‘Upon lifting a stone one discovers all kinds of things, coral flowers or debris; beings who put themselves in a place of shelter. Among them a half-dead octopus opens its human eye. May he too return to the waters, this monster with a strange gaze.’

Where for her beloved Hugo the creature’s weird - the animal’s obdurate refusal to decode - foments ecstatic cephalophobic horror, Louise Michel in her Kanaky rock pool stands in solidarity with the poly-/a-semic thing. 

What could generate its strange gaze but its human eye? By a convolute it is impossible not to think of as tentacular, the weird is enhumaned by Bonne Louise: but the moment evades banalising, because at that instant also the human is made strange.