Octopus evictions.

Bat philosophy. Speaking for the dead.

The octopus is a weird creature, an alien creature. Probably left over from a previous universe. As far we know, they’re also among the smartest creatures on Earth. We tend to judge animal intelligence along a few different lines: complex reasoning, social structure, death rites. The octopus adds one more to the list: evictions. 

There are accounts of octopus cities, underwater complexes with apartments shared by mates and even some freeloaders that have been evicted. We marvel at these revelations, not because they are impossible to imagine—other creatures sharing some semblance of our own societies, our own incentives and punishments—but because they’re just so like us. Our understanding is directly proportional to how easily we can reconcile the event in our own terms of reality. Their story only makes sense if it’s also our own. 

But what it’s like to be an octopus, must be different from what it’s like to be a human. Or what it’s like to be a bat. Even among humans, it’s not a given that any two of us share the same experience of the world. Confronting another, an Other, is a kind of investigation—we are detectives seeking the answers to questions we’re still formulating, looking for clues to both what makes us the same, and what makes us different. 

This is not a novel concept, but it is the concept of a novel made all the more fascinating given the fact that it’s written by an author faithful to deep prejudices, someone unable to comprehend the single deviation of a fellow human he would otherwise consider normal, which is to say understandable. That such a man could write such a book speaks to the unique insidiousness of these questions of sameness and difference, and leads to a new one: why do we ask such questions at all? Perhaps, instead of asking what is the same and what is different about an octopus, keeping ourselves at the center of reference, we should return to asking a much simpler, much more open question: what is an octopus?

And one answer might be: an octopus is a creature that evicts freeloaders.