The Island of the Colorblind

I gazed at the sky once again, and suddenly a strange reversal or illusion occurred, so that instead of seeing the stars in the sky, I saw the sky, the night sky, hanging on the stars, and felt I was actually seeing Joyce’s vision of ‘the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’[42] And then, a second later, it was ‘normal’ again. Something odd was going on in my visual cortex, I decided, a perceptual shift, a reversal of foreground and background – or was this a shift at a higher level, a conceptual or metaphoric one? Now the sky seemed full of shooting stars – this, I assumed, was an effervescence in my cortex, and then Bob said, ‘Look – shooting stars!’ Reality, metaphor, illusion, hallucination, seemed to be dissolving, merging into one another.

I tried to get up, but found I could not. There had been a gradually deepening numbness in my body, starting as a tingling and numbness in my mouth and lips, and now I no longer knew where my limbs were, or how I could get them to move. After a momentary alarm, I yielded to the feeling – a feeling which, uncomprehended, was frightening uncontrol, but which, now accepted, was delicious, floating, levitation. ‘Excellent!’ I thought, the neurologist in me aroused. ‘I have read of this, and now I’m experiencing it. Lack of light touch, lack of proprioception – this must be what de-afferentation feels like.’ My companions, I saw, were all lying motionless in their chairs, levitating too, or perhaps asleep.

All of us, indeed, slept deeply and dreamlessly that night, and the next morning awoke crystal clear, refreshed. Clear, at least, cognitively and emotionally – though my eyes were still playing tricks, lingering effects, I presumed, of the sakau. I got up early and recorded these in my notebook:

Floating over coral-heads. Lips of giant clams, persev-erating, filling whole visual field. Suddenly a blue blaze. Luminous blobs fall from it. I hear the falling blobs distinctly; amplifying, they fill my auditory sensorium. I realize it is my heartbeats, transformed, that I am hearing.

There is a certain motor and graphic facilitation, perseveration too. Extracting myself from the sea bottom, the clam lips, the blue falling blobs, I continue writing. Words speak themselves aloud in my mind. Not my usual writing, but a rapid perseverative scrawl which at times more resembles cuneiform than English. The pen seems to have an impetus of its own – it is an effort to stop it once it has started.

These effects continue at breakfast, which I share with Knut.[43] A plate of bread, but the bread is pale grey. Stiff, shining, as if smeared with paint, or the thick, shiny, grey sludge of the sakau. Then, deliriously, liqueur chocolates – pentagonal, hexagonal, like the columns at Nan Madol. Ghost petals ray out from a flower on our table, like a halo around it; when it is moved, I observe, it leaves a slight train, a visual smear, reddish, in its wake. Watching a palm waving, I see a succession of stills, like a film run too slow, its continuity no longer maintained. And now, isolated images, scenes, project themselves on the table before me: our first moment on Pingelap, with dozens of laughing children running out of the forest; the great floodlit hoop of the fisherman’s net, with a flying fish struggling, iridescent, inside it; the boy from Mand, running down the hill, visored, like a young knight, shouting, ‘I can see, I can see.’ And then, silhouetted against the heaventree of stars, three men round a peitehl, pounding sakau.