When she was a journalist, Ku Lehao accumulated a lot of story material, which could not be written in documentary reports, and she would quench her thirst in the way of literary creation. "Children of Pain" is also a novel that comes from this way, and the emotional story of a painter and her father that Ku Lehao interviewed made her want to describe a often overlooked thing, "how love happens."
In the novel, Ku Lehao uses the experience of painting to depict the hazy emotional atmosphere between people in a defamiliarized alien narrative tone. If you dive under the words, you will swim to a deep ocean of love, see how a person produces love, and how he will express love. This novel is included in "Single Reading 27 Escape from Death: Selected Original Novels".
Behind the literary creation, the authors can also share more. At 19:00 on September 15, Ku Lehao and Zheng Zaihuan will talk with us about the "joy" and "music" of making up stories: leaving their familiar life experiences, how to complete the creation, and where does the story come from? What is the relationship between literature and reality? For more information about this event, please read the two posts we tweeted today.
Children of Pain
Author: Ku Lehao
One
At first it was just a line. Then there's another one. A line summons a line. One line smooths out the other. Faces do not exist, they are just collections of countless lines. Lines are rhythmic, logical, and choppy. Countless things that we can't grasp exist in the form of lines, such as the light leaking through the fingers of the universe; the wind that rises when the stars run; you see the person you want to see most at a glance in the midst of a sea of people, and your eyes are consciously straight, and you walk out of the shortest line; and then with the corner of your lips as the center, you open half a concentric circle-like arc of water waves.
The line has sound. Graphite rustles on the paper, like a whimper when bending, and when smooth, like a cat stretching out its waist and grunting with satisfaction. The pen is straight-forward, and it is an asphalt road with an iron ring rolling under the hot sun. The oil brush suddenly frustrates, like a hanging child, like practicing spelling, pronouncing the letters in a round way, and sometimes suddenly mutes. And ink, God bless Chinese! The ink is like the belly of the clouds surging in the valley, like the core of the sea, and the huge sound is wrapped in a huge silence. Sometimes, the line would roar and engulf the person who drew the line.
Maggie Hamblin's Incursion. Image source: artsy.net
Rita is old, the lines around her eyes are densely turned, and there are a few thick lines at the end of her eyes, and she has to put down the pen edge and penetrate the back of the paper, which is the main rope of the net. The rest of the thin lines crisscrossed each other like a lifted net, pulled into the flesh. The eyes are fish that have slipped through the net, still desperately flapping their tails, drenched in water.
"How come I keep not tuning the color of your eyes, Rita?"
"Bourbon, no ice."
"The doctor said you can't drink anymore."
"Damn, I know," she said with a sexually anxious expression and her mouth tilted to the side, "I mean my eyes. Bourbon. ”
She rolled her eyelids with her fingers and grimaced. Red nails, like arrows, indicated her eyeballs. "What used to be the color of cinnamon coffee seems to have faded now."
The other women dyed red nails were danko, Rita painted red nails, but only made people think of violent things, thinking that she was like a child who ate french fries, dipping her fingers into the blood, tomato sauce like overnight thick blood.
"Let's do this today, the light is not good." I closed the drawing board.
She leaned back on the pillow and shrugged her shoulders, "Whatever you want." Will you come back tomorrow? ”
"Come on." I stood up and said goodbye to her, and she didn't look at me, so I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Her nostrils were so big, like black caves, the kind that would fly out of bats. Every time I approached her, I remembered the little pony Bonnie that my father had given me when I was a child, and for the first time I rubbed the horse's long face with my forehead, and I saw the horse's fluttering nose up close. The pony snorted and frightened me. Kissing Rita was equally frightening. She let me kiss her, I patted her shoulder as a farewell, and by the way took off a strand of her white hair that had fallen on the wool shawl, or maybe it was mine, who knows.
Two
From London to Suffolk, the train takes an hour and the drive takes two and a half hours. I used to drive my car back and forth on this road, three days a week, when I went to give a lecture at The City University of London. The train is good, but the train can't help but wait for time, and I hate waiting.
The English countryside is immutable, the clouds of The Constable era are still surging above me, the twilight clouds are low, refracting the skylight, and the horizon hangs down like a sigh. Wild and difficult to tame trees, knights and nobles stand between heaven and earth. Constable is my fellow countryman, and I can make out in his paintings the way each ray of light changes. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford houses a painting of his cloud practice, pale blue like old velvet, the clouds are creases of the sky, and the composition is flat and straight, as if someone had randomly twisted a piece from the cloth of the canopy and nailed it into the picture frame. Constable was a squire through and through, and he sought the balance of the picture as if he were pursuing morality. He was more honest than Turner, who always acted. As I drove, I thought maybe Rita would like Turner.
Rita, the goddess of London's Soho district in the 50s, sees everything and turns all beings upside down. I barely spoke to her, and at any event scene I met her, she always looked like I had just stopped by and I was about to leave, one foot on her tiptoe tapping impatiently on the floor, looking at the whole audience with her chin. She liked to wear red shoes, and even the most expensive shoes reached her feet, and soon the toe became a mess, and the dark brown hair was casually draped behind her back, like a horse's mane.
"Oh my God, get me out of here!" I heard her complaining to the male companion next to her, her eyebrows raised like a full bow. The male companion had just brought her two glasses of champagne, the glass was covered with fine sweat, and immediately put it down to accompany her outside, she was wearing a man's suit jacket, and the tassels of broken beads hung out from the inside, making a sound of falling and beating, and the fragments of ancient armor were also hitting in this way. The men around her are often different, but I haven't noticed the difference between them, she walks with any man, you see her first, the man is just the pedestal under the Roman idol. Even though she was with the famous bacon, I waited for them to pass for a while before I realized that it was bacon.
< h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > stills from Camille Claudel</h1>
By then she was no longer young, and the good times that belonged to her had passed. It is said that she came to London at the age of eighteen, and she was so beautiful that she looked like a broken jar. It is not surprising that the war has just ended. I was young and hadn't seen the peak of her beauty. By the time I started exhibiting at galleries in Soho, she was old, but still a legend in people's mouths. Everyone knows her, and the men she hooked up with last week, last week, or last week, sometimes women. Who knows? She's Rita! Rita had injured herself again, Rita had almost gone to the police station, Rita had quit drinking for the fifth time, they said. We've seen each other on different occasions, but we've never talked. I was too shy at that time, I hid this shyness with coldness, I was too young to eat the world with my eyes, and I never imagined that I would become the only person she would be with her in her later years.