Thursday's writing class | have passion, but also spirituality

Author: Man Tang

Song Baoying/Cartography

A lot of writers need to grow up on their own. I also want to improve my spiritual realm and improve myself step by step.

This requires the pursuit of the sublime, the need for passion, the need for spirituality.

While reading literary masterpieces, I also like many writers and friends, I put my attention to the famous paintings and classic music in the literary world. I also vaguely feel that the wider natural world than human society will give me a very important inspiration.

In the 1980s, televisions had to be purchased with tickets, and animal world features wouldn't be available until years later, so I could only buy a copy of Cihai Bio Fascicle and read it slowly. There are two entries in that fascicle, "Lecurer" and "Lemming." The former are birds that do not dwell in one place or travel back and forth between two places, as if they have no homeland and are born only to fly; the latter will gather tens of thousands of teams on a summer day, marching in a mighty way, and when they reach the sea, they will jump off the reef and die generously. Later, I also noticed the African red snapper in a dangerous environment, there is only one male in a school of more than a dozen red seabream, and once the male dies, a large and strong female will become a male and continue to move forward with the school. Looking at these creatures from the literary point of view, after I wrote the two prose poems "The Traveling Bird" and "Lemming", it seems that there is a little more heroic personality, as the ancient Roman scholar Langis said, cultivating this personality is an echo of a great heart. He put forward heroism in "On the Sublime", as the shaping of sublime beauty, which is closely related to the life cultivation and personality improvement of each person.

The heroism of writers, of course, is the heroism of writing, using the passion and spirituality of language and writing to write works that exceed those of their predecessors, so that the cultural inheritance can be renewed and publicized.

As Yu Guangzhong said in his prose:

"Burning me to ashes, my Han soul Tang Luo still haunts that piece of land." In that endless homeland, the dragon tribe that wandered around the world called her a continent, the heroes ascended to the heights and called her Kyushu, and the heroes called her a jianghu. Not only the back soil, but also all the dragon clans that were walking above and all the dragon clans that had rested earlier below. There is still a history that has not been completed for thousands of years, and a culture that has been used for thousands of years seems to be insufficient. ”

The heroic complex in the afterglow stems from Zhuangzi's getaway, Xu Xiake's journey of ten thousand miles, and also from Van Gao's passion and spirituality. Before the age of thirty, he translated and published "The Biography of Van Gogh", and after the age of sixty, he published the commentary collection "From Xu Xiake to Van Gogh", and also went to the Netherlands to participate in the exhibition of the centenary of Van Gogh's death, so there was a later collection of calligraphy and paintings, "Talking about Van Gogh in the Afterglow: In Pursuit of Life".

A long, long time ago, I read a lot of van Gogh's correspondence to his brother Theo and thought he was also a great essayist.

"The fantasy family and hometown may be more attractive than in reality... I always felt like a traveler, going somewhere, toward a certain destination. If I can perceive this place, this end point that does not exist in reality, then it seems more reasonable and more real to me. ”

"My plan for life is to create as many drawings and paintings as I can, so that when life is over, I hope to look back with longing, love and deep thought: Oh, I could have made paintings!"

"My heart is quiet, pure and harmonious, like music. In this dilapidated cottage, in this filthy corner, I can see paintings or drawings. Like being driven by an irrepressible impulse, my soul flew in that direction. The feeling grew stronger, and the more chores were thrown away, the more so it became, and the clearer the picture in my eyes became. ...... I now have a broad and free understanding of art and life, and the essence of life is art. ”

If you have not read the words of Van Gogh, you may not be able to fully understand Van Gogh. For example, some people only see his crazy passion and don't see his spiritual thoughts. There's a downside to this, and it would be a terrible thing if they, after learning Van Gogh, had only crazy passion and no spiritual thinking in their prose.

Let me stress again: van Gogh's passion is a spiritual passion; van Gogh's spirituality is a passionate spirituality.

Now, please read a few more passages from him and appreciate the spiritual expressions in them:

"The Mediterranean Sea is like the color of a mackerel. I use this analogy because the color of the sea changes rapidly, and it is not even certain whether it is blue or not, and perhaps the rapidly changing light of the next second adds a hint of pink or gray to it. One night, I was walking along an unoccupied sandy beach by the sea. It's not lively, but it's not bleak either, just beautiful. The deep blue sky is dotted with blue clouds that are darker than the base cobalt blue, and the others are a mixture of blue and milk white. The stars twinkle in the deep blue, pale green, yellow, white, pink, brighter, more amazing, more like gemstones than the stars of home and even Paris—like opals, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, and sapphires. The sea is deep ultramarine – the seashore seems to me to be purple and russet hues, while the shrubs on the dunes (about five meters high) are Prussian blue. ”

"I'm still struggling to paint the painting that I started before I got sick—a reaper, the whole painting is yellow, the paint is very thick, but the subject matter is very good and very simple. As I looked at the Reaper—his vague figure struggling like a devil in the heat until the mission was over—I saw the shadow of Death in him, because in a sense humanity was like the wheat he was harvesting. If you look at it this way, the reaper is the opposite of the sower I drew earlier. But in this death, nothing is sad, it happens in broad daylight, and everything is bathed in the beautiful golden glow of the sun. ”

"I'm still painting cypress trees under the stars, and I'll try it one last time—the moon in the night sky, the slender crescent moon peeking out of the opaque shadows cast by the earth onto the moon—while the starlight is surprisingly bright, shining a gentle pink and green glow in the ultramarine night sky, and the clouds are hurriedly passing by. At the bottom of the painting is a road, along which are tall yellow branches of plants, covering the blue foothills of the Alps, the windows of an old inn with orange light, and a tall, straight cypress tree, dim in color. ”

There is a clip in the TV series "Doctor Who" in which Van Gogh travels back to modern times, and in the exhibition hall of the museum, he is heard that people are commenting on him: it is easy to express pain, but with his own pain and passion, to express the joy and magnificence of the world, in this regard, no one can compare to Van Gogh. In this scene, Van Gogh meets Zhiyin and bursts into tears.

Van Gao's "Starry Moon Night" has the largest number of acquaintances.

This painting does not need to be explained, it is the starry moon night in the wilderness. Van Gogh drew the throbbing and the passion, the warmth and loneliness of earthly life, the repressed manic animation of the night, and his soul.

People saw the light of his soul.

The scholar and writer Fang Long saw a swirling flow of stars, sensitive and unstable. The lines of the almost commotion danced freely, and even the hinoki that grew on the earth was trying its best to break free from gravity and stab straight into the rapids of the blue sky, which was simply a sea of passion.

What was seen in the afterglow was the silence of the world and the warmth of the heavens: the village below had the faint glow of the stars and the moon, but all seemed to have fallen asleep, and only the spire of the church in the distance and the green torch-like cypress trees in the near distance echoed each other, rising from the ground to the night sky as they had prayed. And the vast night sky was unfolding a thrilling revelation, all the stars were spinning into a vortex of light, and the long stream of the Milky Way was rolling and swallowing.

There is a group of essays signed by herons on the Internet, one of which writes about Van Gogh's "Starry Sky":

"This sky is covered with blue crazy swirls of stars and moonlit nights, and those that rotate in the vastness at the same time are the sun, the moon and the stars?" Van Gogh rotated the sun and moon into the sunflowers of the earth, and smeared the colorful oil paint on the soul... He buried his head in the sunflower in order to leave the golden light of life to this human world full of suffering. ”

The netizen Heron wrote 132 interpretations of Van Gogh's paintings, saying that they were commemorating the 132nd anniversary of Van Gogh's death. I think there may also be a purpose: to elevate the writer's own passion, spirituality, and sublime beauty in this way.

What Van Gogh did not know was that in the more than a hundred years since his death, countless writers had set their sights on distant years. They interpret van Gogh as a person to elevate their passion, and van Gogh's paintings to elevate their spirituality.

This is a good choice.

Whether interpreting Van Gogh or his paintings, the writer's heart and words will not be indifferent, not mediocre.

Guest Editor: Dong Xueren

Source: China Youth Daily client