Greetings fellow recoverers of too much Thanksgiving dinner and the Black Friday Specials onslaught!

A word in advance: This is an atypically wordy posting, also probably one of the strangest you’ll read in a while. Consider it an amalgam of recent “inspiration.” My suggestion? Warm a plate of Thanksgiving leftovers, pour a mug of cider, and read at your leisure…

"Alien Octopus," photo by Lauren Markham

I had something different planned for today, but blogopus was slammed the past few days with a truckload of spam and I’ve been busy taking measures to combat the assault.

I may have to turn the comments options off for a few days in the hopes that these weasely marauders move along, trip over their untied shoelaces, fall in a viscous puddle of peanut butter and farkleberry jam, and spend the next six months cleaning it out of their rapacious crevices—

Until normalcy is restored, I’d like to share a YouTube video of an unusual encounter with an octopus walking across a patch of land at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach, California, which is about an hour south of San Francisco.

You may have already seen this fascinating video; it was widely featured on the Internet last week. If you haven’t, I hope you take a few moments to watch it.

I replayed the video a number of times. Each viewing, I had the same reaction. For those of us privileged to watch—people (and I’m not certain spammers qualify here)—this is a rare sighting. For the octopus, well, he’s just doing his octopus thing.

And while I believed I knew something about typical octopus behavior, I didn’t know anywhere what I thought I did. During the video, a member of the astonished family filming the determined octopus on the move cries out, “Where are you headed, dude?”

Have you ever look at your cat or your kid—or your husband, for that matter—and wondered, “What are you doing and what on earth are you thinking?”

“Measuring the minds of other creatures is a perplexing problem.” Sy Montgomery makes this observation in “Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of the Octopus,” a remarkable piece in the November/December 2011 Orion magazine.

Montgomery admits to something I have felt, but until recently kept rather private: “I had always longed to meet an octopus.”

I know what many of you must be thinking. What on earth is she thinking? As Montgomery puts it: “Octopuses are, after all, ‘only’ invertebrates…classified in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.” (Do spammers qualify as mollusks?) However,

increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

New evidence suggests, in Montgomery’s words, the “breathtaking possibility” that octopuses (and cuttlefish and squid) “may be able to see with their skin.”

Should you wish to learn more about the science behind this research, I encourage you to read “Deep Intellect,” and while it contains a number of fascinating and amusing octopus stories, Montgomery centers movingly on her several meetings with Athena, a giant Pacific octopus at the New England Aquarium. She speaks with respect and wonder of this experience, concluding:

She had given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know. I was eager to meet more of her kind.

Time was, I couldn’t have imagined having this reaction to a species other than my own, but life as lived and the power of language, especially in the form of poetry, has opened me to such possibilities and opportunities. And isn’t that a great part of what we do as writers—struggle to imagine the possibilities and strive to understand what it’s like to live inside another creature’s skin?

Montgomery writes:

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses…on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms….It’s remarkable how little is known about them…but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

Do spammers dream? When tripping over a loose shoelace wandering the forest, does the sound of a spammer falling into a puddle of PBJ make a sound? Time and research will tell. But as Montgomery says, quoting another octopus researcher, “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

—photo by Lauren Markham

Yet.

In the meantime, it’s helpful and humbling to remember to use all our senses, to welcome with open arms (two) every octopus (eight) that unexpectedly crawls our way, and to remind ourselves that we’re all evolving.

Felicia

p.s. Consciousness is not the same thing as having a conscience. Let’s work to keep spam canned—and sink it to the bottom of the digital ocean, where it belongs.

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