The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

How could any god rule the sea? The sea itself was God.

Because he never tells you why, because his Han Chinese why doesn’t mean the same thing as our aboriginal why, right?”

I often think that if you stroll from town to town, from village to village, the island would get really big. When we were still dating I told Thom, “Maybe the island got the way it is today because the people living here wanted to be able to get anywhere on the island as quickly as possible.”

We both gazed out at the sea, which seemed to be slowly bringing rain. Every so often a breaker would come rolling in. Following a silence of ten waves, Atile’i asked me another time, “Is the weather fair at sea today?” “Very fair,” I replied and for the first time I realized I could ask him back. “Is the weather fair on your sea today?” “Yes it is, extremely fair,” Atile’i replied. I don’t know why, but right at that moment we both began to cry.

Maybe I’m slowly getting to know the mountains. Now I just feel we have to make sure mountains like this don’t disappear, mountains without potholed roads or tunnels, mountains where goats and boars and deer can run wild.

Going through a mountain to get from place to place as quickly as possible is one way of life, while going around is another. We thought we were making a scientific judgment, but actually we were making a lifestyle choice.”

“Fifteen years just to dig this one tunnel,” said Detlef. “Seriously, do you think fifteen years was worth it to shave an hour off the trip for all these people all these years?” “Was it worth it? I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. My job is to dig, not to assess whether it’s worth it or not.” “But now the heart of the mountain has been hollowed out,” Sara said.

Nobody has ever seen the forest he now beholds, like a forest in a novel that has grown into a real wood. This is not to say that the forest is not immense, peaceful, dark and deep. It is indeed immense, peaceful, dark and deep, just a bit unreal.

Only Little Sara saw the weakness in him. He would often sit up at night in the cabin of his boat and pierce and yank at his skin with a fishhook. This process left twisting scars, which soon snaked all over his arms. People were always shocked by the sight when he rolled up his sleeves and set to work out at sea. One morning while they were eating breakfast, Little Sara surprised him by asking why he poked himself like that. He fell silent a minute, then replied, “To feel what the fish feel, my Little Sara.”

To Han Chinese people, all the pollution means is that there’s no more money to make from the sea, but for the Pangcah it’s different: the sea is their ancestor, and so many of their traditional stories are about the sea. Without ancestors, what’s the point of being ‘Pangcah’?”

“God was there, but not anymore.”

“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.”