Memories of Mount Qilai by Mu Yang

Author:Mu Yang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, Biography and Autobiography/Personal Memoirs, POE009010, Poetry/Asian/Chinese
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

I found myself submerged between a mysterious sadness and joy when I looked at myself, sitting at my desk, starring fixedly at the stack of papers in front of me, the tip of my pen sliding across, soon leaving behind so many true and illusory traces. I felt I was on the verge of tears, and yet also happy, swaying between a slight sense of guilt and contentment. In this way I wrote quickly, until one day I discovered that I really was with full composure writing each character clearly, without a single mark straying beyond the boxes on the writing paper. I actually was already capable of being leisurely and unhurried.

Where does poetry come from?

It comes from a passion. You press a surging passion deep down in the soul, where it fuses with melancholy, stirring deep in your soul; fear it, test it, sometimes make it change color. A passion of a different color shifts position deep in your soul; sometimes it leaps up, falls, crawls, and never comes back, and sometimes it rushes in on all sides, fast as lightning. It has no fixed form or character. I had realized that it was the motive force of art, it was the truth. But where does poetry come from?

Does it come from utmost sadness? Grief? But that is entirely foreign to a fifteen-year-old boy. What is sadness? You try to catch it, fathom it, put it together, and affirm that it is grief or not, and then ask, why did it strike my weak young heart? It was sadness because it arose out of remorse, as if from some dark end of the central nervous system, originally of utter insignificance, but once you fixed on it, then you bravely fostered it, catalyzing it, producing an ever greater sense of remorse. One day amid a light breeze, while I was walking alone along a new wall where a river ran to the right far down to the sea, someone opened a door and pushed out a bicycle, hesitated for a moment, and then rode off in the opposite direction. The streets were quiet and not a person was seen. Suddenly, as if pursuing a memory, my heart throbbed and ached as I thought about some distant matters, which I had forgotten but which had not completely vanished, things that had happened a long time ago. The train approached, traveling slowly, station to station, from Taidong. I recalled the train at the crossing, amid all the clanging, rounding on its way toward Shuanglian, Shilin, Guandu, and Danshui. I resolved on doubt and asked, “Why?”

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