Thursday's writing class | playing soccer and writing essays, there is no comparison

Courtesy of Visual China

As the title suggests, essayists naturally have a sense of prose. But what is prose consciousness? This is a topic that no one has ever said.

Before something is clearly presented, there is a way to find the reference and add our understanding to the reference.

Find closer ones better. There really isn't, you can find something farther away.

I search the Internet for "prose awareness", and there is no combination of these two words at the moment. Searching for "novel consciousness" again, it is almost blank. When I found "poetry consciousness", there was a little more information, probably because most of the people who wrote poetry were willing to talk about poetry and liked to combine some new words.

Three or two poets speak very casually of "poetic consciousness," as if this were a concept that anyone would understand. Only one poet and critic wrote a "Presentation of Poetry Consciousness in the Network Environment", which discusses how today's online poetry shows quality consciousness, innovation consciousness, self-awareness, subject consciousness, and life consciousness. Does he think these are all sub-items of poetic consciousness?

The article reads:

"Poetry consciousness or hobby habits about poetry, first from the cultivation of self-cultivation, psychological balance, cultivation of sentiments, etc., it is similar to positive cultural leisure and spiritual creation experience, no matter the depth of suffering or the quiet years, it contains the parties' self-awareness and self-evidence of various anxieties, loneliness and various complex emotions in contemporary time and space, and the individuals and groups are like the fresh wind and bright light of the soul in the haze of the world... Here I suddenly sigh, I want to say at the end: the so-called poetic consciousness may actually be just a non-existent hypothesis (for some people), but it may actually be just an enlightenment (for some people), a belief (for some people). ”

In this description, it is not difficult to see that the author is talking about what poetry can do, that is, why people who survive in modern networks need poetry; later, he also wants to say what poetry consciousness really is, which is a difficult topic to explain.

The point of finding a reference object is to provoke thinking. Now suppose, if you find this article, or just look at the quotation in front of me, replace the word "poetry" in it with "prose", read it slowly, and think while reading it, will there be some enlightenment?

For example, the consciousness that the author is talking about, the consciousness of quality, the consciousness of innovation, the consciousness of self, the consciousness of the subject, the consciousness of life, and so on, are only applicable to poetry? If it also applies to prose, how can it be distinguished from poetry?

There was a Russian poet and essayist Mandelstam, who lived for about the same time as the Chinese poet and essayist Xu Zhimo. He writes in one of his poems:

"On the pale blue enamel / As if the thoughts of April / The branches of the poplar tree rise / So suddenly dusk falls ... / When the lovely painter paints it / Depicts it on the surface of the glass / His heart remembers the power of the moment / Forgets the painful death / "

And the language of his prose goes like this:

"The horse-backed monument of Nicholas I, standing opposite the State Council Building, is consistently appeasing the guards who have grown mossy because of their age, and pacifying the winters and summers. He had a furry sheepskin hat pressed low on his head. It resembles a golden crown on the head of an Orthodox bishop, large and large, almost entirely made of sheepskin. ”

In his poetry and prose, we do not read very different descriptive languages.

Mandelstam himself explained the difference between prose and poetry: essayists always spoke to a specific audience, to the active representatives of the present. His subject matter spills over into the present, and the result is that he is forced to stand higher than society, to be superior to society. Poetry is another matter. The poet has relations only with the interlocutor in the underworld. He need not be forced to rise above his time, nor to appear superior to his society.

He spoke of something more than a writer than a poet: public consciousness, contemporary consciousness, transcendental consciousness.

Now, let's quickly sort through the previous content.

The high-quality consciousness, innovation consciousness, self-consciousness, subject consciousness, and life consciousness that poets and essayists have together, coupled with the public consciousness, contemporary consciousness, and transcendent consciousness that prose writers have more than poets, these can all be the components that nourish prose consciousness.

So we have the first description of the consciousness of prose:

Prose consciousness is a sense of the overall situation, it is based on the most complete and excellent creative consciousness, it is nourished from the many consciousnesses that are beneficial to improving the cultivation of the essayist and helping to write good prose, and its purpose is also based on this.

The more recent references have been used, and the farer references have been used.

Remembering my youthful years of staying up late to watch the World Cup soccer, after one excitement after another, the word "football consciousness" suddenly came to mind. I think the national football players and coaches who can't always play in the World Cup lack nothing else, it is football awareness.

No one had ever said "football awareness" at the time, but that word was easy to understand.

Why is it that so-and-so can always stop the ball smoothly and then stab the ball in a wonderful direction without stopping - let the companion who inserts it in the back take the ball, and he calculates it accurately before two passes? Why is so-and-so a star a great space reader, and his greatest strength is his ability to recognize and use space in the front court, as if he were watching the whole game from the perspective of God? You just have to say to the people around you that these are the embodiment of football consciousness, and they will nod their heads in approval.

With the new concept of "football awareness", it is easy to understand why the stars on the pitch can appear in the right place at the right time and do the right action.

Now, I searched for the word "football awareness" and there was enough information on the Web. People talk about football awareness, they talk about a lot of things, they have to play with their brains for 90 minutes, they have to be very forward-looking, and so on.

Is there a comparison between playing football and writing prose?

The answer is yes.

Both must exert human intelligence and skills, and must have a performance result that is as superior as possible.

The two can be metaphorically interchanged. If we say that a certain football is like an essay, we mean that the football game is exquisite, as if it has entered the artistic realm; if we say that writing an essay is like playing a football, it means that the author has made more hard efforts than hard work in the process, which can be regarded as arduous.

There is also a definition on the Internet: football consciousness refers to the psychological activity of athletes in football games, such as the comprehensive awareness and awareness of their own state and changes in the situation of the game.

This definition looks good, and the connotation and extension are clear. If I were to refer to the definition of writing a football consciousness, I would have to add the characteristics of prose writing.

Thus comes a second description of the consciousness of prose:

Prose consciousness is the essayist's psychological grasp of the specific application of his own creative skills in this essay, what is important is to create the current sensory response, how to adjust cognition and thinking, intuition and unconscious, understanding and inspiration to a superior state.

As you can see, my description, which is close to definition, emphasizes that prose consciousness is a kind of impromptu play, the psychological state of the essayist when he writes a certain work. Without this point, no matter how good the prose consciousness I say, it is also a general guide to prose writing, and it will not have a tangible enlightenment for the writer.

Let's take another example related to football. A certain scenic spot wanted to amplify its well-known effect, invited a group of writers to collect the style, and each of them had to leave an essay. At this time, it is like a football game, every famous writer is a team, all the players and coaches of the team, take it seriously, and strive to win. Whether your prose is well written or not depends on whether your prose consciousness is good or not.

Combined with my first description earlier, prose consciousness needs to be accumulated and training is also needed.

For this reason, I suggest you read a work, The Black Book. The author, pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, was awarded for "discovering new symbols of cultural collision and fusion in search of the melancholy soul of his homeland".

The Black Book is a long story with dozens of chapters that tells the story of Kalip's search for his missing wife. He roamed the streets of Istanbul, feeling it was related to his wife's brother Yella. The latter is a well-known essay writer, so he explores the deep meaning of Yella's essay column, thinks in The way Yella thinks, and pretends to write his column.

These dozens of chapters, the first one is a novel, the last one is an essay, and it crosses until the end. When we read Pamuk's book, we have to follow his writing feeling forward, reading his novel consciousness in the first chapter and his prose consciousness in the latter chapter.

As we read it this way, we will more or less learn his sense of prose.

Maybe when we write prose again, we can also play on the spot.

Guest Editor: Dong Xueren

Source: China Youth Daily client