The Octopus and the Cockroach

I learned a few things this week, which will probably impact greatly the remaining time I have left in this short, happy life. The sudden realization that the octopus is the smartest creature on earth filled me with a science fiction dread of Kraven proportion. It was difficult enough to accept that the octopus not only has a main brain, but a sub-brain in each of his arms. And to top it all off, his cock sits at the end of one of those arms. Now I know that it is fairly well accepted that a man thinks with his penis, but as far as I know, there isn't an actual brain there. Furthermore, I also learned that the octopus' camouflage is not an instinctual response; it is an act of will. The octopus observes his surroundings, and changes his color, color pattern, and texture almost instantaneously...by willing it. There have been several trysts in my life where this ability would have been greatly beneficial, but, alas, I am not as smart as an octopus.

I also learned this week that a cockroach can live for up to a week after being decapitated. While I am not certain which OCD scientist discovered this glorious fact, it clearly demonstrated to me that the head is not all that important. Since I have lived most of my life trying not to use my brain, this revelation had a certain calming effect on me. Clearly, it's not about what you know. It's all about what you don't know.

It was at this point that it all became very serious. The octopus' mom dies very soon after the emergence of her offspring. The little octopi never get the opportunity to learn anything from mom. She teaches them nothing, and they flip-flop-zoom off into the big blue ocean with only the wits they were born with. While I'm not advocating that human mothers should die after childbirth (or fathers, for that matter), I am suggesting that our children don't really need us to teach them anything; in fact, as I stated in my last post, by teaching our children what we think we know, we are doing them an evolutionary disservice. I mean they seem to come with the basics. They know where the milk is, they evacuate waste in most prolific displays, they smile when they're happy...and cry when they need. And in my own neonatal world, I learned all on my own that sticking your finger in a wall socket is a bad idea. Now the boys will learn everything they need to know about sex in a gooey, REM ejaculation...and, as is evidenced in today's world, girls don't really need to learn to spread their legs. And god knows, they all learn quickly enough that the food is in the refrigerator.

Now don't get me wrong. Passing along your legacy is probably an innate need. So I did teach my kids to hit a baseball, although my son surpassed me in that area a long time ago...at least age appropriately. And I do build a pretty good campfire, and generally, use power tools without injury, and there are some who rave about my cooking, in a comfort sort of way. But it all became clearer to me when I started thinking about how and why I write.

I write because it is important to me; it is important to me to express how I see the world and the people in it. But it is important to note that I write from within my own perspective (as does any other writer), and that perspective is shaped by what I 'learn'. And while I truly believe that what I 'learn' has value, it only has value within the 'time' the universe has given me...my time. My knowledge has relevance in my timeframe, not in the timeframe of my children. That I also believe that what I know and believe may offer valuable lessons to others, may carry some universal truth, is merely testament to my ego. That I believe that I think 'outside the box' may be true, but I have simply learned to live outside of MY box, shaped by my history, my present, and my hint of the future, and my future has nothing to do with the future of my children. I can't write computer code. Fuck, I can barely type. I cannot truly perceive a computer that is 'smarter' than I am, yet it will likely arrive before I perish. There are myriads of things that will emerge in my son's life of which I cannot conceive. Yet I am not afraid of his future. I just don't know anything about it. I am certain, however, that the 'box' of my life will not serve him. If I simply offer my 'box' as my legacy, he will not imagine how his world might become. My 'box' only offers him my limits, and he is limitless. We need to understand, in our own lives and in what we teach out children, that the mind that creates a problem cannot discover the solution, at least not without some kind of paradigm shift. The solutions exist in the undefined areas of our 'circles', and it is those blurry spaces that terrify us...that limit our ability to leap...that limit our willingness to do. This, of course, fully explains why the cures we create carry the unfortunate side effect of killing us as well.

It should be easy to see, for all but the completely blind, that our continued efforts to preserve our boxes, and to pass them along, erases their imagined possibilities; that by educating our children in the rote of what was...as opposed to the wonder of what could be...the wonder of what hasn't even been seen yet...is failing them completely. After thousand of years, all our science cannot account for two-thirds of the mass of the universe (although we did discover the Lyman-Alpha Blob, a triadic favorite), yet we insist on believing that our dark matter forms a foundation for what they might imagine and create. We insist they start from what we cannot see, but think we know. It seems to me that they are better served if, like the octopus mom, we let them 'see' with our eyes closed.