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Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

author:Beijing News

Brother Xiaoyu:

The last time I replied, I could tell what I saw and heard on my daily walk, and these days I could only hide in an air-conditioned room to "express my own opinions". What a scorching summer time! The heat is so hard that I can't even read to put down that anxiety. On days when it is suitable to go out and wander, it is impossible to go out for hiking due to the epidemic; In the hot summer when the "scorching sun is like a fire", you have to have a little courage to be roasted if you want to travel. The world adds to the chaos and makes people live in paradoxes.

However, as my brother said, "day lessons" became a good medicine for daily life, and diary was my daily practice to reorganize myself. Looking back on the diary he wrote for more than ten years after graduating from university, it seems a bit like Chen Zizhan wrote the ups and downs of writing a diary: he once wrote a diary for six or seven years after the May Fourth Movement, but he was stuck in daily complaints because he was buried in the chalk pile; The Northern Expedition Revolution lifted him, and because of the rapid change in the situation, he angrily threw his diary into Dingding, and wrote a poem of grief and indignation: "The diary has ceased for a thousand words, and regret writing idle in the rafters." The rotten cause is a pot of noodles, and it looks confused to the white. (Quoted from Liao Taiyan, "Microscopic Private History: A Pluralistic Perspective on the Diaries of Modern Chinese Writers")

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

"Microscopic Private History: A Pluralistic Perspective on the Diaries of Modern Chinese Writers", by Liao Taiyan, Phoenix Press, June 2022.

However, it has long been separated from the "high-class fun" of the past. When I opened my diary before going to bed, I felt uneasy when I only had a running account, alerted myself to my mediocrity today, and lacked excited conversations with others, failed to read a few pages of written thoughts, and did not practice some daily thinking about what I saw and heard. Today, the diary is more about urging myself to "do something" every day, although the vague and even obvious presence of a "hidden listener" also urges me to "write a long speech" in great detail.

The trivialities I write about every day, which may also be called my "world of yesterday", also provide me with nostalgic material. As the brother said, nostalgia is a call to the past or an alienation from the present; Whether it is an emotional adventure or a spiritual conspiracy is difficult to fathom. It is likely to become a spiritual poison for personal honey, as Alexievich called "second-hand time": before the 1917 revolution, Alexander Green wrote: "Somehow the future is not in its place." ”

In Alexievich's "second-hand era" in which "my time ended earlier than my life", people were forced to prune themselves into "indoor potted plants": "In general, people live closed lives, not knowing what is happening in the world", "only living their own days, not paying attention to their surroundings, not caring about things outside the window", many things are like mirages, in fact, they have never existed, "it can only exist in our minds".

What struck me most about the story at the end of the book, which was full of complaints about the past or the present, was the shortest story at the end of the book: when the postman pushed open the fence door in the Russian countryside and told the old country woman the news of the collapse of the Soviet Union, she said: "How we lived in the past and how we still live now." For us, it's all the same thing. For decades, I only cared about the necessities of life, and what people said, had nothing to do with me. To her, the world is still the way it is, and in this era that shakes the world, she seems to have lost nothing. Events of the times such as the surname Zishe seem to have little to do with her, "anyway, we can't grow potatoes until spring." Except for the arrival of spring, the old woman's daily life does not have to contend with yesterday and tomorrow, nor does it have to ponder despair and hope; It doesn't matter whether the times are sad or happy, she is like those old trees sleeping in the local world, and when the wind blows in the coming year, it can spit out and bloom safely.

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

Secondhand Time, by [Belarus] S. A. Alekseevich, translated by Lu Ningsi, CITIC Press, January 2016.

Of course, there is another kind of living, more like Liu Wenjin talked about in "Moral Collapse and the Crisis of Modernity", which combines a certain incomprehensible "worship" and absorbs those righteous "philistines"; can dedicate oneself to non-utilitarian fanaticism, but also pursue the maximization of personal interests; It can not only export frequent passion to distant places, but also adopt crisp and neat indifference to the present; It can maintain both an abstract passion for false and empty concepts, and a weariness of indifference to the reality that really exists. This is a paradoxical way of living without having a "small ego" but embracing the "big self". In the second chapter of the book, Liu Wenjin writes the same description of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patoška, in which the two sizes of "I" stripped themselves of "Care of Soul" and brewed a new way of life from boredom (I'ennui) and I'orgiasme, maintaining a "Rule of Day." In a way, weariness points to the disappearance of meaning and the abandonment of the self, and obsession carries religious sacrifices.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said: "The sleeping man lives in his own world, and only the awake have a common world." "How to let you and I live in the same world together, even if it is far away, we can be close to the eye, rather than even if it is close to the sky, after all, we have to return to the word "meaning". As exhausting as these two words are, they can at least get us out of the mud and at least make us fall less quickly. As Liu Wenjin writes in his book, "The Mediocrity of Evil" is actually a reminder that rather than everyone "possibly" to become Eichmann, everyone has the "responsibility" to avoid becoming Eichmann. Whether it is nostalgia for the past or imagination of the future, the "seed of time" can only be based on the correct present, and comes from the self's ability to maintain a clear judgment and responsibility at all times.

Suddenly turned out this book published last year to read, mainly to understand and alert their own predicament, for fear that they will learn the ability to easily forgive themselves in daily life; Fall into cynical occasional cheats after news exhaustion and try to avoid making yourself the "Eichmann of life." The inability to hike for various reasons, as well as the scorching sun that killed the world, made me trapped in the air-conditioned room seem to gradually lose some kind of common sense of life experience, and fell into a kind of slightly reassuring void. This daily peace of mind, which can easily be reversed into solid uneasiness when glanced back at by chance.

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

"Moral Collapse and the Crisis of Modernity: The Legacy of Three Post-Auschwitz" Thinkers," by Liu Wenjin, Thought and Society丨Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, March 2021.

Whenever I was uneasy, it was difficult for philosophical theories to salvage me, and in the days when I was living in seclusion and reading idle books and lacked common experience, I still preferred to choose literary works to have a dialogue with my heart, as if someone far away was relieved of the spiritual dilemma. When I was woken up by a tweeter a few days ago and went downstairs to line up for nucleic acid, it reminded me of the long queue in the cold and snow - Olga Grusin's "Queuing".

In "Queuing", on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the big change, Anna changed the way home after work, and she was caught in a year-long queuing marathon. Although at first no one knew what was being sold at the end of the team, in the gloomy years of spiritual deprivation and material shortages, a hope suddenly came that even if it was unattainable, it became a daily beauty spanning winter, spring, summer and autumn, even if it was futile, even if it was ethereal. "From time to time, they can rely on another person with an unscrupulous, straightforward sense of urgency, and unite with each other under the dark snowy sky, under fear, hope and trust, as if they were family, and maybe they would not even talk to their family as such." Although, what they have been waiting for in the long spring, summer, autumn and winter, "it really does not belong to this world, although it deserves to belong to everyone in this world"...

Of course, this is how I felt after reading "Queuing" after standing in line. The author adapted the story of the pre-sale of concert tickets invited back to the Soviet Union by Stravinsky into such a novel, which focuses more on the lack of people disrupting the rhythm of life due to queuing, but also establishing a new order of life from strange to familiar in the process of queuing, starting with "waiting for Godot" and ending with "Angie gift". The reason for the strong contrast between the author's starting point and my feelings after reading may be that we "have no hidden secrets"; And Anna doesn't know what they can buy in line, but the "hope" of the queue can stir their hearts of commotion, and the end of the line is far away - life elsewhere or life that has long died...

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

"Queuing", by Olga Grusin, translated by Weng Haizhen, Sanhui Books丨Lijiang Press, August 2016.

The thing that saddens me lately is that since the death of Tiger Piran, my favorite horse-chested duck palm tree has followed suit. It was once abandoned and brought home by her mother. Almost dying, the leaves were so yellow that only a small trunk remained, and under my careful care, it came back to life, as if it had transformed some of my inner grievances into ferocious growth nourishment in some testimony way, and immediately stood like a pavilion of anger - whenever I was upset, I always liked to serve and gaze, and I felt a sense of sympathy and mutual understanding: its abandoned fate was like a slightly superfluous embarrassing situation for a reader. In the days when I could no longer save it, I recorded its entire death with my mobile phone every day, which was both cruel and unbearable. Until I woke up one day and found that there was only a shallow but deep hole left in the porcelain basin - uprooted by my mother, it completely disappeared from my life.

When it was thriving, I often slept at three or four o'clock in the middle of the night, and I would often glance at it a few times before going to bed, as if saying goodnight to each other. Not long ago, just after four o'clock in the morning, someone sent me a sentence from Yasunari Kawabata just as I was falling asleep: "At four o'clock in the morning, I saw begonia flowers that were not sleeping." I have to admit that I have never read this sentence before, and when I read it that night, I couldn't believe that the other party could write such a sentence. The search found that this sentence was inexplicably continued on social media such as Douyin: "I always feel that at this time, you should be by my side." The more famous quotes are mistold, the more it inspires my addiction.

It just so happened that I had just received "Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man", and only an inconspicuous note in the whole book mentions the article "The Flower Never Sleeps". Various journals and teaching references have interpreted this article as a beauty of material sorrow or lyrical appreciation, and after review, it is found that the article was written in July 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, when Kawabata Yasunari had just revived from the low tide of Japan's defeat.

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

"The Biography of Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man", by Atsushi Kotani, translated by Zhao Zhongming, revised by Li Shengjie, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, April 2022.

A month before writing "Flowers Never Sleep", he read "Weapons Cause War" in Hiroshima, and after receiving "Living Under the Mushroom Cloud" written by Nagai Lotus, he told Nagai that he would create works on the theme of atomic bombs (after hearing the news of Japan's defeat, Nagai raised a glass to celebrate). Of course, at this time, Kawabata Yasunari was close to the left-leaning classical intellectuals in Japan, so the lyricism of Japanese art continued to appear in the text, and not long before that, he also borrowed money and advanced writing fees to raise enough funds to buy the peerless "Frozen Cloud Sieve Rain Map" by Pubu Yutang, which has been seen again for a long time. Whether the country is breaking mountains and rivers, or the country is breaking mountains and rivers, Kawabata is ready to use culture to summon the soul of the country to continue its life...

In the penultimate paragraph, it is written that the "beauty of Arashiyama" that I first felt "at the twilight of last year" has not been appreciated in previous visits; Before going to Arashiyama to see the Yutang Monument at the end of last year, he had traveled with his wife and adopted daughter, and half a month after leaving, he wrote to his adopted daughter Masako: "I, a father, will also start again and work hard for the rest of my life." ...... I was deeply touched in Hiroshima and cheered up again. Perhaps in the rush of the world, only some people can see the "beauty", just like the "flower has not slept" that surprised him, just "this well-known thing suddenly became the opportunity to discover a new flower."

Writing at this point, I can't help but look around my body, when I am trapped in the net and stagnant, I can also see the "flower of sleeplessness" that gives such a good opportunity one day; Writing at this point, it was the time when Yasunari Kawabata woke up alone and "saw the begonia flowers that did not sleep"...

Strict step plowing

August 11, 2022 at 04:03:27

Brother Yan:

The long summer heat has finally passed. I don't know what is the situation in Nanchang? Shanghai is autumn in late August on an afternoon in early August, not an autumn rain or a cool, but a "bang". It was still nearly 40 degrees hot at noon, and when I went to the museum that afternoon, there were more than a dozen high-power floor-to-ceiling electric fans standing in the open-air queue. After entering, look at the special exhibition, there is a faint thunder, from the exhibition hall to the gap of the exhibition hall, and then look outside the north gate, the rainstorm is like a note, a white world. A summer with up to 49 days of hot days ends there. Nearby, there is a yellow plastic sign on the ground, with the Chinese and English words "Slip carefully", which is not translated into Slip carefully, you can see autumn, the mood is light, and some want to slide carefully.

On the way back, we passed a green space, because of the sudden rain, there were no pedestrians and no security guards, and a dozen herons were scattered on the grass with some stagnant water. In winter, I also passed through the museum here, there were many dead branches, and later I saw a sign and realized that it was a fairy flower for the winter. At that time, I thought about returning to the summer, but I didn't expect to thank the flowers when I came again. However, the beauty of dead branches and leaves is no less beautiful than green branches and green leaves and flowers. We are all familiar with the saying "leave the dry lotus and listen to the rain". Many years ago, I saw a pair of yang lian in the Rugao Water Painting Garden, one of which is "the remnants are old like lonely flowers", and "lonely flowers" can also be "dead flowers".

You said that you would photograph the decline of the duck palm wood, there is cruelty and unbearability. I also often keep an eye out for dead flowers, those that fall to the ground, or those that remain on the branches. The camellia branches near the residence have many dead flowers over the years, which seem to be weak and windless, but they have not fallen in heavy wind and rain, as if they are mysteries. Mr. Wang Zengqi said, "I don't seem to have seen a camellia flower withering on a tree" ("Flowers of Kunming"), I have not lived in Kunming for a long time, and I don't know if there is a difference between different regions or different types of camellias. Later, he deleted this sentence in the often repetitive "Camellia of Yunnan", perhaps as a correction.

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

The Complete Works of Wang Zengqi, by Wang Zengqi, People's Literature Publishing House, January 2021.

Some time ago, I saw camellia, a plant with both dead flowers and newborn bud-like fruits, and I felt strange. Looking at the information, it turns out that although camellia has stamens and pistils in the same flower, it needs insect cross-pollination. The dull dead flowers stand out among the many new fruits, and those bee butterflies are really careless. But in the flowers, how do bees remember which one they have been to and which one they have not been? They are not obliged to pollinate camellia. If bee butterflies mark the flowers one by one and do not miss anything, it will be as boring as humans.

Of all the ignorance, what I want to reduce the most is ignorance of the things around me, and this is the hardest. Taking grass and trees as an example, now that there is an Internet, it is much easier to find. I am not used to using a special recognition program, I feel that the answer comes too quickly, and I prefer to search for relevant images and words based on the scene I see in reality, compare them, and come up with an inaccurate answer. The predecessors did not have this condition, and could only rely on limited drawing and text recognition. Wang Zengqi has said many times about "Plant Name True Picture Examination". After Mr. Lu Xun's death, his younger brother Mr. Zhou Zuoren recalled his childhood books, "Flower Mirror" is probably the first book I bought" ("Guadouji About Lu Xun"). These books were first seen in the last few hundred years, and further on, especially when drawing was not yet available, it was even more difficult to identify plants and trees.

The grass and trees do not move and can be observed slowly; Identifying birds is even more difficult. Mr. Goyanagi's poems are mostly "flying birds", "birds" or "bonded birds" and "returning birds", and rarely write about which kind of bird, or write about specific species, such as the common "gull" (also like a general term for water birds), or "Jingwei" that does not exist in reality. Writing aside, he may not know much about birds, and may know some dialect names, but he has difficulty entering poetry. This cannot be blamed on Tao Yuanming not observing carefully, he really lacks a way to learn by himself.

Confucius said that reading the poem can "learn more about the names of birds, animals, plants and trees" (Analects of Yang Goods). This expression is intriguing: it is "the name of birds, beasts and plants", not "birds, beasts and plants". In daily life, it is easy to identify hundreds of "birds, beasts, plants and trees" in the poem, and Confucius seems to focus on talking about "names" on paper, reminding that through the poem, you can know that there are so many "names of birds, animals, plants and trees". This is close to the interest of the natural museum, and the "Erya" has a special focus here, and the preface says: "If you can be naturalistic and not confused, and know more about the names of birds, beasts, plants and trees, it is close to "Erya". ”

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

"Chronicles of Mr. Chen Mengjia", by Ziyi, June 2021 edition of China Book Company; "Chen Mengjia and His Friends", by Fang Jixiao, Life, Reading, New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore, August 2021.

Speaking of museums, the exhibits seen in the museum this time include donated cultural relics by Chen Mengjia, Zhao Luorui and Mr. and Mrs. Yao Nianyuan. Last summer, two books about Chen Mengjia were published, one is "The Chronicle of Mr. Chen Mengjia" (Ziyi, Zhonghua Bookstore, 2021) and the other is "Chen Mengjia and His Friends". The latter has not had time to look at it and cannot comment for the time being. When the former was serialized in "Historical Materials and Interpretation" many years ago, it was noticed that Zhao Luorui wrote in her diary that she talked with Chen Mengjia, "The main difference between the two of us is the difference between individual heroism and individualism. He is a hero, and I don't consider myself a hero. At this time, Zhao Luorui was "forced by the madness of the dreamer, cursed him, and broke his personal heroism." After turning dozens of pages and seeing Zhao Luorui's mental disorder, Chen Mengjia found Xia Nai, the leader of the unit and deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and begged him and the director Zheng Zhenduo not to "transfer Zhao to the madhouse."

In recent years, China Book Company has been publishing more than ten kinds of "Chen Mengjia Collection". It is a pity that the works of Zhao Luorui and Yao Nianyuan are not easy to find. Leaving aside the latter, Zhao Luorui's two anthologies "My Reading Career" (Peking University Press, 1996) and "Scattered Reading Life" (Nanjing Normal University Press, 2009) have not been reprinted for many years and are difficult to understand.

I first knew Zhao Luorui, perhaps because the textbook "History of European Literature" in college had the names of Mr. Yang Zhouhan, Wu Dayuan, and Mr. Zhao Luorui. In 2016, Shanghai People's Publishing House had a six-volume "Yang Zhouhan Collection". Looking at the Aeneid in the first half of the lockdown, I was impressed by the translator's text (slightly changed):

The biggest difference between the Aeneid and Homeric epics is the former's mood, which is full of doubts, sorrow, and even melancholy, making Virgil a poet who "tears in everything", while Homer's epics are optimistic, courageous, straightforward and even fierce. Perhaps the reason for this is what Eliot calls "the maturity of thought." It is precisely because he thinks so much that he is troubled, and it is precisely because of this that he surpasses all his contemporaries in the depth of thought and feelings. ...... Tennyson's poem "To Virgil" has two lines that say it well: "The unknowable destiny of mankind makes you sad, and in your sorrow there is solemnity." ”

I always misread the second "you" in Tennyson's verse, reading it as "The unknowable destiny of mankind makes you sad, and in sorrow there is your solemnity." "Yao Nianyuan has achieved her own solemnity in the unknowable destiny, and where she obtains her continuous mental power is a mystery. You talk about a woman who relies on everyday logic to get through the storm, "Anyway, you can't grow potatoes until spring." It is also not easy to grow potatoes in the spring on time every year. However, this daily life should be the beginning of life, if it is the end, there is still some helplessness.

Yan Bugeng x Wang Xiaoyu: Under the scorching sun, live a life of indoor potted plants

Zhao Luorui's two anthologies are My Reading Career (Peking University Press, 1996) and Scattered Reading Life (Nanjing Normal University Press, 2009).

Green onions and ginger are no longer rare now, but every time I remove the roots of green onions, or see the ginger in the soup ready to be discarded, I always hesitate. At the time of lockdown, green onions and ginger were hard to find. Once received a vegetable set meal, garlic has two ends, three or four spring onions, ginger is only half the size of a water chestnut, not broken by hand, is carefully cut with a knife, the usual size of the stick can be divided into a dozen pieces. Green onions are perishable and difficult to deliver, why there is so little ginger, it is not clear. Therefore, each time the ginger used for cooking soup is left, and then cut into shredded ginger or minced ginger for stir-frying. Green onions are usually seen almost every day, but this time they were first cultivated in a pot and hydroponic in a transparent glass to have a little understanding of the habits of green onions. Still nothing is known about the growth of ginger and garlic. "Begonia flowers never sleep", green onions, ginger and garlic are also sleepless, but they are rarely seen, or even rarely thought of.

The letter was written on and off for most of the month. It is a little early to start saying that summer has passed. Today, the highest temperature in Shanghai is 36 degrees, rewriting the high temperature record in October for more than a hundred years. The 36 degrees Celsius in autumn is no less than 41 degrees in summer. Looking at the building to the north at noon, the exterior wall shone white, and the cyan of the roof tile was darker, but the sky was not bluer, it was uniform blue-gray in the light haze, so hot that it forgot to change, and no cloud wanted to appear. The balconies were covered with laundry, as if hoping that they would absorb all the heat and wait until winter to release it slowly. The curtains are mostly drawn, preventing the return of summer; In the room without the curtains closed, the residents cannot be seen moving, and it is probably so hot that the movement is reduced indoors.

Looking at the weather forecast, the temperature on the brother's side will not be lower, and tomorrow it will cool down ten to twenty degrees sharply. Humans have clothing, rooms and air conditioners, and they don't know how plants and trees spend this impermanent cold and summer. However, plants and trees always have more means than humans.

Xiaoyu

September and October 2022 in Shanghai

Written by/Yan Bugeng, Wang Xiaoyu

Editor/Zhu Tianyuan

Proofreader/Janin

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