Sentience through the looking-glass

An encounter with a novelist, an octopus and the past at the Museum of Life Sciences

If this is a museum, it’s not like any I’ve visited before. No ticket booths, no gift shop, just a dark corridor and a heavy door. Inside, an even stranger scene: less a museum than a mausoleum. Essentially, it’s a single room, lined with dark wood panels and shelves like the library of a vacated Victorian manor house. In place of old books, old dead animals: hundreds of them, stuffed, floating in formaldehyde or stripped to the skeleton. Nothing stirs except motes of dust in the shafts of sunlight from the high windows.

Adding to the timewarp atmosphere, this is only the second time I’ve encountered Rob in person since our first meeting more than 20 years ago. Then, I was a shy 17-year-old still living with my parents in the remote family home miles from anywhere, commuting by bike to college and starting to eke out a sense of belonging in English Lit. Ours was not the kind of family to have dinner guests, let alone literary ones, so when Dad arrived home from his day’s gravedigging with a young American novelist at his side, it was more than a little exciting. Not quite having Kerouac to tea, but as close as we were going to get. Little did I know then, as we sat around the table together – me, Mum, Dad and Rob – that our inquisitive, bright-eyed visitor was moulding from my father the character of Henry Chalk, protagonist for his debut novel The Gravedigger.

Today we’re here to interrogate the museum specimens, or let them ask questions of us, and then, if we feel so moved, to respond in writing. As I wander among the taxidermy and skeletons, it dawns on me that Life with a capital ‘L’ has nothing to do with aliveness, individual lives or grievability; the elephant in the room, aside from the actual elephant, is precisely the absence of life.¹ The bones and bodies here, though arranged in postures suggestive of movement, are stock still and unstoried, and nothing breaks the silence – except Rob, who slaps a box of three iced doughnuts on the table in front of us and tells us we’re not allowed one until we’ve earned it through concerted attention.

Unbeknown to Rob, my attention has been primed in advance. This morning, before travelling up to London, I heard a man on the radio comparing different animals’ minds.² He was pulling at threads on the frayed edges of human exceptionalism, unpicking our tendency to believe that the human mind is so high-functioning as to be in a category of its own. It is more sensible, he advised, to regard what we Homo sapiens have as ‘a little cloud of points’ among an immense constellation of animal intelligences – ‘a space of possible minds’. Even some spineless seabed-dwellers have observable ‘aspects of consciousness’, he added, and drew attention to the fact UK law had recently been changed to formally recognise that crabs, octopus and lobsters are sentient beings. A major legal breakthrough for molluscs – and now, surely, my ticket to a Crispy Creme, as I turn to Rob and ask: ‘Have you got an octopus?’

Inadvertently I disturb him; he gets up from where he had been staring intently at something that looked to me like an antique cocktail stirrer but was apparently a whale parasite, pushes in his chair and ushers me past. And there it is in the far reaches of the room: a small but unmistakable pickled octopus. Encased in glass and minimally labelled ‘Eledone, R13’, the eight arms have been artfully splayed like a wind-lifted skirt, eight concentric rows of pristine suckers unfurled beneath its jelly-bulb head – its whole underside on display for all to see. An undignified final pose, you might think, if you were tempted to project human sensitivities.

As it is, I’m unmoved by this englobed Eledone moschata, just as I – despite being a nearly-vegan who hasn’t eaten flesh in 20 years – felt only vaguely disgusted by the platefuls of baby octopus I saw being served up in Barcelona a few years ago. The first animal I ever saw preserved like this had a far more lasting impact. It was a newborn labrador puppy – cutely curled up, eyes shut tight – floating in a jar of sepia-tinted preservative on a shelf in our school science class: the memory still makes me shudder 25 years on.³ But really, what’s the difference? I’d like to say it’s because a puppy is more intelligent than an octopus but I know that’s not true.

I know, thanks to Amia Srinivasan’s wonderful 2017 essay ‘The Sucker, the Sucker!’, that an octopus has as many neurons as a dog, albeit most of them in its body – 10,000 per sucker, meaning ‘the arms can taste and smell, and exhibit short-term memory’.⁴ In applying this embodied intelligence, octopuses can navigate mazes, solve puzzles, unscrew jars, and in one extraordinary case, even shoot jets of water at aquarium lights to short-circuit the electricity. Despite all this dog-surpassing ingenuity, the octopus’s mind – its cognitive ‘cloud of points’ – remains an almost total mystery to us. On the opposite end of the relatability spectrum to man’s best friend, octopuses are, writes Srinivasan, ‘the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’

Not a problem for Netflix, of course, which would have us believe that a person can profoundly relate to, bond with, and even be schooled by an underwater alien. All you need is a pair of flippers and flexible working hours. We watched My Octopus Teacher as a family on Christmas Eve, and it’d be fair to say I struggled to get into the spirit. Granted, the footage of the protagonist’s undeniably intelligent behaviour – disguising itself as a ball of shells, escaping from a shark by riding on its back, etc – were genuinely gasp-inducing. But the story’s heavy-handed conceit – we’re meant to believe we’re watching the blooming of an intimate, quasi- romantic relationship between one man and one octopus – felt like an insult to my human intelligence.

Blatantly contrived from hundred of hours of filming by an executive team of slick story-tellers, the film attempts to trick us into sentimentality – feeling for the sake of feeling – by tangling other-worldly creatures in all-too-human projections of companionship and pedagogy.⁵ Netflix audience and molluscs alike deserve better: we deserve to have our intelligence taken seriously. I don’t want to fall in love with an octopus or wrap it in a story that doesn’t concern it; I want to take to heart its capacity to feel its life: to want a home, to sense threat and, above all, to suffer. But how to feel sympathy for creatures that are so unsympathetic they won’t even look us in the eye?

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Halfway between my first meeting with Rob and now, my dad died from cancer aged 65. Standing there in the silence of the museum, staring at the once-sentient octopus, my mind drifts back to my childhood obsession with underwater life, and once again the spectre of my father is at my side. I imagine the terrible weight of his disapproval had he ever found out about my reign of aquatic terror between the ages of about 11 and 14. Dad never wanted me to keep live creatures in my bedroom, as he hated seeing any animal cooped up, but after much begging (via Mum) he eventually relented. Once the tank was installed, I’d buy a new fish or amphibian and ogle it intently for a few days before just as quickly losing interest. Then came the neglect. Over-feeding, under-feeding, rank water, floating bodies, over and over again.

My quest for novelty amid the carnage was insatiable: once regular fish lost their appeal, I went in for worm-like loaches, but they turned out to be smart enough for suicide, leaping from the tank to suffocate on my bedroom floor. Freshwater crabs did the same – I’ll never forget the sickening crack of the shell beneath my heel on the landing, and the relief that it was me, not dad, who stumbled upon the escapee. Two baby turtles whose normal food bored me I treated to frozen clumps of water fleas, choking them to death.

The worst was yet to come: a pair of painfully shy red-bellied piranhas that I forgot to feed until one chomped an entire flank off the other. Miraculously the half-eaten one survived, regrew scales and righted itself in a flash, but that didn’t lessen the shock or the fear that Dad would find out. It had finally gone too far: my aquarium days were over. After being offered ‘free to a good home’ in the Friday-Ad, those last two victims barely bothered to bite through the net as I plopped them into the bucket of the kindly school teacher who wanted them for his classroom (slightly less gruesome than a preserved puppy, I suppose). Let’s hope the kids learnt from that maimed piranha, its concave flank, my terrible example.

I’m still troubled by how I treated those creatures all those years ago, so much so I haven’t kept a pet since. You could say I learned the hard way, but I think it’s more complicated than that. What does it take to imagine oneself into the sensate body of a non-human being, be it furred, feathered, finned or besuckered? Looking back, I’m sure it was more than just a dread of my father’s judgement that made me change my ways. He and I were not close – his idea of a dad, if he had one, meant authority, not affection – but this made his sensitivity towards animals all the more entrancing.

It was something that Rob must have picked up on too, I remember as I hear his pen scratching away behind me, because it’s there in the life of his fictional gravedigger Henry Chalk. The first major turning point in the novel comes when Henry walks into the sitting room of his cottage to find his beloved terrier Jack lifeless in his cot. Devastated by the loss of his companion, he digs a grave, and as he lowers Jack’s body in, we bear witness to his inner turmoil: ‘He wanted to check Jack’s pulse once more. His father’s voice stopped him: No point in worrying about things you can’t change.’

Rob can’t have known this, but the only time I saw my dad cry (except when he himself was dying) was when our dear old Jack Russell Robbie died. When it came to the animals in the fields, streams and woodland around our home, Dad’s sympathies were inconsistent and often contradictory. His parents had been hard-nosed farmers, deeply rooted in rural Sussex for generations, and he was immersed in livestock-rearing, hunting, shooting and fishing all his life. It was tantamount to apostasy, therefore, when aged about 50 he threw in his lot with vegetarians. ‘They’ve got a point!’ he’d proclaim forcefully over his ham and chips, adding quietly that it was too late for him – abstaining now would be a hypocrisy too far, given the life he had lived. In his latter years he grew so averse to killing animals for sport that he locked away his guns for good. Witnessing this improbable shift, Dad’s change of heart as he wrestled with the conduct of his younger self, had a greater impact on me, I’m inclined to think, than any philosophical case or campaign for animal rights.

As the octopus floats inert in its glass case in front of me and George Bradford mingles with Henry Chalk in my mind, another character drifts onto the scene. Her name is Elizabeth Costello and she shares with Henry Chalk this liminal space between fiction and reality, between specimen and sentience. Costello is a (fictional) novelist whose strong beliefs about animals are inseparable from those of her creator, the (real) novelist John Coetzee. In Coetzee’s novella The Lives of Animals, Costello is invited to give a speech at the university where her son John is a professor. She elects to speak not about her novels but about animals, and once at the lectern she gets straight to the point:

‘For instants at a time... I know what it is like to be a corpse... All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract... but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death’

I picture my father at work: the grave three-quarters dug, just his head visible above ground, before he disappears from view, stooping again to slice at the earth. Corpses were his livelihood, he dealt with them day in, day out in the silence and solitude of cemetery or churchyard: how could he not conceive of himself one day taking their place on the other side of the spade? Was it this awareness that softened his attitude to animals? Costello makes no bones: if we can ‘think our own death’ then we are capable of thinking ourselves into the being of any embodied soul. This is no greater an imaginative leap, she insists, than that we make every time we engage with a work of fiction: ‘If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.’

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A few days after our museum visit, another memory comes back to me: Dad working in a grave again, but this time as he stoops I realise that it’s not to dig. One hand remains resting on the spade, the other reaches down to the freshly exposed mud and from it plucks between thumb and forefinger a long, elastic earthworm. In one movement, with the swiftness and precision of a surgeon, he extracts the worm and flicks it safe into the graveside grass. Why would he pause like this, delay his work, for the sake of a worm – a creature that keeps wriggling even after being cut in two?⁶ So inexplicable is the image that I begin to suspect it’s a false memory, a tentacular tangle of past and present – so I WhatsApp Mum to check. Almost as soon as the tick turns blue my phone is ringing.

‘Yes, he did, absolutely,’ Mum gasps, rushing past hellos, ‘and it’s so funny that you should ask that today.’ I wasn’t sure what my question might evoke, so I’m relieved by the levity in her voice. ‘It’s something I hadn’t thought about for years – until last weekend.’ She had been outside in the garden with her partner Phil planting a new rose, she explains, and Phil was spade-aloft when suddenly she shouted at him to stop. ‘I’d seen a worm! I had to get it out of the way.’ It’s not the coincidence that delights her, I realise, but the confirmation that, in that curious act of mercy, Dad was still with her, insisting on life. What stays with me most vividly, though, is the image of the man with the spade, frozen in motion yet sensing in a heartbeat the forces at hand. ‘Straight away Phil turned to me and said, “Is that something George used to do?”’

This essay was first published in Issue 16, ‘Museum Pieces’, of Riptide Journal.

1. The importance of grievability in how we conceive of life is borrowed from Judith Butler, who writes: ‘Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life.’

2. The science writer Philip Ball, speaking about The Book of Minds.

3. Our science teacher Mrs Roe – a remarkable polyglot Asian-Ugandan who had fled Idi Amin’s regime – never did explain why she possessed a pickled puppy, nor why she kept it in plain sight at just above eye level in our classroom.

4. ‘The Sucker, The Sucker’ by Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 17, 7 September 2017.

5. The makers of My Octopus Teacher are surprisingly open about the highly selective nature of their editing. They even admit that they witnessed the killing of two whales at a nearby octopus fishery but decided not to include it in the film for fear it would ‘overwhelm the [film’s] more profound message... around the transformative power of nature’.

6. Before writing this piece, I’d believed that earthworms survive being bisected. False comfort, according to Earthworm Watch: ‘If you cut an earthworm in half, the parts will not become two worms. However, earthworms can survive if their tail end is cut off, and can regrow their segments but earthworms generally cannot survive if the front part of their body between the head and the saddle is cut as this is where their major organs are.’