Octopus, oh Octopus!

Sun Jun 12 08:17:43 CDT 2016

One more octopus note to append to my quotation from Schaub that classes
gray Grigori with other colorlessnesses and against "gaudy Tyrone in his
Hawaiian shirt":

Would that be the case if Pynchon had known more about octopus color
changes (for camouflage, probably communication, and for all we know fun)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0QqxwyL_8 and related clips

The more we learn about cephalopods' chromatophores and their distributed
nervous systems, the more they seem a fascinating (and definitely gaudy)
alternative to ours as imagined on pp, 147-148

On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 8:08 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
>
> Had to think of Slothrop and Grigori - "Holy shit it's *moving*---an
> octopus? Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen
> outside of the movies ..." (p. 186) - yesterday, when I was reading Bret
> Easton Ellis' "Glamorama" from 1998 in the translation of Joachim Kalka. In
> chapter 13 of part 2, the protagonist Victor Ward meets a director of
> photography named Felix who tells him about an animal horror film he just
> did. It's called - my ad hoc 're-turn translations' from page 336 likely
> will differ slightly from Ellis' original words - "Sh! The Octopus"
> (actually there is, as I just saw, a movie of that title from 1937, but
> this remake is apparently fictional) and the third part of a serial. The
> first movie is titled "Attention! The Octopus", the second "Alas! The
> Octopus", and the last one so far bears the working title "Let's scram! The
> Octopus". The serial is financed by Ted Turner. While Felix is in general
> not happy with "Sh! The Octopus" he nevertheless - "and Al Sharpton took
> part as Whitney Houston's extremely embittered father --- the embittered
> harpooner" -  praises the casting and reports to Victor that - "really
> ironic, isn't it?" - David Hasselhoff is the first victim of the octopus.
>
> Like Slothrop, I once met an octopus in the Mediterranean Sea. I was
> diving near the Balearic Islands and saw it on a plateau. When the creature
> realized me it communicated unmistakably that it wished to be left alone.
> First - I kid you not! - it took with one of its arms a little stone  and,
> while uttering a bark like sound,  threw it in my direction, and then the
> octopus spread its ink and got lost, somewhere in the undersea scenery ...
>
> When I think about the octopus in literature - in the visual arts there is
> Hokusai's "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife", and "Octopus' Garden" by The
> Beatles in music - the first author coming to my mind is Ernst Jünger. For
> a couple of semesters during the mid 1920s Jünger studied not only
> philosophy but also biology. First in Leipzig, then, following his zoology
> professor Georg Grimpe who had joined the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli, in
> Naples. (Interestingly enough, Grimpe, who belongs to the German professors
> who declared their 'Avowal to Adolf Hitler' in November 1933, had obtained
> his doctorate with a dissertation on the vascular system of Octopoda.) The
> Stazione Zoologica di Napoli had (and still has) an aquarium where Ernst
> Jünger was observing a small octopus species named Loligo media for a
> couple of weeks. Not that anything in terms of science originated from
> that, but in "Das Abenteuerliche Herz" (The Adventurous Heart) we find a
> piece that expresses Jünger's aesthetic fascination with the creature. In
> that piece, which in the second edition bears the title "Frutti de Mare",
> he praises the octopus' ability to first burst into colors - "outta
> floating scale of brown, yellow, violet and purple shades" - and then to
> pale all of sudden, after which "only the deeply green-golden rings, which
> are enameling the eyes, are emitting an afterglow like rainbows". Jünger
> also emphasizes that to eyes used to the paler shimmer of the North the
> colors of a Southern Sea are of inexhaustible charm and linked to dreams
> and the night.
>
> "Seit einigen Wochen habe ich mich hier seßhaft gemacht, als Dottore
> precatore, wie das Volk die in den Räumen des Aquariums arbeitenden
> Zoologen zu nennen liebt. Es ist ein kühler, klösterlicher Ort, an dem bei
> Tag und Nacht süßes und salziges Wasser in große, gläserne Becken sprudelt,
> inmitten eines Parks, der sich am Meer erstreckt. (...) Meine
> Aufmerksamkeit ist einem kleinen Tintenfisch gewidmet, der Loligo media
> heißt und mich jeden Morgen von neuem durch die Schönheit seines farbigen
> Schwanengesanges entzückt, den er aus einer fließenden Skala brauner,
> gelber, violetter und purpurner Töne kombiniert. Insbesondere liebe ich
> eine köstliche Art des Erblassens an ihm, eine nervöse Nachlässigkeit,
> durch die er neue, unerhörte Überraschungen  vorzubereiten pflegt.
> Allzubald fällt diese Pracht dem Tode anheim; sie erlischt gleich
> flammenden Wolken, die sich im Feuchten auflösen, und nur die tief
> grüngoldenen Ringe, die die großen Augen emaillieren, leuchten wie
> Regenbogen nach. Auf seinem spannenlangen Körper spielt das Leben seine
> berauschende Melodie; es überschüttet ihn mit seinem Überflusse und läßt
> ihn gleich einer grausamen Geliebten im Stich. Nach so viel Glanz bleibt
> der Überrest wie ein bleicher Schemen, wie die ausgebrannte Hülse eines
> goldenen Feuerwerks zurück. (...) Was ein südliches Meer an Geheimnissen
> birgt, das ist für die an blasseren Schimmer gewöhnten Augen des Nordens
> von unerschöpflichem Reiz. (...) Diese Farben sind traumhafter; sie gehören
> eher der Nacht als dem Tage an; sie bedürfen des dunkelblauen Abgrundes zum
> Schutz. Zuweilen klingen sie in ihren satten violetten und dunkelroten
> Flecken, die sich in ein Fleisch brennen, das feinen weißen, rosa oder
> gelblichen Porzellanarten gleicht, an gewisse Orchideen wie die Stanhopea
> an --- ..."
>
> (Ernst Jünger: Das Abenteuerliche Herz. Zweite Fassung. Figuren und
> Capriccios. Reclam edition, pp. 55-58)
>
> In Hans Biedermann's lexicon of symbols (see Knauers Lexikon der Symbole,
> p. 312-313) it says that the octopus did have a mythic-symbolic meaning in
> Greek antiquity which is still unknown. Biedermann also speculates that the
> octopus might have been the real world model for both, Medusa's head and
> the Scylla. "The dark cloud of ink worked as a symbol of the animal's
> affinity to higher powers." Later the octopus was, in liaison with the
> prawn, occasionally allocated to the astrological sign of Cancer. The ink
> of the octopus was used as writing ink, and its bite was considered to be
> toxic.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Hokusai_The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife.jpg&imgrefurl=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hokusai_The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife.jpg&h=467&w=670&tbnid=r-k95iOqUTHhlM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=174&docid=PczI0oAcogzWDM&usg=__9OI_jjvKccm1qvKSe8wcNfGQjKs=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwivzY6E-qHNAhVBG5oKHVmfBtAQ9QEIIDAB
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3LdjeCK5I
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> " ... Apirana prepares the traditional bone needles, gives her a piece of
> rope to bite down on, and begins to punch the tips dipped in black ink into
> the skin of the young girl's back./ As if he were a dark Pygmalion, he runs
> his skilled hand in rehearsal over the places he intends to draw menacing
> black clouds, gruesome krakens emerging from the troughs ..."
>
> (Christian Kracht: Imperium, p. 166)
>
>
>
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