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,
