Oozing out into the world, lively, I seep beyond my limbs and lingering affect - the soil and sand consumes me and I it in a never ending dance. The tendrils of sensation uncurl away from me, caught by sounds and sights and scents. I want to learn how to live, live openly and kindly-in-kin. I want to live in a world of watery attending and empathic attunement.

In a never ending dance of distance and difference

Melding, molten, malleable

‘The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails.’

DonnaHaraway, Staying with the Trouble: 32

Similarly to the rhizome, tentacularity is along the lines - it is always in the middle, in between, interbeing. Here it is also useful to employ Deleuze & Guttaris becoming, a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage, not one of imitation or analogy, but a generative of a new way of being that is a function of influences rather than resemblances. A becoming-with the world.

I believe that Octopi hold the knowledge of the world. They are fluid bodies in a fluid world; I think they can feel what it’s like to fall as rain and know what it is to crash as a wave. I think they understand what it is to exist in the moment just before becoming vapour. I think they can feel the currents of the world pulsate through their bodies. Shape shifting, chameleons of the sea.

Sleeping Octopuses

May

Have Dreams

But

They're Probably

Brief

‘(We) inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world, every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others. Thus hanging on to one another, beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Observe octopuses and anemones in the sea. They do not aggregate, and they do not fuse. They do, however, interpenetrate. Their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever-extending meshwork.'

Tim Ingold, Lines: 11