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Text / Black Pottery
Inside the cold and billowing river, your eyes are lost and still open. The utensils beside him slowly moved past the torn flags. Feather arrow. Piping hot gun barrel. Broken halberd. Head. sword. shield. Mutilations. Broadsword. Half-amputated legs. Tilting, sinking vessels. Dense but suddenly slowed down bullets.
……
The previous river surface: the flames rise. Heat wave. Burning. Ships burned. Fierce fighting. Hateful, blood-red eyes. Desperate cries before life is extinguished...
Now, everything is gradually moving away, and there is silence. Slowly, the man sank deep into the ancient river. The wound on the shoulder is still bursting with blood...
When I closed my eyes, a vast and cold starry sky appeared strangely. Blue trivial stars, like lively and sparkling fish, guide you, surround you, and take you to the original source of life in the infinite distance of the blue starry sky.
Culture moves south
Chinese culture, in the Ming and Qing dynasties completed the geographical southward shift. Look at two sets of statistics to prove this.
First, the distribution table of ming Dynasty Wenkui (including Yuan, Bangyan, Tanhua and Huiyuan) origins.
In the Ming Dynasty, the number of WenKui in the above is 244, and the distribution of the south and the north is as follows——
South: Nanzhili, 66 people; Zhejiang, 48 people; Fujian, 31 people; Sichuan, 6 people; Guangxi, 2 people; Guizhou, 0 people; Jiangxi, 48 people; Huguang, 8 people; Guangdong, 6 people; Yunnan, 0 people.
North: Beizhili, 7 people; Shandong, 7 people; Shanxi, 4 people; Henan, 2 people; Shaanxi, 9 people.
The audited number is 215 in the South and 29 in the North.
Second, the distribution table of Origins of the Qing Dynasty.
There is a Qing dynasty, with a total of 114 people. Among them, the ninth year of Shunzhi (1652) and the twelfth year (1655) are Manchu and Han sub-lists, each with a title. In the fourth year of Tongzhi (1865), Zhuangyuan Chongqi was a Mongolian Zhenglanqi person. In addition to the 3 Manchus and Mongolians, the remaining 111 champions, the southern and northern distributions are as follows:
South: Jiangsu, 49 people; Zhejiang, 20 people; Anhui, 9 people; Guangxi, 4 people; Guangdong, 3 people; Hubei, 3 people; Fujian, 3 people; Jiangxi, 3 people; Guizhou, 2 people; Hunan, 2 people; Sichuan, 1 person.
North: Shandong, 6 people; Zhili, 4 people; Henan, 1 person; Shaanxi, 1 person; Shanxi, 0 people.
The audit is: 99 in the south and 12 in the north.
(Source: Jiangnan Reader, edited by Zhang Zhong, East China Normal University Press, April 2010, 1st edition)
Scholar Qian Mu has such a saying, because China has enough geographical space, so Chinese history has its own set of inherent new birth transfer mechanism, the Yellow River Basin declined, turning to the Yangtze River Basin to follow the new life, Chinese culture is vigorous and internal, it can jump out of the German Spengler's circle of cultural pessimism ("the highest peak of cultural development to a certain stage, will inevitably decline"), and continue to grow, thriving, endless luck.
However, in response to the trend of cultural migration, Qian Mu also expressed his personal worries: "But from the overall situation, the chinese culture rotates from the cold place of the big place to the warm place of the low place, often slipping down smoothly, and can not be struggled to turn it over, but the evolution of Chinese culture is worth pessimism, at least it is worth vigilance!" (Geography and Figures in Chinese History)
Generations of twilight, generations of cooking smoke
In the south of Anhui, the ancient house has a large wall. A wall that has been deeply stained by time, eroded by wind and rain, and day and night.
In the remote and vast countryside, such walls often make me stand still for a long time and secretly shock.
Unforgettable old walls in The village of Zhaitan in Jixi County. House Tan. "Spring flowers are full of flowers, and birds are singing and flourishing", people's red door union. In this mountain village next door to Shangzhuang Village, there are triangular red paper bags on the side of the door frame, which contain cypress branches, red fruits and tianzhu branches. During the Spring Festival, under the roots of the old walls in the village alleys, there were wet and cannon red shredded paper scattered everywhere.
Unforgettable old walls in Chaji Mountain Village, Jing County. Cha Rihua, who had visited him (who had lived in his house more than 10 years ago), had passed away this summer. The gable of the old mansion next to Teacher Cha's house was full of the same sentimentality as mine. At the foot of the wall is a clump of unbridled and unattended yellow chrysanthemums.
Unforgettable Huizhou District Xixi South Village Old House Pavilion of the big wall, a persimmon tree in front of the wall, fell off the leaves, between the branches of the remnants of scattered tomatoes, in the wide screen like gray and black old wall background, shocking.
The old wall of Zhaitan, the old wall of Chaji, the old wall of Xixi South Village, the old wall of Huizhou, the old wall of the whole of southern China, I love them.
Time has given them life. Black, gray and white blend and penetrate each other, seemingly abstract, but also so concrete.
On such an old wall, I saw innumerable things.
I saw the twilight of generations, the cooking smoke of generations, and the secluded starry sky blown by the wind.
Generations of twilight and cooking smoke
With
Want to blow them apart
Secluded starry sky
All, condensed within
And even --
A raindrop of yesterday that was nearly dry
In a small, dark wooden compartment, a small flower
The dim lights that had just been extinguished
I saw them all
The nether depths of the wall
They flickered slightly
Ancestral deep house
Twinkling in a mother and son
Warm and silent long sleep
This is the realistic face of time, containing the infinite secrets of life and death. This is hologram: the hologram of the countryside, the hologram of the south; the hologram of the individual man, the hologram of man. We can never crack it.
Nightwear
I am accustomed to seeing the flames of the South. The flames jumped, sometimes shaped like big red birds after another.
So is Asaka. The brilliant morning glow over Taihu Lake, the Yangtze River, and the East China Sea, when they gush, are the birds that amaze me.
This belongs to the divine bird of the hometown. What are they going to do?
The dark night is a dark thin coat that gently covers the hometown.
The sacred bird of flame, the sacred bird of the morning glow, every day, will fly together at dawn on time to take away this thin night coat.
Therefore, after sleep, the hometown is completely and completely, once again, bathed in the brilliant daylight.
The Chu people are still red
The essence of the sun is the phoenix of colorful literature. The south is hot, the sun is bright, and the phoenix is worshipped by the Chu people in the south. The ancient "wind" and "phoenix" are the same words, "the wind, the angel of heaven also". Chu Zhifeng, great, beautiful, god. The Chu people believed that the soul of a human being could only fly to the nine heavens under the guidance of the phoenix.
The phoenix looks like a yin, but in fact it is yin and yang. Its yin, phoenix is auspicious, "see the world is peaceful"; its yang, the phoenix is Pengye, flying is soaring, the sound is amazing, Luanfeng is also the embodiment of the god of thunder and fire. The sun is red, and its essence phoenix is also red (Zhu Feng, Red Feng, Fire Phoenix are also), so the Chu people are still red.
Magic
After the festival is over, on the southern Jiangsu field between a township and a township, a large area of wheat is all yellow. Countless sharp and dry wheat mangoes gently surged with the earth in the warm wind. The same ripe canola is already being harvested. Bundles of rapeseed were carefully received on the field in front of the village house. A hunchbacked old lady is slapping rapeseed straw with a wooden stick, and the large white plastic paper on the field is gradually filled with sandy black brownseed seeds.
In the fields, at the intersection next to the house, you will occasionally encounter one loquat or pomegranate after another. Among the huge loquat leaves, there are golden and sweet fruits, and the pomegranate tree, the shadow of the red flowers, is dazzling. Through the townships, the former theaters now seem to be completely abandoned. Dangling unclean glass or on the walls of the house, it is often written like this: sauna, foot bath, KTV.
Between the townships and towns, in addition to wheat, rapeseed, fruit trees, and the old streets of the villages that are broken and withered, there are also rough bridges, and the reflection of the sky in the river, and the long-forgotten lonely river rocks along the river where fish swim.
In the above-mentioned agricultural, vast plain of southern Jiangsu, suddenly, there is such a strange world that is completely strange and novel:
Imitation of the Venetian water city. European architecture. The world's largest costumed equestrian show. Empty square. Exotic sculpture. Scattered high star hotels. Towering Pegasus Spire. Wrap around the water. Cast iron-like Bridges of Europe. European royal carriages. Huge shopping malls (Heilan House, Black Whale, OVV, Heilan Preferred, AEX). Brilliant lights after sunset. Parade. Musical Fountain Square. An extremely majestic art museum (inside the museum, there is a huge scroll of "Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze River" at 200 meters). The pointed upturned gondola, full of tourists, cruised on the man-made river with colorful lights dangling like flames...
——This is the night of the southern Jiangsu plain that is exuding a strong harvest atmosphere. If you look down from the night sky into the vast and dark countryside, this local brilliant "Pegasus Water City" created by the township private enterprises with assets of more than 100 billion yuan is like a magical oriental fairy tale in the modern era.
I'm incredibly familiar with it
The Pacific Ocean will shrink suddenly. On the sea east of my hometown, I saw the sudden rise of the Pacific Ocean and the stirring of the waves. In the imagination, this scene is more intense and realistic.
Why do oceans suddenly shrink?
There are perhaps a thousand answers to this question. But there is only one answer: because of the pain, the pain of the mud in the raging flames of my hometown.
The mud blocks before they became pottery also had life. The mud needs to be refined by the flame, and finally the qualitative change occurs before it can become pottery. When living, endless homeland muds enter the flames, they inevitably have to ache, qualitatively change and the pain of nirvana.
Therefore, because of this pain, the Pacific Ocean in the hometown will shrink in an instant.
Fathers, toiling by the flames and the sea, day and night. Their drops of sweat, because of the pulsation of the flames, because of the contraction of the sea, splashed more and more in my memory, and never stopped, until now I can still witness it. These droplets of sweat, like the splashed grains made by their mothers in the threshing field, when they reach enough height, they freeze and become stars in the night sky.
These childhood stars with the breath of relatives are incomparably familiar to me.
This article is excerpted from "100 Billion Books" by Hei Tao, authorized by Pure Pura Guangxi Normal University Press)
Selected Chinese books
"100 Billion Books"
Black pottery
Pure Pura
Guangxi Normal University Press
December 2021
"Hundreds of Billions of Books" is a collection of essays newly created by Hei Tao. According to the order of the five elements of the traditional Chinese tradition, it is divided into five chapters: fire book, earth book, gold book, water book, and wooden book. The content includes: objective transcripts, subjective fantasies, geography, characters, letters, quotations, short stories, excerpts, poems, film techniques, diaries, folklore, research, academic essays, dreams, myths, memoirs, sketches of scenes, whispers, interviews, literary history addendums, news, travelogues, literature adaptations, and so on.
These Chinese characters, these fragmentary chapters, carry the author's body temperature, they are scattered, cloudy, and gradually converge and gather. This unique, kanji galaxy created by Black Pottery looks forward to meeting the reader in an infinite universe.
Good books in Chinese
ID：ihaoshu233