Touch: I, an Octopus, the Story of My Life

Deep in the kelp forests of Cape Town, South Africa, lives a female octopus. Her world is completely different from that of humans: her skin can see light, her tentacles can think independently, and her consciousness is scattered among nine nerve centers that talk to each other. She doesn't use words to recall, but her body remembers everything - the shape of every reef, the temperature of every ocean current, the taste of every prey. One day, a strange creature broke into her territory. He was not like a fish, not like a dolphin, not like any of the predators in her genetic memory. He blew rhythmic bubbles from his mouth, had a huge reflective surface on his face, and hid something behind his eyes that she didn't understand at all. He would come every day, stay for a long time, and then leave. He didn't try to hunt her. She decided to touch him. This is an autobiography of life told from the perspective of an octopus - about how to use tentacles to "see" a human being, about being bitten off by a shark and waiting for rebirth in the depths of a cave, and about how in three hundred and twenty-five days, a creature with a lifespan of only one year completed a complete arc from being a solitary to cross-species trust. Adapted from the Oscar-winning documentary feature film "My Octopus Teacher", "Touch" is a literary experiment that uses human language to translate the inner world of "alien intelligence". What it asks is: If a life that is so distantly related to you can take the initiative to put its tentacles on your chest at the end of its life - then does the word "understanding" have a dimension that we don't know about?