Elf Tiger has something to say: "Youth has regrets one, two"
With our skeletons strewn across the ground
Write on the beach: Youth, then carry the aging father
The direction is long and the direction is interrupted
Animalistic fears fill our poetry
Whose voice can reach the autumn in the night long noise
Cover up our skeletons —
Autumn has arrived
Without the slightest forgiveness or tenderness: autumn has come
- Haizi "Autumn"
One
On the evening of March 26, 1989, the young and talented poet Haizi (Cha Haisheng), embracing four books: "The Old and New Testaments", Thoreau's Walden, Haya dar's "Raft heavy ocean" and "Conrad's Selected Novels", after writing in his suicide note that "my death has nothing to do with anyone", committed suicide in Shanhaiguan.
Since then, "what a precious friend we have lost", lost "a dream", lost "a part of our lives", lost "a great inspiration", lost "an echo" (Nishikawa "nostalgia").
Eighteen years later, when I held the poem of this genius poet and recited it alone, I once again felt heavily that life needed a reason, and I was powerless to choose in the face of the time and youth that had passed, but when I stood at the intersection of twenty years old, looking at the twenty years that had passed and the years to come, my heart was full of sorrow.
I sadly felt that I had lost many precious things, which made me fear the coming years and the age that accompanied them, because I was afraid that one day, "I am infinitely ashamed in the face of the great river / My years are wasted, and I am tired in the emptiness" (Haizi, "Motherland")
Like everyone else, I was unprepared for my youth, but I made it flow quietly past me like a silent river. One day, when I woke up from the joy of madness and intoxication, I saw a shattered riverbed and an excessive desolation that grew out of indulgence—almost instantly shattering my ridiculous conceit and pride to the bone! The sadness I felt in that moment was enough to make all the joys that had preceded me into insignificant and ridiculous.
It seems that the remorseful person can be given a step of self-forgiveness, so that he can forget the ignorance and forgive all his faults, so that he can walk into the next pale years and another similar mistake in a posture of "good scars and forget the pain". Unfortunately, time is not a docile sheep, and it does not give anyone the opportunity or excuse to forgive themselves. Thus, when the old pleasures dissipated, and the wounds that had been sleeping in the bubble of memory finally awakened, they began to replicate in a fissioned manner and speed, and the new wounds and old wounds were superimposed and shouted together, and the momentum struck the self-righteous who had never known the height of the sky, and in an instant all his joy was crushed, so that he also had palpitations in his future look!
At that time, I had just turned twenty.
Two
Until now, I still stubbornly believe that my real life began at the age of twenty. Before that, I had only completed the deformity of the flesh in the form of a walking dead.
It was a twenty years without thought, without faith, without pursuit, and it took up a quarter of my life (if I could live as long as I expected). This made me feel as lonely as if I had lost an arm or a leg; and now, my denial and forgetting of this river crossing and tearing down the bridge in the past proves in a sense that I am seriously dissatisfied with myself, and it is this dissatisfaction that has supported my study and life in the past six months, and will continue to support me in all the years to come.
Looking back on the past can bring great comfort to a person, but at the same time it can make a person live in anxiety, which is very much like the fear of a fugitive murderer. It's just that his fear stems from the panic he has generated after he has escaped from space; And all my fears stem from time.
The difference between time and space is its incomprehensibility, just as an old man who has traveled far away can return to his hometown after many years of absence but cannot return to his childhood, and all the sorrows I have generated at the age of twenty make me very helpless to realize that I am no longer young when I was born!
This discovery struck me like a bolt of lightning on a stormy night and made me overwhelmed for a moment.
At that time, I was curled up in bed like a dog or a cat, and outside the house was a boundless darkness, and I heard the rain breaking in my ears like glass. The then bursts of singing, yes or no, drew me toward the window.
There I looked out with the dim light, and the rain before me fell like shredded tin foil, and the distant buildings were still brightly illuminated, and their light made my hut look thin and thin in the dark night, like a beggar.
The song came from the light, a voice with a rough and easy to get out of tune, and it gave me more uneasiness than the raindrops of the night. After a pause in my thoughts, I closed the window. Back under the lamp, I began my long, lonely night. The process of contemplation is long and full of guilt.
I began to think of it from the age of one, and the memory was like a needle, after all kinds of unclear sadness and joy, and threaded the thread of time through the past. The years that have been linked together, with their long-gone but still fresh outlines, show me a mysterious existence, from which I strip the circumstances and emotions of the time, read the hints behind the experience in broken words, and then, like the old tribal elders who discovered the mysterious proverbs from the cracked oracle bones, I saw a certain indicative existence, which, with its almost irrefutable logic, told me a sad truth, that is: I have always been in failure!
It almost destroyed me in that dark night!
Then thoughts began to wrap around me like a vine, making me unable to sleep again. Memories and reality are intertwined and come to me. Throughout the night, the pain of memory and the difficulty of thinking made me no longer feel a little tired, but instead of self-blame and regret after sorting out the past, after reflection was the determination and enthusiasm of painfully correcting the past, I embraced the awakening after the pain like a needle.
In my already tired mind, I gradually developed expectations and plans for the future, which made me regain my perception of real things.
By this time, the sky was bright, the rain had stopped, and the song was long gone.
(To be continued...) ）