Chapter 21 1983 12 The Poet's Persistence and Detachment

one On New Year's Eve, only Su Dongpo's works accompanied me. Reading Su Dongpo's heroic and unrestrained poems and articles, you can hardly imagine that he had such a rough and difficult life. One day after dinner, Su Dongpo paced with his stomach in his hands and asked, "What is hiding in my stomach?" The waiters said respectively that their stomachs are full of articles and insights.Only his clever and beautiful concubine Zhao Yun said: "It's not appropriate for a maester to be full." Su Dongpo laughed out loud and even claimed it was true.In Su Dongpo's private life, the luckiest thing is to have such a charming and understanding woman.

With Su Dongpo's talents, he will have unique achievements in governing the country and economics, as evidenced by his achievements during his tenure as Hangzhou prefect.However, after all, he is too full of poetic temperament, and he can't help expressing what he feels, and complaining when he is injustice, and he always offends others in the end.His poems were famous for a while and will last forever, but his five-foot body can't tolerate the people in power.Regardless of whether a political opponent is in power or a party in power, he is not welcome as a rule.Since being involuntarily pushed onto the political stage, he has been relegated twice, and has been in exile since the age of thirty-five, and has never lived in one place for less than three years.You can seem to see that in the era of inconvenient transportation, he took his family and his family, travel-stained, trekking on the ancient wilderness roads in China, and marched endlessly to the new place of exile.In the end, he was exiled to Hainan Island alone. He was a bold and unrestrained poet who could not do without his friends all day, but he was forced to live like a savage in the coconut grove derived from snakes and scorpions, and died among the barbarians who did not understand the language.

two People with a poetic temperament often mature prematurely intellectually and emotionally, but never mature politically.He has always maintained a simple childlike innocence.He perceives the world and life with a childlike innocent vision, not bound by habits and prejudices, so he often has fresh experiences and unique discoveries.He weighs worldly affairs with the innocent and innocent eyes of a child, but he can't help looking unsophisticated and out of date. Su Dongpo once described writing as "flowing clouds and flowing water", "always doing what should be done, always stopping when there is no need to stop", which is completely out of nature.This is the portrayal of his personality.This irresistible and natural rush of personality, in the eyes of others, is a kind of attachment.

Indeed, poets have different personalities, but they are all very persistent people.Their hearts seem to be fixed in the colorful impressions of childhood, but this kind of fixation is not stagnation and closure, but development and opening.Who can compare to children in the changing and jumping of impressions?Then, isn't the fresh impression acquired by a person who maintains a child's speed all his life amazingly rich?It seems that once a poet's temperament has tasted this joy in childhood, he can't give it up for life.What he has been obsessed with all his life is his unique and fresh perception of the world and life—a sense of beauty.For him, this sense of beauty is a basic need of life.Without this sense of beauty, Fubi Maharaja, life would be dull.If you are as poor as a beggar, you can still live a happy and fulfilling life with a constant sense of beauty.

The sense of beauty is indeed a child's sense in its essence.Children's feelings are characterized by one being simple and unpolished, and the other being fresh and unconventional.Aren't these two characteristics the basic qualities of beauty?However, I don't know of any other feelings than those of a child.Carving is the forgery of feeling, and inheritance is the paralysis of feeling, so the loss of aesthetic feeling is the loss of sensory function. However, after all, this world is ruled by adults. They are contented and self-righteous, and they punish poets with indelible childlike innocence like they punish disobedient children.Needless to say cruel politics, even secular love often ruthlessly dampens the poet's sense of beauty.How many poets have sacrificed their beauty to be destroyed in this way.A person who is obsessed with beauty must have a way of detachment in order to maintain psychological balance.The more persistent you are, the more detached you must be.This is the combination of poetry and philosophy.Which one of the poets who are able to enjoy the rest of their lives does not have a philosophical attitude towards life?Goethe, Tolstoy, Tagore, Su Dongpo... They are all philosophers at the same time to some extent.

three Aesthetics, as a feeling, realizes itself in the process of objectification.Poets who cannot detach themselves are always obsessed with certain special objects.Their hearts are fixed on the sense of beauty, and their sense of beauty is fixed on these special objects. Once these objects are lost, the sense of beauty will lose its sustenance, and the soul will suffer a fatal blow.They cannot become the masters of the aesthetic feeling, but let the beauty feel the slavery of the object.For a poet, there is no greater evil than being attached to some particular objects.This is aesthetic alienation.A free mind is originally the source of aesthetic feeling, but now it is dominated by its own product—objectified aesthetic feeling, that is, the object of beauty—and thus loses its freedom and the driving force of aesthetic feeling.

Su Dongpo is well aware of the dangers of this aesthetic approach that is obsessed with individual objects.In his view, beauty is omnipresent and cannot be objectified. "Everything has something to look at, and if there is something to look at, there is something to be enjoyed, and you don't have to blame the strange and beautiful." If you are attached to a thing, "swim within the thing", and look at it from the inside, the thing will appear taller And big.How can I not be dazzled and bewildered when things approach me with their grandeur?He said that the reason why he can be happy everywhere is because he "swims beyond things". "Swimming beyond things" means not confining objectification to a specific thing, let alone turning the requirement of objectification into a possessive desire for something.As a result, it opens up an infinitely broad world for the objectification of aesthetic feeling. "The cool breeze on the river, and the bright moon in the mountains, the ear hears it and becomes the sound, and the eye meets it and makes the color. It is inexhaustible to take and inexhaustible. It is the endless treasure of the creator." What's the matter?As long as your sense of beauty is not attached to one thing and is not alienated into possession, you will not worry about being unsatisfied.

The poet's persistence lies in maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards life.The detachment of the poet lies in the absence of narrow possessive desires. Therefore, Su Dongpo was able to "talk and laugh at the time of life and death", although he had a keen sense, he was still open-minded. When Su Dongpo lived in exile in Huizhou, one day, he was very tired walking in the mountains, and he was still far away from home.He suddenly realized: Man is the child of nature. Where can he not rest in the embrace of nature?So "the heart is like a fish on a hook, suddenly freed."

"What is life like everywhere? It should be like Feihong stepping on snow mud. Fingers and claws are occasionally left on the mud, and Hongfei's counting things." The poet's soul is like Feihong, it will not be attached to the fingers and claws left on the mud, it will My only mission is to fly, to fly freely in the beautiful country. I believe that philosophy is the patron saint of poetry.Only in the vast sky of philosophy can the spirit of poetry fly freely and persistently. In the world of philosophy, I am an idler tourist.I love to go to the wild to watch the sunset, I love to take a walk on the quiet forest path, and I also love to visit the streets and alleys to see the faces of all living beings.Only when I saw serious places with signs saying "no entry for idlers" and "stop tourists", I wisely avoided them.I knew it was an important office, and I had nothing to do, so I thought the air there was bad for my health and my philosophy.

In the early days, there were no such important offices in the philosophical world.The places where the ancient philosophers lived were under the blue sky: Heraclitus by the ruined temple, Socrates in the street, Aristotle in the forest, Epicurus in the garden.The strangest one is Diogenes, whose "office" is a wooden barrel.Emperor Alexander respectfully asked what he could do for him, and he replied with only one thing: "Please go away and don't block my sunshine." It was the golden age of philosophers, and all philosophers were as poor as beggars , Emperor Odyssey.They are actually rich, with a priceless leisure and intelligence.I don't know when, philosophers have been busy in earnest.They were busy writing lecture notes, building systems, reading and interpreting classics, and reviewing archives.In their hands, the philosophy whose sole mission is to seek wisdom in life has gradually evolved into an academic with complex content and trivial subjects.Philosophy today has become a labyrinthine office building with countless rooms and departments with various terminology labels on the doors.It's a pity that you can only see a lot of desk clerks in these rooms, but not a real philosopher.I have a perhaps outdated belief in philosophy.I have always believed that philosophy is not a public enterprise, but a matter of private souls.When a person's soul has some fundamental doubts about life, he will turn to philosophy.The real philosophical problems are old and always new.With the evolution of civilization, academics will become more and more complicated, but philosophy will always be simple.The reason why we enter philosophy is because it is a quiet garden, where we can get rid of trivial daily affairs, listen to the monologue of our own soul and talk to other souls.If we get caught up in trivial academic affairs instead, wouldn't it be contrary to the original intention of philosophy? Why bother?Young people often express to me that they love thinking about life issues, are eager to study philosophy, and take philosophy as their lifelong career.When this happens, I always discourage it.I tell them that being a philosopher and going to a philosophy department are two completely different things.Philosophy can only be taught by oneself in essence, and philosophers must be self-taught.If there is a teacher, it is only a great philosopher in history. He taught them directly without any intermediate links.As for eating philosophy and being a philosopher, it is even more irrelevant.Eating philosophy has nothing to do with the soul, it is just a job in the society that talks the most empty words and earns the least money.One does not have to be a clerk in that philosophy office building at all and still be a good thinker of life, that is to say, a philosopher.

Of course, this is extreme.In fact, as long as a person has enough understanding, he can not be corrupted by professional philosophy.What I mean is to show that philosophy in its true sense is neither an academic nor a profession, but a spiritual world open to all souls who explore the truth of life.No matter how much you know and what you do for a living, as long as you think about life and have a thorough understanding, you are already roaming leisurely in this world.I myself just want to be such a leisurely tourist, and appropriately regard my works as a kind of spiritual chat and travel notes.