You are the april day of the world

Chapter 4 Prose (4)
Needless to say, now everything is so mutual, so common, and individual emotions are so irrelevant.The current difficulties are not individual, but universal, covering the whole nation and the whole era!What we call life today, it will be history later.Objectively speaking, there is no doubt that the hardships we are familiar with each other are unfolding a great era.So don't ignore that we're nodding to each other right now.And it's best to let us share the sweet and sour smile lines, powerfully and tenaciously, across history.

published in
1939年2月5日《今日评论》1卷6期

Commemorating the fourth anniversary of Shima's death

Today marks the fourth anniversary of your escape from this world!Friend, what shall we commemorate you this time?The first two times I used fragrant flowers to surround your photos sadly, suppressed sighs and sorrows under my throat, and friends looked at each other boredly, completing a form of commemoration, which seemed like a stupid failure.Because at that time, the almost sentimental and not religiously solemn act had no other effect except to point out the distance between you and us, the distance between life and death; it was almost completely unable to achieve any real commemorative significance.

Last year today, I accidentally passed by your hometown from southern Zhejiang. In the dim night, I stood alone outside the train door, staring at the dark platform, silently recalling many discontinuous fragments of the past, until life and death actually became illusions. A blur, life and a series of questions meander like a train running in the vastness.I think of your:

The train stays on the tracks, running in the dark

Over mountains, over water, over... If my tears had overflowed my eyelashes involuntarily at that time, I know you will forgive me.You should believe that I will not surrender to sorrow, I will always believe in the stubborn and loyal to life, even if life is like what you said below:
Just relying on the narrow two rails, it can be regarded as a rail, carrying this heavy, dream-like burden!

At that moment I remember the train slowly pulled out of the platform, one by one, and I followed the poignant poetry, the "moan of the car", "over the wilderness, over the pond, over the silent village .” Arrived at the second stop—half of my hometown.

It's this day again this year!The world is still a mess, how many places are full of dark clouds and thick veins are rushing towards the opposite of the ideal, I am not talking nonsense, when I write:

Faith is only a small stick of incense, that bright idea can no longer withstand the west wind
Blowing rustlingly through the sycamore tree
Friends, you say it yourself, if you are sitting on my seat, facing this window of the sun: seeing the chrysanthemum shadow drawing on the wall; leaning on two stacks of newspapers from this morning under your arm; Listening to the "targeting" gunshots outside Chaoyang Gate; consciously, subconsciously, to understand the mystery of life and death, what kind of poem should you write to commemorate a dead friend?

At this moment, I am completely confused!I used to say that everything is like the will of creation, and in the final analysis it is fate, but I know that everything has our own shadow imprinted in it!I also know that every day is a pattern of many chances and coincidences, but I also wonder who is the master of the process.In my opinion: death is a chapter of tragedy, and life is the backbone of a tragedy!The characters in our group of dramas have contradictory personalities and personalities; reason and emotion are incompatible; ideals and reality are in conflict face to face, and the side or the opposite becomes sad.The days turn forward day by day, and yesterday and yesterday are piled up to form an inescapable background, making a wall or atmosphere around us, so solid and so ethereal, that each of us stands in every moment of every day. It is so important, but also so insignificant and powerless!

I can hardly find a word to say at the moment, because, really, I'm just utterly confused; life and death feel as incomprehensible and incomprehensible.

But I want to tell you that although it has been four years since you left the world of our common activities and ceased to be the main force to participate in the changes of events, no one can deny that you are still standing in the background of our misty waves, Indirectness is a force, especially in terms of effort and belief in literary and artistic creation.Indirectly, you let the natural rhythms, colors, the occasional wind and moonlight, and all human emotions without laws continue to live among us intermittently, and are still intertwined with us in the disputes of this life. The ideal of life.You are not too far from us.Your figure hangs here and there forever, just as erratic as you were when you were alive, love stops when people don’t expect it, the laughter that brings courage is always so loud, and there are also those poems that you chanted enthusiastically or anxiously , One by one, the hearts of many people are still spinning.

Speaking of your poems, my friend, I'm just going to have a few more serious words with you.Don't be impatient.Sooner or later we will have to make it clear.People say that the conclusion is settled, and the former has long since become a fact. In the past four years, the latter is hard to say. I have not read a pertinent or honest review. Within a week or two, it all started.But each of them doesn’t hold the balance of pure literature and art: some like you as a person, some doubt your personal morality; Meticulous sentences; some every comment must touch upon the orderliness of your personal life, or assert that you are frivolous, or cite you as extravagant!Friend, I know you never mind these things. You have already experienced a lot of people’s shallowness and honesty or meanness. Not only have you never been angry, but you often show compassion and forgiveness; your mood is always so clean; Always raised so high; always have such complete sincerity in the chest; always have so many indomitable courage in the arms.But the current situation is slightly different from before. Since you are no longer here, as your friend, seeing you being misunderstood, misinterpreted, and even abused, sometimes I can't help feeling sorry for you.

But don't get me wrong that I'm narrow-minded and regard irrelevant things as important. I also know that misunderstandings, distortions, and abuse are irrelevant, but friends, when we all need someone to understand us, we really understand us. It is a painful criticism, scolding our weaknesses and mistakes, but the whole of us adds more meaning because of this. The overall achievement of a writer's literature and art needs a kind of peaceful judgment on thesis and art.

You said in the "Preface" of "Tiger Collection" that "there is no worse thing in the world than writing poetry", but you did not explain why writing poetry is a tragedy. Now let me make a footnote, okay?I see a person's whole life for a foolish and sincere tendency, putting the complex emotions he feels and the life he tastes into the boiler of his own ideals and beliefs to burn into a few melodious and sonorous words (even if it is a few words) Xiao Sing), to satisfy his own instinctive artistic impulse, which was a very common thing.There are people like this in every place and every era.Most of the people who take turns to be this kind of person are because their emotions are more intense and sensitive than ordinary people, and the impulses generated for this emotion are more impractical—or not all practical—pursuits, and they need that kind of art. satisfaction.Speaking of which, the motivation of the person who wrote the poem is so simple and pitiful. It is exactly as you said in the "Preface" that "we are all controlled and kind creatures"!Although some poets, because their achievements are particularly lofty and broad, including most people, or the artistic and ideological impulse of the entire era, they have cast a mysterious halo in the world since then, making the word "poet" invisible and sublime. .

In this way, those who generally endeavor to use verse to express or describe the emotions and thoughts of man in the interweaving of nature and all things are regarded by human prejudice as a banner of megalomania, which requires the most ruthless ridicule and distrust of his contemporaries to extinguish it. To save human dignity and health.

I admit that writing poetry is a bleak business, a business that struggles in isolation among people, but because I know it too well, your pure faith and sincere attempt in this, fighting for your colleagues, defending their emotional foolishness, praise They have never pursued vanity in their artistic creation, and I think you are always at ease.As you said yourself, "your head is full of blood" and you "have never bowed your head." You yourself believe that "a little bit of spirituality is still struggling there" and "you still want to make some noises under the heavy pressure of real life."

Simply put, my friend, your motivation for writing poetry is frank and involuntary, and your attitude towards writing poetry is honest, brave and stubborn.When discussing your poems, everyone should understand first.

As for the technique of your poems and your artistic accomplishments, no one can judge firmly during the period when the new poems are still wandering in the wrong direction, but there is one thing I would like to remind those who are discussing the new poems now. The reason for the new poems is unconditional and invisible It is so broad that there is almost no definite definition of the era. Turning to the period of discussing the content of shape, even the organization of artistic skills such as syllables, rhymes, chapters, sentences, images, etc., it is based on those poems that have tried hard in this regard, your first two The anthology of poetry is the basis for providing the most material for these discussions.There is a saying in foreign countries that "the horse must always be placed in front of the carriage", isn't it?Without the results of some attempts there, theorists can't keep sending a bunch of empty checks, can't they?
(End of this chapter)