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“carp” (liyu 鲤 鱼 ) within “waters that seem to boil” (shui ru zhu 水 如 煮 ); it also causes snow to “melt”
or evaporate (mie 灭 ) yet does not wither the “green grasses” (qingcao 青 草 ) on its shore. This aspect
of Hot Lake's heat, one that sustains rather than destroying the surrounding environment, is focalized
through a lens of contradictions, an imaginary mode of focalization which presents the image of a heat
that seems to “defy human comprehension” through fantastic and “incompatible statements”. 25
Intertextually more relevant, however, is how this sub-thematic heat radiating from the depths
of the Fire Mountain and Hot Lake themes, a heat which is invisible to body's senses, is focalized by
the poet-narrators of “Passing Fire Mountain”, “Mission to Jiaohe” and “Song of Hot Lake” in a
similar manner. Faced with the limitations of ordinary perceptual lenses in focalizing this sub-theme of
the thermal landscape, the poet-narrators shift to the imaginary mode of focalization to focalize this
heat which exists beyond the threshold of bodily senses. To accomplish this act of extraordinary
focalization, the thermal themes of the landscape, Fire Mountain and Hot Lake, are “seen” through an
allusive lens, a way of “seeing” which “allusifies” the supra-sensory heat thereby causing it to be
“seen” as the images of a particular, and perceivable, allusion. And although on the surface level there
are some variations in what the poet-narrators emphasize within the allusion, this allusive lens remains
consistent throughout all three poems as a reference to a short excerpt from Jia Yi's 26 贾 谊 (210-169
BCE) “Rhyme-Prose on the Owl” 27 (“Funiao fu” 鵩 鸟 赋 ). The applicable quotation is as follows:
且 夫 天 地 为 炉 兮
造 化 为 工
阴 阳 为 炭 兮
Heaven and earth are the furnace,
The workman, the Creator;
His coal is the yin and yang,
25 Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 93.
26 “Jia Yi was a political thinker and poet whose productive years fell during the reign of Emperor Wen 文 帝 (r. 179-157
BCE) of the Han dynasty”. See Robert Joe Cutter's entry in William N. Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to
Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 254.
27 “A rhapsody (fu 赋 ) dating from 174 BCE wherein an owl, traditionally a bird of evil omens, flies into the poet's room
[during his banishment to a minor post in Changsha in the south]. More philosophical than most early fu, the piece uses
the presence of the owl to speculate on the mutability of things, especially the transience of success and the nature of life
and death . Filled with Daoist ideas, the fu takes the stance that life is nothing to cling to, and death is nothing to fear”.
See William N. Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 254.