Autophagy

I am reminded of a story I read when I was a kid
that I suppose is true
about an octopus that was kept in a tank
inside of a place where they observe
animals and their behavior
(not just an aquarium)

and I am reminded of the pictures in my head
as I read about the creature
how I imagined a black room with black painted walls
(I don't know why)
and that the tank was bare

and inside there is a small octopus, eight armed, bumpy, eyes blinking inside a tank.
there are many such tanks.

The story I read was about how smart the octopus is.
An octopus can learn to do something very clever by watching another octopus do that thing.
It can learn from observation
But they can become bored.

They can become depressed.
I think this is why I imagined a black room and an empty tank, glass walls, glass bottom
and only a glass jar to hide in.
I imagined an alien place for the octopus
I imagined its almost human eyes staring out of a world of glass in a room that was black
and I think I could see how it could feel sad
(they can change their colors with how they feel, too, but I did not imagine the color of a
sad octopus)

A bored octopus, the book wrote, can kill itself.
It has a parrot's beak.
It tears its own arms off and eats itself, destroying itself

I remember the word: autophagy
instead of suicide

Zombies

Zombies wear the face of someone we once knew
a person stepping out of one life and into another.
A life after death that excludes consciousness
a life of gnashing teeth, bloody sinews
strength born of a lack of fear, a lack of awareness--
no need to worry if the body is whole, only that it can move
forward just a little bit more, inch by inch, to chew, bite,
ingest, infect.

It's not even destruction that zombies bring wearing
the faces of the ones we once knew. Maybe we even
loved that object that was once a person,
but now the moving body in front of
us is only a body. It's the shell that once held what we
knew was "that person."

That person was something that was not the body.
That person must have been something that didn't include
hands and feet and eyes, or even a smile
That person could be described as an animate "soul."
But this definition doesn't satisfy.
Naming it, labeling the thing that makes "that person"
doesn't confer understanding.
Maybe "that person" is a network of collective neurons
firing in a web of patterns that somehow made an "I."

Alan Turing said that there was a complexity about information
that he believed or hoped could not be destroyed. The "I"
is complex information. Physicists say that information cannot be
destroyed.
But can it be turned into something else?
the way that matter is forced to change into energy
as it explodes over the desert
or over a small island of people with children and dreams and
that sense of "I" and "we" and "us."

The "I" has left the zombie.
A zombie is an "it," neuter like a virus or bacteria.
It is a vector for the creation of itself--a disease that erases the "I" and
replaces it with gnashing teeth, grinding jaws, broken fingernails,
incoherent violence that seeks endlessly without reason for the warm
beating heart,
the fearful dash of movement in the forest,
the cry of fear from behind a
broken window pane.

What happened to the "I"?
Why does the zombie wear the face
of the one I once loved and cherished?
I am left with teeth and hands and
bloody eyes that don't know me anymore
moving ever closer