Biography of Hai Zi (Revised Edition)

Author: Liao Yuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features:
4 Poetics and Literary Theory: The "Eighth Book of the Sun" beyond the "Seven Books" leaves many puzzles in the existing concepts of contemporary poetry. For example, its literary form as a novel and poetic drama, and the reasons why Hai Zi retreated from the contemporary poetry scene toward medieval and ancient artistic texts. To clearly understand these issues, accompanying the "Seven Books" and written intermittently in 1987, "Poetics, an Outline," as well as his diaries and other poetic and theoretical works, become important reference texts. Or, perhaps it's not just that—these essays, saturated with high-density sunlight particles, integrating descriptions of various extraordinary spiritual phenomena and artistic phenomenon analyses, hold equal significance to the chapters of the "Seven Books," even surpassing some of its chapters like "The Great Zas." Further, it should be a self-contained unit within Hai Zi's "Sun Series"—the eighth book after the "Seven Books." In this essay, based on a comprehensive examination and understanding of the vast space of human spiritual art, Hai Zi divides poets and works worthy of entering the "sun family genealogy" into three tiers.
The first tier consists of the brilliant genius-type poets: Shelley, Ye Senin, Pushkin, H?lderlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Mallory, Crane, Dylan, Hérault, and Van Gogh, Nietzsche, and others (Hai Zi included all outstanding thinkers, artists, novelists, and playwrights in human history within his own concept of poets). They are all genius-type poets, but they are essentially all short-lived geniuses. They are the kind who compress the energy of creation bestowed on an outstanding artist over a lifetime into a few short years, spending it wildly. They are destined for God's express lane, controlled by the predetermined, warlike internal life mechanisms of planets, leaving them helpless. Crazy, barbaric, sharp, pointing directly to the essence. The high-energy, super-dense compression keeps their writing perpetually on the brink of explosion, leading to the complete explosion of their lives—not immediate destruction, but becoming fools. Many of Van Gogh's and H?lderlin's works were created when they were already in a state of mental derangement but had not yet fully become fools. Such creation is already on the verge of explosion, thus its very nature exhibits the brilliance, shockwaves, and lethality of explosion fragments. The fate of such artists is tragic. They were placed on this earth by God, seemingly only to speak that one sentence that breaks the heavens' secrets at the critical point of explosion, to walk that equatorial stretch, and then, to be taken away by God; or, like H?lderlin, to be "abandoned by God." Hai Zi called them princes—the children of the sun. This was a type of poetic life that deeply moved and inspired Hai Zi. Because "their tragic struggle and lyricism are themselves magnificent poems. Their tragic existence is poetry within poetry. Their beautiful destruction is the symbol of humanity." Hai Zi saw in them a reflection of himself, and thus he further stated: "I cherish the tragic youth and life of princes like them. I enter life through the sun princes."