It’s actually the 6th when I’m writing this post, but I made a deal with myself that I’d blog all the way through April by the end of this week, and guess what? It’s the end of the week! Because I’m out of ideas, I decided that I’d just copy and paste an essay I wrote from creative nonfiction here for you- it’s relatively short for me, I promise. And it’s fun. So I hope you enjoy!
I was three years old the first time I ever knew fear. The family had taken a day trip to the Seattle Aquarium, and it must have been our last time, because we would be moving to Colorado not long after, where there were no nearby aquariums, or significant bodies of water, or anything familiar. I don’t remember much of this day trip, and even what I’ll be retelling here might be highly fabricated after seventeen years of reminiscing. What I do know is this: there was an octopus.
This might be completely false, but I distinctly remember my three-year-old legs trotting across a narrow, elevated bridge with a see-through floor, where you could look down and gaze into the trench of terror that was the octopus tank. I also remember my brother trying to climb over the edge of the bridge, but that might be me superimposing another memory over this one. He couldn’t have been more than a year and a half at this point, though to be fair to my memory, he tried to climb over things into water a lot. How he lived past adolescence is beyond me. But back to the octopus. I was peering down into that seemingly endless tank at the massive orange beast, casually floating just a seconds’ plunge away from my dry little feet, feeling my tiny heart pumping anxiously.
But whether or not my brother tried to climb over the rail into the tank, and whether or not there actually was a bridge with a transparent floor (although that one I’m pretty positive about), there was definitely an octopus, and it was gazing pensively up at me with a look of murder in its large eyes. It was massive, at least five times the size of me, and the way its eight long legs stretched and twisted made me absolutely sure that if I were to ever find myself next to it, or one of its kin, I would most certainly die a slow, horrifying death.
This fear of the octopus ebbed slightly after our move to Colorado, far away from oceans and aquariums and basically all forms of precipitation. Completely surrounded by dirt, mountains, and desert, I grew up relatively happily, all but forgetting about my deep-seated fear of being both crushed and drowned slowly to death in the clutches of an octopus. But it was always there, in the back of my mind, writhing its tentacles in anticipation for my land-lubbing flesh.
Having just turned twenty, however, I decided that enough was enough. Superstitions and phobias were no longer cute, like when I was a kid. They were just things that people didn’t like you admitting at parties. And I was going to conquer this one, this near-crippling fear of the mysterious octopus, if it was the last thing I did, or so I told myself. The Art of War teaches us that “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.†So that’s exactly what I would do. I would overcome my fear of the unknown horror that was the octopus, and I would win a thousand battles. Or something like that.
Did you know that the male pillow octopus grows to only a few centimeters, while its female counterpart can stretch further than six feet? You go, girl!
The octopus has a complex nervous system and can wrestle a shark, as evidenced by the 2009 film epic Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. And even though the two prehistoric terrors documented in the film died in battle, rendering the fight a tie, sharks can’t reach out and grab things. Octopus arms can break through plexiglass and imitate human limbs by making its arms semi-rigid and bending them in particular places. Not that they need to. Even worse, however, is the fact that scientists have found that each arm -calling them tentacles is actually false because tentacles usually only have suckers on their tips- has a mind of its own. To test this, researchers cut the nerves between the octopuses’ actual brain and one of its arms, and found that the arm behaved exactly the same as if the connection remained intact. Which is perfect. So not only will the octopus as a whole want me dead, but its eight instruments of strangulation and stomach-clenching dread also have it out for my continued existence. Maybe knowing my enemy isn’t such a great idea.
The only fear that was ever comparable to that aquarium trip for me was the fear of going to middle school. In fourth grade, the school counselor, a grey haired man called Mr. Cowles, sat all the kids down in a circle and talked about the next stages of our public school life. School shootings were probably brought up once a meeting, because Mr. Cowles was the worst elementary school counselor ever, and I was so terrified of continuing my education that I got a pass to leave the room every time the counselor appeared in the doorway. Even though I got over that fear fairly quickly, since I had to face it more quickly than I had to face the octopus, I can still remember the chest-pounding panic that appeared any time my elementary school graduation came up. I had no idea what to expect, so of course I expected the worst. In the back of my mind I always knew it was unlikely that I would be the victim of a school shooting- I was a quiet nerd, more likely to be friends with the future shooter than a target. In fact, when my middle school did have a near-school-shooting incident, complete with a hit list and physical guns on school property, I was the furthest thing from the would-be killer’s minds, though thankfully I didn’t know them past being on the same bus route. But the lingering uncertainty before all that overrode that rather morbid logic for a long time.
Remember the male pillow octopus we talked about earlier, the tiny one? Well, what he lacks in size he makes up for in creativity. These little buggers will rip off the poisonous tentacles of Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish -which they are immune to- and wield them as swords to keep predators at bay. As disturbing as that is -imagine ripping off the arm of one of your enemies and using it to fight off your other enemies- is it wrong that I find this defense mechanism kind of adorable? The things are only a couple centimeters long! I bet the male pillow octopus was never afraid of no school shooter. It doesn’t matter whether or not he knows what’s around the next corner- he’s got a motherfucking jellyfish arm sword. Male pillow octopuses probably laugh in the face of the unknown threats their futures may hold.
We know that since each of an octopuses legs, not tentacles, has a mind of its own, maybe they won’t have mercy on me, but the main brain might. One intelligence trait of the octopus that has been circulating YouTube for a while is their ability to camouflage into almost any background. Their entire bodies are covered with pigmented cells called chromatophores, each of which contain three sacks of colors and are surrounded by muscles that can control how the pigments are displayed by either relaxing or contracting. Think of it like a balloon; when it’s loose, the color is small and concentrated, but when you stretch it out the color spreads and expands.
Every one of these cells is controlled independently by the nervous system, allowing for an incredible amount of control and complexity for the range of colors. This also means that the octopus can change its appearance in less than a second. As if I wasn’t already freaked out enough; not only can an octopus completely envelop me in its arms of death, but it can also sneak up on me, like a lioness waiting patiently for the prey it stalks to become complacent.
Octopuses aren’t just strong and smart, though. They’re also documented as having distinct personalities, earning them names like Dolores Umbridge (for her aggression), Harry (for being easygoing), Leisure Suit Larry (for being touchy and, frankly, kind of a pervert), Emily Dickinson (for being shy), and, finally, Lucretia McEvil, for once completely trashing her tank. Gulp.
The Greek god of fear, dread, and terror was Deimos. The Encyclopedia Britannica only has one small entry on him, “association with Ares.†Ares, god of war, is his father, and they were often written as going into war with one another, along with Deimos’ twin brother, Phobos, the god of panic and fear. The twins together also became represented by the fear of loss. In my case, they represent the fear of the loss of my precious, precious life.
I am not the first to fear the mystery of the octopus, however. A Hawaiian creation myth holds that the current universe is the last of a series of universes, and the octopus is the last remaining survivor of a previous, alien universe. And then there’s the Kraken.
Almost every seagoing story, old or new, jokes about the Kraken. In German, kraken literally means octopus, though it also refers to the mythological sea monster. A mythological sea monster that happens to be a giant octopus. The legend of the Kraken has been around since at least the 1200s, and originated off the coasts of Norway and Iceland. It’s said that the creature was so large that it was sometimes mistaken for an island, and the real danger was not the kilometers long tentacles -arms, sorry, arms- but the whirlpool the massive creature left in its wake, sucking ships and sailors alike into the dark depths of the sea.
After a good hour of Googling pictures of the Kraken and thoroughly terrifying myself to the core, though, I came back to my initial text research, a much safer endeavor, and by far the most interesting thing I learned about the octopus is the fact that it they have three, count-em three, hearts.
Two pump blood into the octopuses’ lungs, and the third pumps it throughout the rest of the body. An octopuses blood, in addition, is not red like most mammals, but blue. The circulatory system of an octopus, because of its many hearts, is closed off, meaning that this blue blood is contained in vessels rather than just filling up their body. This fact doesn’t really mean anything until you consider that because of the circuitry being closed off and because there are three blood-pumping organs instead of the usual one, when an octopus gets excited or scared, it undergoes momentary cardiac arrest. This might be exactly what the Art of War was trying to say- this could be the key to my successful battle against these undersea monsters. It’s small, and it might not even work, but it’s hope that I need, not a guarantee.
With all these new facts rattling around in my head, my thoughts immediately go back to the first experience I ever had with an octopus, looking down into a massive tank of death and fear. I vividly remember the first stab of fear as it traveled from my brain and down through my nervous system and into my heart, where I’ve carried it ever since, but I can’t help but wonder. Did that octopus look up from its tank to see my small face peering down at it and feel the same fear? In its proportional main brain and all the subsequent brains in its arms, did it register a similar feeling of dread at the strange, upright creature gazing down at it, ready to drop in at any moment? When my three-year-old afro’d head and my three-year-old beating heart hovered tentatively above the only home it had ever known, did it shudder in fear of whatever the hell kind of monster I was? And did I, my single heart thumping wildly, cause the creature beneath me to have a minor heart attack in one of its three? Maybe we both must learn to live with it, this fear of what we cannot possibly know completely. This fear that never really goes away, because there is so much in the world yet to be possible. And maybe that is the only battle either of us ever needs to win, me and the octopus. The one that allows us to go on, even when terror grips our four hearts with such strength that we don’t know if it’s even worth it anymore. But in my experience, it probably is. I just hope that octopus believes it too.
