Last week, my girlfriend and I watched My Octopus Teacher. It was one of the most beautiful films I have watched—one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It is a documentary, brilliant with long shots of pristine underwater photography. A middle-aged male, South African photographer had become worn and frayed from many years of civilized life, perhaps angry and apathetic toward his family, overall disheveled. To rescue his and his family’s wellbeing from the cult of productivity that had pained them so much, he decided he needed to return to nature. To step back into the cold Atlantic waters that neighbored his childhood home. Not only neighbored, but quite literally bashed against and spilled through the doors during storm surges. His early life was shaped by the intertidal zone of the Storm Coast, nature’s nurture for him was the bouldered waters, the sea palm kelp forests, the deep churning cobalt blue on copper. And so, in the great course of all human epics, he returned to the world of past times to find his self’s axis.

Such a return to nature is troped out the wazoo by tourist industries. Remote and wonderful places like Big Sur, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, San Luis Obispo, etc. are pasted with so many billboards, postcards, online advertisements that the real substance of their nature is virtually erased by the attention to what they mean. People who are obsessed with productivity and the stressed-out pedestrian life will not choose to go to natural places without them being advertised in a way that seems consumeristic. Their attention is warped on focus. The quiet, meaninglessness of nature has no appeal or interest to someone whose life is devoted to its antithesis. (Though, it’s worth noting that nature has its own meaning, too. It would be too much to say nature is meaningless just because it doesn’t mean what we think it means.) Thus, our apprehension of natural spaces is culturally moulded according to productivity methods. It is hard for us to want to connect with environments that aren’t cracked up on stress. So, instead, we crack up the environment. We make it about pictures, about activity, about social standing, about the fact that we run on trails, that we take our dog there, we went *camping.* We pull quotes from Thoreau, Emerson, *John Muir.* People who are from rural places see right through this. They know that authentic nature is not the sense of authenticity, the sense of cutting through. To only see nature in that way is to divorce love from sex.

Yet the man knew that the rough intertidal zone was the way out. He needed nature for restoration, for a sense of wholeness to return. Knowledge of the difference between the seeking of nature as a means to a selfish end and the seeking of nature as a means to a holistic end can only be brought about through direct experience of the natural world. One cannot know how to seek nature’s purity through self-orbiting forays. Neither is freedom from self-orbiting a prerequisite for transformation. What matters is actual transformation in the context of nature. Nature changes you whether you like it or not. When you listen to nature, the voice that is bedrock is not the voice of American transcendentalism or the self-aware sound of stillness. Nature is more ordinary than breathing, more sublime than all words. Nature’s holdfast is not observable directly and yet it interacts with us in nature, as nature.

So this man went out into the ocean regularly to swim. It’s by no means a placid part of the sea. It’s the Storm Coast. Well, he meets this common octopus and then films it for a long while. That’s what the film’s about, and I’m not going to say more than that. I want to talk about the octopus as a creature.

The octopus is perhaps the most intelligent and creative creature on the planet. Most octopuses (not octopi, according to English) live for a short time: females, a year; males, perhaps longer. They are antisocial, spending their entire lives alone. Their mothers die the moment the hundreds of thousands of infants hatch from their egg pods, so they have no intergenerational transmission of knowledge other than the information encoded in their deoxyribonucleic acid. And yet, the octopus learns how to mimic its surroundings, hunt different kinds of prey, use tools all on its own in a short period of time. They can even invent offensive and defensive behavior on the fly.

Imagine if you left a human baby in the wilderness, with a regular supply of milk and perhaps a talking toy so that it wouldn’t feel alone and die from isolation (which is a real cause of infant mortality). Would the baby be able to do all these things? Probably not. We would be like cattle if it weren’t for our society. Communication with other humans makes us wise and innovative. Once we have culture to connect with, or enough knowledge to be independent of culture, we become extremely intelligent and creative beings. But without each other, we would not be nearly as clever as octopuses. They have thousands of suckers that each can taste and be controlled independently, like fingers with tongues at the end. They can conform their skin to the colors and shape of their environment in a fraction of a second. They have a central brain and eight large bundles of nerves at the intersection of each of their tentacles with their head, so that each arm thinks for itself—which is not a bad blueprint for any organization, system, city, etc.: a central governing system where energy-collection and executive control occurs, different branches with their own loosely independent central governing system, then thousands of smaller units that act in sync with the higher hierarchies of control. Separation of power. Federal and state and local intelligence. #TheUSConstitutionIsAnOctopusWithFiftyTentacles

Octopus meat tastes superb, but it is highly unethical to eat them given their mental capacity. The only reason they have not advanced is perhaps their antisocial character. Perhaps such immense cleverness is not capable of great knowledge. Perhaps it takes living on the edge of wisdom and buffoonery to be able to possess the responsibility of great knowledge. Maybe we’re better candidates for space travel and civilization because we’re only just smart enough, just social enough to be able to not do it too quickly. If you flipped a light switch on octopuses’ sociability, they might develop nukes in a hundred years and annihilate each other out of a desire for the best tasting fish, the best hiding hole, or make sharks go extinct so that they can swim without fear.

The octopus lives isolated and withdrawn and yet is a curious, creative creature. You can befriend an octopus if it finds you interesting. They become cuddley and playful if they like you. If they don’t see you’re not a threat, they’re shy and jaded. Their curiosity is so exceedingly great that the activity of another intelligent being fills their senses with delight. They like humans that approach them the right way.

Some might scorn the octopus from being separate from the world, for its great introversion. It lives in a leuisurely state independent of social concerns. Of course, it has to fend for itself—but nevertheless, one could look at an octopus and explain that it is not as valuable as our species, the human race, because it is not capable of relationships with others.

And yet, in another sense, the octopus turns out to be quite sensible, sociable even, if you enter its world. The octopus is not really antisocial or antagonistic to the world at large because it doesn’t try to connect with the entire world in the first place. The octopus is entirely connected to its world. For the octopus, the entire world swirls with sea grass, rushes with bait shoals, crawls with hidden crabs. Every world is in this little world. Whereas for us humans plagued with the modern paranoia of possession and consumption, the sense of entirety is in the realization of every world, the octopus realizes entirety in a microcosm. They have no need to go beyond the confines of their home, because they are perfectly suited for it. This is why when some friendly outsider comes into their world, it is like they belonged there the entire time.

The octopus is a master of deception, and yet there is hardly a more curious and playful creature on the planet. Maybe their lack of society gives them moral freedom: freedom to lie to their enemies, freedom to love their friends. We must admit that the ability to learn and to mimic is the mechanism of empathy. In the octopus, we see the will to power is not antagonism toward positive morality but the embodiment of nature’s hidden truth: freespirited creative empathy obedient to the cycles of birth and death. The octopus does not rebel against its design: it lives in its little world and dies in its little world. If that is not a sign of contentment, I don’t know what is.


October 25, 2020
Arroyo Grande