"When I was fourteen years old, I saw the most beautiful starry sky. "Just fifteen words, like a person gently exhaling and breathing, he lifted the weight to bring out the three most important concepts: people, time, and space. In other words, a sentence like a dragonfly dotting the water throws out an important philosophical proposition straight to the point, that is, the relationship between man and the world. "Starry sky" is always an objective existence, while "beauty" or even "the most beautiful", as an abstract concept, comes from the human heart. Most of the time, the subjective and the objective complement each other, and the resonance of the two will determine the fate of people and determine their perception of life, just as people often say: the times create heroes, and heroes create history. Of course, for the vast majority of human beings, the concepts of "potential" and "history" may be too high, abstract and distant, but through "self-consciousness" and hard work, it is still possible to "poetically inhabit the earth".
The old man's figure swayed with the ploughstick, straight and bent, flashing left and right, and the young man saw a fish caught in a silver fishing net, struggling in this silver woven prison. "At the end of the article, if you look back at the previous article, you will find that not far from the beginning of the article, the author has carefully buried two key words: prison and struggle. For the ill-fated old man (the protagonist of the article), perhaps life itself is a prison, and hardship, illness, overwork, and loneliness, which are often ignored or forgotten, are torture inflicted on the elderly. "Struggle" is a positive attitude towards life, perseverance and perseverance, optimism and uncompromise, courage in the face of "bleak life", a kind of resistance to doom, and an open-mindedness to life. Therefore, we feel a kind of nobility of personality in this "fish caught in a silver fishing net".
"The biggest snow in 2010 took away my grandmother, and before she died, she was white and thin, like a snowflake, and hid in the snow. At the end of the article, the author uses highly poetic language, as if there is no grudge, no sorrow, not even death, and some are just a game of "hiding cats" belonging to childhood. But is there really no resentment and sorrow? Yes or no, it is a torture of the soul, an interpretation of the doom of life, and the final conclusion of the major life issue of "life and death". Perhaps, the author is using the expression "the cicada noise forest is more quiet, and the birdsong mountain is more secluded", but it is not known.
As a famous poet, in the process of prose creation, he begins with poetic language and ends with poetic language, and poetic words can be seen everywhere throughout the article, such as, "Maybe one day, the old man will die like the old cow and become a star, and can only shine with a tiny light on the field she loves." The young man suddenly felt that the starlight that night was really like a grand farewell ceremony, a farewell ceremony between the old cow and the old man and the field." Sometimes I feel that the author is paying tribute to Yu Hua's "Alive".
The above is my personal interpretation of the article "Field". This kind of interpretation may help us establish a model and find a perspective to interpret more of the author's articles, because the first article in the essay collection, "The Field", and some later chapters, both in terms of writing style and connotation, have the same or similar temperament. For example, "The Butcher and the Knife", "Those Flowers" and "The Long Coming Day" all profoundly show people's struggle and self-redemption in distress. However, the language of the article often shows poetry, which may be directly related to the author's poetial identity.
It is undeniable that in real life, everyone is in a variety of relationships and contradictions, the contradiction between ideal and reality, the contradiction between the present and the future, the contradiction between "me" and others, the contradiction between life and death, the contradiction between spirit and body, etc., these relationships and contradictions are wrapped and intertwined layer by layer, forming a majestic symphony of destiny. For example, in "Those Flowers", "my aunt who is surrounded by flowers is not happy, and there are times when I wake up in the night and hear her suppressed sobs". On the surface, my aunt's unhappiness is due to the failure of her marriage, but in fact, the deeper contradictions and entanglements are indescribable.
The aunt who was in love for the first time had a romantic first love soaked in the fragrance of wild chrysanthemums, but after a long time, until she was 27 years old, "beautiful like a cluster of golden flames, but she never waited for the boy who stood in front of her with a large cluster of wild chrysanthemums covered in mud." By chance, she fell in love at first sight with a "well-known tractor driver". However, the grandmother "repeated the old trick, and talked to the young man about his aunt's talent and future in a pleading tone of a wild chrysanthemum boy, but the clear refusal was full of the bitterness and helplessness of a bitter old mother." In this way, the strings of my aunt's fate were secretly plucked by my grandmother, playing a discordant tone mixed with coldness and sharpness.
After a struggle, the aunt got her wish and married the person she wanted, "but the middle-aged aunt failed." They often quarreled, and the uncle threw a wad of money on the aunt and beat the humiliation that his grandmother had brought him. And my aunt always used the trivial ignorance of him and his seven siblings as sharp arrows, and shot back one arrow after another." Two people who should cherish each other are tightly bound by the spell in their hearts and become a pair of enemies who hurt each other. "Is there really no eternal love?" said a sad E minor, accompanied by her aunt's blank questioning.
Eventually, my aunt and another young man left the town where they had lived for a long time and set up a flower shop in another city, completely escaping from my grandmother's control. So far, I have seen the perseverance and uncompromising spirit in the bones of "Auntie". From the wild chrysanthemum in the hands of a teenager, to the plastic flower in the hands of a young tractor driver, to a paulownia flower in the hands of a young man, "Auntie" struggled again and again in the entanglement of hope and disappointment, love and affection, ideal and reality, and finally completed self-redemption by a resolute escape.
If "The Field", "The Butcher and the Knife", "Those Flowers" and "The Death of the Peach" all tell stories that happen in other people's lives from the perspective of a bystander, then "The Best Light Gong is Only the Wind" and "The Long Future" are basically telling their own stories. "The Best Light Gong is Only the Wind" tells the author's growth history of getting rid of psychological difficulties when he was a teenager, and "The Long Days" tells the story of the author's re-growth in the face of serious diseases and tenacious re-growth in the face of psychological difficulties.
"The wind blows the leaves, the rain hits the window lattice, and all the running and pause in the world are like the rain that time has fallen in life. With a highly sensitive heart, sharp brushstrokes, eloquent narration, and poetic language with distinctive personalities, the writer shows the character and fate of each character in stages, which has a strong appeal and penetrating power. In the process of reading, I can always feel the author's love for life and the poetic pursuit of the essence of life.
■This article was published on March 11, 2024 on China Writers Network, written by Cai Wei