Close Reading an Octopus

A sketch of the particular Umwelt which shapes each life

I hadn’t realized how narrow my understanding of this blog’s title—“Close Reading”—had become until a friend loaned me a fine new book, Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Yong’s book has reminded me what “close reading” is for, as described by Slant Books’ own definition:

the art of close reading reminds us that great literature deepens our respect for mystery and the divided nature of the human heart—and in so doing offers us hope for healing and reconciliation.

Whether Yong’s book qualifies as “great literature” I’m not going to judge. But I will say that the kind of close reading the book practices really has deepened my “respect for mystery and the divided nature of the human heart” and that it has also given me “hope for healing and reconciliation.” True, the close reading I’m talking about here doesn’t involve textual analysis, at least not directly. Instead, it involves paying close attention to—reading closely—the ways the animals that share this planet with us live their lives.

They live them, Yong begins by explaining, by learning to survive within the Umwelt (from a German word meaning “around-world”) shaped by their sensory capacities. We humans too live in an Umwelt, distinct to us, but not essentially different from any other animal’s.

Test case: How would you describe your own Umwelt when you’re trying to get to sleep some night and you suddenly hear the whine of a mosquito around your ear? What senses in you are activated by that sound? Smell? No. Taste? No. Touch? No. Sight? Not until you turn on the light and look frantically around. Hearing? For sure. What physical reactions now ensue? What emotional ones? Clearly, your Umwelt during this minor emergency doesn’t supply you with many resources to deal with what your senses suggest is a threat.

But what about your tormentor’s Umwelt? Ed Yong advises you to forget your troubles and try to imagine “what it might be like to be a mosquito,” as,

flying through a thick soup of tropical air, your antennae slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of carbon dioxide. Enticed, you turn into the plume, zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead whenever you pick it up. You spot a dark silhouette and fly over to investigate. You enter into a cloud of lactic acid, ammonia, and sulcatone—molecules released by the human skin. Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat. You land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and other tastes. Your senses, working together, have once again found a human. You find a blood vessel and drink your fill.

Quick conclusion: the mosquito may be a nuisance to you, but its sensory world, its Umwelt, is fully operational, involving all five senses working together to distinguish you as different from itself and desirable. In a perhaps embarrassing way, the mosquito is close reading you. And doing it so well that it is able to avoid your buffoonish efforts to swat it. For a while, the two of you have become equals. And your becoming a winner is not guaranteed. Use your big brain and decide to leave the room.

Yong imagines scenarios like this with all sorts of animals, from ticks to tigers, providing us with a sketch of the particular Umwelt which shapes each life. Then he divides the book according to the senses that enable perception. Not just the usual five (touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste), but also pain, as well as refinements of the basic five that allow some animals (not us) to sense ripple trails in the sea or magnetic currents in the air. Yong’s report is supported by references to a voluminous and ever-expanding bibliography of research all based on close readings of animals’ sensory responses.

Yong’s real achievement, though, isn’t his conscientious cataloging of recent Umwelt studies, but his way of presenting them. He writes about both animals and their human researchers as if they were members of the same community. His point is that while we humans obviously share the senses with animals, we also share their eagerness to exploit them to the fullest. Whether you’re a mosquito or a mosquito specialist, your drive to understand and thus control events within your respective Umwelt is tireless. And because of that kinship, you can be talked about in similar ways.

Yong’s style throughout is like this: using language that brings us constantly deeper into kinship with the Umwelten of the animals whose behaviors we are close reading. My favorite moments in that process of deepening acquaintance and mutual recognition occur when Yong follows the human close readers on their quest to understand how a subject animal employs its senses in exploring its Umwelt—and discover the tables have been turned and it’s they who are being close read.

Let’s follow Tamar Gutnick, a researcher eager to understand better the relationship between an octopus’s central brain and its eight arms, which function like separate mini-brains. Gutnick tested a particular group of octopuses and found that

the central brain can control the arms, but it’s a relaxed boss. It doesn’t like to micromanage but coordinates the team of eight when needed. A single arm can snake its way through an opaque maze, using taste-touch to find the right route with no input from the rest of the animal. . . . But Gutnick has shown that octopuses can also solve problems that stump individual arms. She set up a transparent maze in which the correct path forced the arm out of the water, depriving it of chemical cues. The octopuses could still find that path by guiding their arms with their eyes . . .

Well, not all the octopuses. It turns out that some octopuses in the group, as happens rather often in human groups, weren’t as smart as others. But the majority passed the test. I don’t know Tamar Gutnick, but I bet she’d agree that, by concocting that maze, she achieved a kind of equality with those better students. They, like her, are using powers derived from their senses to match wits with hers, and, based on the evidence provided here, I’d say Tamar and those smarter octopuses have a lot in common.

And sometimes we humans have to take a back seat. Many animals, from insects to mammals, have senses that are actually more capacious than our own. Can you and I echolocate like a bat? Or follow magnetic fields to migrate? Whose Umwelt is larger than whose?

Getting us to ask questions like that demonstrate the power of Yong’s book. If “close reading deepens our respect for mystery,” then Yong shows again and again how our careful attention to the way animals build their Umwelten reconnects us with those animals, even the humblest among them. It’s a reconnection that awakens us to the mystery of what we usually want to deny: our common origin as fellow creatures. Dividing ourselves from our fellow creatures divides us from ourselves and from the mystery of our existence.

So, contrary to the current wisdom, animals are not objects to be used, consumed, ignored, or eliminated at will. Yong quotes American naturalist Henry Beston:

They live finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. . . . They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.

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