Chapter Twenty-Four: Seven Days Of Freedom
“Bora Bora is the ultimate escape from reality.”
• • •
If this is Eden I want to stay. The scent of tiare hangs in the air like a damp bath towel on a clothes line, heavy and saturated; microscopic, fragrant globules floating on the breeze. The delicate flowers are everywhere, white star bursts amidst the dense, verdant backdrop, innocently opening up their petals for public scrutiny, each trying to outdo its neighbour, vying for attention, like young girls just discovering the power of their sexuality, wanting to be the one that is noticed, scared to be the one that is passed by.
There is a river, clear and fast, and a small shelter, constructed on a makeshift dam of reeds in mid-stream; a tiny island of tranquillity, interrupting the natural course of the water’s bubbling flow. This is my home now.
I do not know how long that I have been living here. There are no clues. No possessions as such; no fragments of memory; no evidence of past, no plans of a future. There is today and nothing more. Enough food for one day. Enough water for one day. Enough clothes for one day. In the back of my mind, I am aware that this is not how it has always been, but at the same time, at the moment, it seems right. I am not going to argue with that which seems right. My past may be entirely missing, but my future is no less uncertain too. Arbitrary time can be measured purely by physical and natural phenomena: the passage of day and night, light and dark, the sun and the moon, all accurate markers by which it is possible to count off the hours of one’s life, but without the mental flags of expectation, ambition and hope, it is very hard to gauge the human concept of future at all. There is nothing to look forward to; no goals to work towards and achieve, or fail; no past record of glorious success or dismal failure to learn from. Night still follows day, follows night follows day, but without any judgmental scale to record if the time past has been spent wisely or if the future has been adequately accounted for. ‘I have wasted time and now doth Time waste me’, holds no fear for me any longer.
I am utterly alone. I do not remember the last person that I saw; the last conversation that I had. It does not matter. For the first time in my life I am not reliant on others for my needs; for my survival. I hesitate to sound so bold, but I think that I am free.
There is an immediacy about my life which is intoxicating. I do not know what I shall be doing tomorrow. I can just recall what I did yesterday, but not the day before that; I don’t imagine that it was anything very greatly different. The concept of boredom is alien to me. I know that there is a world where it does not seem possible to be happy, to be fulfilled, without a constant source of external stimulation, but it all seems very distant from me now. Here, I cannot imagine how one cannot feel inspired, not feel utterly content. It is true that the greatest pleasures in life are free: no one can take away the view from the entrance of my modest dwelling, the distant mountains, the palm trees and tropical firs, the colourful blooms, the gracefully flowing waters. Even if I am deprived of this shelter - and it is not my own, it was empty and unattended, and so I have asserted squatter’s rights - even then, no one can deny me this view. There is red hibiscus growing by the side of the river, and yellow-flowering purau. I have seen orchids in amongst the trees on the lowest slopes of the hillside, where the vegetation is at its densest and the light is barely able to penetrate, and fragrant shrubs; red frangipani, jasmine, and yellow poinsettia, and purple, trailing bougainvillaea. I feel like my eyes have been opened. All these things I have seen before but never registered; never made the links between sight and smell, between vision and memory, never had the time to stand and stare and let my mind fully appreciate the beauty that its senses are experiencing. In the same way I have stared at the water, unmoving, for hours on end, trying to make sense of the never-ceasing motion of colours and equations. I want to know the mathematical formula that describes this natural harmony: not just the parts, not just the ripples on the water’s surface, or the regular currents across the bottom of the river bed, or the concentric circles as a fish surfaces or an insect plummets to a watery end, but the big formula - the one that describes the whole caboodle. And then throw in the plants and the birds and the clouds and the hills and describe them for me too. In terms of pure logic. I think that the maths would be equally beautiful as the visual sensation. A fractal description of nature, which would compress the largest of landscapes to the tiniest and most portable of equations. Mother Nature making Euclidean geometry look simple and straightforward. The self-similarity of the most basic plant, from the blueprint of the first seed, increasing in scale, iteratively, to form the smallest twig, then a humble branch, a larger bough, the sturdy trunk, and so the entire tree: a giant-sized version of the initial plan. All around me this pattern is replicated. In the clouds above me. In the twists and turns of the river at my side. Even inside my own body. I am nothing more than an over-large extension of a basic equation: the vessels in my blood, the network of my lungs - nothing more complicated than a sprig of purple-sprouting broccoli. The central nervous system in my body. The stems in my brain: the ganglia of links and connections. From the initial development of neurones and glial cells, multiplying, spreading forth their experimental web of experiences, binding to form the medulla, the hypothalamus, the pons and cerebellum, each programmed with its own specific functions, its own range of duties. I know that somewhere a part of my own personal blueprint has become corrupted; the messages that used to get through so smoothly have temporarily gone astray. I feel like a deciduous tree that has shed all of its leaves in summer and yet does not know why. But while the sun continues to shine, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to be doing. I am not complaining, even if I appear to be so doing. It is just that I am aware that I did not always think in this way, and although part of me knows that the way I am now is not right, at the same time I cannot tell what is so very wrong. Perhaps Socrates was right, that a man should not be judged mad purely because his point of view is held in the minority. I am walking my own path for the first time. It may not lead me very far. I may be walking in the wrong direction. But it is not such a frightening journey as I would have imagined.
I know about the birds now too. I am sure that before they were just so many different shapes in the sky, barely distinguishable one from the other. Squawking, flapping, nameless things. Now, I have seen white-tailed tropic birds, terns, noddies and boobies. My reserve of stored information has surprised me. There are things which I learned long ago, which are as clear to me now as though I had been first told them only hours before; minute details which I had not realised that I had registered at all, which have struggled to the forefront of my mind and so gained importance in my current circumstances. It would seem laughable to compare myself to a finely tuned athlete, who has undergone years of training to achieve a particular level of physical fitness, but I do feel an equivalent kind of mental awareness: all superfluous knowledge has been stripped away; everything that is relevant is instantly accessible and unequivocal.
My shelter has a thatched roof that is so low that it is not possible to stand upright beneath it. The line of stones and branches that stretch, on either side of this construction, across the width of the stream, are of the kind I have read described as a fish trap, and, although I have indeed been fortunate enough to snare several fish since my sojourn here, I do not really comprehend the particular mechanism that the local fishermen must use. Sometimes, when I sit alone, inside my shelter; when the sight of the hills is blocked from my view, or at night-time, when it is too dark to see the flowers and the trees, and when I am left alone with only my imagination for company, sometimes then I feel a sensation as though I am being hunted. I have it too when I fall asleep. My nocturnal hours are not spent as peacefully as my daytime ones. I dreamt - was it last night or the night before? - that I was a stag running through the forest. There were people after me - hunters - with bow
s and arrows. I was fleet of foot, and managed to elude most of my pursuers, but every time I paused to rest - my heart beating and my legs exhausted and aching from the constant running - there was always someone there, one persistent tracker who had not given up the chase, who was determined to see that justice was done. Justice? I did not know what I had done that was so wrong. In my dreams I know that this is a fugue: dissociative psychogenic fugue, I must have read about them long ago, at a time when the phenomena meant nothing to me, held no interest for me, a piece of meaningless information that was noted, processed, and then stored away in a deep, dark corner of my mind, likely never to emerge again. A mixture of amnesia and fright, that was the description as I recall; a condition where the subject - me! - is attempting to flee from his or her fears. Up to a point, I have been successful. Flee? I most certainly have: if I do not know where I am myself, I do not see how my pursuers can have any superior knowledge. Fear? There I have been less successful. By day, with the beauty of nature to uplift me, I feel capable of overcoming all difficulties; by night... it is a different story. I have not yet reached the stage where I dread going to sleep, but I know that my somnolent mind recalls terrors, which I am not yet fully prepared to face.
I remember reading Walden, but I did not finish the book. I am not really comparing our two situations. Mine has not been a deliberate flight from a world that I reject; to lead the life of a recluse has not been a conscious decision that I have made, although my timber shack fulfils every mental construct of a classical hermitage that I could have hoped for. I prefer to see myself as the lion in the Rousseau painting, The Dream. The lion, one of two in the picture, stares out from the verdant tangle of tropical undergrowth and exotic, flowering blooms, completely ignoring the surreal image of the naked woman sprawled on a chez lounge, looking directly ahead, straight at the viewer, but his gaze is in no way confrontational as would be fitting of such a magnificent creature, more it is an expression of being startled, scared perhaps, uncertain of what fate has in store for him now that his camouflage has been stripped away and his hiding place discovered. I feel a little insecure about what fate has in store for me at the moment, but one cannot spend one’s whole life analysing and wondering what if? If I were to think through the minute implications of all my actions I would never achieve anything. It would be like walking through a quagmire of indecision, or standing at the junction of a thousand paths without a signpost to act as a guide. Perhaps this is where religion fits in: God is just the name for the thing that fills in all the bits in life that we do not understand, all the mini leaps of faith that get us through each second of each day: the electricity that runs through our wires; the forces that hold the molecules of our body together; the knowledge that we will wake up tomorrow, and that tomorrow will broadly be the same as the day before, as the day before that. Except, all of a sudden, my tomorrows are different. I wake up not knowing what to expect because I have no clear idea of what has gone before. It is liberating. I think.
Here, with this beautiful backdrop, I feel like the marginalia on the page of an illuminated manuscript. I am sure, though, that this feeling of detachment is not something new to me. I cannot believe that my past life was lived in such an idyllic setting, but the sensation of marginalisation is so familiar to me that I am sure that I have always been society’s equivalent of the mindless doodle in the border of a featureless exercise book. Why else am I here now? An eternal outcast, although what from, I do not know. Somewhere at the end of the river, through the forest, beyond the mountains, is a different world. My world.
It would be nice to be able to recount that I do not have a routine here; that that foolish, stress-making, time-ordering device of civilisation I have been able to shake off without a backward glance, but it is not true. I have imposed a routine upon myself. It is not rigid, but it is one of the things that allow me to define my humanity. I wake with the rising of the sun and the morning sounds of the forest; nature’s alarm clock is more accurate and more sonorous than any I have previously relied upon. I dress – it is not as though I have any choice of clothes to wear – and I splash my face in the river water and take a drink. I have called this area where I wash - it is nothing more than a platform of mud and wood directly outside my shelter - the bathroom. Hardly original, I know. The naming of place is key to man’s sense of control over his environment. I have names for many of my regular haunts. The ‘Long Path’, is the straight clearing through the pines, directly opposite to the point where I emerge when I come ashore; the ‘Boardwalk’ is the short stretch of sandy ground beside the river; the ‘Flowers’ describes the area of brilliant white blooms that I can see from the entrance to my cabin. I have countless more. Like Linnaeus I believe in order and nomenclature. Before the sun is too high in the sky, I try to trap a fish for my lunchtime meal. So far I have been fortunate, but I know that it is only luck, rather than skill, that has meant that I have not gone hungry. I have no fire, nor any means of making one, but the raw flesh is not unpalatable and has not yet made me ill. Poisson cru: it is practically the national dish. Even now, I realise that there is a time limit on this style of existence, though. Man cannot live on sushi alone, especially when the supply of raw fish is by no means guaranteed. I do not spend longer than an hour or two fishing. I have no watch by which to measure time precisely, but I do not think that my estimation of the length of the passage of seconds, minutes and hours is so very far wrong.
I do not know if it is insulting to suggest that I have reverted to primitive behaviour, since I am sure that primitive people have a far more clearly defined system of ethics and schools of behaviour than I have adopted. Somehow, I know that this is only a temporary situation, that things will change again, that I only need to wait and I will be flung back into a world order that is already established. Perhaps that is what I mean about feeling free: freedom is the gap; the period of time between two other events; it is a void, not a state in its own right. This is part of my routine too: this soul-searching; this period for thought and reflection. It is a luxury that we are not normally allowed in the course of modern life: time to think. It should be obligatory.
Man is an island. It is a strange idea. I wonder, sometimes, if I have deliberately contrived to arrive at this situation, free from responsibilities. It would be a worrying - perhaps a guilty - thought to believe that I had consciously run away from society and all of its traps: marriage, children, career, mortgage. Except that I had none of these. Perhaps I was running away from something more basic, something more childish. Even the most minor tasks of adult life can sometimes seem a great responsibility: to earn your own money, to cook your own meals, to find your own mate; to carve your own unique furrow through life. It had always been other people who were the outcasts; the guys who sat on the pavement and begged for money; the ones who looked peculiar, ugly, deformed, disabled; the ones who behaved differently, who stood out, were universally labelled as weird. They were the ones that society shunned. Now I realised that I was an outcast too. I had joined their number. I think that mentally I had been aware of this barrier for years, perhaps I always had. My current circumstances are just a physical representation of an eternal mental state of isolation. I am no more marooned on this desert island now, than I have been all my life. Except in the past I have always had easy access to a supermarket or an Indian takeaway. It is a challenge this: the traditional battle of Man against the elements of Nature. Hunger, shelter, loneliness, fear: it is my duty as a human to overcome them all. This is where routine becomes important again, as a way to replicate the bourgeois ways of a thousand years of civilisation. I do not pretend to know better than those that have gone before me. I am happy to learn. Again.
Close to my shelter, a smaller tributary of the main river branches off, like a young child learning for the first time that it can choose a different course to that of its parents, finding its own route towards the sea. At some po
ints the waters of this immature river run through thick vegetation and it appears as though the greenery has absorbed the struggling stream like a sponge; at other points, further along, they emerge again, negotiating the obstacles of large boulders and rocky plateaux, forming into a series of small pools of standing water and several noisy cascades. I come to these pools in the afternoon. Dragonflies hover over the still water’s surface, seemingly daring each other to see how low they can fly, and groups of small, yellow butterflies congregate on the hot rocks at the water’s edge, feeding off something that they find crystallising on the surface of the stones. I swim in the largest of the pools, although the water is too shallow to make a proper stroke, except directly underneath the waterfall that is, where years of erosion have created a deep plunge pool. The water here is sheltered, though, and quite cold. I watch the fish in the clear water; I watch them for hours. When I swim sometimes they swim around me; sometimes they nibble the fine hairs along my legs. I never see any fish big enough to eat, not here in the ponds, not that I think I could trap them, in any case, they move too quickly to elude my clumsy manoeuvrings, and I have not yet fashioned any implement to aid me in my pursuit. They are tiny, dark fish with silver bellies, which catch the sunlight whenever they are startled, turning simultaneously to flee on the wordless instructions of their leader, looking like a mirage of sparkling gemstones. As a child, I remember, on holiday, I used to watch trout in the river, it would have been the Avon. There were always several men, their fishing rods poised, sitting out in mid-stream, aboard a floating platform, all having paid a fortune for a license just to watch the mocking fish leaping from the clear waters all around them, never once landing one on their hook. Groping for trout in a peculiar river. I guess we’ve all been there. Although not as often as I might have cared to. I have always been rather small fry in that department. Here, though, I am the big fish. It is just that my pond is so small.
It is easy to talk as though I have been living here all my life, when I know that it is only a matter of a few days. It is the lack of knowledge of when it will end that makes it all seem somehow eternal. How it will end? The lack of memory of what has gone before, as well. At the moment, I feel in supreme control of my own destiny. Am I not master over my surroundings? Except, hunger is perhaps a minor gripe, if I am being truthful. Up until now, I have imagined that it would be an external influence that would disturb my peaceful waters, but perhaps not. Lack of food is already causing minor ripples that I can see will grow until they become a mighty storm. A storm that I will have to ride out upon if I am to survive. I shall cry to leave Eden.
Last night I dreamed of the ocean. The Pacific. The largest body of water on the planet. Over nine thousand miles from north to south, and over twelve thousand miles across at its widest point. In total, a 70 million square mile expanse of largely unbroken water. An area equal to one third of the Earth’s total surface. Whichever way you take them, they are impressive statistics. An average depth of close to 2,500 fathoms, and with the Marianas Trench - the so called Challenger Deep - a water-filled chasm stretching down to a depth of almost seven miles, deeper than the highest mountain. The Pacific is truly the Big Pond. And scattered, seemingly at random, across this vast body of brine, islands - small refuges for man - little life rafts, adrift from the mother ship. 25,000 of them, more than the total number of islands in all the other oceans combined. I have tried counting sheep to no avail; counting islands, now there is a challenge. First the big ones, how many can I recall? Australia: too easy. New Zealand: still hardly a challenge. Papua New Guinea: that’s a big one. Japan: too far north, not really my area of speciality. Taiwan. Tonga: big or small? Perhaps it does not fit in this section. Then there are the island groups. The Philippines: if I were more knowledgeable I would name them individually. The islands of Micronesia and Melanesia. The Cook Islands, the Solomons, the Marquesas, and Galapagos. And further north, the Hawaiian cluster, and the icy specks of the Aleutians and the Pribilofs. I do not think that I am doing too well: 25,000 - what have I forgotten? Easter Island: isolated, even by the standards of this company. Fiji, Samoa, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Vanuatu: such evocative names. Palau: I almost forgot. I could go on; I could go smaller: no, really, it was a long dream.
The trade winds and the doldrums conjure up images of high-masted sailboats and seamen in peril; whaling schooners and cargo boats full of exotic spices; voyages of commerce and voyages of discovery. And I, witness to it all, although not from the helm of a mighty vessel, piloting a steady course through uncharted waters, but from down below, beneath the waves, where the secrets remain. Forever the small fish.
Section Four: Shark