Chapter 34 12. Typical petty bourgeoisie

The second year of university is my poetry year, and I indulge in the joy of writing poetry.Heine is my idol and I have written many love poems.I wrote it secretly so that no one would know.A classmate who loves literature accidentally saw a poem, and I immediately told him that it was a copy of Heine's poem, and he believed it to be true, and I was secretly proud of it for a while.I am imitating Heine to a large extent, I have read his poems by heart, I have his melody in my heart, and when my songs flow out of my heart, they naturally carry his melody.I am not in love, but I am shrouded in love every day; I am not in love with a certain girl, but I am in love with every beautiful face I meet.Eighteen-year-old youth has incredible magic power, and my body and mind suddenly feel like I am drunk, and the drunk is just right, and I am ecstatic.I wandered alone in Yanyuan, and the world in my eyes was full of spring, and even the air was green.Of course I know the reason why the world is so beautiful, I strongly feel the existence of the opposite sex in the world, their breath blends into the air, turning the air into wine.However, at the same time, those inadvertent glances, smiles, and Yingying scattered in the air left me with a strong melancholy, and I had no choice but to use poetry to soothe this sweet pain.

When I was in college, college students were not allowed to fall in love. This is a discipline officially announced by the school.On campus, you will never see students in pairs.If a student had a sexual relationship, once it was discovered, the inevitable end would be expulsion from the school, and it would be announced at the school assembly and humiliated in public.By analogy, writing love poems would of course also be considered unhealthy.During the Cultural Revolution, when I destroyed all my diaries and manuscripts, I couldn’t do anything with poetry, so I carefully screened and only destroyed the so-called unhealthy ones, including all love poems.I used to be proud of these poems, but now there is no physical evidence. Looking at the remaining poems, the overall level must not be much higher.However, I still have a certain experience in writing poetry.Among the remaining texts, I found several fragments on poetry.For example, describe the feeling of poetry: "Like everyone else, I read, chat, meditate, walk, sleep, attend meetings... Suddenly, another heart beats in my chest." Talking about poetry: "A A good line can light up a whole poem, just as a living person can light up a whole room."

Although no one knows that I write love poems, no matter where I go, in the eyes of people around me, I am still a typical bourgeoisie.Someone picked up a piece of paper with sentimental words written on it, and the students unanimously concluded that I wrote it, but it was not.I raised a pot of asparagus bamboo, and immediately a classmate said to me that from it, one can imagine the temperament of the owner, which probably means that my emotions are as delicate as the asparagus bamboo.One day, on campus, a boy from another major who had no relationship with me came up to me, in order to tell me: "I think you are different from others." He could see from the appearance that I was separated from everyone, Live in your own world.When I went to the countryside to participate in the Four Clean-ups, the working team leader was a female teacher. She gave me six words: sensitive, fragile, and noble.After graduating from university, when I corresponded with the Guo family, Shiying’s younger brother Jianying called me “Jun Zhou (petty bourgeoisie)” in a letter.

Petty bourgeoisie is a buzzword today, which reminds people of white-collar workers, rich income, cozy room decoration, bars, coffee houses, etc., but it had no such meaning at that time, because there were no such things.There was also a customary usage at that time. Generally speaking, individualism in behavior, selfishness, selfishness at the expense of others, is the bourgeoisie, individualism in emotion, lingering, and self-pity, is the petty bourgeoisie.Or to use the political discourse at the time, if a person can't get along with the workers, peasants and soldiers, and still retains a kingdom of private emotions in his heart, he is a petty bourgeoisie.I seem to be very happy to be seated, and I also position myself as a petty bourgeoisie.Under this title, I feel that my inner life has not been completely assimilated by a powerful ideology, and I still have a pitiful and lovely self in a world where everyone is the same.

Of course, I can't blindly admire myself.Shiying was taken away, and the person who competed for me on behalf of the bourgeoisie was no longer around.There are fifty students in our grade, most of whom are members of the party and the league, and when I was in the second grade, I was the only one who couldn't join the league.Not long after, I also knew that Shiying also sincerely repented and changed.I don't want to be eliminated by the times, and I am eager to change myself.However, even my self-reform was full of petty bourgeois characteristics, and I unconsciously wanted to show my individuality in an ideological movement that eliminated individuality.Criticism and self-criticism are carried out in stereotyped and fashionable terms that do not touch the true inner workings of the individual at all.I just don't use this kind of vocabulary, I would rather use the language with personal feelings, and distinguish myself from others in terms of words.I don't shout revolutionary slogans, I don't go on the line, but I try to speak the truth as much as possible, and talk about my inner contradictions, confusion and understanding.Even if I criticize myself, I would like to be a living person when doing so, rather than a machine turning according to unified instructions.Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" was specially designed to educate literary and artistic figures in Yan'an. I found that the "petty bourgeois, liberal, individualistic, nihilistic, art for art's sake" criticized in it I have all the sentiments of "noble, aristocratic, decadent, and pessimistic" in me, and I feel particularly symptomatic and kind.I read and re-read this article, calling it my "bible" at one point.I sincerely wanted to overcome these emotions in myself according to Mao Zedong's teachings, and my thought reform basically focused on cleaning up, analyzing and criticizing them.However, at the same time, there is a sense of superiority lurking in my heart: compared with ordinary beings who do not have these emotions, after all, I have a much richer inner world.I am different from them both for thought remolding. Although my remolding is more difficult, it seems to be more tasteful.

However tasteful the makeover, the result is still self-distorting.I blush now as I look through the so-called wholesome poems left over from the catastrophe, which are full of empty rhetoric.At the end of the second grade, Mayakovsky replaced Heine as my poetic idol.This reflected the change in my sentiments, the effect upon me of an increasingly revolutionary environment.In a completely positive sense, Heine was also a revolutionary poet with extraordinary satirical ability and profound inner critical power, but I didn't understand this at the time, but felt that his tenderness had become an obstacle between me and the times.I have always liked Mayakovsky, and this revolutionary leader in poetry has emerged at this time, which is very suitable for my needs. I imitated him and wrote a large number of trapezoidal poems.During the summer vacation of the second and third grades, I signed up for military training twice, one in the Ming Tombs and one in Gucheng, Hebei. During those two periods, I wrote a lot.I declare to my poems: "I am your general, and I have found you the best political commissar, he is the revolution!" I write about the life of the army, standing guard, shooting targets, hastily marching, camping, etc.I sang "the approaching war". At that time, the Vietnam War was being fought, and the country was also promoting preparations for the war. There was an atmosphere that seemed to be about to fight to the death with US imperialism.I imagined myself dying in battle, and telling people in the peaceful future: "In your blooming gardens, there is a very inconspicuous little flower, the blood of a little unknown poet who once wrote poetry with one hand and Pull the trigger." For quite some time, I had a passion for war, as if it would solve all my problems.Yes, it is my problem, not the world's problem or the country's problem.This shows that there is a kind of despair deep in my heart. I can't see my way out in the ideological reform movement that eliminates my personality. Full stop.Obviously, this morbid passion is still petty.However, at that time, I was caught up in it, and I even boasted with pride. When I came back from the military training, I declared: "We stand up, and we will wake up Peking University with the sound of majestic footsteps!" Tudao is a Tibetan student with sound common sense. After reading this poem, I shook my head disapprovingly, and gave me a look that was almost pity, and I feel ashamed every time I think of this look.

I don't want to be too harsh on myself. In those poems, after all, I found some commendable content, which is probably a satire on various phenomena around me.I hate the few people in my class who are endlessly teaching others with the so-called Marxism-Leninism, telling them clearly: "In the hands of shallow people, the truth will become shameless." Philosophy students generally like to call themselves nerds, but I know the truth "We've read a few books, so what's the point? We're idiots, that's all." In a poem, I declared my mission: "To load the bullets of dialectics into the machine gun of poetry, and fire at metaphysics. ’” As was commonly used at the time, metaphysics meant the static, rigid, and isolated way of thinking of seeing things, so I could cram into this concept all the dogmatic phenomena I hated, and attack them.On the contrary, dialectics means intellectual flexibility, and with the help of this concept, I can tortuously defend the little spiritual freedom that is left.In the vast ocean of the proletariat, dialectics is the only lifebuoy that my petty bourgeoisie can hold on to.