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The sky is boundless, and the thoughts are endless.
Source of this article: Tianya, No. 5, 2015.
The god of language
Liu Qi
When I was twenty years old, I became a propaganda officer at a large factory in Shenyang, and the leader asked me to write what to write. Many critical drafts were written, and more were written in praise of leaders, praises workers, hard work, and gifts to various festivals. The language was poor, and not willing to be poor, he used words indiscriminately, and wrote a slip of the "Party's Birthday Bride Price" and published it in the factory newspaper. Fortunately, no one pursues: the party celebrates its birthday, but it is not a marriage, which door does it receive the "bride price"?
I don't know how to pretend to understand. If you understand, even if you have a high fever, you don't dare to say so. Worry, inner fear, makes me full of reverence for words, a little and a half respect, a half a fear. Writing manuscripts, writing letters, writing diaries, even if you write a note, your heart is tense, reminding yourself that these words and sentences fall into the hands of anyone, and you can't pick out the faults. The literary network is strict, the society is cold, violence is the language, the language is violence, and when it is said, it will turn the face, which writer dares not add a hundred careful. I edited a factory newspaper for several years, and I encountered many taboos. If nothing else, just a word arrangement is too restrictive to do. When proofreading the sample, I pay special attention to looking at the words "Chairman Mao" and "Mao Zedong Thought", and do not disconnect when changing careers, because disconnection is "disrespectful" and belongs to "political issues". If it happens to be disconnected, quickly delete a few words or punctuation in front of it, vacate the position, and invite the words that are broken on the next line. At that time, the appearance rate of these words was super high, and the probability of separation before and after the typesetting was also high, and the ability to delete redundant nonsense and secondary sentences was inadvertently improved a lot, which was a kind of bias and a strange harvest. It is as if the servants holding up the "quiet" and "avoidance" signs are practicing both face kung fu and arm muscles.
An effective way to avoid making mistakes is to follow the crowds. In this regard, empty words and clichés can be of great help. Why are these words flying around in China for so long? Striving for safety, safety first, can not be a particularly important reason. Along with this, there is inertia, servility, despotism, anti-intellectualism, madness, as well as lies, big words, slanderous words, flattery words, loyal words, and so on. These factors are mixed together, rolling up and rolling, stirring up wild entanglements, eclipses and moons, and adding more to nothing, resulting in the unprecedented abuse and deformation of the Chinese language and writing, becoming vicious, vulgar, hypocritical, exaggerated, pretentious, rigid, boring, whitewashing reality, avoiding suffering, and almost all the ugliness since the birth of the Chinese language has been collected into a huge and far-reaching system of language and speech. Hundreds of millions of people use this language to think, speak, and live, and their feelings, alas, do not say it.
I am in it, step by step to today, the stupid things I have done, the stupid articles I have written, there are many things. I am deeply ashamed of this, and in recent years I have written some reflective texts and published them in the media as my lessons for the record.
Since the mid-to-late 1980s, I have been writing essays and other literary manuscripts. The process of writing these words is a process of trying to break free from the ugly system of language speaking in the past. If I had to use one word to summarize my writing process, could that word be "break free"?
When I wrote a manuscript in those years, I didn't always go with the flow and blindly cope with it. The human nature of liking the new and the old, the motivation of young people to strive for progress, especially the complex and diverse life around me, drives me to enrich my language and write good articles. I carry a small book, who says fresh words, take out a pen to remember, sometimes remember the other party rolled his eyes, secret agent are you? Later, it was changed, first memorized, then remembered, most of the words and phrases, "parts", "bricks", mainly the workers' "bricks and tiles". The superiors called for the study of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and I was a young intellectual; the "peasants" had a little bit, and the "soldiers" could not participate, so they were close to the "workers" and the colloquial language of the people at the bottom. Books, intellectuals, cadres, classical, foreign, also remembered, but not many. The results of this can be seen in my future writing habits and limitations.
Although the "bricks and tiles" are small, they still have personalities and need to be respected. However, bricks and tiles alone cannot build buildings, and it is easy to build a thousand floors. How to get rid of the polluted, slighted, and solidified language environment, build a "good building", and write a wonderful article? It also has to be simple and natural, but also fresh and lively, different, which has always been a problem that bothers me to this day. The article is the article, the object is the object, and the object written out of the article always feels that it is not the object? The article is beautifully and thoughtfully lying on the computer, and the object is enjoying himself, and he is like a person who is alive and kicking.
There are ugly systems and there are beautiful systems in language.
When the ugly system is the most arrogant, it cannot destroy the beautiful system.
The process of breaking free from the ugly system is also the process of entering the beautiful system, and it is the process of continuous reshaping, updating, and self-consciousness of individual language. If I had to add one more word to sum up my writing, could it be "reinvention"?
It's hard to break free, especially to reinvent itself, and there's more to do.
When I recently compiled my book, I found that I rarely use exclamation points in my manuscripts, and the later the writing time, the less it is used. Later, many articles simply gave the exclamation point to the "quit". At that time, he wrote bold words, denounced criticism, three sentences and one "shock", five sentences and one "sigh", thinking that it was Huang Zhong Dalu, sonorous and powerful, but in fact, it was dry thunder and empty cannons. This problem has been changed for a long time, "reshaped" for a long time, and finally realized, increasing the tone and weight, mainly relying on the internal force of the text. Later, I was annoyed when I saw the exclamation point, and I was annoyed to see that there was a certain officer in the media who "emphasized and pointed out". Why do you "emphasize"? Is the official university "emphasized"? Shouting into the microphone is "emphasis"? How many exclamation points does the secretary write for you to be "emphasized"? Overcorrection, perhaps "right" to the other side. Despise Poison Star, probably carrying sunglasses and long hair. Exclamation point, wronged you.
The process of "reshaping" is also the process of breaking and integrating the boundaries of various languages, such as the boundaries of spoken and written languages, the boundaries of dialects and Mandarin, the boundaries of vernacular and literary languages, the boundaries of native Chinese and Western-style Chinese, the boundaries of Chinese and English abbreviations, the boundaries of online and offline languages, the boundaries of style, the boundaries of doctrines, the boundaries of themes, the boundaries of genres, and so on.
China has a harsh saying: "draw a clear line" that has tormented the Chinese people for many years. A good family, a couple, a class of classmates, a group of friends, and a village father and elder forced everyone to choose a side and take sides and divide the enemy and us. Society has loosened up slightly, and a large number of cases of broken threads and secret passages have emerged, accusing and mocking the cruelty and absurdity of the past. "Clear", where is it so easy? Do you want to "draw clearly" and draw clearly?
This is true between people, and it is also true between texts. The manuscript paper is wordless, the screen is blank, how to write with your hands, and who you want to "collude" with. No matter which "territory" you enter, you will not be an outsider to maximize the possibility and adaptability of language. Language and literature are alive, and so are their various boundaries. It is not a sneaky border, territorial negotiations, not so strict. As long as the article needs, all kinds of boundaries should be broken, and the fusion will be integrated, and the "one line" of the original brush will be blurred and blurred, and it will become a strange brilliance between the red light and the blue sky that is also purple and orange and yellow and pink. If it is not enough, simply change the boundaries and become you have me, I have her, you and I are one, a new one.
That being said, there is still a big gap in doing it, and many articles are written awkwardly, far from satisfactory.
Sometimes I like to think, what should it be like for those ancients, those high-ranking people who do not pay attention to the rules and precepts, those simple people who live sincerely, they talk and write. Is literary theory used for exams to fill in the blanks when the rope binds people? Was it more free for people to write in an era when rules were scarce in the early days? Can you make it clear without esoteric terms, allusions, and quotations? Can we use prose attitudes to write theories, use novel means to write essays, use documentary tones to write novels, use humorous spirit to write editorials, use paragraph brushwork to write news, use small people's moods to write big events, use the road of dismantling and reorganization to translate foreign languages, use essay vision to write things that are not allowed to be written casually, use the method of bad classification to write bad classification, and use the pen of four different pens to write four different states?
The process of breaking and merging is also a process of continuous freedom of language. This freedom is not lonely, miserly, bare-chested freedom. Language is never empty-handed, it always has to "carry" something with it.
Language is not only a skill, a form, a tool, but also an end, a being, a person. Learning a language is also learning to be a person. Respect for language is also respect for human nature. To use language is also to use life. Over the years of writing things, I have often felt the divine power of language, receiving its favor, being punished by it, tempered by it, letting it lead, one foot deep and one foot shallow, understanding a burst of confusion, from the finite to the infinite.
In China, there are gods of wealth, doors, vesta, medicine, and son-sending (Guanyin), but there is no language god. Wenqu Xing seems to be close to language, but it seems to be more utilitarian, sophisticated, closer to learning and excellent and so on. Now even the god of gambling and the god of cars have it, why is there no god of language?
In my mind, if there is a god of language, this god should be a god who has transformed countless linguistic geniuses in ancient and modern times into one, with the essence of Zhuangzi Sima Qian, the rhyme of Li Du, the freshness of Brother Fengjie of the monkey, the wind and bone of folk masters, the wisdom of good men in new technologies and new media, the simplicity, kindness, robustness, eternity of the people of Cangsheng, and the cross-ocean, overseas relations, and the brilliance of life and language excellence on all continents.
This god hates lying, gossiping, deceitfulness, pretense, who "pretends" to clean up, who lies, who is kicked, and who curses and dirty himself.
There is no need to kowtow to this god, hold meetings to discuss, and "emphasize", as long as you are as close as you are to your loved ones, as much as you love nature, this god of language will respond with sincerity and let you taste endless happiness.
This God does not dwell anywhere else, but dwells in the hearts of the people.
[Collected Works of Liu Qi (8 volumes), published by Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House in March 2015.] The article is prefaced by the author]
Liu Qi, a writer, lives in Beijing. His major works include "Metaphysics" and "The Man I Respected in the Last Century".