sadreads #6: what if the octopus took over?
Hi friends,
I'm working on the next sadreads so slowly that in the meantime, I decided to send you this thing I wrote last year on Brenda Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum. It was supposed to run, and then never ran, so I am just going to share it here. The book is charming, sad, and weird, and fairly appropriate for *gestures broadly.*
Hang in there.
Your pal,
Niina
*
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Brenda Shaughnessy’s fifth collection The Octopus Museum is a dispatch from a precipitous near-future. In prose poems, the narrator details how octopodes arrived on land and yanked the wheel from the humans who’d been busy merrily ruining everything. They tapped into the internet—their brains perfectly suited for its machinations, their tentacles adept at typing—and people soon lost control, barely even comprehending while it happened, as is our unfortunate pattern.
The cephalopods operate as a slightly creepy collective (“There Is No I in ‘Sea’”), giving the reader a vague sense of an alienating corporate overlord, with “countless eyes watching us, [...] arms radiating out in all directions, feeling for what’s next.” The few remaining humans live in assigned houses, eating a can of beets a week as a treat and leaving the decisions we used to thoughtlessly make to those smarter than ourselves. A lone archivist sends out letters to no one—like the single horror-movie survivor on the ham radio, reaching nobody where there used to be listeners. “If you want to know what we all could have done differently to prevent the situation we’re in now,” he asks, “I have one word for you: everything.” Of course you know it now, after the fact, now that it doesn’t help at all.
The book provides a dark forecast, but these are not poems with a clinical sci-fi atmosphere. The octopodes’ dominion is not the main conflict; it’s simply what is. The book doesn’t depend on the details of this particular bleak future to keep the reader hurtling forward. What happened isn’t even really the point. Rather, Shaughnessy gives us first-person poems about domestic matters against a backdrop of confusing dystopia, and though aspects of this future are chilling, the thing that sticks is the lingering feeling that we’re all careening in a system that’s totally outside our control—a relatable sensation in 2019 (ed. note from 2020: HAHAHAHA). The narrator is a poet, mother, and human being, and the poems are rooted in the moments of her human apprehension and wonderment at how her children still grow and flourish in spite of everything. “A fierce zip of pride bites my heart,” says the narrator about the daughter. “She demands more because she knows there’s more in the world and she believes she should have it all.” This pride is the kind everyone secretly judges parents for—is your child really that extraordinary? But in an unstable system with diminishing resources, ego is compelling. The child’s audacity to demand more pulls the parent into the future.
It’s also worth saying that the world these poems are set in doesn’t feel all that unlikely, somehow. This is an achievement, since the idea of supersmart sea creatures taking over is a far-fetched one. But the purpose the octopodes serve, really, is to be a kind of distant, unrelatable other that wrested control from us and turned everything unfamiliar. The octopus, and its intelligence and abilities, is almost as alien to us as an actual alien, and in some ways, this book could just as well be about the aftermath of an invasion from the sky. But the aliens of our cultural imagination are usually humanoid in shape, so the idea of being overthrown by a soft, small, malleable creature we thought we knew is absurd and even silly. We can imagine a sort of Homo superior, but the idea of being made second-class citizens by something we used to subjugate (or hardly consider) is extra unfamiliar to our collective imagination. The octopus doesn’t even have a skull. In Shaughnessy’s dystopia, we’re punished because we failed to see the obvious—that intelligence can take shapes unlike ours. The dystopia is an analog for the times we’re living in, where we would let anything happen because we’re myopic, and love convenience, and think we’re the best.
The focus on domestic matters, family, and motherhood isn’t small in this book; the family unit—one of the most reliable institutions in recent human history—is at risk in every poem. The cephalopods don’t seem to value human attachment to our own. Their lifespan is shorter, and they seem to implicitly understand the importance of working together for the greater good. Their collective governing body issues extra people into a family if the standard number in a dwelling changes somehow, which just makes everyone miserable. One of the most moving poems of the collection is its final one, called “Our Family on the Run,” in which the narrator lets herself wonder what would happen to her particular family, with its unique needs, if they were forced out of their home in an emergency prepper situation. “If you read the stories, you’re supposed to find abandoned photo albums, suitcases, babies. The useless things cut out by survival’s swift knife. Dead weight, long gone.” The relics of a comfortable life, an optimistic life, scattered along the trail as we flee from something invisible.
As my husband considers the contents of our home prepper kit, I find myself wondering how we would look on the run, and how long we would survive. But if the new (octopod) society is everywhere, even on the internet, where do we even go? What’s the point of moving on? (Ed. note from 2020: I WISH WE COULD!!!) This once more makes me think of the (probably detrimental) optimism that having children forces people to have. In the beginning of the 2018 film A Quiet Place, another ruined-earth dystopia, a family loses its youngest child—he’s snatched up by the unseen danger for playing with a toy, and is a liability just because he’s a child. But by the end of the film, the family has had another baby. They’re just doing the only thing they know how to do: being normal, and continuing to be a family. We flee from something, but only toward our own tendencies.
The book’s arc is the layout of a museum, which is a kind of contemporary gallery of human exhibits from the octopodes’ point of view: “Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony” against “Found Objects/Lost Subjects: A Retrospective” and the unsettling “Archive of Pre-Existing Conditions.” This conceit reminds the reader, structurally, that the overlord exists, but doesn’t interfere much with the reading of the book itself. Beyond the title, I didn’t think of a museum or archive until I got to the poem “Are Women People,” a work generated by the cephalopods examining the title question using our own documentation on the matter, the “methods and modes used by humans themselves, in their various legal, academic, and socio-cultural institutions.” The result is an awful interrogation that feels a lot like reading shadow headlines under the actual headlines of today: “Human parts may or may not be ‘people’ and as ‘woman’ are a part of the term ‘people’ they may or may not qualify in and of themselves.” It’s trying to lose me in its permutations, as bureaucracy likes to do, and even though I know that the governing world does not think of me as a person, I don’t want to follow its bad logic.
But there is plenty of the pleasure of reading to be found in this book, too. Shaughnessy’s work, even when it deals with serious subjects, plays with expected syntax and definition, unable to resist the turn: “[t]he waste stays in place. / The rest disappears. The unrest, too.” Sometimes, when I read this kind of play in a poem about serious subject matter, I think briefly about the sense of dissonance it gives me. But it’s something else, too. It’s a kind of automatic comfort in your own tendencies, even after everything has gone to shit. I’m reminded of Ling Ma’s Severance, a work of dystopian fiction in which a fungal fever spreads rapidly across the globe. The fevered lose cognitive capability and begin to just execute rote, familiar tasks (setting the dinner table, flipping through a textbook, combing their hair) until they basically die of malnourishment. In the face of disaster, we rely on the familiar, and if we’ve always played with language, then that’s what we will continue to do. It has maybe nothing to do with actual joy or resistance, and more to do with being the person you’ve always been, and with the kinds of things you have always found amusing—that person is still there, in a tragic circumstance as in a dystopian future. That person is not flummoxed by the situation they’ve found themselves in; they’re continuing to operate in spite of everything. I’m recently through a world-bendingly sad event of my own, and sometimes still make jokes on the internet. It’s how we are as a species.
All in all, The Octopus Museum is a book about irreversible change and its manifestations, and about how individual, flawed human families cope with it. It’s a book of hindsight, like the letters from Ned, pinpointing the places where we could’ve done differently, to no avail and sometimes to chagrin. It doesn’t know what to do next—“What are the most important questions, other than this one?” asks the narrator, and there is no answer because it’s the end of the poem. But even if it sometimes veers toward the moralizing, it’s one of the more successful works of poetry I’ve read on the topic of climate change, in that it depicts people still living in a world already lost to us.