Listen to the cold rain

Author: Yu Guangzhong

As soon as the Waking of Insects is over, the spring cold intensifies. First the weather is steep, and then the rainy season begins, sometimes drenching, sometimes pattering, the sky is tidal and the ground is so wet, even in a dream, it seems like there is an umbrella holding it. And even with an umbrella, you can escape a burst of cold rain, but you can't escape the entire rainy season. Even the thoughts are moist. Going home every day, I zigzag through the labyrinth of alleys from Kinmen Street to Xiamen Street. Walking into the rainy and windy weather makes me even more imaginative. Thinking about Taipei looking so miserable is like a black and white film. Thinking about the entire history of China is nothing more than a black and white film. It rained like this from the beginning to the end of the film. I wonder if this feeling comes from Antonioni. But that piece of land has been missing for a long time. Twenty-five years and a quarter of a century, even if it rains, it is separated by thousands of mountains and thousands of umbrellas. For fifteen years, everything has been cut off. Only the climate and weather reports are still involved. A big cold wave rolled in from that land. I share this coldness with the ancient continent. You can't throw yourself into her arms. Being swept by the hem of her skirt can be regarded as comforting your admiration.

When I think about it this way, I feel a little warm in the severe cold. When thinking this way, he hoped that these long and narrow alleys could extend forever, and his thoughts could also be extended, not from Kinmen Street to Xiamen Street, but from Kinmen to Xiamen. He is from Xiamen, at least from Xiamen in the broadest sense. For the past twenty years, he has not lived in Xiamen, but has lived in Xiamen Street, which can be considered a mockery or a comfort. But when it comes to broad sense, he is also from Jiangnan, Changzhou, Nanjing, Sichuan baby, and Wuling boy. Apricot blossoms and spring rain in the south of the Yangtze River, that was his boyhood. In half a month it will be Qingming Festival. Antonioni's camera pans back and forth. The remaining water in the ruined mountains is like this, and the soil of the emperor and queen is like this. In the head of Guizhou, people from north to south are like this. Is that China? Of course, China will always be China. It’s just that the spring rain of apricot blossoms is no longer there, the shepherd boy’s distant fingers are no more, and the drizzle at Jianmen is no more and the light dust in Weicheng is no more. But where is the land that he thinks about day and night?

In the headlines of newspapers? Or is it the rumors in Hong Kong? Or Fu Cong’s black keys and white keys, or Ma Encong’s jumping bow plucking? Or is it Antonioni's vision of the end of the mirror? Or, on the walls and glass cabinets of the Palace Museum, the rhythm of Taibai and Dongpo in the sound of gongs and drums of Peking Opera?

Apricot blossoms, spring rain, Jiangnan. Six square characters, maybe the piece of soil is inside. No matter whether Chixian, China or China, changes come and go, as long as Cangjie’s inspiration never dies and the beautiful Chinese language never gets old, the magnet-like centripetal force of the image will surely remain. Because a square character is a world. There are words in the beginning, so the memories and hopes of the ancestors of the Han people have sustenance. For example, if you write the word "rain" out of thin air, bit by bit, drizzle, patter, all the clouds and rain will appear in it. How can any amount of rain or pluie satisfy this kind of visual beauty? When you open a book called "Ci Yuan" or "Ci Hai", metal, wood, water, fire, and earth each form a world. As soon as you enter the "Rain" part, you can see the ever-changing sky of ancient China, including beautiful frost, snow, clouds, and terrifying clouds. Thunder, lightning, and hail all reveal God’s good and bad tempers. The weather station is full of encyclopedias that laymen can’t understand.

Listen to the cold rain. Look at that cold rain. Sniff, smell, that cold rain, lick, that cold rain. The rain fell on his umbrella, on the umbrellas of millions of people in this city, on the raincoats on the houses and on the antennas. It rained on the boat in Keelung Port and on the breakwater strait. It is the Qingming rain in this season. Yu is a woman and should be the most emotional. The rain air is airy and psychedelic. If you smell it carefully, it is refreshing and refreshing. It has a little mint fragrance. When it is strong, it actually emits a faint earthy smell that is unique to grass and woods. Maybe it is the smell of earthworms and snails. Well, after all, it was the awakening of insects. Maybe the life above and below the ground, maybe the layers of memories in ancient China are all clumsy and crawling, maybe it's the subconsciousness of plants and the tightness of dreams, that fishy smell.

I went to the United States for the third time and lived in the high mountains of Denver for two years. The western part of the United States is mountainous and desert-ridden, with thousands of miles of drought. The sky is as blue as the eyes of an Anglo-Saxon, the ground is as red as the skin of an Indian, and the clouds are rare white birds. The Rocky Mountains are clustered dazzlingly. On the snowy peaks, there are few clouds and fog. The first is high, the second is dry, and the third is above the forest line, where cedars and cypresses also stop. The meaning of "stratus clouds growing in the chest" or "shanglue dusk rain" in Chinese poetry is a rare sight in the Rocky Mountains. The victory of the Rocky Mountains lies in rocks and snow. Those strange rocks and rocks, stacked on top of each other, create a thrilling sculpture exhibition for the sun and the thousands of miles of wind to see. The snow was so white that it was illusory, so cold that it was clear and sober. The overwhelming momentum of the snow made it difficult to breathe, and made people feel cold and sore. However, to appreciate the realm of "the white clouds look back and merge, the blue dew comes in and you see nothingness", you still have to come to China. The humidity in Taiwan is very high, and the most cloudy atmosphere creates a mood that is blurred by rain. I stayed at Xitou twice at night. The fragrance of the trees filled my nose, and the cold night hit my elbows. I pillowed on the moist green green mountain shadows and the silence of all the flowers, and fell asleep like an immortal. It rained all night in the mountains, and when I woke up the next morning, in the primitive silence before the rising sun, against the cold air of the previous night, I walked through the broken branches on the ground and the thin streams of rainwater still flowing, and explored the secrets of the forest. Winding and winding, we walked up the mountain.

On the mountain in Xitou, there are dense trees and thick fog. The rich water vapor rises slowly from the bottom of the valley, sometimes thick and sometimes thin. It is almost impossible to get a full view of the peak and half chasm. I went up the mountain at least twice and could only play a hide-and-seek game with the peaks of Xitou in the vast whiteness. When I returned to Taipei, when people asked me about it, apart from smiling and not answering the questions, pretending to be mysterious, the actual impression was that I was in the middle of nothingness. The Chinese landscape, surrounded by clouds and mist, with mountains hidden by vast rivers, gives people the charm of Song Dynasty paintings. The world may belong to the Zhao family, but the mountains and rivers belong to the Mi family. And in the end, no one can tell whether the paintings by Mi and his son are like the Chinese landscapes, or whether the Chinese landscapes are just like the paintings of the Song Dynasty.

Rain can not only be smelled and kissed, but also heard. Listen to the cold rain. Listening to the rain, as long as it is not an earth-shattering typhoon storm, is always a beautiful feeling in terms of hearing. Autumn on the mainland, whether it is sparse raindrops on the sycamore trees, or showers hitting the lotus leaves, always sounds a bit desolate, desolate, and desolate. Now when I think about it on the island, on top of the desolation, there is a layer of desolation. , No matter how heroic and chivalrous you are, I’m afraid you won’t be able to withstand the wind and rain over and over again. A dozen young men listened to the rain and were drowsy with red candles. Listening to the rain again in middle age, the river is broad and the clouds are low in the passenger boat. Three dozen old monks listened to the rain with their gray heads. This is the pain of the death of the Song Dynasty, and the life of a sensitive heart: upstairs, on the river, in the temple, they are strung with cold rain beads. Ten years ago, he lost himself in a heartbreaking ghost rain. Rain should be a drop of wet soul. Who is calling outside the window?

The rain hits the trees and tiles, and the rhythm is clear and audible. Especially the clang clanging on the roof tiles, that ancient music belongs to China. In Wang Yu's Huanggang, big bamboos as broken as rafters were used as roof tiles. It is said that when living on a bamboo building, the sound of heavy rain is like a waterfall, and the sound of dense snow is like broken jade. The effect of playing drums and harp, chanting poems, playing chess, throwing pots, and the sound of crocodiles is particularly good. Isn't it like living in a bamboo tube? Any tinny sound will be exaggerated and make people's ears allergic.

On a rainy day, the roof tiles are floating with wet light, gray and gentle, slightly bright when facing the light, and dim when the backlight is on. It is a kind of low comfort to the vision. As for the rain hitting the tiles with thousands of petals, from far to near, gently, heavily, gently, with streams of water flowing down along the tile grooves and eaves, various percussion sounds and glide sounds are densely woven. Net, whose fingers are massaging the helix. "It's raining," the gentle gray beauty came. Her delicate hands were playing with countless black and gray keys on the roof, turning noon into dusk.

In the ancient continent, thousands of houses were like this. When I first came to this island more than 20 years ago, the Japanese-style tile houses were also like this. First, the sky darkened, and the city seemed to be covered in a huge piece of frosted glass, with the shadows extending and deepening indoors. Then the cool water filled the space, the wind swirled from every corner, and I could feel the heavy breathing on every roof covered with gray clouds. The rain is coming, and the lightest percussion beats the city. The vast roofs, far and near, are played one by one. The ancient piano, with its fine and dense rhythm, has a kind of softness and kindness in the monotony. Every drop, drop by drop, seems to be illusion and reality, just like a child in the cradle. There, a familiar nursery rhyme rocked me to sleep, and my mother chanted in nasal and guttural sounds. Or in the water town of Zeguo in the south of the Yangtze River, a large basket of green mulberry leaves was chewed by thousands of silkworms, chewing the tiny bits and pieces with their mouthparts. The rain is coming. When the rain comes, the tiles say so. One tile says the same thing as a hundred billion tiles. Play it softly, play it quietly, tap it slowly, tap it, tap it intermittently for a rainy season, improvise. From the Waking of Insects to the Qingming Festival, elegy is played coldly on the scattered graves, and hundreds of billions of tiles sing.

Listen to the rain in the old-style house, listen to April, the continuous yellow plum rain, day and night, the ten-month stretch, the wet and sticky moss from the stone steps to the bottom of the tongue and the bottom of the heart. In July, I listened to the typhoon playing blindly on the ancient roof all night long. The heat wave on the thousand-layer seabed was carried by the strong wind, and the entire Pacific Ocean was overturned just to press heavily on his low eaves. The entire sea was in his scorpion shell. There was a rush of water. Otherwise, it is a thunderstorm night, and the drums are heard playing loudly in the white smoke-like gauze tent, the torrential rain is pouring down, the powerful electric pipa is frightening, and the panic of shaking the roof tiles is rising. Otherwise, the slanting northwest rain would brush against the window glass, whip onto the wall, and hit the large banana leaves. A cold wave would pass through, and the autumn mood would wet the old-style courtyard.

Listen to the rain in the old house, the continuous spring rain, the autumn rain, the middle age from youth, and the cold rain. Rain is a kind of monotonous and durable music. It is indoor music or outdoor music. Listen to it indoors or outdoors. It is cold, that music. Rain is a kind of music of memories. Listen to the cold rain and recall the rain in the south of the Yangtze River. It fell all over the rivers and lakes. It fell on bridges and boats. It also fell in Sichuan in the rice fields and frog ponds. It fertilized the wet cloth under the Jialing River. The sound of cooing, the rain is moist music falling on the longing lips, licking the cold rain.

Because rain is the most primitive percussion music that starts from the other side of memory. The tile is the most subdued musical instrument. Its gray gentleness covers those who listen to the rain. The tile is the umbrella of music. But soon the era of apartments came. Why did you suddenly grow taller in Taipei? The music of Wa became silent. Thousands of tiles are fluttering, and beautiful gray butterflies fly away one after another, flying into the memory of history. Now the rain is falling on the concrete roof and walls, a rainy season without music. The trees have also been cut down, including the laurel trees, the maple trees, the willow trees and the giant coconut trees that hold the sky. When the rain comes, there are no more noisy leaves and a wet green light to greet them.

Birds chirped less, frogs chirped less, and insects chirped less in autumn. Taipei in the 1970s didn't need this. One band after another was disbanded. To hear the rooster crow, you can only find it in the rhymes of the Book of Songs. Now there is only one black and white film left, a black and white silent film.

Just as the era of horse-drawn carriages passed, so did the men who worked the tricycles. Once, on a rainy night, the tarpaulin awning of the tricycle was hung up to take her home. The world inside the awning was much smaller and more lovely, and it was hidden outside the jurisdiction of the police. The bigger the pocket of the raincoat, the better. It could hold one of his hands. Holding a slender hand. The rainy season in Taiwan is so long, someone should invent a wide double raincoat, one person can wear one sleeve and the other parts don't have to be too divided. And no matter how developed the industry is, it seems that umbrellas cannot be abolished for a while. As long as the rain is not pouring and the wind is not blowing, holding an umbrella in the rain still retains its classic charm. Let the raindrops hit the black cloth umbrella or the transparent plastic umbrella, twist the bone handle, the raindrops will splash in all directions, and the edge of the umbrella will spin into a circle of cornices. Buying an umbrella with your girlfriend should be a beautiful cooperation. It's best to be in love for the first time, a little excited, a little embarrassed, in a moment of separation, the rain might as well fall a little harder. Real first love is probably when you are so excited that you don’t need an umbrella. You run hand in hand in the rain, leaving your young long-haired skin to be wet all over the sky, and then you taste the cool and sweet rain on the other person’s lips and cheeks. . But that has to be very young and passionate, and at the same time, it can only happen in French trendy films.

Most umbrellas are not meant to be opened for a date. On the way to and from get off work, to and from school, and from the vegetable market. Realistic umbrella, gray wednesday. Holding an umbrella. He heard the cold rain hitting the umbrella. It would be better if it were colder, he thought. Simply freezing the wet gray rain into dry white rain, the hexagonal crystals swirled down in the windless sky. When his eyebrows and shoulders are all white, he reaches out and brushes them off. In the past twenty-five years, I have not been blessed by the white rain in my hometown. Perhaps a little white frost is a disguised form of self-compensation. How many rainy seasons can a hero withstand? Is his forehead cut from sedimentary rock or igneous rock? How thick is the moss in his heart? Twenty years of walking in the rainy alley of Xiamen Street are as long as his memory. A tileless apartment is waiting for him at the bottom of the alley, and a lamp is in the rainy window upstairs, waiting for him to go back and sort out his thoughts after dinner. Moss deep memory.

The past is separated by the sea. The old house is gone. Listen to the cold rain.