Micro-Lectures | The Mouth That Eats Itself (2026)
1: Standing out from Space
All organisms exist or stand out from that which they are not. They occupy space. Each animal is in its own way a unique degree of emancipation from its geological background: If nature is everywhere the same, meaningful distinction requires active assertion.” This is the opening paragraph from Carl Olsson's first book,
The Mouth That Eats Itself, a book about how we as animals can escape
from the jaws of the environment, and what happens when we fail.
A mantid does not choose to look like its surroundings, and while there are, of course, benefits to this configuration, such as appearing invisible to certain predators, it is not all good, and in the case of, say, certain caterpillars which blend in with their own food, the potential for disaster is clear. While mantids, as all other organisms do, strive to stand apart from that which they are not, environmental pressures, such as predation for example, seek to undermine this struggle. After all, as we learned from Christian Damato’s Retrograde Prometheus, life is a localized negentropic configuration against a generally entropic background.
Extending the work on mimicry by French sociologist Roger Caillois, Carl Olsson argues that crypsis in general presents or embodies the dialectic involved with standing apart from the environment, a problem that extends far beyond human existence, as the very speciation of Homo sapiens sapiens is itself a struggle to differentiate something from something else, not just from other species, but, in general, from the immanent, chaotic background.
As such, the image of Hesiod’s Earth breaking-free from Chaos, is a poetic rendering of this philosophical problem involving the relationship between the immanent and the transcendental. The problem is fundamental enough to be called the problem of space, since it is something that every living organism has to negotiate on its own terms.
Consciousness and thought in the sense of the creation and organization of ideas and concepts, is itself a matter of survival and a matter of standing out, as the negentropic configuration of a “life worth living” involves understanding what or who we are, and against what we are striving. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that, like camouflaged animals, our specific means of making room for ourselves in existence, contains within it the same analogous traps. Throughout the 20th century, philosophers have highlighted the potential of a scientific worldview to alienate us from ourselves. When we think, for example, of the world in terms of fundamental particles, it is much more difficult to understand where I end and where my surroundings begin. What has been more difficult to see, however, is that this alienation is contingent and results from our ability to mold our self-representations the way a cuttlefish can change its color or, on an evolutionary time scale, for example, how the appearance of mantids has become captured by the flowers on which they wait to ambush unsuspecting prey. In all these cases, alienation is a means to persist at a cost.
And so it is from here that we would like to begin our discussion of geography.
2: So, what is Geography?
Against the popular assumption that geography is concerned with maps, charts, vistas, beautiful images of the landscapes surrounding us, geographer Carl Olsson argues that his discipline operates with a different logic in mind.
In his first book, The Mouth That Eats Itself, geographer Carl Olsson argues that the best pictorial analogy for geography is actually self-portraiture. The art of representing yourself depends upon the careful construction of a “ground” against which you, as the subject, can stand as a “figure”. As such, geography’s interest in representing “the background” is always nested within a greater interest in representing that which we perceive to be separate from the background, ourselves. As such, we might argue that geography is concerned with the creation of inhabitable stories and worlds in which we can live on our own terms. If this were not the case, then geo-graphy would be indistinguishable from geo-metry; geometry. Geography is, therefore, the true name for the art of self-representation.
Olsson argues that to truly understand geographical thinking, we cannot reduce it to an intellectual or disciplinary tradition. Instead, we must consider it a tool, or even, as Olsson suggests an organ that we as human animals have available to us in our pursuit of emancipation from our surroundings. In much the same way that our skins keep the physical outside at bay, geography can be understood as a kind of grammar that facilitates living freely inside the world. The work of geography is that of articulating an image of what we are not, or of what we perceive to be the thing that we negate — the rain, the river, the trees, the hills — and we do this as a way of fabricating a world in which we can live on our own terms.
When eography works, it allows us to be almost anything. It even allows us to ignore the strict necessities of “nature” outside of us, but it comes at the cost of strict adherence to its rules, as though the painter, painting their self-portrait is not only at risk of losing distinction between figure and ground within the image that they’re constructing, but actually at risk of losing the critical distance between themselves and the canvas that they’re painting on.
To elaborate on this and to see these ideas playing out in a literary context, we must, as did Odysseus, make our return to the shores of Ithaca.
3: What does The Odyssey have to do with Geography?
The answer might not be what you think. According to philosopher and geographer Carl Olsson, geography, as we know it, solves a problem that is far older than Homo sapiens. This problem is “the problem of space” — the problem of how to tell oneself apart from the rest of nature — and, for Olsson, it is a problem that Odysseus, the protagonist of the Odyssey, solves masterfully.
In the Homeric myth, Odysseus is captured by a Cyclops known as Polyphemus, the guest-eating shepherd and son of Poseidon, who declares his intention to eat Odysseus and his companions. One night, Odysseus offers wine to his captor, Polyphemus, who in his drunken stupor, tells Odysseus that if he reveals to him his name, he will make sure to eat him last. An idea comes upon Odysseus:
Cyclops, you asked of me my name.
I will reveal it; then you must give the gift you promised me,
of hospitality. My name is No-one.
My family and friends all call me No-one.
This deceit finds its meaning when, later that night, Odysseus and his men drive a spear into the eye of Polyphemus, who, when screaming out for help, proclaims that “No-one” is attacking him. As such, no one comes to his aid, and so Odysseus and his companions escape the next day, clinging to the underside of the shepherd’s flock, undetectable to the now blind antagonist.
Yet the parable doesn’t end there, as for reasons unknown, though reasons all-too-human, when making his escape across the ocean, Odysseus reveals his name to Polyphemus, who calls upon his father to curse the name Odysseus. Odysseus gave up his name in order to evade and survive, becoming as malleable as a chameleon that disappears into its environment by calibrating its color through the careful use of chromatophores, hidden in its skin. Yet, by returning to his name, it shows that he did not lose track of who he was; he maintained a clear sense of what was and was not, Odysseus.
As Olsson writes, geographers, like Odysseus can choose to be anyone, even “no one”, by making their boundaries malleable. In his first book, The Mouth That Eats Itself, Carl Olsson uses the story of Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus as one of many vivid examples to demonstrate how “blending into one’s environment” relies on a carefully measured self-sacrifice that sits at the heart of geography’s solution to the problem of space.