Cephalopods, our eight legged friends, ebb and flow with the tide of words in our eighth issue of InkBeat.  The appeal of the cephalopod image is manifold, fluid and in constant flux. It resonates with the ‘I flow amid nothing’ of Ariel Xie, the awareness of the thin, porous membrane separating us from death, the Other and others, the constant movement of the cephalopod, self-propelled and yet subject to the whims of the ocean draughts, reminiscent of Diogenes’ ‘solvitur ambulando’, a proof of movement through movement, a statement of our existence, a yes to life and a no to the capture and clasp of life, the liberty and the incarceration of flesh, and what flesh!  In her ‘Cephalopod’ Alina Liu captures perfectly the paradox of physicality, of the threat of calcification in thought and emotion should we dare wrap ourselves around another in ‘I uncurl and become soft, the roiling shades of tentacled flight. I settle on coral and contort my body until I am the shape of arms reaching out, reaching for you.’  Ally Huang too choreographs the fear of the void, ‘If you travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it feels like it’s expanding
and contracting and it feels so
full — really just full of emptiness.’  And so it is.  Our cephalopod image provides us with a rich source of creativity and makes us question with its inkiness why it is we write, why it is we make, and this helps us question the apparent rigidity of rational thought so that we begin to communicate our drifting, slippery perceptions through the teeming sea of language that is both of us but is not us, is of the sea but is not the sea, like the cephalopod.

 

头足类动物，我们八条腿的朋友们，将在第八期《墨动》中随着文字的潮起潮落而出现。头足类动物形象大多是多样，流动和不断变换的。就像Ariel Xie说的那样“I flow amid nothing”。纤薄多孔的膜，使我们与他人和其它事物甚至死亡相分离，头足类动物不断运动、自我推进但又受到海水洋流的摆布，这让人联想到Diogenes所说的“solvitur ambulando”，通过运动来证明运动，证明我们的存在，是对生命的肯定，对限制和压迫生命的否定，肉体的自由和监禁，以及对什么是肉体的讨论。在她的“Cephalopod”中，Alina Liu完美地体现了肉体上的悖论，即思想和情感钙化的威胁，就像她提到的“I uncurl and become soft, the roiling shades of tentacled flight. I settle on coral and contort my body until I am the shape of arms reaching out, reaching for you.”我们与他人的缠结。Ally Huang的编排中也体现了对于虚空的恐惧，“If you travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it feels like it’s expanding
and contracting and it feels so
full — really just full of emptiness.”确实如此，我们的头足类动物形象为我们提供了丰富的创造力来源，并且使我们对《墨动》提出问题，我们为何而写，为何而创作，这让我们能够对理性思维的僵化提出质疑，以便我们能够通过文字海洋与自己文字表达的漂泊感和顺滑感对话，它像我们而不是我们，像海洋却不是海洋，就像头足类动物那样。

 

Inkbeat bids farewell to its amazing creator, Simon Shieh and is delighted he will still keep a weather eye on us from his position as Emeritus Editor.  We would like to thank all of our wonderful contributors and also our enthusiastic editorial and design team for all of your amazing work.

《墨动》向我们优秀的创作者Simon Shieh告别，并且很高兴他仍将以荣誉编辑的身份继续关注我们。我们要感谢所有出色的贡献者，我们热情的编辑和设计团队做出的杰出贡献。

 

 

We look forward to the launch of our new website in January where we will be able to post your work all year around and where you will be able to enter competitions and seek advice and inspiration for your creative work.

我们期待在一月份启动我们的新网站，我们将借此平台全年发布你的作品，你也可以通过参与比赛为你的创造性作品找寻灵感，寻求建议。

 

Just as in this issue we have chosen to showcase an adult author (Zhang Lijia) and an adult artist (Simen Lambrecht), we will be profiling inspirational people as well as your own gorgeous selves on the site.  Keep an eye out for it! It will be called www.inkbeat.org

就像我们本期展示作家Zhang Lijia 和Simen Lambrecht 的作品一样，我们将在网站上描绘励志人物以及富有才华的你。请注意！我们的网址将会是www.inkbeat.org

 

And finally a sea poem, though not a squid poem, my gift to you in thanks for all of your sea pearls in this issue:

最后与你分享一首关于海洋的诗篇，虽然内容不涉及乌贼，但是我想把它作为一份感谢和你分享，感谢你在其中所贡献的海洋珍宝：

 

 

Pearl

 

Tiny exsanguinous, extraneous moon, no pigto bean for you,


no spherical planet of any love’s harem hoard, no Venus,


no day longer than a year, the year a millimetre tissue scar,

powder satellite, a part, less than, a wound, an itch of a life,


not life itself, not love itself: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath not


Dante’s Beatrice, de rapto produce, half-year salaried forcéd price

lined up, ten to a shell, nacre flesh, a Zhejiang river pearl.

... though... it’s still the same, the pain ... a mothering.

Quidnunc, look harder, softer shell and see the rhythmic birth,

infinitas infinitio, the tear in the flesh that makes perception real:

corpse of a life that never was more than flutter-fake, like Venus,

the pale dead, dead white shimmering Zhejiang river pearl.

 

Helen Wing

Editor  责任编辑