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One moment the beach was deserted except for a skinny black dog scavenging along a line of outriggers that leaned drunkenly on the sand. The next it was swarming with children, leaping up and down, shouting greetings and instructions. As our sails were furled, several of the older ones swam out and clambered on board, but when they saw me, all of them dived straight back in. At the waterâs edge was a group of men and women, waiting much more quietly. They formed a semicircle, and a tall man in a faded kebadja jacket stepped forward. He said his name was Hashim and that he was the kepala desa, the village head. He spoke the ritual greetings, we replied in kind, and then he turned and led the way up the beach. In the shade of the first coconut palms on the edge of the village stood a line of young girls wrapped in identically patterned kains and wearing white cotton shirts. One offered us betel nut from a carved wooden box; another brought leaves of the siri vine, and a third a tray of fine white lime. Availing ourselves of their hospitality, we took a little of each and started chewing. If you keep salivating long enough, the entire chemistry of the mixture alters and turns your mouth bright red. This makes everyone else very happy and the chewer slightly high. After two days without food or drink, I found that it made me feel like flying. Then the dance began. It started suddenly, with a chord I shall never forget. It was played by two drummers, who sat cross-legged on the ground, and by three men who launched a concerted attack on a battery of twelve brass gongs of descending sizes, suspended from a rack between two palms. Three of the girls in traditional costume moved with it out onto the edge of the sand and began to hover there in the sun. Like mayflies suspended over a bright summer stream, they skimmed over the surface, dipping and rising, spinning and turning, sweeping with arms outstretched to touch the music in the air. Then two of the girls knelt in the sand, eyes cast down and hands folded in their laps. The third kept on dancing. She was very young, 11 or 12 perhaps, with her slender insect body wrapped in a cloth cocoon. She started slowly, with an easy grace and rhythm, doing very little more than move her hands in a delicate counterpoint to the music. But at the same time she was somehow shifting the balance of her body in a way that introduced an entirely new tempo. I never saw the movement; I only know she managed to flow effortlessly and invisibly through a series of positions so eloquent that she telescoped time. And I understood every word. She told of myths and heroes from a land in the west, of stars and ships and voyages and places fit to rest. She conjured up the heat of the sun and the strength of the monsoon. She remembered the times of hunger and drought, and the seasons of plenty and song. She sang of wars of conquest and battles of restitution; of love and birth and rice and wind; of death and destitution. She danced us both a welcome and a history of her people. She was Tia. And this was Nus Tarian, the Dancing Island. Each day the dance began again in the village of Kota Rendah. I watched from my new home near the school on the hill. To repay the boundless hospitality of the people, I taught English, and as my Indonesian improved, I was able to tackle mathematics and then geography and biology. There had been no regular guru on Nus Tarian for several years, so Pak (all older men are called ãfatherä) Hashim suggested I move into the house set aside for a teacher. It was a tiny two-room hut with walls of leaf mat and woven cane. Most days I wandered down to the beach while the deep vocal drone from the mosque still rolled on out of the village like a river of sound that lost itself on the sand. On the morning it all began, the tide was out. I was watching the ghost crabs on the beach when I saw Tia, the tiny dancer, shaking a sleeping mat out the door of the house of her uncle. She waved, and, a little later, came down to the beach to join me. It was dawn, and the light was was bright and clear on the peak of Gunung Api, the ãfire mountainä at the far end of the island. As we walked together down the beach, a small mottled heron flew up at our feet, landed ahead on the sand, ruffled, walked, watched us coming on, lengthened its neck in new alarm, and flew another few reluctant meters. Every time it took flight it uttered a sharp, broken ãkewä sound on a descending tone.
She shook her head in sorrow and dismay, and faced with the wisdom of this 12-year-old, I felt like a backward child. Later I had the chance to test her with a variety of sounds. I chose more than a hundred, and when I questioned her about them again after several months, she still gave me exactly the same responses. Tia had multicolored hearing. She lived permanently in a roseate world with a unity of sight and sound that the rest of us, sensory cripples, can experience only fleetingly with the help of hallucinogenic chemicals. Yet the word ãhallucinationä worries me. It is a much too convenient label we attach to anything that doesnât happen to fit our current description of reality. I suspect that most, if not all, children customarily link several senses and usually deal with it only when discussing the obvious linkage between taste and smell. Tia knew her own people better than I, but she astonished me with her ability to make rapid, sensitive, and invariably correct judgements about situations based on her appreciation of tone and color. When I or someone else was about to get angry, she would know instantly by what she called warna sakit, ãsick colors,ä in our voices. One day in school, I talked about this and most of the children seemed to think it was self-evident. They were not all as adept as Tia, but there was general agreement about which colors went with particular sounds. We compiled a list of colored words and, looking for some pattern in them, found that each of the usual vowel sounds in Indonesian had its characteristic color. There was a close relationship between pitch and brightness. Deep voices, big drums, and low-pitched sounds were always attached to brighter colors. The strident call of the sulfur-crested cockatoo was white, like the bird. A loud whistle was accompanied by a blinding flash, and one little boy even claimed to be able to locate mosquitoes in the dark by seeing the fine white light of their whine.
Eventually the little green heron grew tired of retreat and, sitting hunched up on a fallen tree, trying to look resentful and invisible all at the same time, let us walk on by. I was still excited by my discovery of Tiaâs ability to hear colors, but didnât want to push too hard, so we changed the subject. Or at least I thought we had.
Abu kept the village store, and I knew he had taken his prau to guide the Little Flower to another island several days distant where the crewmen could get supplies. They were anxious to return to Java, and I had paid them off with a letter of credit to my bank.
We had reached the point that conceals the village from the sea, and now the whole horizon lay open to the north and west.
I looked in the direction she indicated, but I could still see nothing. And my eyes are very good.
Now I was thoroughly confused. I began to think that Tia must be either precognitive or in telepathic contact with her uncle, and I would have been quite content with her prediction if she had made it with her eyes closed. But I could not understand why Tia was looking so intently out over the ocean. There was nothing out there that I could see.
I didnât. I felt naked and did not know what to say, but she wasnât expecting a response.
But at noon the children were calling that two boats could be seen. And just before sunset, Abu came drifting into the lagoon in his little prau, followed by the larger lateen sail of a Bugis trader. This story is excerpted from Lyall Watsonâs 1976 book, Gifts of Unknown Things, published by Destiny Books, an imprint of Inner Traditions International, Rochester, VT 05767 (800-246-8648; www.innertraditions.com). We make no excuses or explanations for what Watson describes. Our purpose is not to make any claims about human perceptual abilities, but rather to illustrate how different worldviews can be, and to suggest that the real value in preserving cultural diversity is to preserve this diversity of views, which, taken together, surely must offer a more complete understanding of the world than any single view can. To protect the privacy of the people on the island, Watson changed the islandâs name in his book, as we have here. |
This started me thinking for the first time that the colors need not be mental associates of the sound, but could exist as sensory inputs in their own right. It may well be true that the world actually is as these children see it. When the rest of us grow up, we stop doing things that way. We no longer feel the texture of a sound or see the image of a taste. We miss the smell of the sunset and the color of a peacockâs call. We put away sensory blending along with other childish things. It seems a pity.