Time to Sing the Body TransReal
Now, for everyone expecting this piece to be written by a transgender person I’m sorry to disappoint. The trans body I am singing about can be transgender, but it’s not necessarily.
Let me explain why. The body I am talking about is the one that became more obvious through the use and integration of advanced technology. This body is not necessarily confused in regards to gender or in regards to any part of existence. This trans body is about the transcendent body, the one that people have said exists since the time we first had people, and it encompasses spectrums, matrices, well beyond binaries.
This trans body is not limited by the body, but enabled by the body. This trans body is not limited by gender but enabled by its current wave of attention.
The simple statement I am making when I say, let’s sing the body transreal is to update Walt Whitman’s poetics, those that sang the body electric at a time when he sang of Leaves of Grass.
Electricity is no longer a headline as it was back when Whitman was alive and rambling. His America of electricity is quaint to us now. His old home on Long Island is now flanked by a mobile phone store on one side. I know this because I recently drove by there.
The vanguard of technology is no longer artificial candles that make reading a paper book viable late into the night.
So, when we reimagine ourselves, and our songs we have to make space for a new kind of poetry, one that matches our times.
In these times we are mobile.
As mobile creatures we are able to exist as multiple profiles. We transit between platforms via these profiles. We are therefore transiting, transcendent, creatures.
As mobile creatures we can watch the news in far away place in realtime or follow a friend as they travel around their countryside. We can sing them happy birthday with others dotting the planet, all through one shared screen, all through video cameras and filters. Through cables and satellites we say, we are, we experience being “here” despite the fact that my here and your here are observably not the same. We are split selves, many selves. We know this.
We travel and transit together on screens all while our bodies remain in a place. Our brains and our memories record these experiences as being true, as having been “here.” Our brains, therefore are transiting in ways that break down space and time and borders. We are transiting geography, mentally and experientially and all this traveling leaves its mark not just in an instance but cumulatively. We see this accrue into ourselves and in the bigger mirror we call culture.
We are transcendent creatures, capable of feeling the feels and storing the experiences of all the mobile, impermanent, fleeting experiences offered by the internet, and yet we are stable, biological conduits. We are somehow, storehouses, capable of also moving on our two feet. We are multiplicities.
I guess I could call this the multi-body, or some other less charged name, but that doesn’t get to the fact that “trans” is the term that actually fits. It doesn’t get to lots of other reasons why the term fits.
Transcendence is part of the physical, the mental and even the ephemeral or spiritual experience. After all, through all of our screens and especially our mobile ones, we transcend ourselves, potentially enrich our “selves” and we sometimes we do this but move nowhere but in our chair.
We transcend ourselves like superheroes or sages did in old movies. We remind ourselves of fabled monks or oracles living in caves, seeing, projecting, knowing what goes on in other places.
Technology of course, gives us shortcuts to these skills of knowing, these transcendent skills and experiences. With the shortcuts comes lots of problems or at the very least challenges. To turn our back on the transiting self would not roll back the existence of transnational corporations. Rolling back technology, if it were possible, would only result in us not meeting the needs of the day.
Our leaves of grass are drying up a bit, and in some cases they are on fire.
That type of global lawn begets, requires, and encourages a transitional period in humans. Does gender come into the transreality? Well, yes it does. Does transnational, transracial — do all the dynamic qualities and possibilities come into the new equation? Yes, they do.
Some nations or their national figures are having fits right now, about their declining birth rates. But generally leadership are upset that a particular ethnic profile is not breeding enough, not that the overall population is down. But what happens when the desired profile and the not so desired ethnic or racial profiles mix? Does the nation have to transition to a broader, more expansive view of itself? Now you understand what I mean, that “trans” reality is a bit of a threshold, a marker of epochs and indeed a new normal with more, not less, complexity.
When I speak of transreality I am speaking of the very abstract self, of its resurgence. The transreality is the reality that speaks to quantum physics and to the leading edge of quantum technologies. A qubit is not a one or a zero, like the good old bit, but a potential one and a potential zero. So maybe I should be singing the body quantum? In fact, I think that I am.
The body transreal is what I sing and in no way am I a perfect representative of it. I do not strive to be. I do not need to be. The body transreal is the body of many, of individual selves and of the nested realities that exist.
The Earth is a planetary system that produces and is in turn impacted by humans, by people. All the many people are here for a reason. No one here is an actual mistake. We all belong, and we all have to agree to get along and to compromise on all sorts of things. We have to enable systems that allow us, each little body, to be dynamic across borders of time, space, nation and self.
When people ask me if art is a necessary component to processing, digesting and comprehending science or the role of it, I ask if the world could ever have done anything without its poetry. Some poetry was stilted by authorities. Some of the poetry was condemned. But in all of history, none of the poetics that were censored or persecuted stopped existing. In this sense, the trans gender community is one of our canaries in the coal mine, although these days it might be a cobalt mine.
I am not here to convince anyone of the politics or the leanings of one particular group. I am not here to identify you or even to identify me. I am here today to remind you that our pettiness is what makes us want to pretend that electricity is still the very cutting edge of our consciousness.
Our bodies are indeed electric, but if during Whitman’s time those bodies were electric 1.0 or 1.2 in let’s say 1855, what version of electric bodies are we inhabiting now? What version of body, of consciousness are we inhabiting or imposing on others now?
I have antiquated views on some things. I know that inside me I have been many people and due to the bias in games and in movies some of those in my mind have been indeed male. Yet, I will identify myself as female on checkboxes because it suits me, and it suits my family, my societal roles and to be honest I find it convenient.
I know that we are in fact all a they and them both in gender and in all other manner simply because we are quantum beings.
I understand that all the different versions of “me” that stare at me from my social media and other profiles do contribute to me, as a biological creature. Oh that’s “me” from three years ago. Oh that’s “me” from the winter. Oh that is “me” from when I wore glasses. Oh, that is me “wearing” a filter in my video chat. That is me and and me, and you, and me, and you see where it goes.
We are transiting, dynamic beings and this is our transreality. It can seem absurd, and surreal, but that is only because what is real is in a state of flux.
Our planet is in a state of transition, one brought on by time and by us, embedded in time through acts of extraction, invention and innovation. To get lost right now in moralizing is to lose time addressing our existence in this new world.
To get lost in censoring or peeling back our definitions of self and how self actually exists is to plunge ourselves back into a time before electricity.
To go forward, to address our very survival, we would do well to engage our conversations not about whether or not people have the right to be mobile but how the rights of our times are applied unevenly. We might not seek to contract the rights of human beings but to expand their rights to match those of transnational entities that define much of the world’s economy.
We would do well to become aware of our transreality and to deal with it from a much less emotional, self-righteous and antiquated place. We are all moving, mobile and dynamic.
We are all multiple, quantum and transcendent selves and it is exactly because of this, that we must allow for and empower new systems of governance and economy. This is no longer the planet of 1855 and these electric bodies are updating themselves with or without our consensus.
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