Vintage Sacks

by Oliver Sacks

  Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  When Jane Hurd, an anthropologist, spent two years among the Pingelapese on Pohnpei in 1968 and ’69, the old nahnmwarki was still able to give her, in the form of an extended epic poem, an entire oral history of the island—but with his death a good deal of this knowledge and memory died. The present nahnmwarki can give the flavor of old Pingelapese belief and myth, but no longer has the detailed knowledge his grandfather had. Nonetheless, he himself, as a teacher at the school, does his best to give the children a sense of their heritage and of the pre-Christian culture which once flourished on the island. He spoke nostalgically, it seemed to us, of the old days on Pingelap, when everyone knew who they were, where they came from, and how the island came into being. At one time, the myth went, the three islets of Pingelap formed a single piece of land, with its own god, Isopaw. When an alien god came from a distant island and split Pingelap into two, Isopaw chased him away—and the third islet was created from a handful of sand dropped in the chase.

  We were struck by the multiple systems of belief, some seemingly contradictory, which coexist among the Pingelapese. A mythical history of the island is maintained alongside its secular history; thus the maskun is seen simultaneously in mystical terms (as a curse visited upon the sinful or disobedient) and in purely biological terms (as a morally neutral, genetic condition transmitted from generation to generation). Traditionally, it was traced back to the Nahnmwarki Okonomwaun, who ruled from 1822 to 1870, and his wife, Dokas. Of their six children, two were achromatopic. The myth explaining this was recorded by Irene Maumenee Hussels and Newton Morton, geneticists from the University of Hawaii who visited Pingelap (and worked with Hurd) in the late 1960s:

  The god Isoahpahu became enamored of Dokas and instructed Okonomwaun to appropriate her. From time to time, Isoahpahu appeared in the guise of Okonomwaun and had intercourse with Dokas, fathering the affected children, while the normal children came from Okonomwaun. Isoahpahu loved other Pingelapese women and had affected children by them. The “proof” of this is that persons with achromatopsia shun the light but have relatively good night vision, like their ghostly ancestor.

  There were other indigenous myths about the maskun: that it might arise if a pregnant woman walked upon the beach in the middle of the day—the blazing sun, it was felt, might partly blind the unborn child in the womb. Yet another legend had it that it came from a descendant of the Nahnmwarki Mwahuele, who had survived typhoon Lengkieki. This descendant, Inek, was trained as a Christian minister by a missionary, Mr. Doane, and was assigned to Chuuk, as Hussels and Morton write, but refused to move because of his large family on Pingelap. Mr. Doane, “angered by this lack of evangelical zeal,” cursed Inek and his children with the maskun.

  There were also persistent notions, as always with disease, that the maskun had come from the outside world. The nahnmwarki spoke, in this vein, of how a number of Pingelapese had been forced to labor in the German phosphate mines on the distant island of Nauru, and then, on their return, had fathered children with maskun. The myth of contamination, ascribed (like so many other ills) to the coming of the white man, took on a new form with our visit. This was the first time the Pingelapese had ever seen another achromatope, an achromatope from outside, and this “confirmed” their brooding suspicions. Two days after our arrival, a revised myth had already taken root in the Pingelapese lore: it must have been achromatopic white whalers from the far north, they now realized, who had landed on Pingelap early in the last century—raping and rampaging among the island women, fathering dozens of achromatopic children, and bringing their white man’s curse to the island. The Pingelapese with maskun, by this reckoning, were partly Norwegian—descendants of people like Knut. Knut was awed by the rapidity with which this not entirely jocular, fantastic myth emerged, and by finding himself, or his people, “revealed” as the ultimate origin of the maskun.

  On our last evening in Pingelap, a huge crimson sunset shot with purples and yellows and a touch of green hung over the ocean and filled half the sky. Even Knut exclaimed, “Unbelievable!” and said he had never seen such a sunset before. As we came down to the shore, we saw dozens of people almost submerged in the water—only their heads were visible above the reef. This happened every evening, James had told us—it was the only way to cool off. Looking around, we saw others lying, sitting, standing and chatting in small clusters—it looked as if most of the island’s population was here. The cooling hour, the social hour, the hour of immersion, had begun.

  As it got darker, Knut and the achromatopic islanders moved more easily. It is common knowledge among the Pingelapese that those with the maskun manage better at scotopic times—dusk and dawn, and moonlit nights—and for this reason, they are often employed as night fishers. And in this the achromatopes are preeminent; they seem able to see the fish in their dim course underwater, the glint of moonlight on their outstretched fins as they leap—as well as, or perhaps better than, anyone else.

  Our last night was an ideal one for the night fishers. I had hoped we might go in one of the enormous hollow-log canoes with outriggers which we had seen earlier, but we were led instead toward a boat with a small outboard motor. The air was very warm and still, so it was sweet to feel a slight breeze as we moved out. As we glided into deeper waters, the shoreline of Pingelap vanished from sight, and we moved on a vast lightless swell with only the stars and the great arc of the Milky Way overhead.

  Our helmsman knew all the major stars and constellations, seemed completely at home with the heavens—Knut, indeed, was the only one equally knowledgeable, and the two of them exchanged their knowledge in whispers: Knut with all modern astronomy at his fingertips, the helmsman with an ancient practical knowledge such as had enabled the Micronesians and Polynesians, a thousand years ago, to sail across the immensities of the Pacific by celestial navigation alone, in voyages comparable to interplanetary travel, until, at last, they discovered islands, homes, as rare and far apart as planets in the cosmos.

  About eight o’clock the moon rose, almost full, and so brilliant that it seemed to eclipse the stars. We heard the splash of flying fish as they arced out of the water, dozens at a time, and the plopping sound as they plummeted back to the surface.

  The waters of the Pacific are full of a tiny protozoan, Noctiluca , a bioluminescent creature able to generate light, like a firefly. It was Knut who first noticed their phosphorescence in the water—a phosphorescence most evident when the water was disturbed. Sometimes when the flying fish leapt out of the water, they would leave a luminous disturbance, a glowing wake, as they did so—and another splash of light as they landed.51

  Night fishing used to be done with a flaming torch; now it is done with the help of a flashlight, the light serving to dazzle as well as spot the fish. As the beautiful creatures were illuminated in a blinding flashlight beam, I was reminded how, as a child, I would see German planes transfixed by roving searchlights as they flew in the darkened skies over London. One by one we pursued the fish; we followed their careerings relentlessly, this way and that, until we could draw close enough for the fisher to shoot out the great hoop of his net, and catch them as they returned to the water. They accumulated in the bottom of the boat, silvery, squirming, until they were hit on the head (though one, actually, in its frenzy, managed to leap out of the boat, and we so admired this that we did not try to catch it again).

  After an hour we had enough, and it was time to go after deeper-water fish. There were two teenage boys with us, one achromatopic, and they now donned scuba gear and masks and, clutching spears and flashlights, went over the side of the boat. We could see them, two hundred yards or more from the boat, like luminous fish, the phosphorescent waters outlining their bodies as they moved. After ten minutes they returned, loaded with the fish they had speared, and climbed back into the boat, their wet scuba gear gleaming blackly in the moonlight.

  The
long, slow trip back was very peaceful—we lay back in the boat; the fishers murmured softly among themselves. We had enough, more than enough, fish for all. Fires would be lit on the long sandy beach, and we would have a grand, final feast on Pingelap before flying back to Pohnpei the next morning. We reached the shore and waded back onto the beach, pulling the boat up behind us. The sand itself, broader with the tide’s retreat, was still wet with the phosphorescent sea, and now, as we walked upon it, our footsteps left a luminous spoor.

  ENDNOTES

  1 I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima a few years later, and I was struck by this passage:

  When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off. . . .)

  2 Such thoughts about “tuning,” I was later to read, had first been raised in the eighteenth century by the mathematician Euler, who had ascribed the color of objects to their having “little particles” on their surface—atoms—tuned to respond to light of different frequencies. Thus an object would look red because its “particles” were tuned to vibrate, resonate, to the red rays in the light that fell on it:

  The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.

  David Park, in The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light, writes of Euler’s theory:

  I think this was the first time anyone who believed in atoms ever suggested that they have a vibrating internal structure. The atoms of Newton and Boyle are clusters of hard little balls, Euler’s atoms are like musical instruments. His clairvoyant insight was rediscovered much later, and when it was, nobody remembered who had it first.

  3 Now, of course, none of these chemicals can be bought, and even school or museum laboratories are increasingly confined to reagents that are less hazardous—and less fun.

  Linus Pauling, in an autobiographical sketch, described how he, too, obtained potassium cyanide (for a killing bottle) from a local druggist:

  Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn’t contain potassium cyanide. It doesn’t even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don’t have a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy.

  When I paid a visit not long ago to the old building in Finchley which had been Griffin & Tatlock’s home a half century ago, it was no longer there. Such shops, such suppliers, which had provided chemicals and simple apparatus and unimaginable delights for generations, have now all but vanished.

  4 There was a short, statistical paper by Calne et al. (1969), describing a six-week trial of L-DOPA in some of the Highlands patients, but there were no biographical accounts of “awakenings” in these, or any other, patients.

  5 Five years later, it happened that one of the neurologists who had taken such exception to my letter in JAMA—he had said that my observations were beyond credibility—found himself chairing a meeting at which the documentary film of Awakenings was being shown. There is a particular point in the film at which various bizarre “side effects” and instabilities of drug reaction are shown in dizzying array, and I was fascinated to observe my colleague’s reactions here. First, he stared amazed, and his mouth dropped open; it was as if he were seeing such things for the first time, and his reaction was one of innocent and almost childlike wonder. Then he flushed a dark and angry crimson—whether with embarrassment or mortification, I could not tell; these were the very things he had dismissed as “beyond credibility,” and now he was being forced to see them for himself. Then he developed a curious tic, a convulsive movement of the head which kept turning it away from the screen he could no longer bear to see. Then, finally, with great abruptness and violence, and muttering to himself, he burst out of his seat, in midfilm, and rushed out of the room. I found this behavior extraordinary and instructive, for it showed how profound, how utterly overwhelming, reactions to the “incredible” and “intolerable” might be.

  6 He returned to this topic the following month, when he said that he had been fascinated by the case of Martha N., and the fact that she had responded to L-DOPA in six different ways: “Why was it different each time?” he asked, “Why could one not replay things again and again?”—questions I could not answer in 1973. It seemed to me typical of the genius of Luria that he had at once homed in on one of the central mysteries and challenges of Awakenings—the various and unrepeatable and unpredictable character of patients’ responses—and been fascinated by this; whereas my neurological colleagues, by and large, had been frightened and dismayed by this, had tended to asseverate, “It’s not so, it’s not so.”

  7 There has been a parallel movement in anthropology since 1970—this had also been becoming meager and mechanical—with a new, or renewed, insistence on what Clifford Geertz has dubbed “thick” description.

  8 I would often ask Miss R. what she was thinking about.

  “Nothing, just nothing,” she would say.

  “But how can you possibly be thinking of nothing?”

  “It’s dead easy, once you know how.”

  “How exactly do you think about nothing?”

  “One way is to think about the same thing again and again. Like 2 = 2 = 2 = 2; or, I am what I am what I am what I am. . . . It’s the same thing with my posture. My posture continually leads to itself. Whatever I do or whatever I think leads deeper and deeper into itself. . . . And then there are maps.”

  “Maps? What do you mean?”

  “Everything I do is a map of itself, everything I do is a part of itself. Every part leads into itself. . . . I’ve got a thought in my mind, and then I see something in it, like a dot on the skyline. It comes nearer and nearer, and then I see what it is—it’s just the same thought I was thinking before. And then I see another dot, and another, and so on. . . . Or I think of a map; then a map of that map; then a map of that map of that map, and each map perfect, though smaller and smaller. . . . Worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds. . . . Once I get going I can’t possibly stop. It’s like being caught between mirrors, or echoes, or something. Or being caught on a merry-go-round which won’t come to a stop.”

  Sometimes, Miss R. told me, she would feel compelled to circumscribe the sides of a mental quadrangle, a “paddock” composed of seven notes of an endlessly reiterated Verdi aria: “Tum—ti- tum—ti-tum—ti-tum,” a forced mental perambulation which might go on for hours or days. And at other times she would be forced to “travel,” mentally, through an endless 3-D tunnel of intersecting lines, the end of the tunnel rushing toward her but never reached.

  “And do you have any other ways of thinking about nothing, Rosie?”

  “Oh yes! The dots and maps are positive nothings, but I also think of negative nothings.”

  “And what are those like?”

  “That’s impossible to say, because they’re takings-away. I think of a thought, and it’s suddenly gone—like having a picture whipped out of its frame. Or I try to picture something in my mind, but the picture dissolves as fast as I can make it. I have a particular idea, but can’t keep it in mi
nd; and then I lose the general idea; and then the general idea of a general idea; and in two or three jumps my mind is a blank—all my thoughts gone, blanked out or erased.”

  9 Compare cases cited by Jelliffe: the patient who would cry out in “anguish” during her attacks, but could give no reason for her fear, or the patient who would feel every attack to be “a calamity” (see Jelliffe, 1932, pp. 36–42). The same term was often used by Lillian W., especially in relation to those very complex oculogyric crises which she sometimes called “humdingers.” Even though she had oculogyric crises every week, she would invariably say during each attack, “This is the worst one I ever had. The others were just bad—this is a calamity.” When I would remonstrate, “But Mrs. W., this is exactly what you said last week!” she would say, “I know. I was wrong. This one is a calamity.” She never got used to her crises in the least—even though she had had them, each Wednesday, for more than forty years.

  10 Jelliffe cites many cases of oculogyric crises with fixation of gaze and attention, and also of crises with reiterative “autochthonous” thinking. Miss R. never vouchsafed the nature of the “mad” thoughts which came to her during her crises at this time, and one would suspect from the reticence that these thoughts were of an inadmissible nature, either sexual or hostile. Jelliffe refers to several patients who were compelled to think of “dirty things” during their crises, and to another patient who experienced during his crises “ideas of reference to which he pays no attention” (see Jelliffe, 1932, pp. 37–39). Miriam H. would have delusional erotic reminiscences whenever she had an oculogyric crisis.