasure fan welcomed back to jiuhua tent. "Life is not worth living. The Song Dynasty was perhaps the most developed era in the world, and perhaps less politically developed. Courtyards and carved beams have arisen in China on a large scale, because people have generally realized that an unbeautiful life has no dignity and is not worth living.
It's easy to be alive, animals will. Life requires art, wisdom, and knowledge. Therefore, Confucius said, "If you don't study poetry, you can't speak." Hölderlin and Heidegger said: "Man is full of labor, but he still lives poetically on the earth. "Nothing is said, it doesn't exist.
Yu Jian photography