Chapter 29 chapter Five

There was a philosopher and mathematician named Bertrand Russell, who was born in the same century as Garth and died in the same century. He once wrote a passage: "Language is not only used to express ideas, and to create ideas without which they would not exist." This is the essence of the creative genius of man: not the edifice of civilization, nor some thumping flash weapon with which to destroy civilization, but words , they allow new ideas to flourish like sperm attacking an egg.One could argue that the twin babies of words and ideas are the only contribution humans can, will, or should make to the tangled universe (yes, our DNA is unique, but so is the salamander's. Yes , we build artefacts, but so do beavers and ant architects, at this moment, I can see them building sawtooth castles at the front of the pier. Yes, we weave real structures out of mathematical dreams, But the universe is connected by algorithms. Draw a circle, and pi pops up. Entering the new solar system, Tycho Brahe's formula is waiting under the black velvet cloak of space-time. But the universe hides the words Where? Underneath its biology, geometry, or its insentient stone?) Even the races of intelligent life we've discovered—the Fat Man of Jupiter II, the Labyrinth Builder, the Senese of Hebron The empath, the sticky man of the doll, the architect of the Time Tombs, and the shrike—they left us with mysteries, obscure artifacts, but without language.There are no words.

The poet John Keats once wrote to a friend of his named Bailey: "I am sure of nothing but the sanctity of true love, and the reality of the imagination—beauties seized by the imagination must be real— —whether it existed in the past or not.” Wu Qiaozhi, a Chinese poet, died in the last Sino-Japanese war three hundred years ago in exile. He also understood it and recorded it in the communication log: "Poetry is the crazy midwife of reality. What they see is not reality. Things are not things that are possible, but things that must be realized." Later, the week before his death, he gave the last disk to his lover, and Wu Qiaozhi said: "Words are truth ammunition belts. the only bullet for a man. And the poet is the sniper."

Lo and behold, at first there were words.As the human universe slowly weaves, words are given flesh and blood.Only a poet can expand the universe, discovering shortcuts to new truths, like a Hawking drive passing through the barriers of Einstein's space-time. As a poet, I think, to be a real poet is to become the incarnation of human beings; to take over the poet's mantle is to carry the cross of the Son, and to bear the labor pains of the Madonna of Humanity. To be a true poet is to be God. I tried to explain this idea to my friends at Heaven's Gate. "Piss, shit," I said, "Asshole fucker, thunder strikes shit. Thunder strikes. Shhsh. Thunder strikes!"

They shook their heads, smiled, and left.Few people can understand the way great poets behave. Acid rain from yellow-brown clouds hit me.I wade through leg-length mud and clean bloodweed from city sewers.The next year, Old Mud died, and we were busy working on opening the 1st Avenue Canal to the Middle Pond mud flat.There was an accident.He was climbing a slimy sand dune trying to save a sulfur rose from a rolling grouting machine, when there was a mud quake.Shortly thereafter, Qi Di got married.Although she still works as a kiln woman, I see her less and less.She died of dystocia shortly after the green tsunami swept away Mudflat City.And I continued to write poetry.

You may ask, how do you write gorgeous poems with only nine words in the right brain hemisphere? The answer is: I don't use words at all.Poetry is second only to words.Fundamentally this is the truth.I deal with the "thing itself", the substance behind the shadows, and compile powerful concepts, similes, and internal connections, just like an engineer building a building: first construct a whisker alloy skeleton, and then glass, plastic, and colored aluminum will appear. Slowly, those words came home.My mind started retraining and reorganizing, and it went so perfectly, it was incredible.What was lost in the left hemisphere found its home elsewhere, reclaiming primacy in the damaged area, like pioneers returning to the burnt prairie, only to be made more fertile by the fire.A simple word like "salt" used to make me hesitant and breathless.My head would dig deep into nothingness like a tongue licking a toothless gum.And now, words and phrases slowly came back, like the names of forgotten playmates, reappearing.By day I labored in the sludge field, and by night I sat at my shattered table, writing my Psalms by the hissing light of the butter lamp.Mark Twain once opined in his own customary way: "The difference between a right word and an almost right word is the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightning bug." He was joking, but it was not comprehensive.At that time, on Heaven's Gate, I began to write my Psalms, and I found that finding the right words, compared to receiving almost right words, was like being struck by lightning. One is simply to watch the lightning show.

And so my Psalms began, and grew.I wrote poems on benzene made from recycled bloodweed fiber that they produced by the ton for papyrus; Store bought. The Psalms began to take shape.As the words came back, like the pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle falling into place, I found that I needed a form.I recalled Mr. Balthazar's teaching, trying to use the richness of the rhythm of Milton's long narrative poem.Confidence returned, and I added Byron's romantic sensibility, along with Keats's ode to language.I threw in all of that, with a dash of Yeats' brilliant cynicism and a pinch of Pound's obscure, mystical arrogance.I chopped it up, diced it, and added other spices, like Elliott's masterful tropes, Dylan Thomas' sense of place, Delmore Schwartz's sense of doom, Steve Tenn's horror Tone, Samuel de Brevi's innocence; Danton's penchant for roundabout rhythmic structures, Wu Qiaozhi's adoration of nature, and Edmund Jifferilla's cynicism.

Of course, in the end, I threw the whole hodgepodge away, and I wrote the Psalms in my own style. If it weren't for the slum bully Unker, I might still be digging acid canals by day and writing Psalms by night on the planet Heaven's Gate. On my day off, I took my Psalter (it was the only draft of my manuscript!) to do some research in the company library in the public hall, and Unker and his two henchmen flashed out of the alley and called me Immediately pay the protection fee for next month.We don't have Universal Cards at the Heaven's Gate Atmospheric Shelter; we pay our debts with temporary company notes or underground marks.But I have nothing.Unker asked to see the contents of my plastic shoulder bag.I refused without thinking.I made a mistake here.If I showed Unker the manuscript, at most he would throw it in the mud, make threats, and slap me.As you can imagine, I said no, which pissed him off, so he and his two Neanderthal companions ripped open my bag, threw the manuscript in the mud, and, with As everyone knows, I was beaten to death.

Coincidentally, that day, an electromagnetic vehicle belonging to the manager of the Air Quality Bureau of the protected body drove by at a low altitude. The manager's wife was heading to the company's residential store alone, and then she ordered the electromagnetic vehicle to descend and told her robot to rescue me. , and took back my remaining "Psalms", and then personally drove me to the company hospital.Usually, only people in the guaranteed labor group will receive medical assistance, and even if they do, they will only receive treatment in simple biological clinics.But the hospital didn't want to please the manager's wife, so I was admitted (I was still unconscious).I was slowly recovering in the rehab tank, while the human doctor and the manager's wife watched over me.

Well, let's cut this old story short.Helena, the manager's wife, read my manuscript while I was floating in the healing fluid.She likes it very much.The day I was removed from the container at the company hospital, Helena teleported to Planet Revival, and she showed my manuscript to her sister, Philia, who had a friend whose lover knew Superline An editor at the publishing house.When I woke up the next day, my broken ribs had grown back, my shattered cheekbones were healed, the bruises were gone, I had four new teeth, a new cornea on my left eye, and a line contract. Five weeks later my book was published.A week later, Helena divorced his manager and married me.This is her seventh marriage and my first.We went to Central Plaza for our honeymoon, and when I returned a month later, my book had sold a billion copies—the first poetry book to hit the bestseller list in four centuries.I became a millionaire, much more than a million.

Terena Greenwing Fei was my first Superline editor.It was her idea to name the book "The Dying Earth" (searching the archives found that there was a novel with this name more than 500 years ago, but its copyright has expired and the book is out of print.) It was she who published it. The idea of ​​publishing only part of the "Psalms", that is, the last days full of nostalgia in the old land.It was her idea to cut out most of the sections that she thought the reader would get bored with - the philosophy chapters, the description of my mother, the homage to earlier poets, I played with the experimental In place of the Psalms, there are more personal chapters—everything, really, except for a rustic and pleasant description of the last days, emptied of all heavy burdens, sentimental flatness, and haunting.Four months after its publication, "The Dying Earth" has sold 2.5 billion hard copy copies. There is an abridged electronic version on the Guanju Data Network, and the holographic film copyright has also been bought out.Tyrena points out that the timing is just right...the primal shock trauma of the death of Old Earth has created a century of denial as if Earth never existed, and a period of ensuing renewed interest in Old Earth nostalgia The appearance of the believers has reached the peak of the sky, and now these people can be found in every world in the ring network.A book about the last days—even a book of poetry—is on the offensive at just the right time.