Meditations: Life and Death
Li Nanfang
Life is completed in time. Time is the flow of life. People use time to measure life, and life to measure time. Time and life are mutual measures. One fact that will never change is that in the continuous chain of human life, all individual life rings are subject to decay. Life is destined to pass with time, and no one can surpass it. But in the face of time, people always have to use their short time to fight against eternity, trying their best to show the victory of life. This is the tragedy of life and the tragedy of human beings.
When I was young, I dreamed of being outstanding and being a person who makes myself happy and makes others happy. Therefore, I face the torrent of time and strive to seek wisdom in order to create. At that time, I never thought that one day I would be tired of struggling.
But now, when I enter middle age and encounter the invisible boundary of time, I suddenly find that my life has lost all its green color. When I look back, it is shocking to see how many vigorous things have been wiped out by time.
In my increasing contemplation, I often think of the passing song. Like today's youth, I also had years where singing accompanied me. My passion and empty ambition were almost ignited by the songs of that era (including songs from history that were washed away by blood). And I dare say that my singing voice at that time was enough to ignite others.
I learned to sing very early. When I was a child, my singing was like the sound of flowing water in the small river outside the village and the fragrance of flowers on the river bank. It often floated in the fields and hills of my hometown, in the elementary school campus and among the houses shrouded in smoke...More Most of the time, it flies in the light of the bright moon and starry nights. In the hearts of my hometown people, I am a talented and intelligent young singer. And the singing of my youth was more like the sound of flying flames and boiling blood, stirring in the neat queues in the military camp, outside the buildings and squares of the Military University, and also stirring in the mountains and ravines I walked through. Between the water and clouds in Sichuan. Those splendid and gorgeous flames illuminate and reflect the hearts of many who are also young. Those bright notes still shine in the memories of my friends and classmates back then.
But I don’t know since when, I rarely sing anymore. Even singing loudly is accidental and unintentional. At the moment, even though the ever-increasing trends in today's era are drawing thousands of young people into drunken dreams and making them unrestrained, I feel awkward. This is certainly related to the disgust caused by those vulgar and shallow songs, but the more essential reason is that my life no longer belongs to the glorious years, and I no longer have the vitality to sing. Time has taken them away. Perhaps it can also be said that I turned the singing of lip kisses into the singing of my heart. This is the quiet contemplation. Then, after tempering, these musings turned into poetry.
In fact, in the process of life, I unknowingly changed from a narrator singing in the flame of passion to a thinker. And the spiritual world of a thinker is already big enough and glorious enough to accommodate my free and unrestrained soul. You must know that that space contains all phenomena of the past and present, and thousands of rivers in the universe, allowing my soul to rise and be intoxicated, fly and inhabit there; at the same time, it also meets many souls and my own heart there, and it is also where the blazing Sing and build your dream kingdom there. The vastness, majesty, brilliance and wonder of that space make my soul obsessed with it and never get tired of it.
However, even so, in the memory disk, those passing songs will last forever. They swirl and echo in the depths of my soul, and sometimes they can't help but rush out of my throat, changing from silence to sound. But what is very different from those years ago is that when sung now, those songs of the past are soaked in melancholy. No matter how inconsistent with their inherent mood, they seem to have become elegies. why is that? It's because those songs are connected to the past, to the passing time and life. They touch my old arms and trigger my current emotions. Many life situations are blended into them.When I sing alone in a deserted place, I often call out and ask involuntarily: "Youth! Where are you - where are you?" With this inner voice, tears that refuse to be shed will burst into tears. Down from the eyes. This is indeed a kind of memorial, a kind of mourning, for the part of my life that has been eroded by weather and rain and is dying day by day. This is also a deep-seated nostalgia, a painful look back at the eternal youth and the youthful ambition that was let down because it was too beautiful and too sacred and no longer belongs to me.
But all this is destined to be helpless. A person's life is so short - there is no life in the past, no death in the future, and when he is prosperous, he is about to decline. Isn't this sad? However, life is precious because of this; the process of life has also become a process of exploration, and value is generated due to exploration. Based on this belief, I often think about life, death, life in death and death in life. What is
death for? Death is the source of all shock in life. It is it that awakens the mind and allows people to understand life and the world, and then leads to the excitement of life and the renewal of the world. Therefore, death is not darkness but profound illumination. If there was no death, not only would there be no life, there would even be no time, no creation, and at the same time there would be no love, and there would be no so-called value. However, for life, death is an invisible reality. Because it is invisible and elusive, in real life and in our minds, death is like a passing voice, a flying shadow, and a nightmare that haunts us forever.
Man is the only animal that can understand life and death. However, due to the non-repetitive nature of the life process, the uncertainty of the time limit of life, the powerful and irresistible shock of death, the darkness of death, and the unrecorded nature of death experience, people know too little about life and misunderstand death. too much. Otherwise, why do people fear death and sometimes despise death or waste their lives? Is it not the trembling of death which destroys the peace of life?
In fact, the process of life is the process of death. Death is not at the point at the end of life, but always accompanies life from the beginning to the end in a seemingly invisible and invisible state. When life and death go together, life exists; when life and death are separated, death appears. To be more precise, except for unexpected factors that lead to the rapid passing of life and the sudden appearance of death, which permanently terminate the natural process of life and death, on the stage of time, life gradually fades away, death gradually appears, and finally completes of life and death. Therefore, death is not the future, there is no need to welcome it, and it is impossible to reject it. Death is very close to everyone.
Since death and life go hand in hand, what is there to fear about death? Isn’t fear of death not fear of life?
Since the path of life is the path of death, can’t we say that the meaning of life is also the meaning of death, and the reason for living is also the reason for dying? Death and life are equally precious, equally sacred, and equally worth cherishing!
Three years ago, during this season and spring, I had a real experience of facing death. In order to go to "death", in addition to a few "last poems", I also plan to leave a "last words" that are not brief. However, when it was not yet completed and just had a beginning, the "death alarm" was suddenly lifted. However, this beginning part, which is far from being explained, partly recorded my extraordinary state of mind and the experience of being born toward death. Now, I am willing to record the remaining "last words" entitled "The Curve of Life - The Pursuit of Beauty and Poetry" as follows:
[It seems that at this moment, I must review my creative path and think about its deeper meanings. The motivation; in essence, this requires tracing the course of my life.
My career can be called creative for twenty years, during which I mainly composed poetry. Although I am not famous and my main works are not known to the world, I may as well call myself: I am a poet.
A true poet has always regarded poetry as his life, and at the same time, he also regards life as his poetry. Their poems are the crystallization of life externalized and quantified in the highest language art form. Through this crystallization, people can estimate the value of the poet's life and regard this crystallization as a symbol of his life.And although this symbolic power comes from life, it can transcend life and will not die with the death of the poet's natural life.
As a poet, I also strive to use the form of poetry to transform the life process into written history, and to transform material life into spiritual life. Although poetry mainly contains the past and those distant mental images, if it is a symbol that can travel through time and space, and is a constellation of artistic language that hangs high, then it will radiate immortal light, and the cry of spiritual life will be It will reverberate long after the death of material life. This kind of value is often not something that the poet himself can estimate, but the poet's fate is ultimately determined by it.
Similarly, whether my poems have such value and height is not something I can know. But the realization of this goal is my hope: for me, this hope is immortal.
I said at the beginning: "It seems that we have reached such a moment." What kind of "moment" is this?
Thanks to the observation methods of modern medicine, it can show the diseases of the internal organs of the human body directly before our eyes. Fortunately and unfortunately, I was recently the subject of this observation and was told that I had a liver tumor. Although its nature has not yet been determined, the shadow of death and danger has lingered in my life, and the end of my life may not be too far away. I can neither resist nor fear it. I know that death is steadfast, that it cannot be shaken by resistance, nor shrink from fear. But this undoubtedly broke my life plan and prompted me to revisit the short journey in the past from the perspective of my creative career while I am still alive, hoping to gain something.
I am not afraid of death, but I am attached to life, its beauty and endless blessings. My fearlessness is naturally a transcendent consciousness, but this consciousness is not a disregard for life. On the contrary, it is a rational sublimation that comes from the love for life, some profound exploration of life and its value, and some degree of in-depth experience and understanding. Everyone will see that the preciousness, sacredness and magnificence of life are revealed in the opposition between its finiteness and the infiniteness of the world. Like those who love life, I cherish life for all its value. This is why I now want to turn my head and look back at life and regurgitate my life. 】
Before I could finish writing all the words I wanted to write, the further examination report came out: the shadow on my liver was not a malignant tumor. Of course, my life should not be cut off, and death did not appear. However, I suddenly experienced a death test. The calmness and calmness with which I faced death, full of passion and calmness, showed reality in this encounter with the phantom of death; and my existing words also revealed my cherishment of death and my respect for life. Attachment and love. Although the understanding at that time was different from today, what I want to say today is still the same: although life will not last as long as time, the victory of life can transcend time, and this transcendence lies in striving for one's mission. , lies in fully developing a life that can create value and have meaning in time. Even though death is the complete collapse of time and space, not all deaths end like this. The death of the great is like eternal life.
No matter how attached I am to the past, to the time that has passed, I am always rushing towards the future, and I will continue to struggle and create diligently in the torrent of time. This is precisely to make life immortal. The brilliance shines through time.
Life continues as always, and so does my belief: as long as I can feel time and see the sun rise and set, my steps will move towards tomorrow, and I will use the brilliance of today's life to illuminate the road to tomorrow.
March 1993
