Chapter 75 flame

The word is abstract and vague, and it is difficult to have any precise meaning.If you say that you don't believe in ghosts or have never seen a ghost, Maqiao people will insist on it.That's why your "flame" is too high. What is a flame? If this question is difficult to answer, you can also ask another way: who has the highest flame?People in Maqiao would say: People in the city, scholars, people who have made a fortune, men, people in their prime, people who are not sick, people in the public office, people in the daytime, people who are free from disasters, people who are near the road, people who live in the city. People on sunny days, people in Pingchuan, people with many relatives and friends, people who just had a full meal... Of course, there are also people who don't believe in ghosts.

What is involved here is almost all the problems in life. To speculate and deduce their meaning, the flame usually refers to a state: in all the relatively weak situations of life, the human flame is low and extinguished, so there are ghosts and ghosts in front of us.The so-called "poor people see more ghosts" is probably the meaning of the saying.I thought of my mother, she had studied in Xinxue, worked as a teacher, and never believed in ghosts.In the summer of 1981, because of a large poisonous boil on her back, she was often in a semi-conscious state due to illness, so she saw ghosts.She screamed in terror in the middle of the night, shivering and retreating to the corner of the bed, saying that there was a person behind the door, a woman surnamed Wang, who was a ghost who was coming to murder her, and asked me to kill her with a kitchen knife—such a situation Recurring in that moment, I am reminded of the word "flame".I think, she must be too low now, so she sees things that I can't see, and enters a world that I can't enter.

She didn't remember what happened afterwards. Intellectual power is undoubtedly one of the important contents of the flame, and it is a symbol of the powerful in real life. It promotes the development of revolution, science and economy.The problem is that if, as Maqiao people understand, flames are only relatively speaking, and strength becomes weakness in the face of greater strength, then exorcising ghosts is almost a goal that cannot be expected too optimistically.When knowledge is also frustrated, when it is not enough, when it falls apart in the face of powerful reality.My mother didn't believe in ghosts.When her reason could not resist a poisonous boil, the ghost came.Modern people do not believe in ghosts very much. When their rational energy cannot solve problems such as war, poverty, pollution, and indifference, and cannot eliminate the heavy anxiety in their hearts, even in the most scientific and advanced cities of the 20th century Here, there will be all kinds of ghosts and superstitions revived.Even in the eyes of some relatively thorough agnostics, in the eyes of fully educated modern people, there may be images of ghosts (please think of modernist paintings), and there may be ghosts (please think of modern paintings). School music), there may be ghost logic (please think about the surreal poems or novels of the modern school)... In a sense, modernist culture is one of the biggest ghost fields that have been secretly born in this century. The haunted college version, derived from people with low flames in modern society: country people, people with little education, poor people, women, children and old people, sick people, people who have suffered disasters, non-public people, people who are not People who rely on roads, people with few relatives and friends, people at night, people in rainy days, people who are not in Pingchuan, people who are hungry... and people who believe in ghosts.

Check the biographies of every important modernist writer and artist, and it is not difficult to find that the above-mentioned people with low flames often have their figures and shining eyes. I am an agnostic.I often say that the ghosts discovered by Maqiao people, including those from other places, can only speak Maqiao dialect, not Mandarin, let alone English or French, which shows that they are not beyond the scope of the discoverers' knowledge.This gives me reason to believe that ghosts are created by people themselves.Maybe it's just a hallucination, a mental image that occurs when people are physically weak (like my mother) or mentally weak (like the desperate modernists), as happens when people are dreaming, drunk, or drugged.

Facing ghosts is actually facing our own weakness. This is one of the lines of thought for understanding flames. Therefore, I suspect that Maqiao people never had a so-called Hei Danzi story (see the entry "Walking Ghosts"), and there is no reincarnation of Tie Xiang at all.When I returned to Maqiao, Fucha categorically denied the authenticity of this story, denouncing it as a rumor to confuse the public and nonsense.I trust the words of the review.Of course, I don't suspect that those who claim to have seen Hei Danzi are deliberately deceiving me, no, they may not have the need.I only saw the suspiciousness of this story from their scattered and contradictory fragments of description.I once asked the ending of the story: Where is Heidanzi now?Will she still come to Maqiao?They hawed and hawed.Some people said that Heidanzi ate red carp, and people who ate this kind of fish could not remember the past life and would not come back again.Some said that Hei Danzi followed her uncle to a coastal city in the south to make money, but he was nowhere to be found.Others said that Hei Danzi was afraid of Benyi——this kind of saying means that she has no face and no courage to come again.etc.

There isn't a definitive ending.Of course, there is no need for an exact ending, let me take it one by one.I have no doubt that the whole story is but a product of their low flame, a common dream, like all that my mother saw when she was seriously ill. When people want to see something, this something will appear one day.People can use two means to achieve this: when the flame is high, use revolution, science and economic development; when the flame is low, use dreams. People cannot be the same.If I can't raise the flames of the majority of Maqiao people, I think I have no reason to deprive them of the right to dream, no reason to prevent them from imagining their Tie Xiang returning to Maqiao, crossing the boundary between life and death with his sister-in-law and holding their heads by the lotus pond cry bitterly.