Thoughts on “Renewal”
The Vietnamese see temples—thái dương, meaning “sun”—as “temples” of the body: sensitive and sacred. My ma and grandma apply dầu gió—the oil of the winds—to their temples when they feel sick. Evil forces found the pores, and to choke them till death we should envelop those pores within the incense-like miasma of grandma’s healing oil. Something’s happening there, between the winds, the temples, and illness. My brother makes another connection. That night, my grandma picked him up from class on her bicycle and asked him what he had learned that day. “Grandma, the god of winds has blown my memory away,” he laughed, his little hands wrapped around her waist.
Winds, illness, the oil of the winds, memory, temples. Relations of elements, objects, places, and abstractions that suture the open wounds of being, and make for bedtime laughter about how silly enlightenment can sound. Or vice versa.
Sometimes my mind is struck by a vague question—not even a question, more like a random thought that follows the winds through my temples into my head. What is more abhorrent after one falls down and gets injured—the sensation of pain, the color of blood, or the self-loathing embarrassment? It happened to me the other day. While I was getting off my Lyft cab, I tripped over and fell to the ground. I threw my body forward—ah no, it was thrown forward, ‘cuz no way free will would consent to tripping right in front of one’s house. Within seconds, I sensed gradations of pain: first it was numb, then it started to prick, from my knees to my palm, before my scraped skin felt rubbed over with lemon drops. “Damn it,” I cursed myself. I was more annoyed about getting vulnerable in such a way than physically hurt.
At least my temples were safe.
I only saw the blood when I got inside. Under the Victorian-style lights in our living room, the blood oozing from my missing piece of skin glared at me. It was bright red, fresh to the touch and metallic to the nose. It looked artificial, stuck to the flesh of my palm like a residue of henna dye. Over the past few days, we’ve been staring at each other. The red spot darkened into a rough brownish terrain, inhabited by tiny entities I couldn’t name. As I removed the bandage, some yellow liquid flowed out.
My biology teacher taught us that, the moment you see plasma, you know the wound is closing its mouth. Red as blood, yellow as plasma, green as grandma’s oil of the winds. The human body has been doing unpaid labor: bleeding, dripping with plasma, weaving crusty layers over pores, growing new tissue, inhaling a drop of the winds’ oil. It keeps organic life in order and communicates its job through colors, just as traffic poles order social life in cycles of red, yellow, and green. As the wound changes color, I know what it means to continue living.
Where’s the Manifesto for my body?
