The Sucker, the Sucker!Amia Srinivasan
London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 17 · 7 September 2017
Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n17/amia-srin ... the-suckerIn 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known in English as
‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and in Japanese as ‘Tako to ama’, ‘Octopus and Shell Diver’. It depicts a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread and eyes closed, while a huge red octopus performs cunnilingus on her. The octopus’s slit eyes bulge between the woman’s legs and its suckered limbs wrap around her writhing body. A second, smaller octopus inserts its beak into the woman’s mouth while curling the thin tip of an arm around her left nipple. In Europe, the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the critics didn’t read Japanese. In the text arranged in the space around the three entwined bodies, the shell diver exclaims:
‘You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Ah! Yes … it’s … there! With the sucker, the sucker! … There, there! … Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! … How are you able? … Oh! Boundaries and borders gone! I’ve vanished!’
The octopus threatens boundaries in more ways than one. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span over four metres, and weighs 100 pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength (a mature male Giant Pacific can lift 30 pounds with each of its 1600 suckers) makes octopuses notoriously difficult to keep in captivity. Many aquarium octopuses escape their tanks through small holes or by lifting their lids, making their way, sometimes across stretches of dry floor, to a neighbouring tank for a snack, or to the nearest drain, and occasionally back home to the sea. Octopuses also lack any stable colour or texture, changing both at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be totally invisible from just a few feet away. While octopuses, like us, have centralised nervous systems, they lack a clear distinction between their brains and bodies. Most of an octopus’ neurons are dispersed through its body, allowing its eight individual arms to act intelligently all on their own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.)
Perhaps most strikingly, octopuses are highly intelligent when, in a sense, they have no right to be. The last common ancestor between octopuses on one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed 600 million years ago. Other creatures that evolutionarily distant from us – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scales. But octopuses (and to some extent, their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish) frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates, exhibiting sophisticated capacities for problemsolving, learning, tool-use, mimicry, deception and perhaps even humour. ...
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n17/amia-srin ... the-sucker