Chapter 38 Li Baijiu

Li Bai is more than 1300 years ago.He was crowned the throne of literary history and was rated as a great poet.Of course he is the pride of the Chinese nation and a celebrity forever.But as an individual life, the universal halo on his head that is effective for outstanding people often does not help us to understand him deeply.The source is obscured.The primordial wonder at life (a Heideggerian term) gives way to classroom discipline.The few biographies I have read have made him comprehensive: he is a great artist, a moral gentleman, and a progressive person.Where there is something that does not meet this established standard, it is either dismissed or dismissed as negative.

Life is not easy to be amazed, and it is even more difficult to stay amazed.Maugham wrote "The Moon and Sixpence" to make us feel this kind of surprise all the time.The painters under his brush are based on Gauguin, who is a master of French Impressionism and is as famous as Van Gogh.The wild impulse of the painter is unimaginable: he was in trouble and was about to die. His good friend saved his life and let him live in his home, but he abducted his wife and regretted it afterwards... Maugham stared at These things reveal to us a living artist through the use of good ideological cultivation, broad vision, and intuitive ability to life forms.Woolf, the master of stream-of-consciousness novels, praised: Reading this book is like hitting your head on a towering iceberg, which completely disintegrates mediocre daily life!

Li Bai and Gauguin have similarities.Li Bai's wildness is more wild in roaming, looking for immortals, and doing great things.This man, who was not tall and mighty in appearance, left an impression of vitality.He has been in a state of high excitement all his life without going crazy, showing his extraordinary ability to control extreme emotions.When people describe a persistent person, they often say: Hey, he went all the way to the dark!And Li Bai went to Hei by several roads.In the thousands of years of Chinese civilization, such people are rare, and Li Bai is an outlier among outliers.Think about the pair of eyes he let Wei Wan see in his later years, just like his early years, "both eyes are bright".Some mental patients have such characteristics.The pressure is too great for most people to bear.Li Bai's life impulse is also the extreme sport of life.The common people under the control of Confucian culture are relatively mediocre, so generation after generation have enjoyed talking about Li Bai.

As far as the great momentum of life is concerned, Li Bai is regarded as a high mountain for Chinese people.Su Shi may be richer and more perfect than him, but he may not be more aggressive than him. Li Bai is often in a state of hallucinations, and his poems are extremely exaggerated, but exaggeration is our feeling, and he himself is not unusual.He wrote: "The white hair is three thousand feet", "Snowflakes in Yanshan Mountain are as big as a mat", "The water of the Yellow River comes from the sky"... Many of his good poems are related to seeking immortals. "Don't dare to speak loudly, for fear of frightening the heavenly beings" is his real feeling. He is realistic and has nothing to do with romance.Scholars accused him of fascination with gods, which is too serious.

Li Bai is simple.He is not complicated.He wrote so many cover letters and strongly requested to see the same official more than ten times, which just shows his simplicity.If he is complicated, he will change his mind to figure it out.In fact, he couldn't figure out the officialdom until his death.He described himself as saying: "At that time, when people saw me with a different tone, they would sneer when they heard Yu's big words." It can be seen that he is not ashamed of his big words, and his nature has not changed. If Li Bai is complicated, then he should learn from politicians like Gao Lishi when he is an Hanlin in Chang'an, and if necessary, take off his boots and wash his feet for Gao Lishi.

Even if Li Bai became a high-ranking official with a real position, he probably wouldn't be like Su Dongpo, eager to seek happiness for the common people.He still wants to get drunk, find a god, and do his so-called big things out of his own way.One thing we can imagine: he will not be a corrupt or mediocre official.There is no reason to be a corrupt official, and it is boring to be a mediocre official. Don Quixote is all dressed up and fighting the windmill, and Li Bai is facing the officialdom, with a similar style.It might be better if he was born in the era of Tang Taizong.The so-called prosperity of Kaiyuan is actually full of dangers, and various interest groups firmly control their own territory, and it is difficult for heterogeneous things to get involved.Li Bai was born at the wrong time, and Du Fu was even more miserable than him.However, fortunately, they bumped into a wall all their lives before they hit a great art.Han Yu said: "Li and Du's articles are here, and the brilliance will last forever."

It is a pity that there seems to be no high-level biography of Li Bai so far.The senior scholars were rigorous in their studies, but they were constrained by the atmosphere of the times and had to be cautious, which hindered the free cohesion of ideological power. Now is the time to talk about opening up, right?Who can learn from Maugham to get rid of all dogma and arouse our original wonder of Li Bai? Biographical works, abroad, especially in the West, have been favored by readers from the 19th century to the present, and have given birth to famous writers of different grades.For example, Romain Rolland, Zweig, Owen Stone, and Mauriac that we are familiar with.Irving is well known for writing about Van Gogh and Freud.The "Three Masters" written by Zweig is included in middle school students' reading books. He has made convincing, profound and vivid descriptions of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. It reveals: The deep meaning of the book is the endless exploration of the essence of life.

Today, when social life is becoming more and more similar and human models tend to be single, the meaning of literature is to search for individual differences. Not only for Li Bai.All kinds of characters in ancient times are waiting to be rediscovered.Biographical works have a lot of virgin land that needs to be reclaimed and intensively cultivated. As mentioned earlier, Li Bai is heartless, not so much hurting him, as approaching him.He left Shu in his twenties and ignored his relatives in his hometown.If you measure him by filial piety, he is obviously unqualified.There is no need to hide from him.Taboo for the Venerable, prevent us from approaching the Venerable.Filial piety and unfilial piety are a secondary issue. Li Bai's meaning is freedom and irrepressible vitality.The Chinese under the imperial power lack this most.And lack what to think about, so ordinary people love him, read about him, and make up about him.He got rid of the fetters of the secular world and left immortal poems for future generations.

Picasso was indifferent to his relatives and cruel to his lover, but he left 50,000 works of art for mankind... According to Wei Wan's records, Li Bai "killed several people with his hands" in Sichuan in his early years.Why did he kill?And who did he kill?There are only a few words in the vast volume of historical materials.Li Bai's murder is still a mystery.He learned swordsmanship at a young age and considered himself a knight. He might fight, or he might draw his sword to help when he saw injustice.Literary experts prefer the latter, without knowing why.Reminiscent of his character, he will not hesitate to strike a sword.He dances the sword, just like his cursive calligraphy.The sword was stained with human blood. In the following decades, he went from "drawing the sword and looking around at a loss" to "knowing that the soldier is a murder weapon". He is an undisputed humanitarian and condemns violence.He is not the kind of so-called chivalrous man who kills people for various reasons and pretends to be kind all his life.If the film and television drama makes him a master of martial arts, it will be a big joke in the world.

Li Bai's landscape poems usually leave a romantic impression on people.It’s all right to label him a Romantic poet, but myself, I’d rather not.Chinese people like to stick labels, and everything will be fine after they are pasted.This tendency to solidify thinking has lasted for thousands of years, hindering the understanding of the source of the poet.Thinking about Li Bai carefully, his feelings for heaven, earth, human beings and gods are far from being romantically summed up.For example, looking at a mountain is completely different from seeing a mountain in the sense of modern tourism.He "loves the mountains and rivers of the motherland", but he has a strong personality. When talking about love without personality, love is vague and average, and the heat is just like lukewarm water.Gods, ghosts and ghosts are mixed together with mountains, clouds, birds and animals. For Li Bai, these are all real, and it is difficult to distinguish reality from reality.He is realistic about feelings, but we mistakenly think that he is romanticizing, imagining, describing, mobilizing literary means to deal with mountains and rivers. ——Understanding Li Bai, this is the key point.

The word reality, which is most frequently used at present, needs to be carefully examined. Reality is not static, it will shift, and it will extend or shrink its horizon.For the ancients, the gods were realistic; for the Chinese in the 1980s, ideals were realistic, even more realistic than reality. In 1955, Sartre and Beauvoir visited China and said a very interesting sentence: the most direct reality of China is the future! I hope that the Chinese people's sense of reality will not become narrower and narrower, drive away divinity, and mock ideals.A world without divinity and ideals is unimaginable, and it is impossible to talk about the abundance of life and the breadth of life.Blindly chasing money will lead you to the mahjong table. The so-called reality will shrink into two tables: the dining table and the card table.Adults play cards and children surf the Internet, and little "addictions" suck up life. There are so many and normalized scenes like this, it is tantamount to a plague epidemic. Reading ancient literati is to recall the richness that our ancestors once had.And, as much as possible, bring that richness into the present. Literary history calls some poets great men, and we should know where the great poets' greatness comes from.Perhaps it can be said: their greatness stems from our poverty, poverty leads to change, and poverty leads to longing. To give a few small examples, let’s take a look at the great Li Taibai: Frustrated in his pursuit of an official position, he said: "The way is like the blue sky, and I can't do it alone." He missed Chang'an, and said: "The strong wind blows my heart, and it hangs directly on the Xianyang tree." When he met a fairy, his appearance was intimate: "The fairy caresses my head, and the hair is tied for longevity." He and his friends confided in each other's hearts, saying, "Three cups are important, but the five mountains are the least." He described his childhood impression of the moon: "I didn't know the moon when I was young, and I called it a white jade plate. I also doubted the Yaotai mirror and flew to the blue clouds." He showed off the three years in Chang'an: "I used to be drunk in Chang'an, and the five princes and seven nobles shared a cup of wine." He boasted of his talent: "He writes with joy and shakes the Five Sacred Mountains, and writes poems to sing proudly in Cangzhou." Reading Li Bai's poems, I really feel like the wind is blowing sand.His collection of poems was already "every family has it" in the first year of Zhenyuan in the middle Tang Dynasty.This shows that Tang people are close to him, unlike Tao Qian at the end of Jin Dynasty, but far away.Most of the poets in the middle and late Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty benefited from him.Including the so-called unrestrained school of Song Ci, they also drew nourishment from him.There are as many examples as the Gypsophila 20 years ago, so I don't need to elaborate.Regarding his overall evaluation, Gong Zizhen has a passage: "Zhuang and Qu Shi cannot be united, and they can be regarded as the heart, and they are self-defeating; and also." This means that Li Bai has the ability to unify heterogeneous things. Li Bai has few poems, but his "thin rhythm" is just like Su Dongpo.Poems vary in length, similar to Song Ci.Rhythmic poems flourished in the Tang Dynasty, but Li Bai was out of fashion.A free man uses a free style, and his poetry writing is far less deliberate and laborious than Du Fu.He has already started writing lyrics, one "Bodhisattva Man" and one "Recalling Qin'e", which can be found in various anthologies.He is the beginning of the poems of famous Tang and Song Dynasties. The first film of "Bodhisattva Man" says: Pinglin is deserted and smoke is like weaving, and the cold mountain area is sad and blue.When the darkness enters the tall building, some people worry upstairs. The sentences are simple but have profound meanings, and the traveler's worries are shaped.The ancients made countless paintings based on this. Li Bai is free and unrestrained, and writes poems boldly, but there are exceptions for great poets. His famous work "Long Gan Xing" has delicate brushstrokes and tactful emotions.Changgan is a place name, in the south of the Qinhuai River in Nanjing, it is a flat land among the hills, scattered with quiet villages.The poem writes about the feelings of a business woman: The concubine's initial payment, the drama in front of the folded flower door.Lang rode a bamboo horse to make green plums around the bed. Living together in Changqian, the two little ones have no time to guess.Fourteen is a gentleman's wife, and she has not yet opened her face. Bow your head to the dark wall, and call it once a thousand times.At the fifteenth day, I raised my eyebrows, wishing to be with dust and ashes... Needless to say, probably all men and women will like this song. Li Bai claimed to be adhering to the "great elegance" in China, but his works handed down from generation to generation are closer to the "national style" and ancient Yuefu.It's as if he envied Sima Xiangru, but he was arrogant all his life, which was far from Xiangru who was serious about being a royal literati. Most of his good poems are easy to understand, although scholars have pointed out that he has too many allusions.He has indeed read a lot of classics and is familiar with anecdotes of thousands of years. He is Li Bai, and he wants to show off.Fortunately, the explanations of various anthologies are clear and clear.Famous scholars have annotated Li Bai one after another, and it is also a kind of enjoyment for us to read the annotations.The study of exegesis in Chinese studies has always been developed.The four-volume literary history compiled under the lead of Professor You Guoen analyzes Li Bai's art very well. Among the great poets of the Tang Dynasty, there were two who did not like Li Bai, one was Yuan Zhen and the other was Bai Juyi.Wang Anshi of the Northern Song Dynasty demoted Li most violently.Lu You of the Southern Song Dynasty stepped forward to defend Li Bai and question Wang Anshi.In modern times, it is well known that Mao Zedong admired the "Three Lis": Li Bai, Li He, and Li Shangyin.Guo Moruo, a giant in the literary world, wrote "Li Bai and Du Fu", which was widely circulated in the 1970s.He used the method of class analysis to suppress Du Yang Li, which was tainted by future generations.However, some important textual research in the book has been concluded so far. For example, Li Bai was born in Suiye in Central Asia.Guo Lao's work also prompted thousands of young people to read Li Taibai.In my memory, many educated youths, including my brother, went to the mountains and went to the countryside to go to great lengths to obtain this book. It is difficult to compile Li Bai's poems into a collection in the form of chronology, because it is difficult to determine the writing period of many famous poems.He has been non-stop all his life, from the city to the countryside, and he can't figure out when to write any poems.Unless someone is sent to follow him. He left many mysteries to future generations: the mystery of his life experience, the mystery of his death, the mystery of his works... And the biggest mystery is his life itself.Like an active volcano, it has been erupting continuously for sixty years.The body turned into volcanic ash soaring into the sky, and it would not fall for thousands of years. It is suggested that the country set up a heavy reward and invite a high-level person to solve the mystery of Li Bai's life for us. 2007.2.14. Second draft in Wangyanzhai, Meishan