The Limits of Planet earth: Octopus Kinship on a Terra-Aquatic Planet

ABSTRACT

Within Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene exists a ‘rich terran muddle’, an increasing earthliness that replaces Earth, and ignores ocean. In this environmental epoch partial to notions of Earth entirely focused on terrestriality, the octopus prompts a new awareness of the planet, where terracentric philosophies accommodate oceanic perspectives. This terra-aquatic reframing of Earth’s rhetorical topographies manifests the octopus as an archetype of the dichotomy of strangeness and familiarity in the emergence of human/non-human entanglements. Identifying the processes by which humans have alien-ated the octopus aids in the acknowledgement, and acceptance, of networks of symbiotic relationships on a shared planet. Contemporary displays of intimacy with the tentacular other in Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum (2019), Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (2015) and the Netflix film My Octopus Teacher (2020) join in a cephalopodic union to guide meditations of what it means to inhabit planet Earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecocriticism
• octopus
• blue humanities
• terrestriality
• kinship
• dwelling

earth as we know it

Contemporary, so-called Western, media and environmental studies have traditionally displayed a conceptual bias through an approach to planet Earth almost exclusively focused on terrestrial spaces and their inhabitants. Recent appreciations of the octopus and examinations of the creature’s similarities with humans show that physiologically, octopuses and humans share cognitive complexity, a closed circulatory system and eyes with iris, retina and lens. Phylogenetically, however, these beings are extremely different. Such comparisons serve as prompts towards a fuller awareness of the planet’s diversity, one that forces previously terracentric philosophies to adopt new, terra-aquatic modes of thinking that include oceanic perspectives. This newly terra-aquatic reframing of Earth’s ‘rhetorical topographies’ (Olson and Messeri 2015) manifests the octopus as an archetype of the dichotomy of strangeness and familiarity in the emergence of human/non-human entanglements. Identifying the processes by which humans have made the octopus into an alien to Earth, thereby bolstering the animal above the status of a mere symbol and to the status of living, Earth-dwelling creature, aids in acknowledging and accepting networks of symbiotic relationships on a shared planet. Contemporary displays of intimacy with the tentacular other in Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum (2019), Sy Montgomery’s memoir The Soul of an Octopus (2015) and the Netflix film My Octopus Teacher (2020) join in a cephalopodic union to guide meditations of what it means to inhabit planet Earth.

First, we may distinguish between the planet’s two conceptualisations, usually facilely combined in its singular name. Terra firma,¹ or lowercase e earth, defines the solar system’s terrestrial planets. earth exists on Mercury, Venus and Mars. Under geocentric modes dependent on Earthly semblance, this categorisation separates the terrestrial planets from their Jovian counterparts. When viewed from space, however, Earth’s conspicuous abundance of water allows it to claim the title of ‘Blue Planet’ – a moniker the planet’s terrestrial designation fails adequately to consider. James Lovelock favours this top-down evaluation of Earth, concurring with Arthur C. Clarke: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean’ (Lovelock 1990, 102).

A concentration on Earth’s earthliness guides recent ecological philosophies. Within Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, for instance, exists a ‘rich terran muddle’ (Haraway 2016, 53). Haraway translates the Greek chthonios to ‘of, in, or under the earth and the seas’ (53), but this inclusion of the aquatic in the classic translation (‘of the earth or underworld’²) is no more than an appendix. Under Haraway’s definition, the chthonic Gorgons, imagined as sea demons with sea deities for parents in Hesiod’s Theogony, ‘erupt more than emerge; they are intrusive in a sense akin to what Stengers understands by Gaia’ (Haraway 2016, 54). In this representation, Gaia is ‘the one who intrudes’ (Stengers 2015, 43) quite literally, and does not therefore naturally belong. What, then, does this intrusion suggest?

If truly chthonic, in Haraway’s application of the term, no intrusion would be necessary, as the sea Gorgons would be included in Earthbound life. Thus, in Haraway’s model, the creatures of the sea, including the octopus, are not simply creatures of their own but exist as figures through which to understand the earthbound. earthbound companions inhabit Haraway’s Terrapolis: a multispecies niche ‘rich in world’ and ‘recuperating terra’s pluriverse’ (Haraway, 11). At the same time, the ‘material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters’ exhumes a ‘laterally, semiotically, and genealogically’ (103) common flesh. In the Chthulucene, human beings ground themselves alongside earthly tentacular creatures:

The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. (32)

While Haraway mentions ‘squid’ and ‘jellyfish’ in her list of the ‘tentacular’, these creatures, like the Gorgons, are merely intruders into her terracentric space. These tangible, physiological recognition points intertwine the human and the non-human to propagate ‘unexpected collaboration and combinations’ (4). However, as human/non-human kinships become increasingly earthly, the terra-aquatic cthonios loses its aqua, and an intensifying greenness replaces a ‘yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth’ (Haraway 1995, 174). Consequently, tentacularity, the quality of possessing tentacles, becomes a distinctive feature of united land-beings and the resultant ‘biotic and abiotic powers of [lowercase e] earth’ (Haraway 2016, 55), all the while ignoring the aquatic. As the current chronostratigraphic time unit (whatever its name may be) archives recent anthropological changes in the Earth’s physical substances and structures, the Anthropocene (or Capitalocene, or Chthulucene) remains inherently terran. Terrapolis replaces Earth, represents earth, and ignores the ocean, in an attempt to ‘make everything go according to it — | feelings, food, flight, ordinariness, the very earth’ (Shaughnessy 2019, 9, ll. 17–18).

In the process of ‘keeping the “Anthropocene” connected to its spatial absences and physical others’ (Olson and Messeri 2015, 28), however, Earth’s rhetorical topographies require an expansion to include both land and water. Spatial demarcations establish the alien-ation of the octopus since the creature exists within the ‘outer environment’ (28) of the deep sea: an ‘other environment to define what counts and matters as the human [inner] environment’ (29). A reappraisal of Earth’s macroscale divisions of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ manifests the possibility of the alien within familiar spaces, and vice versa. Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of An Octopus underscores the octopus as both of this world and, as shaped concerning its alien strangeness, out of it:

Octopuses represent the great mystery of the Other. They seem completely alien, and yet their world — the ocean — comprises far more of the Earth (70 percent of its surface area; more than 90 percent of its habitable space) than does land. (Montgomery 2015, 2)

It, therefore, takes a reframing of the Earth for symbolic portrayals of the octopus to emphasise ‘alternative geographies [to] show how the alien need not be confined to dwelling outside of the familiar’ (Olson and Messeri 2015, 38–39).

A queer tug-lust for the alien

The ‘queer tug-lust for what already is, who already am | but other of it’ (Shaughnessy 2019, 3, ll. 21–22) exhibited in Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum arises from a desire to know recognisable unknowns intimately. As Olson and Messeri suggest in ‘Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch’, ‘even with our feet planted firmly on Earth, images and imaginings of the more expansive and complex ecosystem through which the planet moves are impossible to turn away from’ (39). Within this expansiveness, taxonomies classifying the other depend primarily on divergences from the same, placing the unknown along a spectrum of (in)accessibility to and difference from the human, for ‘interconnection implies separateness and difference’ (Morton 2010, 47). In this ‘world of beings – human and otherwise – suspended in a kind of epistemological and ontological limbo’ (Azzarello 2012, 80), the uncanny functions as ‘[an] oscilla[tion] between a melancholic understanding of the world as fundamentally unknowable and an enchanted (also embodied) encounter with it as rich and strange’ (Huggan and Marland 2020, 6).

On planet earth, humans perceive the octopus as an alien. The eight-legged organism’s evolutionary history positions it closest to human conceptualisations of extraterrestrial life: a sentient creature sharing minimal ancestry with wo/man (Goldhill 2017). The unexplored depths of the Earth’s oceans embrace this other-than-human, other-than-animal creature in a realm beyond simple human access, complicating the ‘material and imaginative possibilities of our earthly lives’ (Huggan and Marland 2020, 4). However, human life in the Anthropocene cannot wholly detach itself from the ocean‘s seemingly alien creatures despite the water‘s physical and conceptual breadth. In his analysis of J.M. Ledgard’s ocean-exploration thriller Submergence, Pieter Vermeulen states that literature ‘explore[s] strategies to negotiate and translate alien life’ (Vermeulen 2017, 184) and, consequently, ‘come[s] to terms with a new situation in which human and natural history have irrevocably begun to leak into each other’ (184). As the Anthropocene complicates this blend of human and natural histories, human attraction to the alien epitomises attempts to expand present networks of ‘symbiotic entanglement[s] across bodies’ (Tsing et al. 2017, M2) on, and beyond, a damaged planet. Semiotic and literal constructions of the octopus reveal how uncanny human/non-human relationships reform normative conceptions of Earthly belonging, especially those that often prioritise the terrestrial and exclude the aquatic.

Reframing Earth

Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum internalises and amplifies Stefan Helmreich’s notion of ‘extraterrestrial relativism’ (Helmreich 2012) in a ‘folding back towards rethinking Earth’ (1131) that undoes the planet, not to merely ‘[redo] as Ocean’ (1133) but to redo as a synergistic union of Earth and Ocean. Shaughnessy merges water with land through a ‘cross-fertilisation of narrative with non-narrative’ (Caracciolo 2021, 5). This hybrid form, also present in Montgomery’s memoir The Soul of An Octopus and Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s film My Octopus Teacher, reframes Earth and, while challenging the ‘psychological comforts of storytelling’ (Delistraty 2014), permits human-octopus kinships. Rather than a ‘way for humans to feel that [they] have control over the world’ (Delistraty 2014), Shaughnessy’s poetry instead envisages a redoing of Earth to disrupt the false securities of terrestrial human dominance. As octopuses climb from the depths of a damaged sea to take on the response-ability (Haraway 2016, 2) of salvaging the residual planet from anthropogenic ruin, the creatures adopt the authoritarian role of Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords (COO).

Shaughnessy rids this newly-formed world of normative division – the very demarcations that bring the apocalypse upon her human species: ‘No one is one. | No one is no one’ (Shaughnessy 2019, 43, ll. 1–2). In this ‘exhibition space’ (ix) titled ‘Found Objects/Lost Subjects: A Retrospective’, Shaughnessy’s octopus museum laments pre-apocalyptic human modes of classification. The octopus-managed archives elicit questions of human identity, ownership and claim. From this focus on the human subject-turned-object arises a remodelling of further anthropomorphic distinctions, those that guide the planet:

I never used to believe I was part of the world that meant the world to me when I was young. But it’s me who changed, wasn’t it? Changed what it meant? (37, ll. 23–24)

Shaughnessy’s restructuring of the Earth begins by denying human cognitive supremacy based upon an appreciation that some world features exist, impermeably, beyond standard definitional principles. As she questions the explanatory frameworks humans employ to shape the earth and their place within it, Shaughnessy merges uncanny oceans with more familiar soils in a quest for belonging and acquaintance with the unknown:

I washed down the sides with seasponge, as far as my arms could go then lowered myself in the bucket. Down there I used my feet. Scrubbed the stones and cracks of moss and slime and what else? Dead water. New algae. Legs of things. (11, ll. 10–12)

‘Wellness Rituals’ echoes the tentacularity Haraway suggests as a feature linking the non-human and human. Still, as both observers and actors, Shaughnessy’s personae become as ‘amphibian as ever’ via intimate experiences with foreign spaces. (11, l. 15) These bonds between human and non-human strangers in uncommon places decentralise the terrestrial, and thus the human, in a planet whose topography entails more than just land. Shaughnessy progressively hauls the water closer to the ground to contravene kinship founded solely on earth-based familiarity. Incapable of diving into the new world beyond the shore, it is the sea’s unknown, ‘inhuman surface’ (3, l. 7) – lacking a sense of human ‘beingness’: mercy, compassion, character – that paradoxically promotes both fear and attraction. The ocean draws the speaker of Shaughnessy’s ‘Identity & Community (There Is No “I” in “Sea”)’ to unfamiliar depths. No recognisable kin exists in the water; even the ‘three mom-like women’ (3, l. 16) who ‘splash away from’ (3, l. 18) the dramatis personae exist within their particular grouping: ‘they’re their pod’ (3, l. 19). On Earth, aquatic exploration offers an opportunity for estrangement, a decentring of the humans and their land through entry into a new space, although, as shown in Montgomery’s investigation into octopus consciousness, ‘belonging to a group is one of humankind’s deepest desires’ (Montgomery 2015, 81). This counterbalance of entry versus exodus and inclusion versus exclusion lingers throughout ‘Identity & Community (There Is No “I” in “Sea”)’:

At seaside, I have that familiar sense of being left out, too far to glean the secret: how go in? (Shaughnessy 2019, 3, ll. 5–6)

Shaughnessy’s omission of the subject-modal verb unit in this line’s final phrase evokes a multi-layered question regarding ability, permission and obligation. The typographical separation and enjambment separating ‘how’ and ‘go in’ distinguishes the qualitative physicality (way, manner, condition) of the action of entering this unfamiliar territory (‘how’) from the question of the possibility of entering (‘go in?’). This mere inquiry presents the ocean as an independent territory on Earth, one beyond human claim, understanding or recognition: ‘In the ocean, it seems that anything is possible’ (Montgomery 2015, 107).

The question and possibility of entering the water conjures a return to the primordial soup from which primitive living systems may have arisen. Shaughnessy’s reimagining of the Earth overlaps terrestrial dirt with seawater. ‘Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer’ purifies both earth and its terrestrial beings and water and its aquatic beings down to shared, inherent, equalising units of salt. Airs of distinctiveness humanness are ‘eras[ed] […] with seawater’ (Shaughnessy 2019, 3, l. 19) – the terrestrial human story, no longer prominent or central, effaced as it ‘dissolve[s] into salt water’ (35, l. 33) to become ‘most real’ (35, l. 34). As Lawrence Buell writes:

To understand fully what it means to inhabit place is […] not only to bear in mind the (dis)connections between one’s primary places but also the tenticular [sic] radiations from each one. (Buell 2001, 66)

Shaughnessy’s Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords know this emphatic realness afforded to them by the ocean. They bring an awareness of tentacular radiations to the earth through an accomplished, dual understanding of their previous aquatic lives and current terrestrial presence. Thus, through this framework, the Earth becomes an inclusive world of ‘parallel but | unreachable’ (Shaughnessy 2019, 33, ll. 15–16) spheres of existence. The octopus survives as a concealed part of the ‘unseen labors in a frenzy in the wall behind [one’s] bed’ (33, l. 12), ‘factually’ (33, l. 16) alive and a stranger only to planet earth.

Strangers to planet earth

For Timothy Morton, the ‘strange stranger’ sits ‘at the limit of imagining’ (Morton 2010, 17) and upholds the notion from Montgomery’s text that: ‘The more you know the weirder things get’ (Montgomery 2015, 161). Inconsistently, however, The Soul of an Octopus counteracts this very statement. While the octopus appears to epitomise Morton’s figure of the strange stranger, metaphorical abstractions propel the creature beyond imaginative bounds. The octopus’s symbolic significance traps the animal in its oddity. It modifies the estranging function of knowledge acquisition, leaving memoirists like Montgomery to ‘defend the octopus against centuries of character assassination’ (7). The octopus’s residence outside of earth only enhances this symbolic role to provide ‘a sign of uncertainty about what the sea can tell us about life on Earth and the place of humans in this realm’ (Olson and Messeri 2015, 39). Although intimacy with the uncanny may be the ‘essence of the local’ (Morton 2010, 50), conceptual and physical divisions of space limit such closeness, once again requiring topographical redefinitions to include the other in the local.

The strangeness of the octopus, coupled with an inability to gain experiential knowledge through closeness, helps to reduce the creature to a simple symbolic significance. As Serpil Oppermann argues, depicting the octopus as alien is ‘emblematic of the pitfalls of aesthetical readings and even scientific descriptions that homogenise the actual diversity of life forms and move away from human concern’ (Oppermann 2019, 448). Jamie L. Jones shows how semiotics have similarly functioned against Hester Blum’s rejection of the metaphor of the sea (Blum 2010). Jones reasons that

sometimes the sea is a metaphor, and metaphors ramify in the material world. Just as the metaphors of the earth as an ‘archive’ propelled new understandings of geological history, the metaphor of oil as an ‘ocean’ did work as well. (Jones 2016)

While symbolic knowledge of the ocean, thus, ‘helped engender twinned fantasies of abundance’ (Jones 2016) of oil and water, metaphoric portrayals of the octopus detached the animal from its environment and escorted aliens to Earth. The octopus poses ‘an evident mythical resource on which to draw’ (Harrington and Hackett 2018, 2) and ‘can be used as a figure for the unrepresentable’ (2), two frameworks that contribute to the creature’s ‘character assassination’ (Montgomery 2015, 7), that of an other-worldly being.

In accordance with Morton’s definition of the strange stranger, however, it is indeed physical strangeness that bases this overwhelming metaphorical strangeness. As Montgomery states, ‘It’s hard to find an animal more unlike a human than an octopus. Their bodies aren’t organised like ours’ (1). Anatomical differences alien-ate the octopus. The primary differences Montgomery offers as dividing the octopus from the human are bodily ones:

With an octopus, the opportunity for misunderstanding is greatly magnified. A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different colour from ours; its blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen. (15)

These anatomical deviations from the human continuously produce the alien eccentricities on the basis of ongoing fictional conceptions of the octopus – those that de-animalise. The extraterrestrial heptapods in Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life (the basis for the 2016 film Arrival), for instance, remind of the ‘pulpy, tentacled head[s]’ from Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1926): ‘It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg’ (Chiang 2002, 97). As cephalopodic anatomy inspires fictional alien bodies, essential octopus physiologies further foster disembodied analogies of ongoing strangeness. This symbolic essence thereby typifies the octopus as anything other than a legitimate, living creature. Instead, the animal descends into a representative token employed to explore forbidden and feared desires, sociocultural concerns and the human psyche – a de-animalisation that ‘imaginatively removes [alien creatures] from the planet, from the terrain of human concern, and even from reality’ (Alaimo 2017, 154).

Science fiction does not ‘need aliens’ to ‘[throw] into relief what it is to be human’ (Sardar 2002, 5). As the non-fiction My Octopus Teacher and The Soul of an Octopus demonstrate, even in a genuine, non-metaphorical sense, the octopus allows for an opportunity to examine humanity via attention to ‘the otherness in ourselves’ (Montgomery 2015, 14). In Octopus Museum, Shaughnessy’s octopuses (COO) are alien primarily due to their use of wo/man-made technology against humans:

Before our COO learned how to communicate electronically, we thought they were merely naïve excited about ‘life on land’ (LOL) so we equally naively helped them build COOPS (Cephalo-Octopodal Oceanostomy Pods).

Soon we realized we’d been doubly naïve and they’d been zero naïve because they used their new land mobility to access the world’s Electronic Communication Operating Systems (ECOS) and boy could they type fast

Shaughnessy’s octopuses thereby become alien because of their entanglements with us, echoing Anna Tsing’s description of the role monsters play in the Anthropocene: ‘monsters point us toward life’s symbiotic entanglement across bodies’ (Tsing et al. 2017, M2) (Shaughnessy 2019, 14–15, ll. 81–86).

Visitation rights

The octopus inhabits Earth as a strange stranger alongside the human, yet the anthropocentric ideational division of Earth’s land and water breaches both parties’ rights to access each other freely – humans unable to live among the creatures of the sea, and vice versa. Here, visitation rights refer to the rights granted to an individual, human or non-human, to enter a space within which they, as an entrant, are deemed other. In a reframed, singular and cohesive planet Earth, not demarcated into independent spaces of water and land, inhabitants of the planet inherently possess free access to each other’s domains resulting from shared Earthly occupancy. This free access elucidates the aforementioned ‘symbiotic entanglement[s] across bodies’ (Tsing et al. 2017, M2). Ideational divisions, however, infringe upon this inherent right of free access, blocking direct contact between the earthbound and waterbound. Regarding human-octopus kinship, a reunion of water and land depends on the human’s freedom to explore the deep seas and the octopus’s inherent right to ‘human’ terrestrial space, not as an invader, but as a cohabitant. The visitation rights that allow My Octopus Teacher’s Craig Foster to venture into a South African kelp forest, for instance, permit this terra-aquatic reunion, and ultimately recognise cohabitation on Earth: ‘What [the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris)] taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor’ (Reed and Ehrlich 2020). The acceptance of cohabitation on planet Earth relies on free access to all spaces through visitation.

Similar to what Caracciolo describes as Shaughnessy’s titular octopus museum’s ability to ‘reveal the uncertainties and physical as well as moral entanglements of living in times of altered relationality between the human and the non-human’ (Caracciolo 2021, 17), the aquarium in Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of An Octopus exposes these human/non-human networks via visitation. For Montgomery, octopus visitation takes place in the aquarium, an intermediary space where land and water unite to prioritise being at home with the other on Earth:

But what I began to discover that day was my own sweet blue planet—a world breathtakingly alien, startling, wondrous; a place where, after half a century of life on this earth, much of it as a naturalist, I would at last feel fully at home. (Montgomery 2015, 2)

In the aquarium, the human initially perceives themself as a ‘privileged visitor to another world’ (Montgomery 2015, 2). Eventually, they learn the meaning of Earthly inhabitancy beyond the mere ‘rules [learnt] on land among vertebrates’ (20). As Montgomery writes, ‘to many people, an octopus is not just another nation; it’s an alien from a distant and menacing galaxy’ (15). Thus, feeling fully at home becomes a matter of connecting with the entire Earth, not merely earth, and experiencing the deep-sea as another nation: a lure to explore the planet – ‘a world of mostly water, which [is] hardly [known]’ (15).

Within the deep-sea, a realm outside of the limits of human wisdom, the octopus is more-than-human, ‘a being who doesn’t need us to bring [it] to completion’ (22) and possesses the agency to allow visitation: ‘the wonder is that [it] will allow us to be part of [its] world’ (22). In this way, Montgomery’s octopuses influence and encapsulate human actions as much as Shaughnessy’s post-apocalyptic cephalopod rulers do. Kinship with the octopus allows human acquaintances to ‘touch an alternate reality’ (2) and ‘explore a different kind of consciousness’ (2), but only within both the visitor and host’s mutual, consensual limitations. Shaughnessy’s Octopus Museum likewise effectively reminds visitors of the limits of human knowledge alone. The museum’s ‘Visitor’s Guide to the O.M. Exhibits’ indicates that there are ‘five exhibition spaces, with another three currently under construction’ (Shaughnessy 2019, ix). The omission of the three under-construction exhibits establishes visiting as a two-way process of request and permission. In Shaughnessy’s created futurity, ‘people are alien’ (3, l. 18), yet with the visit of the octopuses onto land comes an acknowledgement of relational human insignificance:

I fantasise about outer space as if I have some relation to it besides being an animal in its zoo. No visitors. No matter how far I travel on earth I wind up sitting in rooms. (Shaughnessy 2019, 9, ll. 3–5)

Shaughnessy dwarfs and alien-ates the human, an alien-ation that depends on spatial, classified separations. The rooms of Earth confine beings into subdivided spaces without reciprocal interactions; therefore, the subject becomes minuscule, disoriented and decentred from the planet. Visitation thus depends on points of contact between the rooms in the public domain.

It is in the water that Montgomery experiences this disorientation necessary for acknowledgement and appreciation of a lack of human dominance on Earth:

Nothing looks right: On land objects seem closer and 25% bigger in the water. Nothing sounds right: Sound travels four times faster in water than air, and directionality is distorted. Nothing feels right: Since you’re not really swimming, you can’t warm up and water carries heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than in air. (Montgomery 2015, 127)

Resulting in a necessary ‘prospect of defeat’ (129), this disorientation from an attempt to enter a world not bound by human notions makes the unknown known. The process of exploring alternate, reframed Earthly realities promotes the reunion of terracentric and aquatic ways of knowing.

The search for critical zones

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble reminds us that ‘No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone’ (Haraway 2016, 100). Understanding how ‘assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors’ (100) operate intimately demands reframing the Earth into a terra-aquatic space of cohabitation rather than a planet of hierarchically ranked spatial divisions. In their innately hybrid forms, The Octopus Museum, a collection of prose-poetry; The Soul of An Octopus, a scientific memoir narrative; and My Octopus Teacher, a participatory and performative documentary film, situate the human and the octopus within public communal spaces of intimate kinship. These stories establish human relationships with the non-human yet decentre terrestrial human sites to unify land and water on a shared planet. Relationships in the museum, aquarium and ocean require shifted ontological bases past the control and authority of wo/man on land.

The strangeness of the octopus, depending as it does on metaphorical edifices, deems it an alien on Earth. A figurative reconstruction of Earth, however, removes the ocean’s extraterrestrial (non-earthly) qualities to present a unified planet to which the octopus naturally belongs. The elusiveness of space and the intangible divisions between land and water are not merely symbolic. In 1998, Gail Ashley first introduced the term ‘critical zone’ and stated that from ‘Surface to Bedrock […] the upper few meters [of the earth], are crucial for life’ (Ashley 1998, 148). The United States National Research Council now defines this zone as

the heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine availability of life sustaining resources. (National Research Council, 2001)

As in the previously mentioned case of the geocentric designation of terrestrial planets, scientists believe that the notion of the critical zone can effectively apply to the surface of other planets (Ashley and Delaney 2017). However, Earth’s current critical zone does not include aquatic environments despite these spaces producing much of the Earth’s oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide emissions (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration US Department of Commerce 2021). Ashley’s request still rings true two decades later. Just as a new ‘holistic approach is needed to understand the three-dimensional complex linkages involving physical, chemical, and biological processes’ (Ashley 1998, 148), kinship on a shared planet requires a conceptual reframing of environmental topographies to bring the octopus and the human into homoeostatic harmony on planet Earth.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jasmyne Eastmond

Jasmyne Eastmondis a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Content Editor at the digital learning app, Imprint. She received her BSc (Biology and English) from the University of British Columbia and holds an MPhil (English Studies, Criticism and Culture) from the University of Cambridge. Engaged with environmental consciousness as a ‘way-of-being-in-the-environment’, she attends to questions of access, alienation, and kinship. Her areas of interest include Black Atlantic studies, oceanic studies, blue humanities, and postcolonial approaches to the environmental humanities.

Notes

1. ‘The land as distinguished from the sea; dry or firm land; in quot. 1786, the earth’. (‘terra firma, n’, in The Oxford English Dictionary [online], [accessed 20 March 2021]).

2. ‘Chthonian gods, literally gods of the earth, χθών‎, a subdivision of the Greek pantheon. In this usage, chthonios gets its meaning from a contrast, implicit or explicit, with “Olympian” or “heavenly” gods’. (Robert Parker 2015)