The Divinations of Paul Oktopus

By Alicia Liu, aged 17

1.

I once received an unexpected lesson from a cephalopod. It happened in a land far, far away, on the orange-juice-stained, white-cotton-covered sofa —falling apart from cat scratches but smelling of home and so comfortable that you sank right into it—that is now replaced by another with cold and expensive leather. It happened long, long ago, when my parents still had time for me to snuggle between them on the sofa in front of the television as the rain fell outside and alphabet soup boiled over the stove.

2.

The cephalopod was called Paul, octopus vulgaris. I was sandwiched warmly between my parents when I first came across him on TV, and my eyes widened as I sat watching his body and tentacles undulating, like a flower, in a transparent acrylic tank. The big tank held two smaller ones, again both transparent. Paul owes his name to the German poem Der Tintenfisch Paul Oktopus. Tinted fish.

3.

Food was placed in both of the small boxes – either a muscle or a clam. Painted on each box was a small rectangle of varying colors and patterns. And thus began Paul’s career as an oracle. Twelve out of 14 of his predictions were correct: a success rate of 85.7% making Paul perhaps one of the most legitimate oracles in history. His successful prediction of Spain as the winner of the 2010 FIFA World Cup final was sure to make the Oracle of Delphi’s eyes water with envy.

4.

Afterwards, these predictions imbued Paul with a value so that he became so much more than eight tentacles attached to head – despite that being all that he really was. After his claim to fame, a Galician businessman offered €30,000 for a “transfer fee” to rent Paul and showcase him as the main attraction at the local festival. Paul’s caretakers at the Oberhausen aquarium in Germany refused the eye-watering sum, making it perhaps impossible for any of them to ever become politicians. Meanwhile, as the concerns for Paul’s health on the trip to Spain weighed heavier than €30,000, trending on YouTube were videos of other octopus vulgaris being slapped onto a cutting board, writhing as they were dismembered in front of a transfixed audience sitting in a sushi bar. I wondered, what did Paul and his unnamed brother do differently that amounted to such different fates?

5.

As Paul’s popularity grew, I watched soccer with my parents more to see his soft body settle into one of the boxes than to see the football settle into the back of a net. But one day, it seemed like Paul was in a particularly pensive sort of mood whilst deciding between muscle or clam, and so his caretaker prompted him with a little push that resulted in a cloud of ink being shot into the acrylic box. Paul really was an inkfish. But the ink quickly dispersed, and clean water was pumped into Paul’s tank so quickly that I could hardly believe that the ink has been there at all just moments before. After the water cleared, there was Paul, as visible and trapped as ever. No ink, no matter how pure, how black, how strong, was to be of any avail if he was trapped in his crystal box. No ink would shield this elusive creature, living in the cracks between corals, from millions of pairs of eyes that he would never even know were directed at him. No, without an ocean to hold him, his ink was as useless as single chopstick.

6.

Then, as Paul became increasingly famous, the animal rights organization PETA saw his publicity as a springboard and warned that octopuses, like many sea animals kept in aquariums, are highly intelligent, with “complex thought processes, memories, and even personalities”. They said it was cruel to keep Paul in permanent confinement. But the Sea Life Center replied that it would even crueler to release him: hatched in captivity, Paul, like many others, lacked the ability to find food for himself in the wild. Numbed by the assurance of the regular magical appearance of plenty of food, exempt from the evading hunters, the ocean, with all the thrill of dark current, and brilliant storms and deep trenches, no longer reserved a place for Paul. I thought Paul had somehow been degraded into something less than any common octopus, despite his hefty net worth.

7.

I said one cephalopod taught me a lesson - but maybe it was two. Rabio, another octopus vulgaris managed to predict all of Japan’s World Cup stage games.  “I'm glad that all the forecasts turned out correct and Japan moved on to the knockout stage,” the fisherman Mr. Abe, told Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun and added “I hope Rabio's successor will accurately tip the results of all games and Japan will win the World Cup.” Rabio wasn’t as lucky as Paul, who died in tranquility in 2010: It seems that Mr. Abe couldn’t be held to the same moral standards as Paul’s aquarium workers, and Rabio had been sold to the fish market to become someone’s delicacy. By the time of Rabio’s death in 2014, I was old enough to marvel at humans, who, “troubled” over the death of a foot-ball predicting octopus, condemned the fisherman for selling him and even spread theories of the Japanese soccer team being cursed. Rabio, like Paul, had unknowingly become transformed into something greater than the millions of his brethren served on a plate. Attaching symbolic meaning where it does not belong, romanticizing octopi into oracles and then fighting over the feats of our imagination could be called mass stupidity.  Professors from the University of Cambridge were even driven to making a news statement that the probability of predictions – whether by Paul or Rabio or Rabio Jr. – was no different from flipping a coin.

8.

But in 2018, as the FIFA world Cup drew closer, I clicked open Google Explorer on my new MacBook Pro and saw a doodle of Paul, his tentacles spread across soft clouds and a halo on his head. I hovered my mouse over his tentacles, and they waved at me, almost as if to make another prediction. As I sat alone in front of my desk, in an empty dorm in the harsh 2am lamp light, my only companion a convenience store sandwich wrapper, Paul took me back to that warm living room in 2010, with the smell of soup wafting up from the kitchen, when the world was so much simpler, when the voices in my head had not yet silenced the sound of my parents’ laughter and the gentle pitter-pattering of rain against the glass.

Inspired by anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) and his essay ‘The Hidden Teacher’