Dust Unto Dust in the Ocean Froth

A kelp forest, hidden away in the Atlantic waters, boasts a fading form— an octopus, pale and pearled from the wear of her existence. She flutters with the waves, her eyes savoring her last glimpse of the ocean hues. Thus closes My Octopus Teacher, a documentary showcasing the encounters— or perhaps, a pas de deux— between filmmaker Craig Foster and a wild common octopus in False Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa. Over the course of nearly twelve months, Foster painstakingly observes her movements as she pursues food, is pursued as food, and dances in the underwater realm.

Her life is short, precarious, and fragile. She, in all her unstable, transient numinosity, completely dazzles Foster. He marvels at her every twirl. In one of their many interactions, Foster comes face-to-face with the octopus. In a moment of brave curiosity, she extends her tentacle towards his hand; time slows. All is suspended, stripped away, silent. What remains is this meeting point between two grains of God-dust. The viewer sees a man in awe, transfixed by a tenderness for creation, and with a creature whom he sees and knows intimately in encounter. His gaze, at first panoptical, dissolves into cautious reciprocity. He looks towards her as a parent accompanies his child on the playground. This is a scene of play—pure, unbridled play.

Such “play” has evaded me since the start of 2020. Since last March, I seldom graze hands with strangers—except at the supermarket checkout, in a hasty exchange of paper receipts. These encounters, once populated with half-smiles and warm eyes, have devolved into frantic recoils of averted eyes and hidden faces. I choke out an apology through my mask—an apology for the encounter—and rush away to my car, my sterile refuge. In the early stages of the pandemic, I, like my fellow shoppers, was stricken with fear. Like the octopus, I found myself in uncertain waters— the market is awash with shoppers, begging for paper wares, clamoring by check-out aisles, desperate for pocket change and a swift return to their nests. We each threatened the other, complicating the boundary between predator and prey. Accidental interaction was volatile, an intimate threat to one’s health. To brush past another was to incur risk, and to graze fingers, like Michelangelo’s Adam and God, portended pestilence, even death—not creation. We were skittish in these early days of the pandemic— and as cases continue to fluctuate, we remain so.

In the documentary, Foster’s encounter with the octopus was delicately mediated by a sensitive hand. On a few occasions, however, he would fumble, drop his camera lens or other equipment, and startle her. She fled, wedging herself beneath the rock caverns. She too could be skittish.

And yet, she returned to him. Numerous times.

I too, return, to the market, to the strangers, to a different kind of sea.

Early in the pandemic, each of these trips warranted an hour spent disinfecting cartons, cans, and cereal boxes— and hours more of a sobering guilt and worry, for myself and for the eyes I had so quickly evaded. I looked for God in the parking lot and in the frenzied aisle folks. I wondered if God watched as I, as we, played the tenuous game of death-evasion. I wanted to dance, to touch newness, to marvel at the strange, like the octopus. Instead, I was gripped by the fact that I could die, I would die— perhaps today, tomorrow, the next. This fragility, our truth, can be easy to ignore. The holy sacrifice of the Mass has been softened by the drone of Sunday consumption— football, couponing, the funnies. We have so easily settled into ignorance, purposeful or otherwise, as our personal life raft, to complement our bubbled nests. But neither nest nor paper offer respite now. I think of how the newspaper, populated with pages of death after death, obliterated all sense of security. After a year in a pandemic, not much remains of my self-assuredness. I am without refuge— and I imagine I am not alone.