•
I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
Back in 2019, when I read Reon’s report for the first time, I could already see myself buzzing through Gaia with lush flowers in my hair, naked except from some algae or fungal skins, in total communion with nature, what a relief. So, when I was asked to facilitate a workshop to collectively dream up a future economy along the lines of the technological Etheria trajectory, of course I said ‘No’. I am not going to ‘vision board’ a future I don’t want. But I was tempted to learn from the Etherians, and so I did say yes, eventually. A future economy in Etheria is hard to imagine, because it is so otherworldly. We would be nobody in this future, nor would we have a body. Why? Because the transhuman Etherians (which is the original perspective that Reon based this trajectory on) perceive their body as no more than a brain taxi. I can relate to that, as I once also perceived my body as no more than a brain taxi, a side effect of growing up in a world which cultivates the split between body and mind as common sense. In my youth I met many bodies numbed by history, bodies that decided that it was better to leave a legacy of mind rather than embodying the vulnerable animal flesh. The life of the mind is free and unburdened with pain, death and emotional discomfort. If we cultivate our minds, we can rule. To have a body is to be food for the sharks. In school, I was taught that time and space are linear dimensions and that we are separate physical entities in a universe of matter. I learned reductionist philosophy without anyone telling me that there were alternative ways of perceiving. I was taught that we do not have free will, and so it is OK to externalize our authority to technology and to control nature, as man is above nature; that our visionary and auditory centres are the superior senses; that the ones who connect us to the carnal pleasures of taste, touch and smell are inferior, immoral and should be ‘managed’ and suppressed; and, that the subtle senses are too esoteric to be accepted. I learned that in Western culture, one should be identified with the rational mind. Not the anima or soul or heart (as in indigenous traditions), but the rational mind holds property over the self and maintains self-control over the body and desires. As Klapeer and
•
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson
NO-BODY’S ECONOMY
100
101
Lisanne Buik
