The Endless Self

Mandy-Suzanne Wong | Longreads | February 5, 2026 | 2,658 words (11 minutes)

The word “polyvitality” appears in Between Pacific Tides by Edward Ricketts and Jack Calvin, a beautiful tome of a guide to the Pacific Ocean’s intertidal zones along the western coasts of the United States:

Here is polyvitality (if one is permitted to use such a word) with a vengeance. How the single arm of an animal [a starfish] that normally has a disk and five arms can live, regenerate, and grow offers a striking example of the flexibility and persistence of what might have been termed “vital purpose” a generation or two ago. In the matter of autotomy, it would seem that in an animal that deliberately pulls itself apart we have the very acme of something or other.

Autotomy is a not uncommon strategy for predator distraction and evasion; I have seen lizards drop their tails, astonishing inquisitive parties into abandoning their inquiries. But in the small starfish genus observed by Ricketts, an individual’s excision of his or her longest arm happens so slowly that an otter, turtle, or cannibal would probably vanquish anyway. Many individuals of the same genus, Linckia, tear off their own arms “under laboratory conditions,” traumatized by imprisonment and relentless observation by grotesque giants, to whom it rarely occurs that such conditions could be stressful, mortifying, terrifying, sickening beyond the point of panic. And so it’s been decided by various giants that self-­dismemberment-­for-no-­reason must have a perfectly rational and banal explanation, namely reproduction. Because why should anybody, creepy crawlies least of all, be interested in anything else? These starfishes also produce eggs. They’ve no need to shear off their own arms and call them children. How much more of oneself is really necessary? Ricketts and Clark do not invoke survival or even “species survival” as plausible motivations for ripping off one’s own limbs. Instead the question is left open, “the very acme of something or other,” and the strange word offered: polyvitality.

In music, the term “polyphony” refers to multiple voices simultaneously singing the same composition. “Polyvitality,” which is not in any dictionary (and internet searching takes you right back to Between Pacific Tides), would therefore seem to mean multiple lives simultaneously living the same “something or other.” Not as a community or clone, neither of which Ricketts and Clark mention with respect to “an animal that deliberately pulls itself apart,” although they do observe other animals making communities and clones. In the case of this starfish, I don’t believe the authors mean a Jekyll-­and-­Hyde situation or multiple personalities elbowing one another out of the driver’s seat of a single consciousness. I rather think they are envisioning one animal, one starfish, simultaneously living many lives.

FiveArm, a razzle-dazzler of a starfish mottled all over with red, white, maroon, orange, and yellow spots, braces his tiny feet against the rock he’s standing on as one of his arms twists itself free from the rest of him. He looks very odd, askew, and we’d better call him FourArm from now on, but he is none the worse for it. The arm, erstwhile FourArm’s fifth, walks away. The tide is high, the seaweeds swaying in all their colors. The arm, like a slow comet, meanders between red and golden fronds to a hole in the rocks, which the seaweeds conceal and reveal as they sway. The hole is intriguing, only far too small for FourArm. But it is not too small for Comet. And Comet really is FourArm! Together they constitute a single body, they are physically one and the same individual: the starfish FiveArm. 

Does FiveArm (now FourArm) at last get to explore the intriguing hole as Comet? Comet isn’t a child; when he severed himself from himself to wander the seafloor as an individual distinct from himself, he did so with his very own, fully developed complement of internal organs, including the decentralized nervous system that, untethered to any brain, is characteristic of all starfishes, and with all of FiveArm’s knowledge and experience of life. Now, assuming that Comet learned of the existence of the hole while he was still part of FiveArm, when Comet creeps down the hole into the dark, is he fulfilling FiveArm’s desire or acting in defiance? Perhaps their thoughts and memories continue to reach each other through some mysterious oceanic medium. Perhaps, like those of twins, their secret senses need no medium except their history as one body. Distance can’t undo the past. Cleaving from himself as Comet, FourArm cleaves to himself as FiveArm’s remnant, and so—are Comet and FourArm two selves of the same self? Not masks or faces of a single personality but a complex self that paradoxically has always been multiple and now, in addition, is dispersed over some distance, wandering two places at once?

Not all starfishes can expect their torn-off arms to develop eyes and saunter off to independent adventures in stomach extrusion and limb rending. Not all starfishes are so reckless with autotomy. But among Linckia, stories like that of FiveArm, FourArm, and Comet are inordinately common. Somewhere in the Pacific, someone is even now tearing themselves into pieces for the sake of what acknowledged experts call polyvitality.

I am no such expert. I’m not a biologist. I’ve little patience for ideologies of quantification as an infallible adjudicator of living things’ capabilities. Are not the best and most authentic qualities of life precisely those that are unmeasurable? Are not all too many measurements of other animals’ living qualities made possible only by their deaths, or by their imprisonment in a life that is no life at all? I’m not a philosopher either. I’ve limited patience for generalizations. I’m simply wondering. “Polyvitality” is most intriguing when permitted to suggest neither a synonym for “organism” (a thing composed of diverse things), nor any manner of “community” or “hive mind,” but the paradox of a living self that is conscious of both the singularity of its selfhood and the multiplicity of its lives. 

Whereas a polyvital starfish lives its various lives in simultaneous bodies, a certain species of polyvital jellyfish lives serial lives.

ClearBell, a little jellyfish whom you can see right through, is arrested and incarcerated in a laboratory, there to be peered at by giants who want to grind her into medicines. Her cell has seawater, transparent walls, and nothing else. Her tentacles are like wisps of spiderweb, each with an ocellus (an eye) at its base. She is smaller than your smallest fingernail. She swims by pulsing like a butterfly, but she is tiring. She’s starving; they are doing this to her on purpose. They observe that she is smaller than she was a while ago. Her tentacles shrink and retract into her body. The watchers watch her fall slowly to the floor, becoming a blob of stuff. The blob is bereft of distinguishing features.

Hours pass. The blob that was ClearBell is becoming a cyst, a stub of stem, a stem . . . the stem, or polyp, that ClearBell was and that gave birth to her as a rosebush buds a rose . . . the newborn she once was and may yet be again . . . she is! And there she goes, breaking free of the branching polyp that she is, fluttering into the too-bright nothing that’s her prison. She has done what many a human would give their soul to do. She has physically reverted to an earlier stage of her development: a free-swimming animal reverting to a plantish polyp, a bud of which blossoms into a free-swimming animal. She has become a child again. Worn out by prison life, ClearBell dies into herself and is reborn, not reincarnated as a frogfish or someone else but reborn as the polyp she once was. And she can do it again. “Immortal,” they call her, as her death is no cessation but starting over.

What does she remember, born again and over again? If you answer “nothing,” then you’ve no imagination. Worse, you humiliate yourself and others by assuming that just because you couldn’t read the mind of another, not even if you were a scientist, the other therefore has no mind. Born in a lab, does ClearBell remember the ocean? Does she remember the underside of the pier where they found her, the bushy hydroid colony she left behind? With fresh ocelli she beholds the white light of her prison.

Let’s say she’s forgotten everything that went before, all her lives, however many. She bumps the prison wall all over again for the first time. And she grows up believing that this is all there is. Walls and monsters and suffering and light without nuance.

Or she does remember. The barnacles, the mussels, the orange sponge and baby brittle stars who shared her colony’s bit of pier. The ClearBell colony loosing ClearBells like snowflakes into the water. Unpredictable smells. Variable currents. And the light in the water was neither this nor that but ever-changing. A teensy medusa butterflying through the water, she participated in contactless larva production. Some larvae settled down, plantlike, to build colonies of flower bud–like polyps, of which some went butterflying off while others stayed behind as bountifully budding polyps. She remembers her abduction inside a hard thing. And the cell and starving to death in the cell. Awakening to the horror that nothing at all has changed.

ClearBell is unique. There is only one of her. But she’s that one how many times! You have to wonder how it is that 1×1 is only 1 when it is ClearBell.

It isn’t their multiplicity that makes lives hells for such as she. But you can see how polyvitality carries the threat of madness. What if one’s many lives are not spread out over time, are not shared out among bodies? If they occur to one all at once, such that every living moment is congestion and cacophony!

BlueAugury has eight arms and a head. His head has a very powerful brain in it. Each of his arms is covered in sensitive suckers and, speaking neurologically, is as good as another brain. Nine brains, then, has BlueAugury. And each perhaps is living its own lifeworld; each is living its very own subjective experience of warm shallows, black sand, all the broken bottles, squashed tires, and general filth befouling BlueAugury’s corner of the ocean.

He walks and skims the ocean floor in alternation. Each arm that touches the sand tastes ground-up glass and microplastics. Each arm that touches the water tastes petrol and compressed-air bubbles. For each and every vile pollutant, BlueAugury has his own curses. Every one of his eight arms is shouting curses at every other, at itself, and at the brain inside his head. Along the neural pathways of his multisystem scampers chaos as of eight voices—nine, for his brain is no idle onlooker. Nine voices raised in discontent.

A moment is nine moments all at once. A moment is a flood of world with nine heads, and a world is even more simultaneous living times. Surviving a moment entails living it nine times at the same time, each time with hypersensitive curiosity and skepticism on behalf of nine distinct subjectivities, all of them perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and making everything more complicated. Reports exist of octopuses’ arms wielding humans’ tools, using humans as tools, perfecting escape artistry.

BlueAugury has seen other octopuses wall themselves up in their dens with stones. Others gather broken coconuts, dead scallops, tin cans, fragments of soap dish, anything that might form a bit of wall. They walk around with all this junk, lugging it under their arms, so that when they can bear no more they can collapse under the weight of any nine-headed moment. They flop down right where they are, wall themselves up in the trash of other people’s lives. All these vain efforts to ward off the polyvital din, which in the end you can’t escape even if you could wall out the world. BlueAugury’s sort may have evolved the cunning to outwit and evade even the brainiest vertebrates; but from oneselves there’s no escape. Even if you ripped your waffliest, most indecisive and tergiversatory arm off, it would only grow back and continue heaping up experiences.

I’ve yet to find the most convincing way to narrate stories like BlueAugury’s. Nine livings of a moment described in columns side by side? But since you couldn’t read them simultaneously, you’d have to read them one at a time in full knowledge that your experience bears not the least resemblance to the experience you’re pursuing through the text. How far can your consciousness go out from itself into other spaces and times while going forth within itself as simultaneous other selves? “To take in so many other brains,” writes Montaigne, “our own must crowd itself down, confine itself, and make itself small, to make room for the others… [but] being caught and entangled in a great variety of things, [one’s own mind] may lose the ability to break loose [from all the others], and be kept bent and huddled down by its burden. But it [also] works the other way, for the more our soul is filled, the larger it becomes.”

Montaigne is writing about reading. Actually, he’s paraphrasing an acquaintance of his, possibly Marguerite de Valois, queen of Navarre, whose words, caught in his head, were as if reborn as their own paraphrase from Montaigne’s quill. But by writing this passage, in the act of recollecting and thinking over the ideas, Montaigne attempts a foray into the psychological tangle that polyvitality might well be dragging along behind it like a fishing net stuffed with by-catch. A polyvital individual might live their lives simultaneously in multiple bodies, like Linckia starfishes; sequentially, like Turritopsis jellyfishes; simultaneously in a single body, like octopuses; or in ways that are unimaginable from a human’s limited perspective. Montaigne, in contrast, understands better than most people that he is mortal and, in many respects, alone. Nevertheless, he looks into the unknown; it’s what he invented essays for. Montaigne’s essays are forever contradicting themselves, Montaigne writing as Montaigne and writing against Montaigne, practicing or playing the paradoxical condition of the many-living mind only to quietly withdraw from that condition, deprecating himself lightly, with the barest hint of panic, for the risk he takes in writing and reading so many books: the risk of his own silencing, losing track of where and when he is.

Two words more about BlueAugury. He’s too small for dragging coconuts and stones. Cameras adore him. Photographers spend months pursuing him; they keep at it even when bioluminescent rings glow with blue-hot fury all over his lethally venomous body. Also, like all octopuses’, when he chooses swimming over walking, his three hearts stop beating. BlueAugury swims in cardiac arrest. So if a beating heart is a requirement for living, then BlueAugury lives by dying again and again.

Four seasons of this. Nine times four seasons, nine times how many moments too crowded to carry.

In one-minded terms, the natural lifespan of most octopuses is approximately a year. In many-minded terms, an octopus’s natural life spans so many lives that the one-minded might call it unnatural or even schizophrenic. BlueAugury lived surrounded by one-minded fishes, shrimps, clams, tourists, and so on, not one of whom appreciated what he had to put up with, imprisoned in a multilife without hope of the singularity that to everybody else was a requisite for sanity.

And for all his piled-up knowings, BlueAugury may not have known how long he had to live. He did know—he felt, as even humans do, not only in his brains but in every fiber of his overextended being—the limits of his endurance.

On his first birthday, BlueAugury went too far with a female. He did it because he’d had enough. He made her angry because he was angry too, because there was so much to think about nine times over, and so little of it was good. She tore him apart and ate him, and BlueAugury was relieved.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s novels and essay collections include The Box, Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, and (forthcoming) The Quiet Upwelling, all published by Graywolf Press. She is a regular contributor to Asymptote.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald