Paul Is Dead

A genius around the box

Our summer darling, the omniscient octopus Paul– the best thing to come from South Africa 2010– passed away this morning at the advanced (for an octopus) age of two-and-a-half years.

Directors at the the Sea Life aquarium in the German city of Oberhausen said Paul died in his sleep last night, of “natural causes,” just hours after a routine check-up.

Paul, aka Pulpo Paul, aka Pulpo Profeta, aka Psychic Octopus, correctly predicted the outcomes of eight games during the World Cup in June and July. Six times he picked Germany, his adopted homeland, to win– only deferring to Spain hours before the eventual champs defeated der Mannschaft in the second semifinal contest.

Faced with death threats in the aftermath, Paul carried on. He selected the Germans to beat Uruguay in the third place game; they did, 3-2. And he took his final stroke like Ted Williams, picking the Spaniards to knock off Holland in the July 11 final.

Paul was brave, professional in the face of Nationalist rage

In the month before, he became one of the few bright icons from the first African World Cup, an altogether bleak competition that saw the host nation take its final bow after just three group stage matches; the insipid image of Adidas’s jabooolanini bounding around uneven pitches like a taut beach-ball; and a rash of officiating horrors.

But even as the world stumbled, Paul was flawless. The international sporting press sprung to his side. Cold-blooded as ever, “El Pulpo Profeta” never wavered, making his predictions by pulling open the lid of one of two plastic boxes (tempted into action by the mussel snack inside), each with one of the competing nations’ flags on its side.

By early July, Paul had become a fixture on Twitter’s Worldwide trending list. He would take up three or four spots, his named spelled out in different languages.

When the Spaniards finished their own historic tournament, Paul retired from the prediction game. In all, including his work during Euro 2008, he leaves with a career 84 percent record. He went 4 of 6 selecting winners during Germany’s runner’s up finish in Austria and Switzerland.

But that was all prologue. The summer of 2010 belonged to the English-born octopus. He leaves us today, and I leave you with this, paraphrased liberally, from Roger Angell:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a psychic octopus, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-believer directs at those faithful to Pulpo Paul (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.

Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish or freaking brilliant and suction-cuppy is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.

Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the [entirely not] haphazard snacking of a mystic mollusk  — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Amen. Goodnight Paul.