Alien evasion
China Miéville
Unreliable narrator
A visit to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole fills China Miéville with wonder – cut with chthonic angst
I nvisibility is nothing. An invisible thing in a landscape is just a landscape. The point of invisibility is to fail. A just glimpsed beast-shaped burr – now that catches the breath. The realisation that a vine is not a vine, but a limb, and that it’s hunting: that sensory stutter is what gets you. It takes seeing through a disguise to be astounded by it. That’s what it takes to realise that the universe is not as it seems.
Normality blathers like a bore at a party, and to shut it up takes quite an interruption. These satori outriders, these glimmers and half-realisations, are like slow dot-dot-dots as the world’s monologue peters out, confused. So when the full disruption comes, it does so like a strange noise into silence. The cloaking goes down, and there, ex nihilo , something is watching. The Predator. The Romulan Warbird, shimmering into malevolent prominence too close to our enterprise. On the forbidden planet, ravening in plain sight, is the beast from the id.
And a more astounding unveiling even than those spectaculars of pulp. You know it: that YouTube footage of that octopus hiding on that weedy rock outcrop , its peerless mimicry abruptly and dramatically dissolving in a flash of alarm-blanched skin. The video is everywhere, clogging up the internet, provoking endless ignorant flame warriors to accuse its maker of CGI trickery. It is simultaneously depressing and a backhanded compliment to nature that the sheer miracle of actual animals’ actually evolved abilities can, to many, only be considered possible if rendered by DreamWorks or Pixar.
Roger Hanlon is the man, traduced by fools as a digital cheat, who filmed that moment. He is one of the world’s foremost researchers into camouflage, and into cephalopods. He is watching another octopus. He is introducing its qualities to you, its visitors, and no matter how many times he has done this, he has about him not a scrap of insouciance.
Peering from a shard of piping, coming into view, not with dermatological showmanship this time, but slowly expanding from its hide, the lone survivor of an earlier world looks back. It regards you neither with nor without enthusiasm. The alien melancholy in its eyes is hardly a surprise. The octopus should not be here. It is a refugee from an eradicated past.
Anthropologist Roland Burrage Dixon, in his 1916 book Oceanic Mythology , explained its sheer alterity. "According to the Hawaiian account," he said, the world is created from shadow and abyss and chaos, "the wreck and ruin of an earlier world." In this brutal and astonishing protology, waves of new creatures fight and die until the universe is a pile of debris and outcompeted corpses, on the accumulating decay of which a new world rises. New but for one form. A solitary escapee. In the waters, "as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world".
You stare at the lone survivor. It emerges from that snapped-off pipe. It hauls itself like a tugged rag and abruptly spreads against the inside of its tank, a muscular starburst of vacuums. It moves across the face of the glass, now through the water, now on the tank-floor stones.
In 2005, Science published Huffard, Boneka and Full’s article Underwater Bipedal Locomotion by Octopuses in Disguise . The piece came with now-iconic videos of Amphioctopus marginatus and Abdopus aculeatus each walking subaquatically on two arms, the first like an urgent coconut , the other like vaguely threatening algae . Eliciting hilarity not unmixed with unease, this sinister-comic ambulation quickly became an internet trope. But, astonishing as such motion is, it is walking. It has a name. The survivor in the tank of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, moves in a different way. It is utterly, characteristically, octopus motion, and it has no name at all. It is polyvalent: eager, curious and observant. It partakes of crawling, rolling, oozing, climbing, swimming, struggling, swaggering, billowing. And tonguing. The arms are muscular hydrostats equipped with taste buds. Each grasp, each suckered hauling and investigation, is a taste test. Alien libertine, the octopus moves by sensuous licking.
Hanlon explains what you are seeing. He describes the four muscle groups that power those extraordinary motions. He enumerates the 10,000 neurons in each sucker. In an extended, visionary slander against the octopus in his book The Toilers of the Sea (1866), Victor Hugo gasped that "[a] bite is formidable, but less so than such suction," and the astonishment is appropriate. Even one so used to them as Hanlon describes the pads with something between glee and awe. "They are so strong," he says urgently, "they can cavitate water." Perhaps in the earlier world of which it is an exile, such suckers were as unremarkable as the paws of cats.
If we have not learned to be cautious of imperious claims about precisely "what natives believe", then our credulousness shames us. But whether Dixon’s Hawaiian informants would recognise the story imputed to them or not, whether the insight into octopus’s secret origin is indeed a traditional Oceanic one, or some inadvertent dream misunderstood into existence, it is indispensable. It explains everything.
There is no shortage of considerations of, ruminations on, considerations of, anxieties about the octopus. Roger Caillois, dissident surrealist, devoted a whole book – "an essay," he styles it, "on the logic of the imagination" – to la pieuvre . Ray Harryhausen, the Leonardo da Vinci of stop-motion, lovingly had one (technically a hexapus, for budgetary reasons) assault San Francisco . More than 100 years ago, puppet-master Walter Deaves made of it the world’s most astonishing marionette . Most movingly, the great revolutionary Louise Michel, in exile in New Caledonia after the destruction of the Paris Commune in 1871, offered up her fascination and solidarity to "this monster with a strange gaze". She met one marooned in a rock pool. Remnant again, for a second time. Something in our bones knows Burrage is right: they are here by the grace of apocalypse–eluding luck and grit. They should not be here. They are interruptions. Disruptions.
Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, is small and pretty. It is served by tea shops and swish boutiques. It is stuffed utterly with research institutes. Home to fewer than a thousand inhabitants, it houses the Oceanographic Institution that bears its name, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, a Geological Survey Science Center, the Sea Education Association, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The ratios of marine-science insight per square foot and per inhabitant are giddying. A curious wanderer could, in half a day’s brisk stroll of these streets, find answers to all her abstruse queries about oceanic geology, fluid dynamics, fish morphology and the diet of krill. And cephalopods.
Off the corridors of Roger Hanlon’s MBL are pleasant offices that could be in any university wing or administrative building around the world. Computers, personal photos, potted plants, water coolers, noticeboards and name tags. Departmental decor. Another turn, a different route, and you’re in a chamber the size of a small warehouse, where the survivor lives.
Overhead are tubes like low boughs. Pick a way through a maze of workbenches and waist-high containers. There are many more animals than just cephalopods here. Horseshoe crabs, starfish in piles, worms, ridiculously adorable seahorses. Tanks of small, curious squid torpedoing around. Nearby, though carefully separate, are containers of gloopy egg fingers laced with pheromones – Hanlon calls the stuff 'kickapoo joy juice' – capable of triggering savage mating behaviours and colourful Teuthic battles, aggression lightshowing the skin.
There are more colour shifts to come. Up the stairs to a room full of cuttlefish. This chamber is at once a vital research amenity, and a moment of redress.
You can tell a lot about someone from their favourite cephalopod. Animal acme of formlessness, the octopus is the cultural point-zero; it is the ceph of choice for the discerning philosopher. The giant squid has more swagger and kitsch cachet. The nautilus, its nacreous Fibonacci shell embedded in poetry by Oliver Wendell Holmes , is favoured by those of prissier taste. In the last few years even that unlikely deepwater relict Vampyroteuthis infernalis has accreted its own symbolic notoriety. Financial catastrophe was the animal’s memetic making. In 2010, in Rolling Stone , Matt Taibbi pronounced Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity": a colourful political intervention and a gross insult to squids, and vampires.
At such a semiotic level, cuttlefish, Sepiidae , have been poor relations, known best for posthumously providing beak-sharpeners to pet birds, and it is bracing to enter a room devoted to them. They deserve nothing less. They are, Hanlon stresses, formidably intelligent – the equal of the octopus. The precise nature of cephalopod intelligence and thought is enthusiastically debated. Does the octopus have distributed intelligence, a sort of one-animal hive mind, as Peter Godfrey-Smith has mooted? Do octopuses have distinct personalities? Hanlon is particularly sceptical of the latter claim , but whatever the precise nature of their smarts, they are considerable.
The shelves are stacked with cuttlefish in plastic tubs like large washing-up bowls. They scoot around their habitats holding their limbs up in oddly formal poses, like Victorian pugilists. They are mostly brownish, on entry, but any observation of cuttlefish colour is at best contingent and fleeting. That, indeed, is one of the main reasons for their presence. Their chromatophores – the colour-producing cells that enable their extraordinary dermatological shenanigans, and enthrall YouTubers – command much attention in Woods Hole.
There are no cuttlefish native to American waters. These flamboyant-skinned subjects, international travellers, have been imported from Europe, to be kept suspended in time in this ruthlessly seasonless room. Like Dickensian orphans, they are kept cold and fed just enough: such conditions keep them from entering adolescence, with its concomitant pugnacities and difficulties. Not that these pre-teens are wholly quiescent.
They watch you warily with pupils shaped like Ws: you are eyed by letters. Kimberly Ulmer, laboratory research assistant, moves with care. The room displays the consequences of incaution: the wall behind a bank of tubs is stained with what looks like it could be dried blood. It is melanin and mucus: ink. Each salvo was jetted a considerable distance by the captives, and each has hit the wall hard – they are spattered to delight a CSI. The institute is decorated with cuttlefish anxiety.
Ulmer provokes no such sepia fusillade. She isolates a subject, and under it, one by one, she slips mats printed with a variety of prepared backgrounds, of various textures and colours. With flushes and strange blushes, the cuttlefish changes. The cephalopod professionals seem mildly disappointed with the display, but to amateur eyes the swift transition of patterning, the protean shimmer of the cuttlefish skin, is adequately astonishing.
Camouflage studies, like any specialism, is split. There are orthodox and dissident, avant-garde opinions. Hanlon argues, counterintuitively but with a wealth of evidence, that there are only three basic camouflage strategies: that depending on background, animals will be uniform, mottled, or – that most intriguing category – disruptive. "How", he stresses, "do you hide edges?" As much as on efforts at resemblance, his work focuses on how cephalopod camouflage breaks up information.
The research has led to countless photographs of countless cuttlefish against backgrounds of decreasing naturalness. Sand and pebbles. Checkerboards. Stripes, vertical and slanted. And there are some on strange, black-and-white, vaguely ink-blotty backgrounds. As the scale of such patterns gets larger, the animals find it harder to hide until, cowed-looking, they sit quite visible.
There is something precise and conclusive in those images of cuttlefish failure. They ruin the lines. They do not fit. Their disruption no longer confuses, but draws the eye. The everyday, anthropocentric gaze banalises the world, interprets remorselessly, makes everything at which we look diagnostic of us, and it is more than just the background these animals disrupt: it is these efforts of ours. Cephalopods struggle for their own opacity. The lone survivor means nothing but itself. The squid is a predatory evasion, no matter what of it we learn. And here are cuttlefish, ruining our solipsism, schmutz on the Rorschach test.
Thanks to Diana Kenney and all at the Marine Biological Laboratory