When a new object would come into my life, I would have a very thorough sensory experience of it. I would savor the feel of it, the smell of it, and the appearance of it (all the visible aspects except color, of course). I would even stroke it or tap it or do whatever created an auditory experience. All objects have unique qualities which can be savored. All can be looked at in different lights and in different kinds of shadows. Dull finishes, shiny finishes, textures, prints, transparent qualities – I scrutinized them all, up close, in my accustomed way (which occurred because of my visual impairment but which, I think, provided me with more multi-sensory impressions of things). How might this have been different if I were seeing in color? Might the colors of things have dominated my experience, preventing me from knowing so intimately the other qualities of things?
13
Darwin’s colleague and, later, editor, John Judd, relates how Lyell, the strongest proponent of the submerged volcano theory, ‘was so overcome with delight’ when the young Darwin told him of his own subsidence theory, ‘that he danced about and threw himself into the wildest contortions.’ But he went on to warn Darwin: ‘Do not flatter yourself that you will be believed till you are growing bald like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity of the world.’
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The coconut palm, which Stevenson called ‘that giraffe of vegetables…so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign,’ was the most precious possession of the Polynesians and Micronesians, who brought it with them to every new island they colonized. Melville describes this in Otnoo:
The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year, the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit. He thatches his hut with its boughs and weaves them into baskets to carry his food. He cools himself with a fan platted from the young leaflets and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves. Sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks. The larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet; the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes. The dry husks kindle his fires. Their fibers are twisted into fishing lines and cords for his canoes. He heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut and with the oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.
The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless. Sawed into posts, it upholds the islander’s dwelling. Converted into charcoal, it cooks his food…He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the same wood and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material…
Thus, the man who but drops one of these nuts into the ground may be said to confer a greater and more certain benefit upon himself and posterity than many a life’s toil in less genial climes.
15
The sort of divergence which has made Pingelapese a distinct dialect of Pohnpeian has occurred many times throughout the scattered islands of Micronesia. It is not always clear at what point the line between dialect and language has been crossed, as E.J. Kahn brings out, in A Reporter in Micronesia:
In the Marshalls, Marshallese is spoken, and in the Marianas, Chamorro. From there on, things start to get complicated. Among the languages…is a rare one used by the eighty-three inhabitants of Sonsorol and the sixty-six of Tobi, two minute island groups in the Palau district but far off the beaten Palauan track. It has been argued that the Sonsorolese and Tobians don’t really have a language at all but merely speak a dialect of Palauan, which is that district’s major tongue. Yapese is another major one, and a complex one, with thirteen vowel sounds and thirty-two consonants. The Ulithi and Woleai atolls in the Yap district have their own languages, provided one accepts Woleaian as such and not as a dialect of Ulithian. The speech of the three hundred and twenty-one residents of still another Yap district atoll, Sa-tawal, may also be a separate language, though some assert that it is simply a dialect of Trukese, the main language of Truk.
Not counting Satawalese, there are at least ten distinctive dialects of Trukese, among them Puluwatese, Pulapese, Pu-lusukese, and Mortlockese. (A number of scholars insist that the tongue of the Mortlock Islands, named for an eighteenth-century explorer, is a bona fide separate language.) In the Ponape district, in addition to Ponapean, there is Kusaiean; and because the Pona-pean sector of Micronesia contains the two Polynesian atolls, Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi, there is a language that is used in those places – with considerable dialectical variations between the version in the one and that in the other. And, finally, there are linguists who maintain that the languages spoken in still two more Ponapean island groups, Mokil and Pingelap, are not, as other linguists maintain, mere variations of standard Ponapean, but authentic individualistic tongues called Mokilese and Pingelapese.
‘Some Micronesians,’ he goes on, ‘have become remarkably versatile linguists.’
One cannot but be reminded of how animals and plants diverge from the original stock, first into varieties, and then into species – a speciation intensely heightened by the unique conditions on islands, and so most dramatic in the contiguous islands of an archipelago. Cultural and linguistic evolution, of course, normally proceeds much faster than Darwinian, for we directly pass whatever we acquire to the next generation; we pass our ‘mnemes,’ as Richard Semon would say, and not our genes.
16
There are two kerosene generators on Pingelap: one for lighting the administration building and dispensary and three or four other buildings, and one for running the island’s videotape recorders. But the first has been out of action for years, and nobody has made much effort to repair or replace it – candles or kerosene lamps are more reliable. The other dynamo, however, is carefully tended, because the viewing of action films from the States exerts a compulsive force.
17
William Dampier was the first European to describe breadfruit, which he saw in Guam in 1688:
The fruit grows on the boughs like apples; it is as big as a penny loaf, when wheat is at five shillings the bushel; it is of a round shape, and hath a thick, tough rind. When the fruit is ripe, it is yellow and soft, and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of Guam use it for bread. They gather it when full grown, while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven, which scorcheth the rind and maketh it black; but…the inside is soft, tender and white, like the crumb of a penny loaf. There is neither seed nor stone in the inside, but all of a pure substance, like bread. It must be eaten new, for if it be kept above twenty-four hours, it grows harsh and choky, but it is very pleasant before it is too stale. This fruit lasts in season eight months in the year, during which the natives eat no other sort of bread-kind.
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