I.

I can't let go of my octopus and it won't let go of me. After all it has eight legs of traction. The thrust of a tugboat. Arachnophobia on the sea bed. Tentacle porn on the television screen. The Kraken is pure elemental power.

Eight forever. Infinite exponential eights like Moore’s ever-expanding RAM on the motherboard that runs your software.

My white whale, if you will, if you accept that I am both Ahab and whale, predator and prey. Call me Ishmael as I narrate the whole fishing expedition. As I sculpt this block of linden wood chip by chip looking for myself in the grain.

Octopod, life pod, rescue pod, podologist of dreams: rescue me from this ocean of endless greyscale, from this sheet metal expanse of brushed steel striated with endless waves.

Je touche le fond. Je prends mon souffle à deux mains et je me submerge.

Rock bottom, I merge with the subaquatic, subversive, sub-dom relationship I have with myself.

I submerge, subsume, subjugate myself to the dark half of myself.

I render myself submersible, immiscible, impermeable—an infinity of adjectives as I dive beneath the mirror-finish, down there where the greyscale gives way to more colour than my cones could ever drink, full as they are of leafy shades of green.

I am infinitely adjectival as the reed that bends to the storm winds, flattening like the ears of a cat as it watches the oak tree uproot and lift. A tree column rising on a thermal column of nothing but air, metric tons of dense hardwood lifted by an F5 twister rotating at 500 kilometres-per-hour, a colonnade of pure violence taking with it tractors and farm animals and all your worldly possessions—taking the very breath from your lungs, all the words you could ever speak.

II.

Oak in French is the masculine common noun le chêne, a homophone of the feminine common noun for chain, la chaîne.

I can't let go of my Kraken and it won't let go of me.

Maybe this is my Final Boss, my Infinite Jest, and maybe I'm afraid to finish your novel because I don't want to end up like you, David, and while there is no real causal link between my inability to finish things and your decision to end things, I'm still so mad at you for checking out like that.

In fact I'm mad at all of you, Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain and Matthew Perry and all the sad clowns who checked out early—because clowning around is my favourite coping mechanism, too. And I'm so mad at you, mum, for that one time you tried to check out mentally, by leaving, and that one time you tried to check out physically by that most medieval of methods, defenestration. And I’m mad at myself for sometimes thinking about suicide as a viable option, the last of last resorts but still the last resort we are all entitled to until we are not, until we can't even manage that, until we get to fail at one last thing and let old age and agony erode us one nerve at a time.

III.

So I hammer away with my wooden mallet. The atomic edge of my chisels and gouges pushing through the grain like the prow of a mighty ship, funnelling kilograms of kinetic energy into a microscopic line of metal so thin it may as well not exist at all, stacking milligram upon milligram until the blade rends apart the immovable object placed before its unstoppable force.

I put my entire body weight into the handle of the antique tool stamped with the words Sheffield cast steel. I put every gram of myself into these blades I collect and shape, sharpen, hone, polish by hand. I put it all into my favourite chisel, the 6-sweep 15-millimetre scribing gouge, its oxidized metal stamped Marples & Sons, which I like to believe was cast from the steel of WWII tank treads and armoured panels, the scribing gouge which turned out to be the perfect size to shape the spines of each tentacle, to really accentuate that insectile, chitinous air of predatory aggression, a counterpoint to the unctuous octopus musculature of these eight tentacles with their otherwise free-flowing peristaltic sexuality.

The octopus. My biggest project to date, carved from a block of lindenholz—the softest of hardwoods favoured by German renaissance sculptors, a user-friendly, tight-grained pale wood that rolls off the blade like vanilla ice cream, AKA basswood or limewood—le tilleul—gold with pink hues, a strawberry blonde who forgives all your mistakes.

To level up, you work with oak.

IV.

The mighty oak, a sculptor's dream as much as it is a nightmare. Tan with a hint of grey. A beautiful, winding grain that splits and blows out when you look at it wrong. That stains purple when you touch it, the tannins reacting to the merest hint of sweat. The sawdust that settles in your lungs leaving asthma in its wake, that settles in your nose leaving cancer in its wake.

A cup of tilleul—tilia sp., the tree of love, the tree of light, the medicinal leaves of which make a fine tea favoured by old ladies in France—will do just fine because the next woodworker to die by the sword could be me.

Could be Yew (headaches, nausea, fainting, intestinal irritation, visual disturbance, lung congestion, reduced blood pressure, death); could be Oleander (nausea, cardiac malaise, cancer, death); could be Milky Mangrove (temporary blindness, headache, burning of throat, blistering of skin); could be Mimosa Hostilis (respiratory distress, nausea, malaise, pneumonia, and the cosmic hostility of its dimethyltryptamine alkaloids otherwise known as ‘DMT’ that will reduce your mind to its constituent parts before remaking you from the ground up according to arcane principles that only centenarian hive-mind beings could ever understand).

V.

The 15-mm 6-sweep was a gift from my father, a selection of worn gouges we bought together from an antique tool vendor in Brighton, UK, during that Christmas trip when a different kind of sea monster first began to dismember my brother one limb at a time.

I felt his pride that I was taking up an honest craft, the art of the model ship to his life-size, capsizable sailing ships and local heritage vessels. I took up the dying art of sculpture like a drowning man, trapped in my COVID lockdown capsule until the jaws of the trap rising around us became the walls that kept us safe, a refuge, a fortress, a workshop, the shop I hadn't known since my early teenage years when I first began playing around with hand tools and chemical solvents the old man kept in the garage while he went off to save the world.

That first foundational fortress was tucked behind the Alps in a town I hated in a département named Ain and numbered Un (01) which is yet another set of homophones (hein?) that won’t let you forget you are in France. Papa was gone so much that mum lost her mind a little bit and ended up "running away" to Mozambique and returning home with a shaved head à la Britney Spears.

And so I lost myself in the garage workshop of that Alpine fortress, channelling my teenage self-loathing and misunderstood kinetic energy into blunt instruments and destructive constructions, bows and crossbows, blow-darts AKA sarbacanes, slingshots, pipe-bombs and DIY napalm after I learned the recipe (just petrol and polystyrene) among the many, many other diabolical recipes listed in my yellowed print copy of The Anarchist Cookbook…

And so I worked my anger into my hands and out of them like chakra exit gates, sawing, hammering, screwing, shooting things at things, bending anything I could find to its breaking point, and setting the world on fire: trash, the floor, the front gate, my clothes, my shoes, a glove which I used to smack my friend in the face such that he lost an eyebrow and had to go back home looking like the spitting image of an extra in Mad Max.

And it's a miracle I didn't kill myself, or my friend, or the dog Simba whose name was actually Sinbad, after the sailor, a very intelligent black lab we trekked from South Africa to Bangladesh via the Alps and finally Paris, the oil-slick sea-lion of a dog who had a fondness for swimming to neighbouring islands, places so far they were invisible, so far they may as well never have existed, places only he could smell like pine sap on the sea breeze.

VI.

My sea monster is carved from the stuff boats are made of and, in a weird, cannibalistic kind of way, the wooden Kraken crushes itself as it crushes the hull of the two-masted schooner.

My father is the navy man, the sailor, the boat-maker, the maker of useful things… Call me Ishmael, his son, he who sculpts harmless monsters from the softest of hardwoods for no apparent use or reason other than his own self-actualization.

And so I grip its eight members, huit à huit, and it grips mine and we multiply, exponential, obeying the laws of both Moore and mitosis: eight by eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four like a RAM chip inching its way towards the technological singularity, its suckers like transistors soldered onto me because, really, this thing won't let go.

It's on me. It's all over me. It watches me sleep.

Je me réveille et il est là, me regarde de son œil de bois. Cet œil lubrique.

I sleep in fear of what lies beneath because everybody knows tentacles cannot be trusted. Shapeshifters and chameleons and adapted adapters cannot be trusted. Formless, boneless vats of liquid slime mould cannot be trusted. This eight fingered, eight-membered, octo-phallic monstrosity cannot be trusted just as my desires (for suction, constriction, penetration) cannot be trusted because the Kraken is no animal but a creature of the collective unconscious.

Geologic in scale, an island that awakens—capsizer of ships, killer of men.

A sad referential copy of a copy of an oft-told story. A sailor’s yarn spun from the depths of a whiskey or rum-induced blackout to explain how he sunk his own ship out of sheer hubris, out of sheer naval incontinence, out of his own inability to keep the air in and the water out.

And I’m doing everything I can to keep out the water, the water, the void of space behind mere millimetres of aluminium, behind mere inches of steam-bent hardwood and tar, that abyssal expanse of jet black, navy blue, slate grey, verdigris…

That depthless coal-black night with its mica-dusting of stars and stars and stars.

VII.

Le chêne et le roseau, the oak and the reed, from Aesop to Jean de la Fontaine…

Sometimes it feels like that malleable child-brain of mine just never quite solidified. Sometimes it feels like my father just watches me flounder over and over, rolling like a beached sea-mammal in the surf, rolling joints to give my joints more joints so I can flex my way around corners, ooze under doors, needle my way through any and every key-hole.

Meanwhile my father's hand is steady, so steady, rocksteady as a pachyderm, thick-skinned as a WWII tank. My father the artist and the work of art, the ship made by its own hand like the hand that draws the hand that draws itself. My father the container ship who carried us on his broad turtle shell, the carrier vessel so heavy it sits low in the water, displacing the water as much as the water displaces its hulk, shrugging off waves that capsize me, waves that roll me over, roll me like a joint, like a 50-50 spliff of fine, dank, hydroponic weed that I roll by hand as I am myself rolled, licked, lit, and smoked into a fine haze of carbonised ash, vaporised terpenes and self-administered amnesia.

I am smoke when he is stone. I forget when he remembers.

I am mist when he is both ice shelf and prow of the ice-breaker. I am liquid invertebrate slime mould. No maze is a match for me, this hive-mind intelligence that thinks itself a single mind. I fold myself again and again, eight-fold, bone snapping, crack-popping and locking like eight worms on a dancefloor—like a wave, a rivulet, a roaring river.

Telle une larme qui coule, qui roule le long d'une joue.

Dry as kiln-dried wood, the eye of a sea monster never weeps—one would think, but perhaps it is the Kraken that weeps every waking minute of that long underwater night, because how would we ever know? The sea water and the body's water taste just about the same to me.

All bodies come from the sea and to the sea they shall return—just as this eight-membered golem of linden, walnut, brass, solder, Tung oil, limonene, three deck screws, and the sweat of my hands will one day biodegrade into its constituent parts and, like you and me, feed the trees.

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