Chapter 23 maple ghost

Before I started writing this book, I ambitiously tried to create a biography of everything in Maqiao.I have written novels for more than ten years, but I am becoming less and less fond of reading novels and writing novels—of course I mean traditional novels with strong plots.In that kind of novels, the dominant characters, dominant plots, and dominant emotions dominate the vision of the author and readers, making it impossible for people to look aside.Even if there are some occasional idle pens, they are just sporadic embellishments to the main line, a little bit of grace under the autocracy.It must be admitted that there is nothing wrong with this kind of fiction serving as a perspective close to reality.But as long as you think about it for a while, in more cases, real life is not like this, and it does not conform to this main line of causal guidance and control.A person is often in the intersection of two, three, four or even more causal clues) In addition to each causal line, there are a large number of other things and things present, which have become an indispensable part of our life.In such a multifarious causal network, what legitimacy does the hegemony of the novel's main line (character, plot, and emotion) have?What doesn't make it into traditional fiction is usually what "doesn't make sense".However, when theocracy is dominant, science is meaningless; when human beings are dominant, nature is meaningless; when politics is dominant, love is meaningless; when money is dominant, so is beauty. meaningless.I suspect that all things in the world have the same status in terms of meaning. The reason why some things sometimes seem "meaningless" is that they are rejected by the author's view of meaning and resisted by the reader's view of meaning. An exciting area for people to have fun.Clearly, notions of meaning are not innate instincts, but on the contrary, they are fads, habits, and cultural tendencies—often reflected in how fiction itself shapes us.In other words, the ideology hidden in the novel tradition is constantly completing its self-replication through us.My memory and imagination are not specially prepared for tradition.Therefore, I often hope to jump out of the main line of cause and effect, and look at some seemingly meaningless things, such as focusing on a stone, emphasizing a star, studying a lackluster rain, looking at an insignificant and I seem to never know and never know. Unrecognizable back.At the very least, I should write a tree.In my imagination, there shouldn’t be a big tree in Maqiao. I must let one tree, no, two trees—let two big maple trees grow on my manuscript and stand in the village under Maqiao. Afraid of the back slope of the house.I imagined that the tallest of these two trees was more than seven or eight feet tall, and the smaller one was five or six feet tall. Anyone who came to Maqiao could see their crowns from a distance, and their vision was stretched by their tops.I think this is very good: biography for two trees.A village without big trees is like a family without parents, or a head without eyes.In the center of Maqiao are two maple trees.There is no child who has not breathed their shade, sucked their cicadas, and been inspired by their weird tree tumors to imagine all kinds of bizarre and terrifying.They don't need special care. When people have good things, they can leave them as much as possible, and forget them completely.But they are willing to accept and accompany the lonely person at any time, wash away the depression of the lonely person with the sound of rustling leaves, and use the broken silver under the sieve of the leaves to make circles, dissolve and pile up, and pour out from time to time. Bright dreams.The person who planted these two trees is no longer available, and the old team is still unclear.It is called Maple Ghost. It is said that there was a mountain fire many years ago, and all the trees on the slope were burned to death. Only these two trees were safe, and their branches and leaves were not damaged. .There have been many legends about them since then.Some people say that those tree tumors are mostly human-shaped, and they grow several feet in the face of strong wind and heavy rain, and shrink as before when people come.Ma Ming spoke even more eloquently, saying that once he accidentally slept under a tree and hung his bamboo hat on a broken branch of Xiaofeng Ghost, and was awakened by thunder in the middle of the night. Odd thing.Ma Ming boasted that he had studied Danqing when he was young.He said that he had painted these two trees, but after painting, his right arm suffered from severe pain, redness, swelling and fever for three days, and he never dared to do it again.You can't even draw a picture, and naturally you don't dare to cut it down.As a result, the two trees grew taller and taller, and became objects of attention from dozens of miles away.Someone once sawed a tree branch, hung a piece of red cloth on the door to ward off evil spirits, or carved a wooden fish out of a tree, and used it to pray for gods and disasters.I once participated in the design of water conservancy construction, and went to the commune to draw the planning drawings.Teacher Fan from the middle school was also sent to participate in this matter.We went to the county water conservancy bureau together to copy the map of this commune.In that dusty reference room, I realized that the government hadn’t surveyed and drawn any complete maps after 1949, and all the designs were still based on the military maps left by the Japanese army when they invaded China, a kind of black and white like Zhuge Liang used. Line map, with a large scale of 1:5000, one commune can occupy a large one.This picture does not take the sea level as the base point, but the cornerstone of the Xiaowumen City Wall in Changsha City as a reference. It is said that it was drawn secretly by Tong Hanhao before the Japanese invasion. It cannot help but marvel at their thorough preparation and efficiency. .On this picture, I saw two maple trees in Maqiao, which were also impressive.It was specially circled by the Japanese with a red pen.Teacher Fan has experience. He said that this is the navigation sign of the Japanese.Then I remembered that Maqiao people had indeed seen Japanese planes.Benyi said that when he saw this monster for the first time, Benyi's big house fear uncle thought it was a big bird, and he yelled to the younger generation to scatter grains on the ground to lure it down, and asked everyone to hurry up and get the bird. The son came to prepare for arrest.When the plane didn't come down, the big house uncle confidently yelled at the sky: I don't think you will come down!I don't see you coming down!At that time, only Xi Daganzi guessed that it was a Japanese plane, and it was here to drop bombs.It's a pity that this foreigner's speech is so rustic that it's hard to understand. Everyone didn't understand. The original meaning of the big house uncle said that the Japanese are short, so why are the Japanese birds so big?The villagers waited for a day in vain, but no plane came down to eat the grain.When they came for the second time, the bombs were dropped, and the ground was shaken.Uncle Dafang was killed on the spot, and flew to the tree with his mouth open, as if he wanted to bite the bird's nest on the tree.Benyi is still a little deaf until now. I don't know if it was the shock of the explosion, or he was scared by the mouth that flew towards the tree pole.Three people were killed in the village, and if a bomb exploded more than twenty years later and killed the lion (see the entry "Gui Sheng"), then the number of those who died should be four.Think about it this way, if there were no two trees, would Japanese planes be in the air?Will it drop a bomb? ——After all, the Japanese don’t have to be too interested in a small mountain village.If they didn't use the maple ghost as a navigation mark, they wouldn't have to fly over here, and they wouldn't be able to see the crowd shouting and shouting, so they might drop the bombs where they thought it was more important.With these two trees, everything happened, including the deaths of four people and other stories that happened later.Since then, a flock of crows has always been perched on these two trees in Maqiao, and from time to time they explode into a broken black in people's eyes.Some people once tried to drive them away, burned them with fire, and smashed the crow's nest, but these ominous things still flew back when people were unaware, and stubbornly garrisoned the treetops.The crow cries year after year.It is said that three other women were hanged under this tree one after another.I don't know their lives. I only know that one of them had a big fight with her husband, poisoned her husband, and then hanged herself.That was a long time ago.When I passed by these two trees, it was like passing by some other tree, a certain piece of grass, or a certain stone, without paying much attention to them.I would not have imagined that it is they, hidden in the depths of the day, that hide unfathomable possibilities, that the leaves and branches are gathering danger, and will explode at the predetermined moment, condemning a certain person or the fate of some people.I sometimes think that trees are very different from each other, just like people are very different from each other.Hitler was also a man.If an alien came to interpret him, based on his facial features, limbs, walking upright and often making some regular sounds to the same kind, the alien would look through the dictionaries they may have and define him as a human.There is nothing wrong with that.The Han bamboo slips "Chu Ci" is a book.If a Hebrew scholar who does not understand Chinese reads it, based on its font shape, writing tools and excavation site, the Hebrews may be smart and knowledgeable enough to conclude that it is Chinese.There is nothing wrong with that either.But how significant are these "nothing wrong"?Just like we say that the maple ghost is a tree, a maple tree, how much sense is this correct?A tree does not have human will and freedom, but it often quietly occupies an important position in the complex causal network of life.In this sense, the difference between one tree and another is sometimes like the difference between Hitler and Gandhi, like the difference between "Chu Ci" and the manual of an electric razor, much greater than we imagine .Even if we are familiar with botany, we are only at the beginning of our understanding of any inconspicuous tree.The two maple trees finally disappeared in the early summer of 1972, when I was not in the village.When I came back, I didn't see the crown of the tree far away, and suddenly felt that the outline of the foreground was a bit wrong, and I almost thought I was going the wrong way.After entering the village, I found that the houses are much more open and bright, and the white flowers are a bit dazzling.It turned out that the shade was gone.I saw wood slag and sawdust with a strong smell of fat and juice all over the place, piles of branches and leaves with bird's nests and spider webs sandwiched between them, and no one moved them home to make firewood.I smell a chilli-like smell but don't know where it's coming from.Feet stepping out of the branches and leaves, it is the sound of making people old.The tree was cut down by order of the commune. It is said that it was used to arrange chairs for the newly built commune auditorium, and it was also to break the superstition of Feng Gui.At that time, no one wanted to hoe or saw. There was no other way. In the end, the cadres of the commune had to order a controlled landlord to do it, plus two needy households, and promised to pay off their ten yuan debt. They moved hesitantly.Later, I saw rows of brand new maple chairs in the commune, which had been held by party members, family planning meetings, water management or hunting meetings, etc., leaving some dirty footprints and dinners. oil soup.Probably from this time on, dozens of nearby villages began to suffer from a kind of miasma and itching disease. When meeting male and female patients, they always scratched their bodies wanting to cry and laugh, and their disturbed clothes were messed up. People can't help leaning against the corner of the wall to move up and down or left and right, or reach into their pants while talking about instructions from the county.They tried the doctor's medicine, but it didn't work.It is said that the medical team from the county can't explain why, which is very strange.There was a rumor that it was "ringworm of the maple", caused by the maple ghosts in Maqiao-they wanted to mess up people's prudence and take revenge on the murderers who felled it.