Some basic facts about the Giant Pacific Octopus:
Each of its 1600 suckers can lift more than 30 lbs, and
They are easily bored and become restless without new stimuli, and
Will regularly escape their enclosures in captivity if their needs aren’t met, or sometimes even if they are.
We have reached a difficult part of the year. The holidays are always stressful; this year, the Thanksgiving-Hannukah-Christmas-New Year’s continuum is for obvious reasons more fraught than usual. For many people the core question is no longer “can I keep my relationships intact with the people I love if we are suddenly packed into each other’s spaces for a few weeks while under the pressure of trying to please everyone,” it’s “will my participating in the holidays at all cause the deaths of people I care about, or even people I’ve never met?” Despite what your Instagram feed might tell you it is completely reasonable to be conflicted about this, to feel guilty and sad and lonely at the prospect of missing out on one Christmas out of a finite number you’re granted in this life, to agonize over the risk calculations and incubation period math to see if you might pull off a holiday miracle.
I don’t know about you all but I’m starting to feel a little bit like a Giant Pacific Octopus. I feel desperate for new stimuli, for experiences and comfort, and I am just about ready to try to make a break for the door of my enclosure (the lock of which I figured out without any trouble, no big deal). That some octopuses who escape never find their way back to their enclosures and die in the escape attempt only increases the length I am willing to stretch this simile.
But for all its demands regarding the quality of its surroundings, the octopus is also remarkably adaptable—a colorblind creature that can mimic a dazzling rainbow of shades. For the past nine months we have all been asked to do the same: to bear up under new circumstances without the tools to do so. To survive and get by on ingenuity alone, stripped of all that we should have at our disposal in a just world.
It is as yet unclear exactly what the newest coronavirus relief package will look like, as both Republican and Democratic legislators remain divided within their parties as to the funding numbers and the targets. But if the language of the most likely current proposals is any indicator, nothing that’s coming is worth holding your breath for.
…it’s already clear that any relief package that might emerge from [negotiations] will be too little too late. Twenty-five million Americans have taken a severe economic hit. Fifty-four million Americans are experiencing food insecurity. Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty over the course of the pandemic, to say nothing of those who were already below the line. Five million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance in the middle of a public health crisis. Uneven communication about and application of the law has resulted in a continual wave of evictions in spite of a federal eviction moratorium.
…Congress’s months-long impasse has amounted to a near-total abandonment of the American people in their time of greatest need — leaving them to fend for themselves and rely on each other through informal kinship and charity networks.
This is not good for any of us, by the way, even if you have a roof and a full fridge. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s how flimsy a house of cards our Great American Enterprise is built upon, how pathetic our Norms and Values really are in the face of something so existential. Amia Srinivasan writes of the octopus:
An animal with a soft body and no shell cannot expect to live long, and so harmful mutations that take effect only once it has been alive for a couple of years will soon spread through the population. The result is a life that is experientially rich but conspicuously brief.
Hard not to read that these days and say “Yeah, buddy.”
Over the weekend my wife and I watched Palm Springs, an Andy Samberg reimagining of Groundhog Day: what if you not only got caught in a time loop that caused you to endlessly relive the wedding day of your awful girlfriend’s best friend, but you accidentally dragged a few other people into the loop over time, too? It seems like it’s no mystery why it became such a hit in a year like this, besides the fact that we’re all inside watching stuff more than usual—it’s the story of America’s middle layer in 2020. How many numberless, colorless days of the same vague shape have each of us passed this year, those of us fortunate enough not to be out on the front lines in retail or restaurant or hospital work? Perhaps the activities vary slightly from day-to-day, but they still exist within a narrow set of social and geographic constraints, with a very limited cast of characters able to participate in them around you.
That’s Palm Springs’ Nyles, too. After untold thousands of trips through the loop, in which he can neither die nor sleep—meaning he can only go so far, and has met seemingly every other person within his possible radius of travel—he adopts an attitude that is some mixture of Zen and childish: None of this matters, and since I can’t change it, I just won’t think about it anymore. By the time he accidentally gets the sister of the bride stuck in the loop with him, he doesn’t even seem to remember his life Before, unable to answer the most basic questions, like what he used to do for work. Enviable, almost, to contemplate; through Nyles we see what a life might look like if each day contained the promise of the exact same amount of money, to be replenished as if by magic overnight regardless of how much had been saved or spent the previous day. And, of course, without having to do any work to get it.
But of course there’s nothing much desirable about immortality, either. It’s only the finitude of all this that makes any of it worth a thing, as Nyles comes to know by experiencing the inverse. And for those of us outside of cinematic time loops: how cruel that our precious finitude can be so quickly and thoroughly despoiled by the people in charge of it. A Giant Pacific Octopus lives four years, at most, but in those four years experiences a richly textured life that we are now pretty sure it is capable of engaging with on an intelligent, creative, knowing level. Time, light, color, sound—the octopus experiences it all in ways we cannot comprehend, its brain diffuse and its sensory organs alien. During a human pandemic the quality of life of the octopus does not change, unless maybe an aquarium or two shuts down.
But our lives do change, the quality of them lessened dramatically, and those responsible, as the saying goes, have names and addresses. Last night I had a small role in the Democratic Socialists of America’s Medicare for All campaign relaunch; one of the other speakers was an oncology nurse from Texas who shared a story with us that puts a neat bow on how ghastly and perverse the systems that govern our lives really are. A cancer patient on her ward had forgotten to take her anti-nausea meds before taking her four chemo pills and threw them up almost immediately. She began to weep, and when the nurse told her not to worry about the mess, she said “Each of those pills costs $7,000. I’m crying because I just threw up $28,000 onto the floor.” She was left with a fun set of choices: have the patient skip a crucial round of chemo, subject her to another $28,000 bill by getting her four new pills, or sweep up the pills and vomit from the floor and feed them back to a person with a compromised immune system.
I don’t know about you but all of this makes me feel like I’m coming unmoored. I have so few illusions, but I keep losing pieces of them anyway. The runner and essayist Devin Kelly asked it this way:
What happens if what you once used to make sense of things no longer helps you make sense of things? What happens if the patterns and habits and metaphors we lean on do not serve us in the moments we need them? What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?
I think the answer must lie, in part, in a fuller understanding of that finitude I spoke of before. If you’ve read this newsletter before you know how I feel about individualist solutions to our problems compared to collective ones, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t individual work to be done. How much more quickly might things change if we more deeply reckoned with the meaning of mortality—what it takes from us and what it can impart to us, and how the systems that govern our lives steal that one beautiful life from so many billions of people?
Because in the end, it’s the billions that are important, all those other people out there somewhere in whose lives we must find as much value as in our own. Nothing else will do. Kelly closes that piece with the following thought:
Today, I can still hear the echo of my friend Andrew singing Kenny Rogers from a mile away, somewhere on a farm in Georgia. You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them. How apt. I think you hold for as long as you can the moments that don’t feel like you have to choose between holding and folding. I wish I had been there, right next to him, instead of where I was. But it’s alright now. Because even though I’m no longer out there, in the middle of some unimaginable distance, I’m still here, which is a kind of out there, which is where all of you are. Each of you, in each of your out theres, trying to love the ocean you’re in.
I’m going to keep trying to remember that, too, because it’s what gives me the strength to keep fighting. There are lessons to be learned out there—from octopuses, from runners, from whoever. One such person we might learn from is the actor and comedian Rob Delaney, who lost his infant son to a brain tumor a few years ago. He reflected on that experience for BBC Radio 4 recently in a way that felt entirely relatable, even if his pain is unimaginable to me. (And yes, this clip is going to do exactly what you think it’s going to do to you. You’ve been warned.)
Really…something, huh? Here’s what turned me into a mess:
I don’t know if Henry’s death made me love his brothers more, but it certainly made me love them better. Because when I hold them now, I know what they really are. They’re temporary gatherings of stardust, just like Henry. They won’t be here forever. They’re here now, and it is my staggering privilege to hold them and smell them and stare at them.
They’re here now. They won’t be here forever. Let’s do something with that first sentence so that the second sounds like a blessing and not a curse.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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So much perspective above, yours and others'... Delaney's 2-minute video is courageous as hell. Add to your viewing list: "My Octopus Teacher." It's "out there," as it were, but I think you'll be captivated by it if you haven't seen it already.