(no subject)

[xinjinmeng]

:
Zhōngyī xué medicine recognizes several organs of the body. The san jiao, translated sometimes as "triple heater", "triple warmer", or "triple burner", is unlike all other organs in that it does not have a physical component.  Rather, san jiao is a general metabolism function, responsible for functions of the spleen, kidneys, lymphatic system.  Doctors talk of the san jiao as if it were an organ, and it has its own meridians and acupuncture spots, but if you were to dissect a dead body, you would not find a san jiao inside.

What has always intrigued me about the san jiao is that it is a system, not an item; it is not concrete, but abstract; it is not at rest, it is in motion.  Yet the doctor is expected to treat diseases of the san jiao just as they treat everything else.  The zhōngyī xué practitioner emphasizes harmony with all of the body, both its function and its material.  Health is a condition, a state of being, and it affects all things.

When I meditate, I seek to feel the san jiao within me, the great water wheel that turns, that burns the fuel, that pushes out the waste.  To know the san jiao is to know what it is to be alive.

After the weekend's come-down from excitement, and with failed effort to achieve closure, spent this morning in a foul mood wanting to rip something to shreds just to transcend my own limitations.  I felt surrounded by effete bohemians, callous hoydens, chirping mooncalves, rakish tyros.... I felt as if I had had an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot, but stepped back to let a master take the blows instead; and when none were, the glow subsided, and all crawled back to their homes and made excuses never to try again, leaving me standing there wondering why I had even bothered to attend. Why had I come into this light, this heat? Is it my destiny to watch the stars grow dim?

Then I stumbled across T___, who had a magazine. There was an article that calumnized me and condemned my last opera as sounding something like the cries of the vivisected.

My mood improved considerably.

There is a wheel inside of me, and as it turns, I live.