Zhang Yingshu is a poet, editor, and vice chairman of the Xinjiang Writers Association. Editor-in-Chief of Western Magazine. He has published nearly two million words of poems, essays, and scripts, and his works have been reprinted many times and selected for the annual anthology. He has published three poetry collections, including "Grass and Trees" and "Flowers in the Western Regions". He has won many awards such as the "Red Bean" Annual Poetry Award and the first Haidongqing Poetry Award. The poetry collection "Grass and Trees Have Words" was selected as one of the top ten Chinese poetry collections in 2022. In recent years, he has focused on the writing of plant poetry and nature essays, which have been published in more than 20 literary journals.
Spring in birdsong
Zhang Yingshu
One
"The precious thirty-one days of May are so crowded with breeding, brooding, foraging and singing that it's hard to tell where to start. "This is the British Isles from Birdsong Season.
In my impression, in Urumqi, the city farthest from the ocean, birds spread their wings in the sky, birds chirped in the woods, and brooding by the waterside began in May.
During the long winters, the most common resident bird is the sparrow. Sparrows rise and fall on the branches, sparrows peck at rice grains on the windowsill, and sparrows bounce and rummage through garbage cans...... The chirping that can be heard must also be sparrow's. The sparrow is the closest bird to us, whether in the countryside or in the city, and I have come to this conclusion based on my own limited life experience.
Another resident bird is the magpie. Compared to sparrows, it is much quieter. Its cry was unpleasant, rapid and dry, cough-cough——, like a machine gun suddenly firing a shuttle of bullets. If it cries like a sparrow, it will make people have a headache and will tire itself out half to death. As far as I can see, magpies are also much less numerous than sparrows, which probably has something to do with the fact that magpies like to move in pairs, while sparrows prefer to live in groups.
In fact, there are other resident birds here in winter. It's just that I didn't pay attention to it before.
After such a long and monotonous winter, May, the month of birds and flowers, is really beautiful and lovely.
However, the spring in Urumqi has slowly kicked off a grand and vigorous prelude since April.
Two
"The best way – and the satisfying and enjoyable way to get to know birds – is to find a 'place to keep alive' in the local area. "That's what the author of Birdsong told me. The "self-reserved land" I found was the Blue Sky Forest Garden.
It's a residential neighborhood next to my house. The community is built on Mount Yamalik, which has become part of the mountain with the expansion of the first phase. In other words, the residents of the community enter through the gate located on Cangfanggou Middle Road, and they have to keep climbing to get home. The price of houses in the community has always been higher than other houses in the vicinity, the important reason is that there are many trees, there is a wooden plank road leading to the top of the mountain, a stream of water from the middle of the mountain, along the waterway next to the wooden plank road.
Yamalik Mountain, also known as Demon Mountain, was still a barren mountain more than 20 years ago, and every spring the wind blows, covering the sky and the sun, like a monster scourge the world. In order to change the harsh ecology, the citizens of Urumqi have volunteered to plant trees for many years, and have created a miracle of "turning barren mountains into green mountains" for more than ten years. Today, walking on the mountain road, I can't find the slope where I used to pick up a pickaxe to dig a tree pit, and I can't find the saplings I planted with my colleagues. The wind blows, the leaves move, and the heart ripples, as if he is also a tree in the mountains.
Most of Xinjiang's flowing water comes from meltwater from ice and snow. The best mountain of Mount Yamalik is the young peak, but it is just over 1,300 meters, which means that it has no permanent glacier to provide a steady stream of meltwater. It has a temperate continental climate with limited precipitation. So, how does the flowing water come from next to the wooden plank road of the Blue Sky Forest Flower Garden? It is to extract the water from the bottom of the mountain to the halfway up the mountain with a pump, and then inject it into the waterway and rush down. Due to the steepness of the mountain and the large drop, the flowing water hits the stones in the waterway, and the jade beads splash and make a loud sound. It's a big project, and the flow of water is really hard to come by.
Because of this water, this mountain has an aura, because of this water, this forest has more birds and insects, because of this water, this forest garden is worthy of its name, with the small bridge and flowing water of the Jiangnan scenery and aesthetic taste, in the background of the unique desolation of the northwest mountain range, showing a contradictory and unified aesthetic temperament.
This forest garden, in line with the ideal "self-reserved land" conditions, is a few minutes away from my house to the gate of the community, and an hour is enough to climb from the wooden plank road to the top of the mountain. It has residential areas, water flows, artificial forests and natural vegetation, sunny and shady slopes of mountains.
The next step is to visit the place frequently and document the changes it has experienced.
Three
"Birdwatching isn't just about the birds: it's a way of life, a way of connecting with people and the natural world. "It was a natural choice for me to make such a choice. When you want to understand the region you are in, when you want to live in harmony with the life of this region, when you try to discover the same joys, sorrows, births, old age, sickness and death from them, and then explore the meaning of life, birdwatching provides another winding path full of hope. This road, leading to the sky, needs to be looked up.
On April 3rd, I went birdwatching for the first time in my own home. I will remember this day. I spent three hours going up and down the mountain, stopping and walking to the birdsong, searching for the birds on the bare branches and among the bushes and weeds along the trail. Sparrows, magpies, pigeons, blackbirds, chickadees, ochre redstarts, this far exceeded my expectations. There is also a white, black-throated bird whose song attracts me. At last I saw it in the old elm tree at the top of the mountain, and I followed the birdsong, but it spread its wings and shot out like an arrow, disappearing from sight. A beautiful bird, weaving with its chirping, enriching my spring journey.
There is often a feeling that what you pay attention to, you will frequently find it in the surrounding area. The same goes for birds. I have been to the Blue Sky Forest Garden so many times, climbed so many mountains, rested by the water so many times, smelled spring flowers, tasted autumn fruits, avoided summer rain, bathed in winter snow, and now look back on these warm times, but find that they are like silent films in the early 20th century, only images, no sound, the sound of life that belongs to the competition of nature. I'm a little sorry to realize this.
My birdwatching trip will make up for the shortcomings of the past.
As soon as I entered the neighborhood, the sound of birds broke into my ears. It was the familiar chirping of sparrows, dense, disorderly, as noisy as schoolchildren rushing out of class. I've seen them on the bus rush into the carriage like a sparrow, and the sparrow noise threatens to turn the roof of the carriage over. For the first time, I felt that the sound was no longer an annoying noise, but a cheerful and vibrant music, perfectly integrated with the bright sunshine, the blue sky, the old man sitting on the stone bench resting, the babbling baby, and the housewife carrying fruits and vegetables in the pedestrian street. They are singing for their own lives, and they are also participants and witnesses of the peaceful life in this community.
I noticed that the most dense area of the community, that is, near the pedestrian street, had the largest number of sparrows, which flew to the tree and fell into the bushes, chirping incessantly. Turn right from the center of the pedestrian street and you will step on the boardwalk. Walking along the wooden plank road, you can't walk three or four hundred meters, with the elevation of the terrain, the chirping of birds, the sound of the stereo of the pedestrian street merchants, the sound of car horns, and the shouts of children, all seem to be blocked and weakened by the woods, and they are stagnant at the bottom of the mountain.
Four
My eyes wandered around, and suddenly I noticed a familiar bird shadow on the elm tree four or five meters away. It stood motionless, standing on a branch more than two meters above the ground. I tiptoed closer and held up my phone and pressed it a few times. Yellow eye circles, yellow beak, all black. It's a male blackbird. I stared at it, and it looked motionless ahead. A bird fluttered off from the bushes behind it, and my gaze followed. The sound it makes is supposed to be a magpie. Looking back at the blackbird, it disappeared silently.
Next, the "disappearance" of this Wudong was compensated for by the appearance of several of its kind. I searched as I went. For a long stretch of the mountain road, when I stopped, I could look up and see the blackbird on the branches, and I heard the clatter of the bushes, and soon I could lock on to a moving black shadow among the dead branches and leaves on the ground. Is it rummaging for insects hiding in the dirt and dead leaves, or is it pecking at fallen fruit from bushes and withered grass seeds?
Hearing a melodious and changeable birdsong, I got up from the stone bench and walked up the wooden steps. There are no flocks of birds, I am so strange, obviously the call is very close. When I looked closely, a blackbird stood on a small branch, its yellow beak opening and closing. It suddenly occurred to me that the blackbird is a famous and talented singer, and can imitate the calls of many kinds of birds, such as swallows, willow warblers, thrushes and even chickens, so it is called "hundred-tongued" or "anti-tongue bird" in some places. It is said that the male bird sings for love, and then stops singing, and the female bird is fully engaged in the great cause of breeding offspring and feeding the chicks.
Halfway down the mountain, I rested on a wooden chair next to the pool, and when I looked up at the big, I accidentally saw a bird's nest. This nest is built at the fork of the main trunk of an elm tree, two or three meters above the ground. If you look closely, it seems that there is a bird lying inside, and a tail exposed outside the nest. I took out my phone and adjusted it to the 10x magnification function, and on the screen, it was clear, with a maroon beak and a black body, clearly a female blackbird. One of the branches at the fork was sawn off, so that I could see its nest, which was shallow and bowl-shaped. I'm a little worried that its future baby will accidentally fall off when he grabs food.
The discovery of this nest blew my mind. This is a mountain, there are a lot of people coming and going, this bird's nest is next to the wooden boardwalk, if it is not for the bushes to block, it will easily be destroyed by naughty children. The blackbird is timid, sharp-eyed, and responsive to the outside world. Building the nest in the center of this transportation artery only shows that it is not afraid of people, or rather, people do not pose a threat to it, I guess.
My suspicions were soon confirmed, and the next day, the Fourth of April, in a small elm tree in the middle of the two buildings, still at the fork of the main trunk, I found another bird's nest, about two meters above the ground. A mother blackbird is quietly incubating eggs.
I also went out of my way to see the first bird's nest. On the screen of my mobile phone, I was shocked to find that the bird that hatched the eggs had been replaced by Dad, and its beak was bright yellow. I flipped out the pictures I took yesterday from the gallery of my phone for comparison, and sure enough, it was not the same bird, it was a female bird with a brown beak that hatched eggs yesterday, and a male bird with a yellow beak today. Baidu says that blackbirds hatch eggs from females. Are the blackbirds trying to break the mold?
The male blackbird lying in the nest was quiet, and his yellow mouth was always open. I thought I was startling it by taking a picture of it, and it was about to chirp and fly away. It didn't fly away, what a dutiful dad. I sat on the wooden chair, firstly to keep the blackbird father nervous, and secondly, to wait for the blackbird mother to come back and verify that my judgment was correct. Daddy Blackbird's mouth was kept open. Is it cooling down in this way? Or is it thirsty and hungry and out of strength? Or is my presence making it nervous? I get up and leave, hoping that the mother bird will come back soon to change shifts and hatch the eggs.
Five
Starting from the Kannon statue, the path up the mountain was divided into two parts, and I chose the one on the left that I don't often walk. There are few people walking on this road, and the birdsong is noticeably dense.
It's already halfway up the mountain. Looking back, the buildings are patchy. The birdsong is no longer a gentle and varied movement of the blackbird, but a clear and crisp "chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-", occasionally mixed with the call of "thorn-fry-t-t-f-".
A blue rests on a branch of a bush in front of it. While chirping, it was alert to the movement around it, and at the slightest movement, it flew farther away. The other blue should be called by it a few meters away. They're having a sweet time in love.
Two and a half children came down from the mountain, giggling and laughing, and their feet banged on the wooden plank road. My heart was pounding. The two blue were frightened and flew away one after the other. I never found them again.
The sound of birds pulls my steps. I saw another kind of. I have been familiar with its physical characteristics on the bird recognition software, the head is black, the cheeks are white, the back is yellow-green, and the white chest and abdomen have black longitudinal stripes in the center and are connected to the black jaw and throat. This type of is the great, also known as the white-cheeked. The first time I saw a big free-flying, I was thrilled. All the way up, I heard the cry of the big, and I saw the brisk and agile figure of the big. They always kept a safe distance of a few meters from me, and as soon as I approached, they flew farther away and stopped, as if they were deliberately teasing me.
During the continuous singing of the big, there is a kind of chirp that is different, gentle and bright. I want to take a look at the traces and see the honor of the owner who has such a good voice. Climbed all the way to the top of the mountain, but the owner still couldn't call out. Following the voice, I looked up. It rests on a high branch, and its white figure is petite and pretty. I regret not having the binoculars with me, and I can't see its face clearly. It seemed unwilling to be bothered by me, and spread its wings and flew quickly to the other side of the mountain. For some reason, I think it's also a.
Everywhere you go in the past two days, you can see the big, hear the song of the big, and obviously the big are courting. Now in April, all kinds of migratory birds are on their long migration to their breeding grounds, and I suddenly realize that the great, like sparrows and blackbirds, is a resident bird. As soon as the weather warms up, they are eager to start singing, choosing their favorite lovers, and then lovingly choosing the most suitable and satisfying place together, settling down, building nests and laying eggs, and feeding their offspring. Compared with the migratory birds that are still running around on the journey, they occupy the advantage of the right time and place, and when the migratory birds arrive here in May, these children who stay in the birds have opened their mouths and are waiting to be fed, maybe some of them are going to fly with their wings.
Six
Pulling your gaze back from the treetops to the earth, a small patch of yellow top ice flowers bloomed in the shade of the trees by the waterway. It was the first wildflower I saw blooming this spring. In the past few days, or earlier, in the distant West Tianshan Mountains, the white crocus, buttercup, and top ice flowers all over the mountains are the spring messengers of the grassland, and then the wild apricot flowers, wild plum flowers, wild apple flowers, wild hawthorn and other fruit flowers rush to bloom. The fragrance of the earth is the beautiful appearance of plants dressed in gorgeous clothes, and it is also a turning point in their uncertain fate. A sudden snowstorm, the accidental passing of the flock, and the slight neglect of the bees and butterflies will all change their outcome. For a plant, it is also difficult to live until autumn and the seeds are ripe.
The clusters of top ice flowers in front of me are dazzlingly yellow against the background of the surrounding dryness, and the green of the leaves perfectly holds it out from the dead leaves. Plants that bloom in early spring do not have dense and fat leaves, so the plants will provide as much nutrients as possible to the buds, so that the flowers will open earlier, bloom more brightly and sweeter, so as to attract the few insects and butterflies to pollinate at this time. Nearly two meters through the waterway, I couldn't see if there were any insects busy around it. The appearance of this yellow flower reminds me to pay attention to the earth under my feet. Dots of greenery seep out from among the dead branches and leaves. Under the bare branches of the bushes, the green is thicker and more moist. I looked left and right, but I couldn't find a second blooming top ice flower. I'm not in a hurry, it will grow freely somewhere, quietly waiting for a beautiful encounter.
There are many trees on the mountain, there are many elms, poplars, and ash, and there are many mountain peaches, apricot trees, and elm-leaved plums, and the shrubs are mainly wild roses, but there are very few caragana common in the wilderness. Because of this small patch of yellow top ice flowers, I noticed the grass and trees around me. I thought that in another ten days and eight days, their spring would be full of dew, after all, it had only been a few days before a heavy snowfall, the cold air was menacing, and the temperature had plummeted by more than ten degrees.
A large willow tree next to the boardwalk, the bark of the upper part of the branch is already a dewy yellow-green color, which is very different from the bark of the lower part. Looking up, the color of the branches in the high trees is still gray, no different from in winter. Shouldn't the leaves sprout from the highest branches? I saw a few more willow trees, all of which were branches close to their roots, and the bark of the trees was yellow and green first.
Next to the wooden plank road, there are large and small torch trees. The power of life gathers at the base of the torch tree, waiting for the moment of breakthrough. When I was a child, I never saw a torch tree in the regimental field, and I always thought that the torch tree belonged to the city, but later I learned that it is an alien tree species, which is widely used in the greening of barren hillsides and urban roads because of its strong root ability and few pests and diseases. Its leaves are alternate pinnate compound leaves, the leaves are long lanceolate, and the breeze passes through, waving and dancing. There were a few torch trees outside the window of my house, and I watched them grow from small seedlings to big trees in seven or eight years. Its erect panicles are shaggy red, like torches raised. Especially in autumn, when the leaves also turn red, no one can ignore the appearance of the torch tree.
Now, the branches of the torch tree are still bare, unchanged, and the color of its panicles is beginning to brighten. Throughout the winter, its flames slowly extinguished, and the inflorescences were black and gray like unburned torches, and there was no beauty in them. I looked closely at a torch, and the fine fluff seemed to be rejuvenated, and the color was ruddy, and when I looked at the light, it had a golden velvety texture. Is it that the torch is rekindled every year, and a new flower blooms where last year's fruit was grown? I had never thought about it before. I found a small torch tree, and its three little torches were dry and gray, and there was no hint of reddening. I easily took one off and twisted it with my fingers, and the particles fell off and it dried up completely. I became more and more curious, and when I looked up, the reddish torches were all large, and the ones that were not reddened were basically very small, and they grew on the branches of small bushes. I also noticed that the bark of the torch tree, about two inches long, was densely covered with a dense layer of down, brown with green and glowing in the sun. Newborn deer antler velvet, the thought popped into my head. It's a lot like that, indeed.
Nature has nurtured infinite secrets that have left to fend for hundreds of millions of years and never known. It's also lucky to have one of them.
Seven
Before the disappointment of the white bird's "escape" dissipated, luck struck again, even though I didn't know it was luck at the time.
Walking down the mountain, thirsty and tired. I was really inexperienced, so I went up the mountain, and in order to lighten the burden, I drank all the water I had with me. It's past two o'clock in the afternoon, and it's past dinner, and I don't even have a piece of chocolate candy on me to replenish my strength. Just as he was about to sit down and rest for a while, a bird landed on a branch opposite. I approached lightly, and it was alert, and flew to another tree. I didn't dare to make a mistake, so I used my phone to zoom in and shoot, but unfortunately the angle was not good, and it was partially blocked by branches. I adjusted the angle and took a full picture of it. It was completely unexpected, not a large, but a bird I had never seen before, with a black head, neck, and back, and chestnut brown belly and tail. My mind was full of wondering what kind of bird it was, completely forgetting that I was thirsty and hungry.
After returning home, I tossed around for a long time on Baidu and Bird Recognition software, and finally determined that it was an ochre redstart. During the comparison, I also got to know another bird that is very similar to it, the Northern Redstart. If I see this bird in the wild, I can be sure that I will recognize it immediately, and unlike the ochre redstart, it has inverted triangular white wing spots on its wings. Once again, I experienced the joy of learning.
Eight
In just three hours, I was already familiar with the singing of the blackbird. Its gentle singing has become the main tune of many songs on this spring day.
Under the pavilion, twenty meters from the pedestrian street, three young men were chatting. As I passed by them, the song of the blackbird rang out. A blackbird sings in a nearby elm tree. I turned around and retreated to the tree. The blackbird resembles a ventriloquist, constantly changing its call. It sang for a long time, and I reveled in it. Why didn't the female come? Wasn't she impressed?
It occurred to me that I could record it with my mobile phone so that I could listen to and enjoy it at any time. After the blackbird harvested love, it stopped singing like this.
A female blackbird flew over and landed on the grass a few meters away. It barked a few times, moved a few steps, barked a few more times, and flew away. After a few seconds, the blackbird in the tree stopped singing, spread its wings, and flew bravely in the direction where the female bird had flown away.
The song of the blackbird's courtship was saved by me in my phone.
It is a colorful overture to this spring's grand concert and a vivid interpretation of the endless life of the natural world.
Zheng Dehong, a native of Hunan Province. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association, a member of the Chinese Poetry Society, and the vice chairman of the Zengcheng District Writers Association of Guangzhou. His works have been scattered in periodicals such as "Stars", "Poetry Magazine", "Mountain Flower", "Works", "West", "Jiangnan Poems", "Selected Poems", "Poetry Tide", "Youth Literature", "Contemporary" and other periodicals. He is the author of three collections of poems. Served for the party media. He now lives in Zengcheng, Guangzhou.
A poetic secret of the natural world
——After reading Zhang Yingshu's essay collection "Blank Land".
One
Zhang Yingshu's collection of essays, "The Empty Space", quickly made my mind pop up with a person's name: Thomas Tronström. To be exact, a poem by Tronström - "Since March 1979": "Tired of all the people who bring words, words instead of words / I go to the snow-covered islands / There are no words in the wilderness / The blank page spreads out in all directions!/ I touch the traces of deer's hooves in the snow / It is language and not words". Thomas Tronström is known as the most outstanding master of symbolism and surrealism in European poetry, who is good at starting from daily life, combining organic matter and science into poetry, placing intense emotions in calm words, and fusing everything he has heard and witnessed into an independent whole - poetry through the driving force of personal literature and philosophy and social experience. I mentioned Baidu's text here, which seems to be a bit unreasonable, but it hides a mystery, especially after reading "The Empty Space". Zhang Yingshu was first a poet and then an essayist. She must have read the works of the masters. A poet who writes prose from a starting point is undoubtedly higher than that of ordinary people, she wanders in the casual daily life as if she is in the wilderness, and her "Empty Place" attempts to discover and wander in the poetic secrets of the natural world through individual life experiences (both physical and spiritual), and open up a world of love and even "fairy tales". She touched "the traces of deer's hooves in the snow."
Two
Women's prose is getting more and more attention. Their body structure and function allow them to take more delicate care and care for their small lives, through which they are able to understand grandeur. In their writings, all the small creatures in everything are the objects of their writing. Among them, my favorite essayist Zhou Xiaofeng is the most. In recent years, Zhang Yingshu seems to be a special "one" among them, first "plant poems" (flower poems), and then wrote "plant prose". In her "Empty Space", various trees, herbaceous plants, poultry, birds, small beasts, and mountains and rivers appear one after another, and she glazes these "plants" with a layer of maternal brilliance (color). Reading Zhang Yingshu's prose looks like watching a movie documentary and a literary science and education film.
"Blank Land", "Spring in Birdsong", "Fragrance in Birdsong", "Silent Earth", "May Flowers and May Clouds", "Four Ways to Walk In", "Thousands of Mountains and Ten Thousand Acres of Begonia Red", "Wild Half a Day", these are the first eight 10,000-word essays in "Blank Land", and they are also the axis and center of gravity of "Blank Land", which confirms and identifies the path and ambition of Zhang Yingshu's writing. Each essay is carefully laid out, and she tirelessly retraces, transforms, and appears in the "scene" of life in the wild, dissolving the silent, subtle, and bizarre life experience into the background of knowledge (which comes from discovery and continuous popular science learning), and discovering the complex, mundane, and intelligent meaningful connections between nature and man. Sparrows, mallards, sheep, magpies, blackbirds, white crocus, cattleflowers, ice-capped flowers, wild apricot flowers, plum flowers, hawthorns, elms, roses, poplars, white ash, mountain peaches, etc., these life species that have continued in the land of the Western Regions for thousands of years, they have lived even earlier than human beings, their genes and totemic codes religion generally exist, how dreamy and wonderful, everything presented in "Blank Land" hints to us that the unknown "secret contract" between man and nature. "Every life is worthy of praise", Zhang Yingshu once wrote in her poems, and now, she uses intelligent words to further "redeem" this poem in prose.
Zhou Xiaofeng once wrote in "Xia Sang": "In Xia Jin, I keep seeing "mulberry" - the vicissitudes of mulberry, which is composed of three "and". Yes, one begets two, two begets three, and three begets all things...... So depressed, so firm. Zhang Yingshu wrote in "Empty Space": Nature is too vast for my little heart to hold all her things, and it is too mysterious for my mind to carry its rich common sense and undiscovered and unrecognized "extraordinary knowledge". My nature, my mountains, has been looked upon with my eyes, touched with my hands, and measured with my feet. Above, Zhou and Zhang point to the same spiritual dimension in different expressions, and the lineage is the same.
Three
When writing prose, breath is very important. The smell covers the taste, a good, long taste. Now let's talk about the penmanship and penmanship of "Blank Space". As I mentioned earlier, Zhang Yingshu was a poet first and then an essayist, so this makes her add many new elements in the traditional narrative sense (poets have always been at the forefront), but these elements can be self-defeating if they are not well controlled, which is worthy of the vigilance of all writers. "Empty Space" takes the poet's arrogance, the woman's (mother's) restraint and restraint into her own text.
Reading "The Empty Space", you will find that its language is long and transparent, and it will make you encounter a poem from time to time, or a whole good poem. The joy and pleasure of reading make you close the pages of a book in the midst of fatigue, close your eyes and reminisce about a moment of tranquility. "The sun at two o'clock in the afternoon is the most powerful" see "Empty Place", the word "strength" is clumsy and ingenious; "These stones that stay on the riverbed are the flow of solidified water" see "The Earth is Speechless", a line of intellectual poetry leaps on the paper; "Walking on the plank road, the ears hear the bird's call, and determine the direction of the bird" See "The Fragrance in the Birdsong", the so-called "Birdsong is not seen, but the sound is heard first". Such sophisticated pen power abounds in "Empty Space". "The bird that flew over the observation deck flew in its own world. The land it overlooks is like the mountains and fields for countless winters. Snow after snow fell, on sunny slopes and on shady slopes: on mountains and valleys, on trees and on grass. Snow floats in the air, drifting in its time. The snow falls on the ground and falls into its life. See "The Empty Space", if we try to divide this sentence into lines, is it a good poem—
The bird that flew over the observation deck,
Fly in your own world.
The land it overlooks is like the mountains and fields for countless winters.
Snow after snow falls,
Falling on the sunny slope and also falling on the shady slope;
Drifting down the mountains, but also down the valleys;
Falling on the trees, but also on the grass.
Snow floats in the air, drifting in its time.
The snow falls on the ground and falls into its life.
If the poetic texture is the linguistic characteristic of "The Blank Land", then the moving details and graphic descriptions are the linguistic soul of "The Empty Land". In this regard, Zhang Yingshu has enough patience that she can keep her eyes on a bird for a long time for a whole day or even months, and her delicate and precise brushstrokes make those small lives in nature fly out on the paper. She writes of the common magpie "whose cry is unpleasant, rapid and dry, cough ——,cough cough "She writes blackbirds" A female blackbird flew over, landed on the grass a few meters away, it screamed a few times, moved a few steps, chirped a few more times, and then flew away. After a few seconds, the blackbird in the tree stopped singing, spread its wings, and flew straight in the direction of the female. "She writes Mallard" It was beautiful, with a glowing dark green head, a white collar around its neck, a white tail upturned, and black wing feathers tucked up at the tips of its gray body, which made a striking rough cut on the two sides of its gray body. "She wrote mulberry leaf peony" It is so special, the funnel-shaped corolla, a long pistil tube stretches out generously, like an antenna, receiving messages from the mysterious heavens. The upper part of the pistil tube is densely covered with slender filaments, so dense that the whole pistil tube looks like a miniature version of the brush, and when the anthers at the top of the filaments are ripe, they will be yellow. At the top of the small brush, five small red balls poked out, which were also fluffy, and it was the stigma. "The imagery is dense and precise, and the detailed descriptions of such images not only enrich the readability and artistry of the prose, but also fully demonstrate the denseness and purity of the written language of the text. Zhang Yingshu's writing is not a condensed and consistent conclusion, but brings more considerable and perceptible to reading. Wilderness even everyday. Zhang Yingshu opened up the poetic secret realm of nature and swam in it.
Four
The earth naturally exists. Later, human beings transformed nature and formulated the order of the earth, and animals, rivers, and plants all developed with human consciousness. None of us is a bystander in this process. Finally, a relevant or irrelevant digression. A few years ago, I watched an American science fiction documentary "The Aftermath", and after reading "The Empty Space", today I watched "The Aftermath" again. The film assumes the following background: What will become of the earth if billions of human beings in the world "disappear en masse" from tomorrow? Will the earth automatically repair the wounds inflicted on it by humans, and will it erase the memory of human existence? The conclusions are: 1. All the poultry and zoo animals will be restless. 2. Half of the Earth's water resources are currently being dammed and transformed, and these dams will stop working, and floods will break down the dams and flatten all the dams to converge into the sea. 3. Each human body will release the equivalent of 100 watts of light bulb in heat, and the temperature of a city of 8 million people will drop by at least 1 degree Celsius. 4. More than 50,000 power stations around the world will cease to function, and some chemical gases will need electricity to operate in order to store them as liquids, otherwise they will leak and emit deadly poisonous gases that will cause the collapse of entire biological systems. 5. Natural gas chemical plant, without electricity, it will gradually overflow, and this explosive gas only needs one spark to detonate. With hundreds of large chemical plants around the world, the consequences of this explosion are unimaginable. 6. Nuclear reactors, nuclear waste, and nuclear fuel in nuclear power plants are a time bomb, and nuclear radiation will destroy everything. If humanity disappears suddenly, the earth will eventually erase any imprint left by humanity. Of course, this is just a science fiction film, but this kind of brain-opening hypothesis is really shocking. Returning to "The Blank Space", if we live and depend on nature, love everything that exists in nature, discover and create, be grateful and cherish, I believe that the earth we live in, the blue planet, will be evergreen and never end. Embrace nature! This is what human beings should do and should do today. Zhang Yingshu walked in front with words. Perhaps, this is the ultimate concern of the writing of "The Blank Space".
2024.4.14 in Zengcheng