Lu Yao丨

The search for land

Text/Lu Yao

Gu Xi and I first met at the end of the Cultural Revolution drama. In this social drama, my role turned out to belong to two hostile "camps". The long and senseless struggle exhausted everyone's enthusiasm and brought about a spiritual death-like loneliness. The Cultural Revolution ended as a war without a winner, but sadly, the antagonism between the losers was still very strong, and surprisingly, Gu Xi and I became friends at this time. What connects us is literature (it's a long-lost word). Before that time, Gu Xi was already a well-known young poet in the province, and as early as 1965, he attended the National Congress of Young Amateur Literary Creation Activists. The shared hobby led me to abandon my factional prejudices and enthusiastically plunge into a new and breezy new world, forgetting the nightmare that I had been working on for years. Although even one of the works of that time cannot be included in the current collection, it will always occupy an indelible aspect in the chapters of life—a few rare green grasses that grew on the dry spiritual land, which are still alive in the memory today.

During this period, Gu Xi and his friends edited and published a collection of poems "Yan'an Mountain Flowers". At that time, hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at home and abroad, and it can be said that this was the first collection of poems with earthy atmosphere and literary consciousness in Chinese mainland in the late stage of the Cultural Revolution, which could not but attract widespread attention from society. Later, Gu Xi and everyone rushed to publish a literary tabloid "Mountain Flower" (1992 will celebrate its 20th anniversary). Today, many influential writers and poets in China have published their first works, some of which are even their debut novels, in this tabloid newspaper. For a time, the literary and artistic creation of Yanchuan County, northern Shaanxi, where we are located, attracted the attention of the whole country and almost became a "typical". All of this is inseparable from Gu Xi, and he enthusiastically organizes these meaningful activities. Later, I felt that the tempting soup of poetry was not suitable for my spleen and stomach, so I changed my career to smear the novel, but Gu Xi has always been obsessed with it, and has always been in love with his muse, so that today I have this collection of poems that embodies his decades of hard work.

The poet Gu Xi began his career as a man. At that time he had just said goodbye to his youth.

After his poor family barely finished high school, he began to fend for himself and dealt with oil, salt, sauce and vinegar. Whether before or after, he has tasted the ups and downs of life. As the son of a peasant in northern Shaanxi, he inherited the tenacious and indomitable spiritual qualities of the laborers, and for decades, while coping with the embarrassment and embarrassment of survival, he searched for and picked the flowers of poetry in his beloved yellow earth with childish stubbornness.

The style of Guxi's early poetry creation was almost entirely formed on the basis of studying the folk songs of northern Shaanxi (mainly Xintianyou). His fascination with northern Shaanxi folk songs even went to the point of consciously or unconsciously rejecting other forms of poetry. He grew up sucking the rich milk of northern Shaanxi folk songs. In the use of this form, Gu Xi has reached a very unusual realm, and some of the poems have left a strong impression on people, but in terms of content, they are limited by some limitations of the social life of the time, which affects the depth of the works, so there are very few of them in this collection, which cannot but make people feel a historical shortcoming.

Reading Gu Xi's first poems, you often feel that those poems were not written on paper with a pen, but dug out of the ground with an old pickaxe. Some people call his poems "old poems". Of course, if you insist on comparing the poems embroidered with embroidery needles on silk and satin with this kind of old pick-up poems, this kind of poems may be considered vulgar and difficult to get into the hall of elegance. But I think that bread and wowotou have their own taste, just as a proverb in northern Shaanxi says: clear oil and bitter vegetables, each takes his own love.

Gu Xi, who is an intellectual, has peasant blood in his veins, and even suits and leather shoes and wide-brimmed glasses can't hide this essence. His state of labor is first and foremost like that of a farmer in northern Shaanxi, and every time there is a harvest, the first person who is greatly moved is often the poet himself. Whenever there is a new cage, I always have to take the trouble to recite it to my relatives and friends. In the eyes of outsiders, he even cherishes the fruits of his labor a little too much, and those who know him certainly understand him, because each of his proud songs is almost the product of sweat and racking his brain. This person has not gone to college, writing cannot be based on profound knowledge, he does not belong to the kind of talent who has a brain that does not play and sounds, poetry can often flow like tap water, Gu Xi is not to a large extent by talent to write poetry, sometimes even until the poetry god unmistakably hints, it seems that "suddenly realized", and the peasant-style simplicity often leads to the capture of a dragonfly, but also uses a large net to catch flying eagles, its hardships and hardships, it is not known to the people of Yaxing, even if it is so painstaking, He didn't always catch that beautiful dragonfly. Judging by the poet's decades of work, the number of his harvests is not very large. But there can be no doubt that in all these harvests of his life there are many resounding qualities that make us pay homage to the poet's labour, and we can guess that between the two harvests he was often confronted with a large blank space. Once he lost the spirituality of poetry, he hurriedly and feverishly devoted himself to all kinds of social literary activities, guiding the creation of beginner writers to other trivial matters, and never changing his mind even if his efforts were thankless, and this enthusiasm also affected his own creation. Of course, he has never stopped his persistent pursuit of poetry, and sometimes even has no hope of harvest, he is also working hard. At this point, once again shows his true character as a farmer, for a farmer, even in the face of a pure and unharvested autumn, he will never have the slightest regret for the hardships paid for spring sowing and summer cultivation.

From this point of view, we feel that Gu Xi's gains in life struggle may be greater than his gains in poetry creation. It is difficult to judge which of these gains is more precious to him, and perhaps the joy of life's struggle is far better than the concrete result obtained. This is true not only for Gu Xi, but probably for all of us.

Gu Xi's later poems have changed a lot, and he has made great progress, he is obviously not satisfied with the early mountain songs and wild tunes, and tries to sing a richer feeling of life with his broad singing voice, and the stream gushes out of the narrow valley and begins to flow on the wider riverbed. We even have the feeling of a river suddenly diverting course, hearing some kind of grandeur resounding in the river of his poetry. Although there is a stiffness or reluctance in some places, on the whole, his later poems show a distinctly mature attitude towards life. For Gu Xi, this is a leap, albeit of an experimental and exploratory nature, and this collection of poems mainly includes the poet's works from this period. It can be seen that he is obviously deliberately pursuing a kind of depth, pursuing a philosophical consciousness, and when showing the prism of real life, he tries his best to use his calm fingers to pluck the candlelight of history to give him a far-reaching observation. And shrouded in all this is the poet's deep love for the thick land of northern Shaanxi and the blood-like attachment of the cuckoo, and in this way evokes the kind of nostalgia we share. These largely compensate for the poet's shortcomings in technique.

In addition, we also feel that the pursuit of a new form and a new expression does not necessarily mean that it must be sacrificed and discarded at the expense of the original. Gu Xi's profound folk song literacy should be reflected in the pursuit of creation—of course, it should be a sublimated embodiment.