The Uncommon Octopus

"It's a lot of work to separate signal from noise."

― Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor of information science at the University of North Carolina, who cautioned about the need for masks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early COVID phase

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"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us."

― Wendell Berry, “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”

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Dear Alex,

To me it happened without plan last night. I cried after watching the 2020 Netflix Original film, "My Octopus Teacher."  Don’t quite remember the last time letting go of tears before the big screen.

I won’t tell you about the documentary, except this one thing: it took a decade of weeping in the kelp forest from the storyteller to keep his heart buoyant with the tide now looming on our flat panels. Not for show or sermon. An accidental narrative not meant to be told.

By design or mishap, our lives dip into the stories and stanzas on celluloid or page perhaps much like how we clash in conflict and conversation. Two years ago you gave me Wendell Berry’s collection of 21 essays from where I scoured the quote above. Your first book for me, “The Pastor,” had changed my entire family meal plans from mostly take-outs to home-cooking. I have not finished reading this softbound by Berry. I fear change, the certainty of our world. Books seem to move people off of the plateau. I don’t know when I'd dare face Berry in my nightly reading, though he is gentle poetry, intimating to me an invite, not fear.

Of the throngs in amplitude that suck on our senses, how do you decide in a twist of destiny about what to listen to and who to let in? The few passages that I’ve been following in my reading ritual are now written on the faces drifting towards me. Not long ago, I saw the bare back of an old man hunched over bedsheets pale as his lips. The nurse had called me to the room for help. He did not ask for us to come. In the state of familiarity, we comply with expectations and set on foot what we’ve rehearsed in habit. There is scarcely pause or attention to filter meaning from mess, signal from noise.

Um... Do you really want to watch this one, together? I asked my daughter in a sluggish pitch one final time after she had clicked on the octopus image. An hour passed, I reached my breaking point, cheeks wet but dark in the slant of night.

Yours, Kate