Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“How is the weather at sea today?” asked Atile’i, calmly.

Alice did a double take for a few seconds before replying, in a voice as fine as drizzle, “Very fair.”

The man sits up, but the pain forces him to lie back down. Then he yawns a big yawn, whether due to sorrow or some other emotion he does not know. It is as if the world of men has become too tedious and he would prefer eternal sleep.

After the yawn, the man is pleasantly surprised to discover that the pain has subsided somewhat. The man stops stifling his urge to yawn, and the yawns come fast and furious, like they are lining up, waiting for the man to exhale them. In less than a minute he yawns a grand total of thirteen times.

“Not as painful as you might imagine, is it?”

The man knows most of the bones in his body are broken, that it’s the kind of compound fracture that can never be reset. He has sustained many serious fractures in his life, and knows what it feels like, as if the feeling has been etched in his memory. But this time he does not actually feel any pain.

“Strange, it doesn’t hurt.” The man quickly alerts to what this lack of pain implies. “So, I’m dead?”

“How many yawns?”

“Fifteen.” The man has miscounted. It’s actually been thirteen.

“Then, by the regular definition, you’re dead.”

The man does not understand what “by the regular definition” is supposed to mean. He props himself up, stands up, and walks away from the cliff, looking up anxiously. “But my son is still up there.”

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?