Becoming the Octopus: Three Variations on a Metaphor

Abstract

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• Becoming the Octopus:Three Variations on a Metaphor
• Martina Astrid Rodda

between 2018 and 2019 I hit a wall. Depression was involved, as was relationship breakdown; sexual assault made an appearance. Paradoxically, my work was the most stable aspect of my life: an understanding supervisor and a research topic fairly separate from my everyday experience helped. Anyway, things were much improved by the end of 2019; 2020 was to be the year in which things started looking up.

Well.

Still, this is not a COVID piece. I did not get COVID in 2020; I did get a referral to a rheumatology clinic. My joints hurt. All the time. And I was tired all the time. And my brain felt alternatively full of fog and bees. And this was not getting better even when I stayed home and rested and took my antidepressants.

As of summer 2022 (the UK National Health Service's [NHS] referral times are dismaying),¹ I have a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Diagnosis marks both a rupture and the opposite of one. A chronic illness is a curious thing: by definition, there is no cure—there may be barely any treatment;² little in the patient's status changes by virtue of being diagnosed. Chronic illness being [End Page 315] an open-ended state,³ from which there is no return, it can be uncomfortable for both patients and caregivers.⁴

I want to use the rest of this article to explore this concept through one guiding metaphor with classical connections: the octopus. My primary symptoms are joint and bone pain, so it is tempting to imagine a different kind of embodiment for myself: malleable, tentacular, not confined to the rigid form that causes me deep discomfort. In a sense, this is a utopian, impossible form of adaptation, an unreasonable adjustment: what if instead of struggling to be a human I redesigned myself into a different, more accessible body, a full-body prosthetic?⁵

What follows is a somewhat rhapsodic set of thoughts about precisely this: bodies, precarity, utopias, what we can do to adapt to ruptures that it is impossible to return from, and of course, cephalopods.

malleability

In a recent lecture on Homer's underwater imagery, Alex Purves argued that the two alternative biographies which the Iliad provides for Hephaestus (the version in which he hits land in Lemnos as told in 1.585–94 and the one in which he hits the sea instead and is raised by Thetis and Eurynome in an ocean cave in 18.393–407) reflect "a split in the fabric of the Iliad itself": between a space defined by land, in which the focus is firmly on the heroes' hard and unforgiving masculinity, and one defined by water, in which social bonds are more fluid and "expressed through a medium that has more to do with lyric than epic."⁶ This split is also reflected in Hephaestus's different kinds of craft: convoluted, organic jewelry under the sea ("many wrought items, brooches and twisted spiral wires and flower cabochons and chain necklaces"),⁷ versus the hard, shell-like armor forged for Achilles. [End Page 316]

It is tempting for me to wax lyrical about the virtues of softness, or perhaps more precisely, squishiness—malleability, if you prefer an academic-sounding term. It is a good autobiographical narrative: I am moving from the "hard science" of computational linguistics (my PhD topic) to the soft lands of thinking about disability, embodiment, and (queer) failures of normativity. The metaphor has its own respectable scholarly history: by accepting my disability (and other aspects of my identity which I will keep private here), I have broken out of my rigid shell and returned to life having embraced the way of the octopus—squishy and adaptable, ready to fit my body into any little crevice, thinking about my body and with my body in a way that is simultaneously alien and illuminating.

Octopuses⁸ have been a particularly popular recurring character in the long COVID era: from Netflix's Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher (2020) to the revival of Other Minds (Godfrey-Smith 2017), whose author now has a fictional counterpart in the protagonist of Ray...