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perspiration is unnatural and should restrict itself to the preceding summer months and not exude
during “the ninth month” (jiu yue 九 月 ). 24 The poet-narrator's discombobulation is even more
pronounced in “Passing Fire Mountain”. By noting the time, one in which winter is at its most severe
(yandong shi 严 冬 时 ), the thermality behind “scorching winds” and “flowing sweat” (hanliu 汗 流 )
becomes even more astounding, suggesting that the ferocity of even the most frigid time of year is
enfeebled by the heat of Fire Mountain.
5.1.3. Imaginary Mode Correspondences
Under the ordinary mode of focalization, the poet-narrators used ocular, dermal, ocular-dermal
and glandular lenses to focalize sub-themes of Fire Mountain and Hot Lake that were accessible to the
five senses. But there is still a sub-theme amplifying these two themes that neither the eyes nor the skin
can detect: a heat hiding within the ordinarily perceptual thermal heart of these two regions. The poetnarrator
of “Song of Hot Lake” initially focalizes this heat as a generative force interwoven with its
perceivable equivalent:
海 上 众 鸟 不 敢 飞
中 有 鲤 鱼 长 且 肥
岸 旁 青 草 常 不 歇
空 中 白 雪 遥 旋 灭
Flocks of birds do not dare fly above the lake;
In the lake carp are long and fat.
Green grasses on the shore grow for a long time
and don't wither,
Snow at a distance overhead swirls and then melts.
(“Song of Hot Lake”, lines 3-6)
The temperature of Hot Lake simultaneously repels “flocks of birds” (zhongniao 众 鸟 ) while nurturing
24 This feeling of thermal strangeness is akin to other types of confusion, such as that caused by infinite spaces (to be
discussed in chapter six), the bleeding of memory and nostalgia into scene, and the floating, sourceless borderland
music, found in Chinese frontier poetry. See Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier Poetry”, p. 127. An especially striking
couplet of meteorological aberrations on the frontier can be found in lines five and six of Cen Shen's “Composed at
Beiting” (“Beiting zuo” 北 庭 作 ): “Autumn snow in spring still falls,/Morning winds at night do not cease” 秋 雪 春 仍 下 ,
朝 风 夜 不 休 . See CSJJZ, p. 155.