Yellow Dragon Cave Dreamscape
Yellow Dragon Cave Dreamscape by Peng Xueming. Yellow Dragon Cave has always lain quietly in this ancient land of Zhangjiajie. When the Yellow Dragon opens its mouth, there is a cave, like a well, deep, deep. Time sealed for hundreds of millions of years is paved here into a tunnel, stone walls cold, light and shadow dim, bizarre and motley, dark and mysterious. Fairy tales, dreams, science fiction—all stand, sit, squat, and sleep inside the cave, letting us converse with time, gaze at aesthetics, and connect with the secrets of another world. Leading us…
The Dreamlike Yellow Dragon Cave
By Peng Xueming
The Yellow Dragon Cave has always lain quietly in this ancient, weathered land of Zhangjiajie. The Yellow Dragon opens its mouth, and there is a cave, like a well, deep, deep. Time sealed away for hundreds of millions of years is paved here into a tunnel, its stone walls cold and clear, its light and shadow dim, bizarre and motley, dark and mysterious. Fairy tales, dreams, science fiction—all stand, sit, squat, and sleep within the cave, letting us converse with time, meet aesthetics eye to eye, and connect with the secrets of another world.
The first thing that leads us into this connection is an underground river. This water-string buried deep in the strata is strung full of cool, delicate, and beautiful notes, composing a folk song of the water country. The sound of oars, the shadows of lanterns, the calls of boatmen, the lights of fishing fires—flickering on and off, tossing and swaying. The whispers of fish and the dream-talk of shrimp float on the water's surface. They brush past boats and people. Xi Shi trails a wisp of her long robe as she washes it in the river; Xiangjun wipes a trace of rouge as she dresses by the riverbank; Daiyu, who buries fallen flowers, always knits her willow-leaf brows so lightly, gazing at the fallen blossoms and flowing water, at the lone traveler going far away.
The immortal-like Jiang Taigong, wearing a bamboo hat tilted against wind and rain, leisurely and joyful, fishes with closed eyes. The fine little fish take the hook. The hurried passersby take the hook. The laughter and sentiments of the crowds of visitors, too, take the hook one after another. Thunder rumbles, swifts fly, companionable flowers and herdsmen ride a leaf-like boat, returning home in youth.
The Yellow Dragon's underground river, a length of water-silk from a deep palace, sets ancient melodies flying.
On both banks of the river are mountains. By rights, mountains are green; green mountains and green waters are always twin brother and sister. But no. The mountains in this cave are yellow. They are the loess plateau of Qin and Jin. Yellow mountain ranges, one line after another, move forward and climb upward, gathering into ridges, into beams, into cols, into mounds, into earthen hills and mountain ridges large and small, rising and falling. And in many places there are knife-cut summits and axe-hewn cliffs—that is, endless plateau tablelands and sheer, straight, ten-thousand-fathom abysses. After a storm of yellow sand, over the vast, dim yellow earth come the hoofbeats of livestock. A northern Shaanxi man in a sheep-belly towel carries a song all the way, driving Xintianyou and Qin opera, Hui hua'er and love, toward the eight-hundred-li Qin plain and the tens of thousands of li of plateau.
At the foot of the mountain. A stretch of countryside. Crisscrossing field paths divide the bright, mirror-like field water into plots and farms, planting tray after tray of poetic lines. At the edges of the lines are dense field grasses and nameless wildflowers; deep within the lines are pools of moonlight and pools of frog song. Laboring people and laboring ballads come and go along the paths, feeding agriculture until it is fat and full, broad-hearted and stout. The mud-colored nostalgia, like mud-colored rice, sprouts, heads, and grows wildly in the mud-colored fields. Shoulder-rubbing, back-brushing farming is always linked to the farmers' native love, leaving farmers wholly satisfied and visitors full of poetic inspiration. The thin paddy fields are thin warm beds, letting homesick feelings gaze left and right.
Passing through the level-and-oblique countryside, one arrives at the oblique-and-level farmstead. A dreamlike Peach Blossom Spring shades dreamlike farmhouses. Inside and outside the courtyard, apricot blossoms, pear blossoms, plum blossoms, gardenia flowers, lily flowers, and snow lotus flowers all have a face of bright spring light, all have a smile of bright spring light. Rabbits forage, chickens lay eggs, dogs dance, oxen plow, lions roll embroidered balls, eagles circle in the air, and a delicate, exquisite grapevine hangs the farmstead into autumn. A stretch of farmstead, a stretch of freehand brushwork, splashing the infinite tender atmosphere of the countryside.
Wind passes without trace, snow falls without sound. Standing in the cave, wherever the eye falls there are pools and patches of white—pure white, gray white, black white, transparent, turbid—winding and twisting, forming picture after picture of the most beautiful white genre scenes. In shallow places, they are like a greeting of winter snow or frost to the south; in deep places, they resemble ice peaks and glaciers seated in meditation in the northern frontier. Grain by grain, like piles of crystal-clear pearls. Particle by particle, like layer upon layer of radiant silver powder. Root by root, like columns of ice standing for a thousand autumns. At a touch of the skin, the cold pierces to the bone. Many imaginings and stories about ice and snow bloom forth like snow lotuses, one after another, planted all over the snowy realm's scenery.
Passing through the forest sea and snow plain. Then walking the nine-turn winding corridor. When we leave behind the small bridges and flowing water of the countryside villages, when we step over the flowers of the plains and the folk songs of the plateau, we seem to be traveling across a desolate Gobi desert. No human habitation, no flowers or grass, no sound, only gravel and loneliness. But as we walk, suddenly a forest appears! Stalactites ranging from ten to several tens of meters tall rise densely from the Gobi desert, like rows of long swords piercing the sky, like brushes falling to the ground, like rifles and cannon barrels waiting in strict formation, like carrier rockets soaring straight into the clouds—as if in a military base or space city! Whose giant hand waved once, and a net spanning heaven and earth was laid here? Whose command was given once, and thousands of troops and horses gathered here? It is time and nature! It is nature and time! So it turns out that behind the greatest loneliness there is often the most enthusiastic applause! On the coldest stage there is often the most splendid grand opera!
In this way, these stalactites, with their stone bodies, calcified lives, and bony spirit, have nurtured and forged these small bridges and flowing streams, pastoral songs, loess landscapes, snowy winter charms, and military bases, and have forged life in all its myriad forms, vivid and lifelike. Although these lives and scenes are silent and wordless, their thoughts are molten lava surging deep in the strata. Silence is a kind of tenacity, not concession. Silence is a kind of power, not dejection. Silence is a kind of posture, not death. Silence is a kind of expectation, not despair. Silence is the process of labor and creation, not helpless wasting away and passive resistance. Just that one drop of dissolved-rock water—does it not silently seep thread by thread, fall drop by drop, one stroke in a thousand years, one ink mark in ten thousand years, dyeing a sheet of mud paper so full of vitality and poetic richness! Humans are indeed great and can surpass nature's workmanship, but before this sculptor named time and nature, what are human clever works? However great a human artistic masterpiece may be, it is an imitation, not nature itself, and will vanish without trace in time; at most it is only a copy. Of course, a certain kind of person may also be remembered in history and leave a fragrance for all ages, but compared with this thing called time and nature, what are a person's place in history and eternity? Are they not merely an instant of time and nature?! Therefore, when we understand that the lives forged by these stalactites are calculated in hundreds of millions of years, just as I expressed in "Our Scenery," how tiny we are, how brief life is! We will then love life and cherish ourselves, have a little less desire and a little more responsibility, and will not scheme against one another, fight for fame and profit, or even kill and rob because of various desires. We will, like the lives of these stalactite groups, stand clean and open in the depths of time and history, and be serious human beings.
The Yellow Dragon Cave is a painting and also a book. Those who enter and leave through this painting and book will be readers suddenly enlightened.