If you could somehow peer inside Craig Foster’s head, you imagine that you would find inside, swimming about, a carnival of strange sea creatures. It would be like peering into an aquarium inhabited by brightly hued, many-tentacled, alien-like molluscs, fish and anemones.
This is a fanciful idea. I hesitated before putting it to him. He is … well, what is he? He is a scientific seeker, a meticulous documentary film-maker, best known for his Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher, in which he spent a year, every day, floating deep down in the cold waters of the Great African Seaforest in his native South Africa.
He visited his octopus teacher to track her life, and eventual death, in an attempt to find out what the inner life of one octopus might be like. Does an octopus have an inner life? Can an octopus and a man have a meaningful relationship? He loved her. What form does the love of an octopus take?
I am certainly not the first to ponder these questions. Sophie Lewis, who is a queer feminist writer, appeared to have claimed that Foster had had some sort of erotic relationship with the octopus. She didn’t really. A throwaway line – “at one point they had a form of sex” ( a joke, really) went virally steamy on social media. In fact, the hottest things got was a spot of hand-holding, if a tentacle could on any level be deemed a hand. And it can’t, surely?
Little-known octopus fact: they don’t have tentacles, they have arms. This is the sort of arcane thing you learn when you peer into Foster’s inner aquarium. But the “Man has sex with octopus” story is so nuts that it is also very funny. It is Daily Mail-worthy. The author of the cephalopod-as-sex-siren piece admitted that she had watched My Octopus Teacher while tripping on acid. He says, “That crazy thing. You can’t take it seriously.”
I decided to put my fanciful, slightly trippy, aquarium-inside-his-head idea to him. The hesitation was because, having watched the film and read his just-published book, Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World, he comes across as terribly worried about the planet, particularly the oceans, and hence, at moments, terribly earnest. He was, you’d surmise, not a man given to flights of fancy.
He is terribly worried. He can certainly be earnest, but not terribly so. And he is not in the least preachy or judgmental. He just would really like you to give a shit. He is the co-founder of the not-for-profit organisation the Sea Change Project, which aims to collect and share 1001 stories about creatures of the sea. He figures that if you teach people about the wonders of the sea they might care more about the creatures and bodies of water that house them.
If you get to the end of his book and you do not care, frankly, you probably are a shit. And he is a man who spent a year with an octopus. What could be more seductive, even once you remove the “man has sex with octopus” angle, than the story of a man and an octopus? Is that fanciful?
Yes. And magical. He loved the idea of my imaginary aquarium. “It’s actually surprisingly accurate in a way. When you’ve spent so many hours diving, with this method I’m using I’m trying to build threads to these animals. I’m using tracking to get into their secret lives. So what I’m trying to do is use underwater tracking.” He sees “signs and symbols … And then I sort of hang back and I keep very still in the water and then track these animals and watch them. You get inside their secret lives.”
This sounds cryptic, or mystical. There is something of the mystic about him. He sounds elusive, as slippery as a deep-sea eel. He’s not. He’s practical and precise. He has a scientist’s mind and, I suspect, a romantic’s spirit.
When he talks about the sea creatures, he says, “Very, very few people, if any, know much about them at all … So it feels tremendously privileged to get inside their lives … And you can’t help falling in love with them … because their lives are so fascinating and sometimes so hard and difficult and they have to be so clever to get to adulthood.”
Falling in love? Can he define love? “It’s not like a human love. But I feel that they are like, almost, a human family. Because it’s years and years of this connection to them and they feel like wild kins. They are inside my head and my heart. And I feel this tremendous bond with them after being in the water, day after day, year after year.”
Who’s the alien?
An octopus, is, surely, the closest thing to aliens that we know. An octopus’s blood is blue; it has copper in it. They’re weird. “My sense is that it’s the opposite, Michele. I feel like we’re the aliens.”
I said, prefacing a question with trepidation while telling him I was prefacing the question with trepidation: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have an obsessive personality?” He didn’t take it the wrong way. He laughed. No he didn’t. He barked, like an amused seal.
“Probably,” he said. “I’m trying not to be as obsessive as I used to be.” Oh, ha ha. He barked again when I told him he was a masochist. An example: he bought an old chest freezer and turned it into an icebox, making it waterproof with marine-grade silicone, filling it with water and letting ice form over a matter of hours. Then, in he happily hops. His record for staying in what sounds like an ice coffin is 22 minutes so far. Sometimes he closes the lid and lies there in total darkness. It is frickin’ freezing, obviously. Not to mention, you know, kind of uncomfortable.
He has what I reckon to be an extremely complicated relationship with the uncomfortable. The ice-water bath, the diving without a wetsuit. He embraces the extreme. His relationship with cold is, he says, a form of therapy. He realised that when he came back from epic documentary-making expeditions with his brother, Damon, he would crash – mentally and physically.
He writes that he “craved immersion” in the cold. “I vowed to enter the great Atlantic Ocean each day. I made the commitment to dive every day for 10 years no matter how much the wind and the cold urged me to stay in bed.” He wanted to “transform my manic muse from a dominating tyrant into a creative force that would still grant me stamina and vision but not break down my health or distance me from my family”.
He says our ancestors were often cold and wet. He wants to experience that: “You know, what our original lives used to be like.” But we don’t have to be cold and wet and miserable. It’s called comfort. You could also call it progress. “You could. But there is some evidence to suggest the hormonal system doesn’t work as well. You could call it the opposite of progress.”
He wants to make connections. It’s what he calls tracking, and the other thing he is attempting to track is his connection back to his ancestors. He is trying to find the “wild” within himself. He believes that finding the wild within himself solidifies his connection with the earth and the ocean which he calls “Mother”.
He likes hard and gruelling things. Hard physically and mentally. Has he examined why? “It doesn’t feel like that, okay? It’s freezing and … maybe the first five minutes will be a bit difficult. But after that I’ll feel amazing for the whole day.”
Has he got a bed? Or does he sleep on a concrete slab? Another seal bark. “I think we’ve got a little bit of a wrong idea! I also love the comfort of the tame world. I really do.” He loves the cold but also the heat. He has made himself a sauna from an old heater and bits of wood.
He’s a funny fish. He was destined to be a funny fish. He was born and raised in the Cape of Good Hope: “In the lap of the sea.” The day he came home from the hospital after he was born, his father dunked him in the sea.
He is capable of complete stillness and manic bursts that he sought to cure. He likes rigour. When he decided to pursue his icy experiment, he thoroughly researched the science behind what is called cold stress. Cold-water immersion, by the way, was all the rage in the 18th century, when toffs flocked to Bath seeking to cure what ailed them.
You see what an education an audience with octopus man is? That is not a glib observation. He is clever and thoughtful and unexpectedly funny. He let me tell him stories about how clever my sheep are and a lady blackbird I tamed. “Yes, lovely.” He would say she tamed me. He has an unexpected tolerance for, and a delight in, the whimsical.
On the wild side
He has an almost super-human tolerance for what normal humans would regard as danger, to the point of foolhardiness.
He has dived with an enormous, 4.5m Nile crocodile and followed it into its lair. He has dived with a great white shark and the even more dangerous tiger sharks. He writes, with what amounts to a shrug, about his diving companion: “Walter eventually got bitten quite badly but he’s fine now.” Whew, that’s all right then.
As a kid, he encountered a giant octopus, 6.5m tall, “with a bright orange head the size of a rugby ball”. The sea monster grabbed his arms and began to drag him off to its lair. He sensed that to struggle would be a mistake, so he forced himself to completely relax and the thing let him go.
That particular encounter would put most people off ever going back into the water. He is not most people, obviously. He couldn’t wait to get back into the water. I think he’s part – possibly mostly – fish.
I think he is a romantic. He falls in love easily, with creatures such as this one: a “magical” Cape clawless otter. They are terribly shy critters. The one he came across reached out to stroke his face. He felt: “love, gratitude and a bit of confusion”. He cried. He was so overtaken by emotion – joy, mostly – that he had to get out of the water and lie on a rock. You have to love that story.
He is a good storyteller. On the page and in person.
He will be the first and last person I have talked to who has sucked the marrow from the giant leg bone of a giraffe. It goes without saying that he didn’t wander into a butcher’s shop and say, “Just one giraffe’s leg today, thanks.” He was doing a film called My Hunter’s Heart. He and the film crew had been invited “on what could have been one of the last giraffe hunts with poison arrows”.
These weapons, he writes, are “at least 24,000 years old, possibly older”. The hunters were San trackers who live and hunt in the Nyae Nyae Pans in Namibia. The hunt culminates in the great giraffe dance, a ritual designed to honour the animal sacrifice. Is it horrible to eat a giraffe? Some people, me in particular, think it’s horrible to eat a lamb. But I eat cows. The French eat horses. Foster no longer eats octopus. But he has eaten it.
There is something almost hallucinatory about some passages in his book. Here he is in a sea cave: “We were entering a fantasy world that was somehow real. My flashlight looked like a light saber penetrating the darkness, illuminating the giant molluscs, anemones and urchins living in the dark.”
You do have to ask: has he taken trippy drugs? “A long time ago. But only in the context of I used to be interested in altered states. Because the San people have this incredible thing called the trance dance. It’s supposed to be one of the oldest ceremonies in the world. The rhythmic tapping and the heat and the dancing … to enter these altered states.” He almost managed to get into a trance state. He has tried other methods without plants and managed to “get quite deep into those states. And they’ve been absolutely fascinating.”
Here is another way to achieve an absolutely fascinating altered state: peer inside Craig Foster’s head.
Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out now.