Metempsychotic

A very short story where I imagine what it is like to be non-human

I am now an octopus, but I have not always been an octopus. After my first metempsychotic transition, I spent three months as a ladybug. These were hard months. Day one I had a big but not hard problem - what is eatable?

Having squeezed free from my egg I felt the air on my flesh for the first time. Squirming forward I bit one thing, then another. Stick: unchewable, tasteless. Leaf: chewable, nasty. Aphid: chewable, delicious! And abundant! Gushy, unrestrained larva that I was, I gorged myself for four days. That halcyon time is now an exquisite blur of tastes, to be soon followed up by the longer, primordial blur of pupation.

For the first time I experienced a thing for which a human being has truly experienced no equivalent. It is something like popping your knuckles, but your whole body is knuckles, and they pop every second for two weeks, at the end of which you have a carapace, which is like having a new tooth in your mouth which you cannot stop feeling with your tongue, except your whole body is covered by teeth, and you can feel all of them.

Further days presented further challenges. I was, you see, a suburban ladybug. Meaning people. Meaning children, the insatiable curiosity of which was a serious cause for concern. Capture became the major fear. To a ladybug the omens of incoming children are not the characteristic screeching and giggles that humans know. Rather there is a terrestrial rumble. Accompanied by the sound thunder, but without the remotest gravitas.

I spent one week in a bottle. Which was not so terrible in itself. It is quite beautiful inside a bottle. Especially if you are very small. However, there was a real chance of my premature death as the child thought I ate leaves. These aphidless days passed more and more slowly. My lethargy became so extreme I could barely move, the child threw me out, presumably thinking I was dead.

After this salvation I became more cautious.

Soon after, I discovered that I was male which had never before been relevant to me. Upon seeing another ladybug, I experienced a profound urge to copulate. The process came naturally to me though that is not to say with ease, for it is a lengthy one. It involves two hours of almost complete stillness and involves a rather lightheaded yet strangely addictive feeling, like standing in a sauna while dehydrated.

All things end of course, and I was snapped up one day by a toad who I begrudge not at all. All things pass.

The moment of metempsychosis is, foremost, a plunge. The soul, slipping from the body, falls down the well of the self and is submerged into a subterranean current wherein it loses all sense perception. Thought too becomes a somewhat meaningless category and there is no memory. Feelings remain but take on a deeply musical, wordless quality. Emerging feels like nothing in particular. One simply wakes up.

So, I woke up. A flea this time. Living the hard and fast life of the flea, the only real joy of which is the joy of feeding. The relationship of the flea to blood is not at all what the human imagines. It is not an experience of burrowing, furtive, parasitism but something more like the primal majesty of the hunter or the joy of the desert nomad, who, after days in a wilderness of sand discovers an oasis. It was a fact I was to learn time and time again: for many animals the great delight of life is not sex (a routine, instinctive affair) but food. Freud would be illegible to the flea, to the bat, to the urchin.

I was to be some version of a flea thousands of times. Slightly different. Barely perceptible levels of difference but enough to be exciting when I first noticed them. Indeed, I was to be an insect far more than anything else. I spent much, much more time than I would have initially desired as some type of beetle or another. Almost as much time as wasps. The latter being preferable to the former as flight never has lost its charm.

I was also many non-insect things of course.

I was a noble bull moose, respected in my herd. I nevertheless died engaged in an open combat for the passionate love of a deserving cow moose.

I was a nematode, gaining a Zen-like clarity in my small, dark world. Living by Boolean thoughts and simple deeds. Part of a teeming mass of life on the deep-sea floor. Almost negligibly aware as individuals, overwhelmingly conscious in aggregate.

I was an Albatross. My life was defined by fidelity to the colony, complex courtship dances, deep affection for my partner, child-rearing, queer adultery, siblicide, interspecies raids. Between it all, taking the most long-haul flights possible, years in the air before returning to raucous society.

Now, I am at the end. A common octopus. Octopus vulgaris. My final life has been alone but not lonely. There is so much in my cove. It is such a place to be sensate; each rock is a world to the kinesthetic intelligence of a grasping tentacle.

When I was young, I was full of terror and awe at this overabundant world where predator and prey were still undefined. Everything a threat, everything a meal. I hold the memory of this time in my body, the lashes of the bull shark’s teeth and the painful regrowth of limbs.

In middle age, awe gave way to curiosity. I made mental maps of kelp forests and rocky beaches. Gorged myself on images of swirling rabbitfish and the otherworldly texture of discarded plastics. Danger still abundant but dwarfed by sensation.

In my dotage I am spent. Having become pregnant, I have long been destined to die. Mating was a nothing, a consequence of chance encounter. I accepted his offer, and then I ate him. Another octopus is nothing special to me in the web of being, our similarities less important than his edibility. He tasted better than clam, worse than crab. Our children hatched minutes ago, swam off into the sea. So, I die.

My soul slips from my body, down the well of the self, plunged into the subterranean current where the memories my body held are swept away, replaced by musical and wordless feeling. I do not wake up.

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