Lyrical Basin

Author: Jing Wendong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Martin Heidegger believed that the essence of language is "language speaks." We have reasons to think Heidegger was mistaken. For in his view, the essence of language is the essence of humans. The actual situation is more like "doing actions." Even language itself, even "language speaks," is merely a part of human actions. "Doing actions" encompasses the immense desire brought by actions, and the desire of actions often leads to the desire for narration. When the mundane life and the life of the times have become a universal fact, nobility, purity, and sublimity have actually been revoked in the 1990s. The desire for narration entered the Chinese poetry of the 1990s through the back door of lyricism, indicating that the poets had realized that the noble (such as lyricism) is definitely pure, but it also means that it is definitely something extremely unusual in life. In an extreme sense, it has little to do with our daily lives. And can we not infer from this that the vulgar (such as narration) is actually a necessity of life? To this, Xiao Kaiyu, Sun Wenbo, Zang Di, Zhong Ming, Zhang Shuguang, Sen Zi, and others answered yes; while Ouyang Jianghe openly declared: the poetry of the 1990s expresses only the "quantitative problem" of "more or less" in actions, not the ontological problem of "presence or absence" of lyricism that the 1990s sought to express. The narration of poetry about the "actual events" of the 1990s was completed with an attitude of closeness to the "present moment." In the lyricism of the 20th century, poetry mostly adopted a dismissive attitude toward "actual events" and "present moment," shifting its focus instead to the past and the future. This is an old tradition in Chinese poetry. In fact, whether it is reminiscing about the past or yearning for the future, both imply the subtext that "actual events" and "present moment" are unreasonable, ugly, and can be ignored or abandoned. Its deeper meaning lies in this: through lyrical treatment and the simplifying effect of zero, reasonable and pure things can only exist in the past (such as childhood) or will be born tomorrow (such as the time when ideals are finally realized). Narration breaks this stubborn ailment and myth in the Chinese poetry of the 1980s. Its statement about "actual events" and "present moment," its broad involvement in ordinary life and the life of the times, make poetry unprecedentedly chaotic, making "the present" an important concept of time. Everything seems to be only the present. The present is the only credible, reliable, and graspable moment. The present encompasses both "actual events" and "present moment." It is necessary to understand the present as the people and events of the present moment, because apart from humans, time is meaningless, and an empty present is just a shell. This does not mean that the past and the future are unimportant in the Chinese poetry writing of the 1990s, but rather that through narration, the poetry of the 1990s has changed its perception of the present: it has adopted a way of transforming the direct confrontation with the present into a reflection on the present and a yearning for the present. The present can appear in the form of memories or as a future face, but it cannot be simply equated with the common understanding of the present as merely an intermediary between the past and the future. The issue, however, lies in the Chinese poetry writing of the 1990s: whether it is reminiscing about or yearning for the present, it is actually virtual. It shows that when poetry gets close to "actual events" and "present moment," it can still adopt a detached stance to observe the present. In this regard, poets and poetry "follow" the principle of the wave-particle duality of light: just as light unexpectedly appears as both a wave and a particle, poetry and poets are both immersed in the present and detached from it. It proves that when poets and poetry narrate the present, the "actual events" and "present moment" of the 1990s also gain different masks about the present. The present is multiple, and this is the special meaning of the present in the poetry writing of the 1990s.