Idle and meditative | Busy

Street view of Paris. Visual China|Figure

Memories and forgets   

On one side of the street, there are houses, upstairs for homes and shops downstairs, no different from many other streets in Hong Kong, and on the other side there is a resting passage along the train tracks, and under the shadow of the trees, there are benches with orange garbage cans with the logo of the Food and Environment Department in front of the benches, and there are sand piles for the convenience of dogs every few steps, so it has become a good place for people and dogs to meet. Every day, no matter morning or dusk, as long as it doesn't rain, there are always people leading dogs, big and small, yellow and white, walking back and forth on the passage; There are also people who sit on chairs with faint old eyes staring ahead, accompanied only by dogs, sitting for hours, not knowing what they are thinking in their hearts - thinking about the present, thinking about the future? No! Most of them are remembering the past, are they thinking: "My past is hazy?" (Xue Lihua's translation of "Dark Shop Street")

The past, who doesn't have the past? Is the past a vague superimposer, or a heavy heart lock? Should it be put away, hidden, and placed in the forgotten pavilion, or should it be taken out, dug out, pile after pile, piece after piece, carefully examined, quietly browsed?

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, once declared: "Life is about the past, not the future." Most of his works are related to memory, and Rue des boutiques obscures, which won the Prix Goncourt, is a masterpiece that pursues "memory, identity, history". As soon as I opened the book, I was fascinated, not for the unique characters, not for the intricate plot, not for the neither! just for the confusing and indescribable feeling - a private detective who has lost his memory for ten years is chasing his past, the hazy past is like a veil, constantly cutting, sorting and messing, the more he wants to solve it, the more he loses, so the protagonist keeps shuttling through the streets of Paris after World War II, looking for it, sometimes palpitating, sometimes disappointed. Paris is the best city for conservation, and the scenes and streets depicted in the book are still unchanged decades later, and they still exist today, so I, who used to study in Paris many years ago, followed in the footsteps of the protagonist and walked into the meandering path of memory, going deeper and farther.

Remember – the streets of Paris, the cloister of statues at the Sorbonne in Paris, the days when the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Paris were open to the public for free, the long passages between metro stations in Paris: statues of cultural figures everywhere in the streets of Paris, the "two puppets" cafés in the Latin Quarter where Sartre and Simone Beauvoir frequented, the second-hand bookstalls on the banks of the Seine-et-Marne, the small bookstores near the Sorbonne...... Yes, I have wandered in the Jardin du Luxembourg, lingered in Balzac's house, wandered in the Père Lachaise cemetery, and remembered the flickering candlelight in front of Chopin's tomb and the pious maiden praying in namaste; Balzac and his lover have never been separated from each other; and a weak willow in front of the tomb of the romantic poet Muse, swaying gently in the cold wind! I have vividly experienced the scene in those years. When a person lives independently, he no longer has to rely on him and has to be sangular, but the memory of the time in Paris is still fresh, but it just highlights the sudden and difficult years in Hong Kong.

The street in front of me, where I used to live when I first came to Xiangjiang, has long been vaguely remembered. During a dinner, one of my classmates suddenly mentioned, "Do you remember the street where you lived before?" I lived downstairs from you!" I don't remember, I don't remember at all, "Then what number do I live in?" "Number six!" he said unequivocally. A mystery that has been entrenched in my heart for a long time has finally been solved after half a century. Now that I have returned to the old place, I have searched among the high-rise buildings, and the house numbers are displayed in front of me, No. 6! Is it No. 6? The "flock of chickens and cranes," the only low building among the towering and huge buildings! Could it be that after 50 years of Shaoguang, it has not been demolished and rebuilt? If this is the case, then I believe that at the entrance of the building, "the footsteps of those who walk by every day and then disappear are still echoing." Something continued to vibrate wherever they passed, and some of the fainter and fainter sound waves could still be picked up if you were careful." This déjà vu is Modiano's words, or is it my heart's voice?

My mother brought me from Taipei to meet my father in Hong Kong. In his early years, his father invested in the filming of "Confucius" in Shanghai, but after frequent wars and troubles, he fled from disasters and had already lost his money, and he had to work hard for his livelihood in the south at this time. After several years of separation, the family was finally reunited in Hong Kong. That year, I was admitted to the second year of Peizheng High School, so my parents followed Meng's mother's example and moved to a small building near the school. At that time, although my mother was younger than my current daughter, she never seemed to be young in her memory. When she first came to Hong Kong, she didn't know Cantonese, had no relatives or friends, and in those days when there were no air conditioners and no washing machines, she climbed up and down the four-story building every day to prepare meals for the family and take care of everything. I never thought that at that time, in addition to taking care of the housework, she would feel lonely? No matter the sun or rain, she would walk through the street in front of her door every day, so I must have left her footprints everywhere on the street bricks that I often pass by, and I wonder if she would sit next to the tree on the opposite street when she came back from the market with a heavy vegetable basket? Is the tree in front of her the phoenix tree with sparse branches and leaves? I wonder if she is as afraid of dogs as I am? Will she hide from the sight of the oncoming giant dog alone? I can't remember everything, let alone ask clearly. The past is hidden in the depths of memory, and it has long been blurred.

"After all the vicissitudes of life, I went back to the source. Modiano wrote. The years are long, half a century later, I hesitate again on the streets that passed by every day, that seems to be the flow of water does not stay for many years, is it really spring return like wings, gone without a trace?

Birds and fish

Fish in the water

Dreams become birds

Birds in the air

Longing to become a fish

Tranquil water in the sky

Ripple around the lotus-like stars

A starry white lotus

Rest in the lotus pond that reflects the sky

(Translated by Kim Sung-hwa)

This is a poem from the "Lotus Pond" by the famous Canadian poet Budmai Ke, a poem from the "Lotus Pond Sextet" written when he visited the Chinese University of Hong Kong many years ago. The poet has a rich imagination, and when he lingered on the lotus pond now called "Weiyuan Lake", he actually felt that he had a spiritual connection with the birds in the sky and the fish in the pond, but in fact, no one knew whether the bird wanted to become a fish, and whether the fish wanted to become a bird. Do you remember the dispute between Zhuangzi and Huizi over "Zifei Fish and Knowing the Joy of Fish"? What is the life course of birds and fish? Are there hopes and expectations in life? As human beings who can neither spread their wings nor survive in water, can we really find out about this?

In those years, the living environment has changed, ordinary days at home, adding a lot of solitary moments of self-reflection, used to live every day, it is difficult to settle down to look around, this time there is leisure and space, I found that the room is quiet, but the world outside the window is blown by the wind, there is sunshine, and there are branches swaying!

Outside the window, in the distance in the upper right corner, on the tall and thin tree with sparse green leaves, the branches of the central part are crossed, just forming a small nest of comfort, which clever bird actually found this benefit in the dense bushes of dense branches, so it flies regularly every day, rests on it, or spreads its wings, or looks forward to it; and which pair of keen eyes, actually in the deep and shallow shade of green, glimpsed this black figure, since then it has been a good companion, looking forward to it day by day.

On a Sunday morning, there are few pedestrians on the slope, the vehicles are sparse, outside the window, the sun is dim, and a piece of green under the shining sun has become heavy and depressed, at this time I look forward to it even more, a bird that must come every day, it should be a returning bird, as Tao Yuanming wrote: "wings and wings return to the bird, carry and fly", even if it is far away, it will definitely spread its wings and return, suddenly, a black shadow flashed, passed in front of the window, came!

In the surprise, the following sentence was written:

正惦着,它来了,

Dressed in black, he slowly flew back to his throne,

The branches of the treetops in the distance.

The vast earth, the boundless sky,

Why did you choose this tree, this branch?

Timing and timing every day?

Is it foraging and returning? Is it ready to go?

Is it a long-distance post station?

Or is it a shelter for returning from a prison trip?

Come quietly every day, go quietly,

How much joy and joy, sorrow and sorrow come and go,

Who to talk to, who to talk to?

Don't know how big your world is?

Don't know how long your life is?

I only know that I tell you to come every day,

Regardless of the weather, don't forget to come here,

Do you know that there are people who look at you from afar, looking forward to you,

May you stretch freely, year after year.

I don't know what it's called, maybe it's an eagle, maybe it's not, you don't need to know its genus, let alone whether it's a rare bird or not, anyway, it doesn't care, no one cares. I only felt its appearance, its coming, and its companionship, which soothed the hearts of the people in the room, and I learned that it was safe and sound outside the window, and she was calm and serene indoors.

In addition to bird watching, he also raises fish in his spare time. A tank of clear water, eight small white and red fish, aquatic plants slowly swaying in the clear stream. The feeling of being hungry and hungry must be there, and when the time of feeding arrives every day, the eight fish will be restless, and the eight pairs of small eyes will be staring at the figure of the feeder outside the fish tank, and the figure will be to the east, and the fish will suddenly swim to the east; the figure will go west, and the fish will desperately chase to the west, and then, the eight bodies will be tightly squeezed into a pile, and you will fight for me, so you are not brave! The tail of the fish behind him, thin as the wings of a cicada, soft as a veil, swings rapidly in the water; the fish's mouth is open, like a baby waiting to be fed! As soon as the fish food was scattered, the eight figures shot out like flying swords, each finding a territory and enjoying it like a chicken pecking rice.

The birds soaring in the sky, the fish in the water tank, which one is happy and which one is unhappy, I never know! I only know that watching birds and raising fish can let myself taste slowly and enjoy the fun of life. It seems that the only human beings who want to go to the water and want to go to heaven when they go to the water are probably the human beings who are never satisfied and claim to be the spirits of all things!

Kim Sung-hwa

Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan