Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“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 trick, 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.”

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.