Text/Toilet Director
Today we will talk about the first poem in the "Complete Poems of Haizi", "Asian Copper":
Asian copper, Asian copper Grandfather died here, father died here, and I will die here You are the only place where people are buried
It is the bird that loves to doubt and love to fly, and it is the sea that drowns everything Your master is the grass, dwelling on his own tiny waist, guarding the palms and secrets of the wildflowers
See? Those two white pigeons, it was qu Yuan's white shoes left on the beach Let's—let's go with the river, put it on
After the drumming, we call the heart that dances in the dark the moon This moon is mainly made up of you
The poem was written in October 1984, the second year that Haiko joined the workforce after graduation. As we already know in the previous articles, he read a great deal of various works during his undergraduate studies, from law to literature to philosophy in his own specialty. In this he accumulated a large number of "experiences", although these experiences did not come directly from life, it is inevitable that they are almost ideal and divorced from reality, but it is likely that from this large amount of reading, he came up with the idea of reconstructing the epic.
At that time, he did not know the b for whom he was going to die in the future, almost a young man whose love and life experience were obtained from books. In this context, he wrote "Asian Copper".
The poem consists of four short sections, and at the beginning of each paragraph, it seems to be a call—Asian copper, Asian copper, and the next two lines of the poem begin. Therefore, we naturally have to ask, what exactly is this "Asian copper"?
On this question, researchers of Haizi poetry mostly agree with Xi Mi's statement in "Haizi < An Analysis of the > of Copper in Asia": "The intention of copper may have a double meaning. Its color and texture are hidden in the hard and tough yellow earth of northern China. Asia, in Haizi's eyes, may be represented by China, which is the "copper" buried under the asian land, a yellow, sparkling vein.
The first paragraph says "Grandfather died here, father died here, I will die here", maybe someone wants to bar, saying that Haizi is not nonsense? One sentence of "three generations of our grandchildren will die here" can solve the problem, and there are so many twists and turns. To answer this question, let's take a well-known example — Lu Xun's famous opening in Autumn Night:
In my back garden, I could see two trees outside the wall, one was a date tree, and the other was also a date tree.
As early as when I was in middle school, I discussed with the Chinese teacher (about the story of the Chinese teacher, welcome to jump: Lao Wang) why Lu Xun said so much nonsense, and whether this sentence could be rewritten as "In my back garden, I can see two jujube trees outside the wall." I have forgotten how the teacher answered, but now that I want to come, it is not okay to rewrite it in this way. The reason is very simple, this is a prose poem, not an official document, Lin Yutang said in the "Biography of Su Dongpo":
All the problems in art are the problems of rhythm, whether it is painting, sculpture, music, as long as beauty is movement, each art form has an implicit rhythm.
The rewritten sentence destroys the original rhythm and becomes an empty statement. You can imagine the situation at that time--in the almost hopeless night, Lu Xun looked out the window lonely, he first saw a tree, remembered that it was a jujube tree, there were one or two children who had come to beat dates before, and now there was no one left, and then, his gaze wandered around, saw another tree, and also lost its leaves, and in a trance remembered that it was also a jujube tree, there was nothing left, not even leaves, so he could only say, "One is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree." This sentence, as he saw it, where his heart was, naturally flowed out, and when he read it, he gave people the feeling that in the dark night, two blurred tree shadows, one by one, slowly emerged from memory, followed by an endless emptiness and loneliness. If you only say that there are two jujube trees outside the wall, it is as if you put two trees on the canvas at once, and there are only two jujube trees in front of you, and there is nothing.
So, from a semantic point of view, you can certainly say "all three generations of our grandchildren died here". But Haizi's poem clearly has a fatalistic tragedy - "Grandfather died here, father died here, I will die here"-"Grandfather", "Father" and "I" are like a long and distant river, connecting the past, present and future, and the destined death is like the water of the river, carrying the culture of the East (perhaps it is the epic tradition that Haizi wants to revive?). ), flowing in the blood of every generation.
In this way, the following sentence becomes a natural one:
Since "Asian copper" implies the yellow earth, and "grandfather", "father" and "I" must "die here", just as a river cannot flow out of its own channel, Haizi believes that we cannot get rid of the shackles of our own culture. Therefore, for Haizi, there is no second choice but to bury himself in the yellow land he longs for. Perhaps in the future he envisions, there is only one "place to bury people", a place that is irreplaceable and must be reached, and there is no room for turning.
The second paragraph, again calling for Asian copper, then says:
To understand this line, you need to know a little bit about the story of Noah's Ark in the Old Testament of the Bible. God created all things and man, and man began with Adam and Eve and multiplied. In Noah's generation, he found that all the creatures of the world, except for Noah's family, were "corrupt before God, and the earth was full of violence." So he instructed Noah to build the Ark, and he and his family chose various creatures, all of them male and female, and hid in the Ark. Then God decided to create a flood and destroy the world, "and all living things on the earth that have flesh and blood and breath will not die." ”
In Genesis chapter 7, it is written:
When Noah was six hundred years old, on the seventeenth day of February, the fountains of the Great Abyss were cracked open, and the windows of heaven were opened. Forty days and nights of heavy rain on the ground... The water was vast, on earth for one hundred and fifty days.
On July 17, the water subsided and Noah's Ark stopped on Mount Ararat. Noah released a pigeon from the ark, and the pigeon could not find a place to stay, and returned to the ark. Seven days later, he released the pigeons again, and the pigeons returned to the olive branch. After another seven days, he released the pigeons for the third time, and this time, the pigeons nested outside and never came back.
So Haizi would write here, "It is the bird that loves doubt and loves to fly, and it is the sea that drowns everything." This bird that loves to doubt and love to fly is probably the "white pigeon" below, that is, the pigeon released by Noah in Genesis.
The only basis for this is a sentence by Haizi Nishikawa in the article "Remembrance":
Haizi committed suicide on a slow train road between Shanhaiguan and Longjiaying, and he committed suicide with 4 books with him: the Old and New Testaments, Thoreau's Walden, Hayyard's Raft and Selected Novels of Conrad.
From Nishikawa's account, it can be seen that during her short life, Haiko's interest in the Bible was extraordinary, perhaps even to the point of using it as a spiritual pillar, and still took it with her when she decided to commit suicide. Therefore, it is possible that Haizi unconsciously incorporated the plot of the biblical story into her creation.
Here Haizi strives to find a cultural unity, a kind of what he calls "great poetry", so he uses this bird that loves doubt and loves to fly to connect the source of Chinese poetry below, Qu Yuan, with the Bible, the source of Western culture. The sea that drowns everything is both the monstrous flood of God destroying all things, and the river that qu Yuan sinks himself, destroying everything, but also giving birth to everything, as he once said to Nishikawa:
You people in the city imagine that the countryside is always rolling with wheat waves, but in fact, to really feel the countryside, you must be full of wheat stubble after the wheat is cut, and when you stand on the ground, when it is almost dark, you will feel that the earth is desolate.
Wheat fields after the autumn harvest
It is after the harvest, the death of the wheat, that the real countryside (which can also be called yellow earth or, like this poem, "Asian copper") is revealed. Therefore, the earth destroyed by the flood is not nothing, and the birds that love doubt and love to fly fly through the yellow earth that rotates through the four seasons, and the scene unfolding before their eyes is not a dead silence, but:
Although the earth had just experienced destruction, there might be corpses buried underground, but the yellow earth was already covered with grass, and they used their slender waists and palms to support wildflowers, becoming a bright color above death. But under this bright color, there is still a "secret" after all, what is this "secret"? We can go back to the first paragraph, even if wildflowers and grass cover the earth, this is ultimately "a place where people are buried", and death flows faintly in the shadows.
Sure enough, the third paragraph returns to the theme of death:
As mentioned earlier, the "white dove" symbolizes the rebirth after the Great Flood in the Bible Genesis, and here we must lament that it is worthy of Haizi, who directly connected the white dove to the "white shoes left by Qu Yuan on the beach". No one knows whether Qu Yuan lost his shoes since he sank the Miluo River, let alone what color they were, but they were completely created by Haizi, which made Qu Yuan, who threw himself into the river, connect with the pigeons after the flood. After the Great Flood of Genesis, Noah released the dove, trying to find a little meaning of life, a little hope, from the death that enveloped the world, and this hope later came true, and the dove told him that the flood had receded and the trees had sprouted. In Haizi's view, Qu Yuan also released his own pigeon, which was the white shoe he left behind, his poetry. These poems later became an important part of the Chu Ci and, together with the Book of Poetry, became two sources of Chinese poetry, eventually converging into a mighty river.
Notice that the subject of this paragraph is still Asian copper, Asian copper, let's put it on with the river. Rivers are the seeds of Chinese civilization, and many other civilizations in Asia Minor also originated from rivers, so the use of the word "river" itself is intended to make people go back against time and trace back to their roots. The source of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River is on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and this idea became a weather vane in Haizi's later life course and poetry creation, and the guide he constantly traveled to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and wrote one poem after another about Tibet. That is the last word, not to mention for the time being, but at this point, civilization and the source of poetry converge, and Haizi wants to wear Qu Yuan's white shoes with The Asian Copper (Yellow Earth), that is, to directly inherit Qu Yuan's tradition, or, in the words of Yu Guang, to pursue "the ancient soul of the poet who is dripping with water" to continue the poetry of Chinese civilization.
Now let's look at the last paragraph:
The I Ching Zhi Ci says that "the drum is thundered, and the run is based on wind and rain"; the Zhou Li has the saying that "all the countries pray for the new year in the field rent, blow the "Fengya", beat the earth drum, and take the LeTian Qi (the god of agriculture)"; the "Shao Feng Drumming" says "drumming its boring, enthusiastic use of soldiers"; it can be seen that the activity of drumming was previously mainly used for sacrifice or war. But whether it is sacrifice or war, it actually means to pray for supernatural power. At that time, Haizi may have vaguely felt that it was almost impossible for him to complete the dream of rebuilding the epic, so he had to "beat the drum" to pray for the power of the gods. At this time, the image of Asian copper re-emerges as a brass drum, and the sound of the drum is like a beating heart in the darkness. But the light can't beat, the beat can only live, can't write poetry, and Haizi still has to let it burn itself madly, let it "dance". So why is the dancing heart called the moon? I think that when writing these sentences, Haizi probably thought of Li Bai. Li Bai died fishing for the moon, he is the "heart dancing in the dark" in Haizi's heart, a poet "composed" of Asian copper. Haizi must have drawn nourishment from the energy poems that burn everything like the sun, such as "Difficulty in Walking", "Will Enter the Wine", "Shu Dao Difficulty", etc., and in the subsequent creations, we will see that he constantly pays tribute to Li Bai, and even rewrites Li Bai's "Gongwu Crossing the River" in "The Sun And Broken Head", just like Li Bai rewrote the popular Hanle Fu.
Now, let's return to the title of the poem, Asian Copper. Why does Haizi want it to be called "Asian copper" instead of "yellow earth"? In fact, Asian copper is a more generalized intention of the yellow earth. The common feature of copper and yellow earth is that it is yellow. Through this feature, Haizi establishes a connection between two things with completely different textures, the loess is dry and rough, and the brass is smooth and clear. But in addition to the yellow, they have a common feature - hard, copper is the actual texture of the hard, and the hardness of the yellow earth comes from a culture that has lived here for thousands of years, from the people who grew up slashing and burning on this land.
Haizi very keenly grasped this junction, combining copper and yellow earth. Then, through the flying bird, he elicited the biblical myth of the Great Flood, and then derived the imagery of Noah's white dove and Qu Yuan's white shoes. He then uses the inner theme of "destruction" (for Noah, the destruction of all things in the world, and for Qu Yuan, the destruction of the self) to tie these two images together. But destruction and death are not the end, just as the return of the olive branch by the white dove heralds a new birth, qu Yuan's white shoes, his poems, also foreshadow the tradition of Chinese poetry, from Qu Yuan down to Li Bai, and until Haizi, who intends to inherit their mantle, will eventually continue like history.
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