We’ve been studying, among other things, the octopus in our homeschool. Now here is a fascinating creature. A mollusk (who knew?), the octopus is relative to clam, oyster and mussel. But she makes use of her spineless, shell-free state: that soft body can insert itself into minute cracks and dark slips of spaces where it can hide and become irretrievable, even to the eel, the octopus’s arch-enemy.
Octopuses (octopi?) can also jet, siphoning water through a, uh, siphon and then squirting it out again, much in the way a jet plane (if I understand these things correctly) gains speed based on the air it sucks and then propels through its engines. And octopuses can squirt ink, obscuring their scent and shape during getaway. And they have eight (count them: 8) tentacles that, should an eel succeed in efforts at Removal, will grow back.
I have been dealing, these past few days, with an octopus of my own. It does not require salt water. It does not require water at all. What it does require is a Great Deal of Thought, and Concentration, and the looming deadline that is tomorrow at noon. Yes, I have been writing a paper, a last paper, the final paper of my Master’s coursework, and I have likened this particular project to bagging an octopus.
I don’t know if people do this. I would imagine that they do. Octopuses live, don’t they, some of them? in aquariums—they had to get there somehow. But catching an octopus (and keep in mind here the aforementioned ability of the octopus to hide, jet and squirt) seems tricky. Seems to me one could get a PhD in marine biology just for bringing one of those puppies home.
Well, I’ve been bagging an octopus here on my laptop. Yes, I’ve been writing—for hours and for days—a paper on Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and it has been one heck of a feat.
You are familiar, O Faithful Reader, with this book. I’ve mentioned it here a time or two and, if you are among the elite (members of Vlaardinger Boeks, I’m speaking to you), then you have also endured my Reading Aloud some of the exquisite prose this book has to offer. But you can’t know—really you can’t—how tricky this book is, how encumbered with meaning, how imagistic and radial its design.
My professor wisely recommended that, in preparing to write, we choose three or four passages for close reading. Rather than sprinkle the paper with quotes from throughout the text, he said (but far more eloquently than that), read closely a few passages that support your thesis. That seemed like a good plan, and I went for it.
I had the passages picked out; I had a vague awareness of a thesis. But these passages and, in fact, any passages, had so many possible interpretations, so many nuanced inflections, that I began writing (gasp!) without a clear thesis.
That is a No No.
I had no choice. If the thesis were the body (or head) of the octopus, then I couldn’t grasp it from the top. I had instead to explore a tentacle or two; I had to follow those suction cups all the way to the beak-like mouth and find out what it had to say. And that’s what I did.
When I woke up this morning, I had a closely read analysis of one section of the book and an introduction, which might be the equivalent of two—maybe three– tentacles in the bag. That isn’t much, when one is talking octopuses.
I commenced writing on the second tentacle—er, section, then the third. But even as I wrote, ideas emerged from the page like so many… tentacles. I tried as best I could to write one down, but needed, alas, the thesaurus. So I held fast to the waving tentacle of my idea even as I thumbed through the well-worn book, looking for new ways to talk about it. As I did so, other tentacles tried to pry this one from my grasp and I, as ever, was snagged on the beauty of synonym and shades of meaning. It’s the same sort of problem with the dictionary, and dictionaries are, apparently, great friends of octopuses making an Escape.
In short, no sooner did I have a tentacle in hand than another came drifting before my gaze while still two more suctioned themselves to my hand and three attached themselves to my brain and the last one (which makes eight) came slipping out of the bag.
I took a much-needed break and got the children something to eat. I read over the first few sections and realized that the introduction and–worse– the thesis were All Wrong. I finished the forth section and said a prayer over the introduction and went to have dinner at my mother-in-law’s house.
When I returned, the octopus had escaped entirely and had wedged itself behind the homeschool cabinet. I took two ibuprofen for my headache and started watching a movie with Bill. I thought about how long the movie would be and how bad it was and how the octopus would still be behind the cabinet when the movie ended at eleven, and how hard it was to bag that octopus and how badly I wanted it to be, once and for all, Contained.
I returned to the kitchen and I re-read the paper thus far and lured the octopus out with a hermit crab. Eight hermit crabs.
And while those tentacles were busy, while they were engaged with sending those hermit crabs down the rows of suction cups that comprise their undersides, I grabbed that octopus by its head and stuffed it in the bag. It took some doing, in the form of editing, to tuck the tentacles in after it. The last tentacle (read Conclusion) took some tricky manipulation. But I wound it around itself even as I narrowed the bag’s opening. Cinching the sack ever tighter, I poked and poked that tentacle into the bag until: Squeeze! The tentacle disappeared under the diminished aperture (yes, I’ve been spending time with a thesaurus) and the octopus, defeated, settled into a heap at the bottom of the bag.
Yep, it’s done, folks. Octopus nabbed, bag sealed, bibliography listed, pages numbered, and staple in the upper left hand corner. I’ve got me an octopus, and I’m so glad it’s over.
And tomorrow, as I drive over to campus, I won’t heed the bag’s squirming. I won’t listen to its efforts at escape, won’t attend to the ink-stain seeping over the sack, won’t even think about opening the bag to take a last little peak. The paper is done, and that’s Final.
