Locke finally died on a wire bed in Hawaii. The dream was haunting Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Like a poet, he dreamed of dying “lying in the azalea bushes of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain”.
The fascinating thing about Lijiang in Yunnan is that it is still a place where you often encounter wasteland. Mountains, lakes, and wasteland are all one kind of things, they are all desolate things, but people look up to the mountains, love the lakes, and treat the principle of waste as just “wildness”, think it is useless, and turn a blind eye.
The reason why the wasteland survived in this era of large-scale development is probably because of its uselessness. In fact, waste is one of the most powerful things. At the beginning of the world, it was its waste—it gave people the strongest enlightenment about the original, about eternity, and about existence. The earth exists because it is useless.
When a vast wasteland unfolds under the southern slope of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, coming out of Dayan Town, the world becomes a drooping sky and golden fields, and weeds, rocks and flying sand gradually appear. The wasteland stretches to the bottom of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, where the immortal peak rises from the ground.
I walked on this wasteland more than ten years ago. The gravel, white sand, purple-red thorns and countless insects caused by ancient geological movement ran up and down on the wasteland. The earth was steaming, and a group of noisy mosquitoes lingered on my head. , A wasp stings on my neck. In the middle of the wasteland is a gray-white road paved with gravel and yellow sand, extending straight into the blue sky. When a truck drove by, the highway floated like fog, and it really felt like the American West in the movie. The sky is majestic and desolate, and the earth is primitive and vast. I walked all the way to the desolate southern slope of the Yulong Snow Mountain. For a moment, I imagined that the king of the Naxi people was leading his nation to walk over the wasteland, gold, jade, animal skins, and hemp. , Wizards, beautiful women and children. The hillside is full of black stones, and the hands of God have shaped them into moving shapes. The locusts are jumping, countless yellow flowers are blooming, crows are in the wind, horses are looking at the earth…
At that time I was still young, looking at such earth and mountains, I firmly believed in eternity. Now all of this is disappearing. My faith in eternity has been shaken. I see more and more things that are covering up the truth of the earth, covering up the “waste”, and making the wasteland appear plastic, glass, cement and steel. …
On May 9, 1922, Joseph Locke, a special writer for National Geographic magazine, saw the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain for the first time. This explorer, surveyor and data collector, his suitcase is full of things called tools, even a set of surgical instruments used to extract teeth. These things are unheard of in Lijiang. At that time the earth was a land full of gods, rivers and rivers, mountains and puddles, puddles and puddles, and a tree and a tree…all things have spirits, sharing the earth with people. But Locke’s scientifically modified eyes couldn’t see the gods all over the earth. All he saw were plant specimens that made him ecstatic. Jade Dragon Snow Mountain welcomes him plainly. He can go wherever he wants. People don’t want to know what he collects those grass leaves for. It grows on the ground, and most of them are. But one person did not welcome him-the British botanist Frank Kington Ward, who entered Lijiang before Locke. He believed that Locke’s arrival “infringed his interests.” But Locke has strong funds, arms and equipment. He drove Ward away and made Lijiang his own enclosure. His famous “The Kingdom of Ancient Naxi in Southwest China” is a dry survey report of various data, names, altitudes and climates, and it is boring to read. This is Lijiang that Locke saw-a huge specimen. But in the end, he was conquered by another Lijiang, the Lijiang in the hearts of the Dongba people: ancient, poetic and full of gods. Locke later became tired of collecting plant specimens. He adored Dongba culture fascinatedly, compiled the “Encyclopedia of Naxi English”, collected and studied Dongba scriptures. He already felt that Dongba culture was facing the danger of extinction. Locke finally died on a wire bed in Hawaii. The dream was haunting Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Like a poet, he dreamed of dying “lying in the azalea bushes of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain”. This is also the dream of the American poet Pound. This person has never been to China, but Lijiang appeared in his famous poem “Pizza Poems.” It was Locke who provided him with the knowledge of Lijiang and enabled Pound to expand his Poetry map: “The verdant snow-capped mountains that dominate Lijiang are verdant and white. How many memories Locke’s world holds for us, and the memories are still swaying in the clouds…” Poets in the industrial age can only rely on explorers from the far east A bit of rough and abstract knowledge brought him helped him revive the memory of “waste”.
The Cedar Village where Locke lived in the past is still the same. Yuhu Lake is so small that it is actually just a pond. It is still extremely clear, indeed like a piece of jasper, worn on a finger of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. I walked around the lake and heard the sound of fish flapping on the water. The lake has a sense of mystery and the water is daunting. In the old days, Locke sat by the lake and drank coffee. A small round table and a round table cloth made Yuhu unique. There is a hole in the cliff behind Yuhu Lake. People who know it say that it was the place where the Dongba people used to hold the soul transfer ceremony. When I passed by, I looked at it, and it was empty and the ground was covered in dust. There are many dark, scaly beech trees growing between the cliffs outside the cave. The trees are more than 1,300 years old. The old trees and dizzying cliffs made me tremble and my legs were weak. This cedar village is now known as Locke’s former residence, and is no longer the unknown village before Locke’s arrival. Locke’s former residence was an ordinary Naxi courtyard. The old tools left by Locke were found and put on display in glass cabinets. There were several elderly people sitting in the yard. It is said that either he had led a horse to Locke or ate the chocolate he gave him. There is an old woman with the key to the exhibition room tied to her waist, who is said to be from Locke’s former landlord. Before she opened the door for me to visit the exhibition, she took out a stack of tickets, 30 yuan per person. This is an era when everything is charged. The door is opened only after the fee is charged. It takes only two minutes to go in and finish watching. I saw the set of extraction tools. This village used to not pull teeth. If the teeth were worms, they would use a peppercorns to stuff them in the tooth cavity. From any corner of the village, you can catch a glimpse of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which is volatile and unpredictable.
The world and waste are two things. Desolation is useless, and the purpose of the world is to turn everything into useful things. It is said that the world is progressing in the wild, but is progress beneficial to life? Hard to say. Huang was concealed by the world, and Huang was powerless, because Huang was silent. Poetry is between the wilderness and the world. Poetry tries to say what is silent in the wilderness. Poetry is alert to the world. Poetry is the knowledge of the wilderness, not the knowledge of the world.
In fact, Lijiang, no, the value of the entire Yunnan and western China lies in the fact that it still retains a lot of deserted parts. As far as the kind of paradise the world dreams of, it is inherently “waste”. Huang is the mother of the world, and the world is the cemetery of Huang. Fundamentally speaking, the so-called progress of the world is to return to the place called the Garden of Eden that only existed in the past. When Locke thought so, he had betrayed his original intention of coming to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and was transformed into a poet.
Not only that, Huang, it also has a greater power, this is the world can not be destroyed.
But now, I am not sure whether this power still exists, because when I wrote these words, people were building golf courses in full swing in the “wildness” of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in Lijiang, which used to make people grasp and believe in eternity.
