Today, an employee told me she was a little tired because she had been up late last night watching a movie.
"What movie? Was it good?"
"It was amazing. It's about an octopus."
"Remarkably Bright Creatures, with Alfred Molina as the octopus?"
"Yes! Have you seen it?"
"No, but I just started reading the novel yesterday."
The novel was published in 2022. I became aware of it this past January. The Netflix adaptation was released on May 8. And yet the sync fairies saw to it that I started reading the novel the same day my employee watched the movie, and that we talked about it the next day.
3 comments:
Can't help but feel that the conversation above also somehow falls under the heading of "Remarkably Bright Creatures"-- and not just because the post itself is so titled. Surely William plays the part of the octopus, which in turn connects him to Mr. Molina and Dr. Octopus, etc.
Following a time-honored example in these precincts, I dropped "molina" into the Elvish dictionary. While I didn't get an exact hit, it's clear that the component "moli" indicates work, hard labor, even slavery. In fact the closest I came to getting a precise match was "molindo", meaning "worker", so it's interesting that the conversation William relates involves an employee of his (a rare occurence on the blog).
I haven't read this novel or seen the movie, but I am roughly familiar with the synopsis of the story. Now, being in the clutches of an octopus must be a terrifying exprience for any creature who suffers it, but I suppose that in the novel the octopus plays an other, more positive role. The necessity of work can extend to hard or punitive labor, and even to "mólië", as the Elves term it, yet despite certain onerous connotations, work (like the storied octopus) is not without its blessings.
"Moli" (derived from Molina/ molindo) indicates work, servant, hard labor, slavery, thralldom. Mr. Molina plays Dr. Octopus (a powerful villain of Pharazonic stature), as well as an octopus-- and even mere octopuses can be remarkably threatening creatures when they need to be. William is a business owner conversing with his worker in this post, and he is of course (again like the storied octopus) a remarkably bright creature.
Tyrants, like Dr. Octopus or the Antichrist, are enslavers and/or destroyers and that is why they are counted odious by most, yet enslavement and destruction are always toward ends that transcend those unjust means, ends that by definition are accounted higher than the instruments used to attain them, just as the octopus counts its own ends higher whenever it grasps a fellow creature, however remarkably bright, in its tentacles.
To end on a side note, just after having written the gist of this comment I came across the following news item about a new species of octopus that's been discovered, and it inter alia engages the notion of the octopus as predator.
"If the octopus grabs a prey item that emits light, that light may attract predators that might then eat the octopus[.]"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-octopus-discovered-galapagos-islands/
Wade's linking of the octopus to hard work makes me think of Victor Hugo's novel The Toilers of the Sea, which often has an octopus on the cover. I've never read it but know of it via Jacques Cousteau, who in his book Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence criticizes Hugo for portraying the octopus as a monster.
I was curious to look at book-covers for "Toilers of the Sea", so I dropped the title into Amazon's search engine. I've not read the novel myself, this being the first time I've heard of it. As an aside, I have it on excellent authority that "Toilers of the Sea" translated into literary Elvish yields the result Ëarmolindor.
Out of several advertised editions I only found one with the traditional monstrous octopus. While it's really just a giant octopus, it nevertheless gives off a certain Lovecraftian vibe. On the picture's right, beneath the sea's surface, the octopus cum demon's writhing entangling tentacles form an infinity sign that itself almost appears to be a pair of eyes, or at least a costume eye mask.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Z5xlLLwGL._SY522_.jpg
Interesting factoid from Google:
"What makes Victor Hugo’s use of the word pieuvre so memorable is that he single-handedly changed the French language with it. Before the publication of Les Travailleurs de la mer in 1866, the standard, educated French word for an octopus was poulpe (derived from Greek). Pieuvre was merely a obscure regional dialect word used strictly by the fishermen of the Channel Islands. Hugo took that local patois, thrust it into a massive international bestseller, and forever altered both literature and natural history."
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