The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  The man with the compound eyes shakes his head, as if perplexed by the man’s inability to understand, and says, “He’s not up there. You can say he’s up there all you want, but in fact he isn’t. You know it well.”

  I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not … Incensed, he ignores the man with the compound eyes and tries to climb up the cliff by himself, but finds he cannot. He seems to retain a physical existence, but cannot operate his body as he pleases. More precisely, he can’t climb. He seems to be limited to a single plane of movement, as if he’s gone flat. So this is what death is like.

  “You can’t go up, not anymore,” the man with the compound eyes confirms, his reply impassive, unwavering, unhesitating.

  He knows the man is right, he cannot go up, so he sighs a sigh so heavy and so cold that it seems to cover the plants around him with a film of frost. But he is still worried about his son. He is so anxious he gets up to try over and over again.

  The man with the compound eyes does not stop him, only waits until he tires himself out and sits down dejectedly on the ground. In despair he looks at the man with the compound eyes, as if to use every last ounce of strength to appeal for assistance, but all he sees is the man’s compound eyes, which seem to change from moment to moment in hallucinatory permutations and combinations. And the scene in each of the tiny ommatidia that compose every compound eye is completely different with each passing instant. Watching carefully, the man’s mind is helplessly mesmerized by the instantaneous images playing in each ommatidium: could be an erupting undersea volcano, might be a falcon’s-eye view of a landscape, perhaps just a leaf about to fall. Each seems to be playing a kind of documentary.

  The man points at the ground and says, “Sit down and have a chat, all right? If you’re not in any hurry.”

  “What’s the hurry, if I’m dead?” The man sits down resignedly.

  “So, how much do you know about memory?”

  The man is a bit taken aback by the pop question. “It’s just what you remember, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. I’ll give you a crash course. Generally speaking, human memory can be divided into declarative memory and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memory can be reported, for instance in speech or in writing. And nondeclarative memory is, roughly, what you call the subconscious mind. It’s the memories a person might not even know he has. This is not to say that it can’t be reported, just that usually it is not reported, because you don’t even know about it. Do you follow?”

  The man nods, but he does not know why he has to sit here, listening to this stuff.

  “Well, these two kinds of memory can be subdivided into three basic types: episodic, semantic and procedural. Remember your son still couldn’t speak until the age of three? Then one day, when he was looking at an insect specimen, he blurted out a complete sentence, didn’t he?”

  The man nods again, but is baffled: how can this man possibly know such personal minutiae? At this, he realizes he is not too certain about the timing. When exactly did the event take place? Was Toto three or four? He couldn’t have been older than five.

  “This is an event, an episode in your life, and you can report it, so it’s a declarative, episodic memory. Here’s another example: you remember your wife’s and son’s birthdays, don’t you?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Well, that’s semantic memory or factual memory. Even if you forgot something like this you could still look it up, right? It’s on their ID cards, and even if you misremember, there’s still a ‘mismemory,’ right? Basically, if there’s not been any mistake, their birthdays are recorded the same everywhere, because they’re facts. And people have a way of confirming the facts. In the world people have constructed for themselves you can usually look up a fact like that. You still with me?” The man nods.

  “But episodic memory is different. The details you remember about any event must be different from the details your wife remembers. Right? For instance, for when you and your wife met for the first time, what exactly did you say to her in the forest? Each of you remembers different details, that’s for sure. You almost ended up getting into a fight over it on many different occasions, didn’t you? You were both remembering different parts of the same episode.”

  The man lowers his head and thinks about it. “I get it. What about procedural memory?”

  “You’ve climbed this rock wall many times before, haven’t you? If I asked you to look up at the cliff could you more or less make out the routes you traveled?”

  I suppose I could, the man thinks, but he isn’t too sure. The man revisits the climbs in his mind. The second time a seasoned rock climber takes a certain route some details from the first time will come back to him.

  As if continuing the man’s line of thought, the man with the compound eyes says, “Right. Certain details will occur to you the moment your fingers touch the stone, details you normally couldn’t remember no matter how hard you tried. Sometimes it might even cross your mind that there’s a cleft in a certain rock as you climb. Am I right?”

  He looks at the man with the compound eyes in amazement.

  “People’s minds are continually weaving the threads of memory together without anyone being aware of it. Sometimes not even you know what you might remember. Even if you climbed this rock wall a hundred times you probably wouldn’t bother remembering the position of every rock and foothold, but your body would remember as a matter of course. If someone moved a certain rock, your fingers and toes would tell you the next time you climbed.”

  The man looks in the man’s eyes and seems to see a familiar scene in one of the fine ommatidia. Though overall, the man’s head is no bigger than an average person’s head, nor are his eyes bigger than an average person’s eyes, there were at least tens of thousands of ommatidia in each of his compound eyes, each so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye. But if so, the man wonders, how can he be sure of what he is seeing?

  “When it comes to memory, people are no different from any other animal. I’m not kidding. You probably won’t believe it, but actually even a sea hare has memory. Eric Richard Kandel, a scientist famous for his research on memory, started out experimenting with sea hares. Fortunately, he survived the Kristallnacht, the first systematic Nazi attack on the Jews, or he wouldn’t have had the chance to study memory. In a certain sense, maybe it was because Kandel had a profound understanding of what it’s like to have something etched in memory that he was driven to try to understand it.”

  The man with the compound eyes said, “Animals like sea hares may not have much episodic or semantic memory, but animals with developed brains have episodic, semantic and procedural memory, just like people. Migratory birds remember the seacoast, whales remember the boat that harpooned them, and seal pups that manage to avoid annihilation will remember the murderous coat-clad, club-carrying creature that chased them. I kid you not, they’ll never forget. But only human beings have invented a tool to record memory.”

  The man with the compound eyes reaches down and takes out a pencil he has stuck in a pocket on his pant leg. The pen is broken in two, but there is no doubt it can still write.

  “Writing.”

  As he says this there are two dull rolls of distant thunder. Dark clouds are shrouding the sky. A change in the weather.

  “There was thunder just now: this is a fact. And it’s a fact that we’re talking. But if there’s no one to record what just happened in writing, the evidence of its occurrence will only be found in the episodic, semantic and procedural memory of two people, you and me. But if you represented these memories in writing, you would discover that the mind adds massive amounts of material anytime it weaves an episodic memory. In this way, the world reconstructed in writing approximates even more closely what you call ‘the realm of nature.’ It’s an organism.”

  The man with the compound eyes reaches into a rotten log on the ground nearby and, as if performing a magic t
rick, pulls out a pale, rough thing like the larva of some beetle.

  “But the world that people perceive is too partial, too narrow. Sometimes, you consciously, all too consciously, only remember what you want to. Many apparently authentic episodic memories are partly fabricated. Sometimes things that have never happened anywhere in the world can be vividly ‘represented’ in the mind, again by virtue of the imagination. Many people have diseased brains, and some of them even mistake one thing for another, like the man who took his wife for a hat.”

  The man with the compound eyes gazes off into the distance. How strange that even though compound eyes do not focus like human eyes, he can still tell where the man is looking. “Similarly, as I was just saying, it’s not just humans who have the ability to remember. And of course it’s not only Homo sapiens who have the ability to make things up. But only you people can turn the contents of their minds into writing, that’s for sure. This larva I’m holding will never be able to recount the memory it will have of being a pupa in a cocoon.”

  The man discovers that at some point the larva in the man’s hand has pupated, covering itself in a brown cocoon.

  “So what you mean to say is that …” The man cannot finish his sentence. He falls into a stupor, maybe a state that people who have just died all experience.

  “Your wife’s writing kept your son alive,” said the man with the compound eyes, looking the man straight in the eyes. “You remember that summer? That snake? That afternoon? You lost the life you’d born and raised. It was your wife who kept the diary, did all the things only your son would have done, bought the things he would have needed when he reached a certain age and read the field guides she imagined he would have found interesting. She went out into the wilderness and collected specimens, then rendered possession of them unto your son. And in order to protect her, or rather in order to protect her ‘brain,’ the people around her went along with her memories, at least with the memories she was willing to acknowledge. And for this reason, at the opposite extremes of life and death, your wife and your son have enjoyed a kind of symbiotic coexistence.”

  The man feels something flashing in front of his eyes, fleetingly. Someone puts out the light of his life. Someone has extinguished something.

  “In fact, since then your son has only existed in her writing and daily activities, and you have been an accessory. You two have been the bearers of a traumatic memory, and its authors.”

  The man sighs. Clearly, something leaves his body at that moment. “So my son’s later existence is meaningless?”

  “Not exactly. At least for a certain period of time, by a kind of tacit understanding, he lived between you and your wife, didn’t he? He lived, like a chain. He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore. No other creature can share experience like this. Only human beings can, through writing, experience something separately together.”

  The man with the compound eyes looks into the man’s glimmering eyes as they start to dim: this is a sign that he has reached fourteen and a half yawns.

  “But at the end of the day memory and imagination have to be archived separately, just as waves must always leave the beach. Because otherwise, people couldn’t go on living,” the man said. “This is the price humanity must pay for being the only species with the ability to record memory in writing.”

  The man discovers that the chrysalis in the man’s hand has begun to writhe, as if being trapped inside the cocoon is quite painful and it wants to end the pain.

  “In all honesty, I don’t envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the wilful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for your sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek, is not a revelation … When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem.” The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sigh and says: “But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.”

  “And who are you, then?” The man uses the remaining fraction of his final breath to spit this question out, and it is as if a chorus of a million voices asks it.

  “Who am I? Who am I indeed?” The cocoon in the man’s hand is throbbing violently now, like an emerging galaxy in the agony of formation. His eyes are flashing, almost as if they contain flecks of quartz. But if you looked carefully, you would see that they are not really flashing, that some of the ommatidia are wet with tears, tears so exceedingly fine they are harder to perceive than the point of a pin.

  Pointing at his own eyes, the man with the compound eyes says, “The only reason for my existence is that I can merely observe, not intervene.”

  30. The Man with the Compound Eyes IV

  The boy resolves to climb down the cliff.

  He attaches the safety rope and slowly starts climbing down. Because he is light, the boy does not feel the weight of his body at first, but soon he feels his strength deplete. He’s never imagined his body is this heavy. He looks up, and all he can see is an endless stone wall. He has to wipe the sweat on his brow away with his arm, so it doesn’t sting his beautiful brown eyes, which from a certain angle look a bit blue.

  When he is about halfway down, the boy’s foot slips. In a moment of panic he plummets. Luckily he returns to the wall, but by this point his energy is drained, and he can go no further, neither up nor down. At first his body feels hot, and the sweat keeps dripping down, but soon his motionless body feels the chill of the wind. He shivers.

  Stuck there, the boy realizes his hearing is now keener than normal. In addition to the sound of the wind blowing, the leaves falling and insects beating their wings, he seems to hear his father talking to another man at the base of the cliff. He cannot understand most of what they are saying, but when he hears the other man say, “He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore,” he suddenly feels his body grow light. No, better to say that his original sense of weight disappears.

  He cocks his head to one side, as if in contemplation, and decides to climb back up instead of continuing down. He is surprised to find that for some reason when he starts ascending he feels light as a feather, hollow in the middle.

  The boy reaches the top of the cliff, walks into the tent, and opens his backpack. Inside is the pocket in which he keeps his insect specimen bottles. He takes them out, walks outside, opens them and dumps out the beetles, one by one. Initially the beetles are terrified. They all play dead, lying motionless on the ground, legs curled up. Then the boy turns the beetles over, one at a time. Several minutes later, a few of them tentatively crawl a short distance, then open their elytra to reveal transparent wings so thin as to be almost invisible. And then they flutter off.

  Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

  The boy stands at the edge of the cliff. The beetles are now mere specks in his beautiful eyes, but their elytra can still be discerned. “Such beautiful insects!” says the boy in a singsong voice. Just then, a huge beetle with charming green and yellow mottling on its elytra stops on a rock in front of him. “A long-armed scarab! A male long-armed scarab!” calls the elated boy.

  “Look at that long pair of arms! See how large its elytra are!”

  But from that moment on, he feels everything start to get “blurry,” not “blurry” in the regular, visual sense but a kind of blurriness that people could never imagine. It is as if he is transforming into a leaf, an insect, a birdcall, a drop o
f water, a pinch of lichen, or even a rock.

  Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

  It is as if there’s never been such a boy who climbed that massive cliff in that incredible scene, which is now, once again, received into one of the ommatidia, far smaller than pinpoints, of the man with the compound eyes, along with the panorama of all scenery. No scene now remains, except in memory.

  31. End of the Road

  Dahu kept calling but couldn’t reach Alice at the cell he’d given her. So the morning he woke up in the Forest Church, he decided to drive up the coast to the Sea House, to make sure Alice was all right. Reaching the shore, he saw that the volunteer cleanup team had started the day’s work. Maybe it was a false impression, but the Sea House seemed to be sinking even further into the sea. He saw a man and woman, like a mother and son, facing the Sea House and pointing at things. Dahu went over and asked and they turned out to be the writer Kee’s widow and son.

  “My mother just wanted to come by and see the old lot, and to check whether Professor Shih is all right,” the son said.

  “She’s moved already, for her own safety,” Dahu said.

  The writer’s widow seemed filled with regret as she said, “We used to plant vegetables here, looking out to sea. Who would have thought it would end up underwater?”

  Dahu resolved to take a trip to the hunting hut, even though it might make Alice angry. When he got there, he was even more convinced that there was someone else living at the hut besides Alice, because there was a tent outside the hut, and a fixed-frame awning had been added on to the hut itself. He also discovered a kind of food cellar, and there were books and drawings scattered around the room. He could tell right away that some of the drawings, wild, and incredibly imaginative, were not from Alice’s hand. So that was why he could never get through to her: Alice had not even taken her cell along. The cell was off and it was being used as a paperweight for those drawings instead. Dahu was going to take the phone with him, but on second thought decided to just set the phone with the solar cell up, turn on the transmitter, and leave Alice a note. This way, Dahu could still get in touch with Alice after she got back. And once she picked up the phone, he would also be able to track her no matter where she went.