Homo Sapiens Radix
Physiological characteristics
Homo Sapiens Radix have entered into a mental symbiosis with the abilities of fungal filaments. The pores of their skin have fully developed into olfactory receptor cells in the dermis itself. They can perceive smells and even their chemical composition through fine pale hairs that protrude from their epidermis like tiny aerial roots ot antennae.
These people’s sense of smell is so refined that they can use it like ‘sight’. It seems that they can read smells like stories.
A Homo Sapiens Radix perhaps also smells their own smell much stronger (or at least it seems that way to themselves). They carry their smell around with them like a delicate cloud.
Lifestyle habits
A Radix individual perceives the world around them in every direction and can think in many different directions simultaneously. They love the night because bright daylight disturbs their olfactory and chemical perceptive abilities. That is why you usually see them walking around by day with their eyes closed.
They are rather restless, delicate creatures in constant motion. Perhaps this restlessness could be compared to ‘goosebumps’ in a Homo Sapiens Sapiens. However, when Homo Sapiens Radix dives into a memory or meets like-minded people, they can pause and contemplate for a very long time. When such encounters last long enough, the smells of these individuals combine to form a distinct new odor. When two such people are comfortable with one another, their delicate sense organs point to each other. But if they cannot smell one another, their sensilla fold back in opposite directions. [1]
Because their odors change through proximity to others and through moving from place to place, they also perceive their ‘self’ as something changeable. [2]
Sense of time and perception
Time does not seem to have a linear quality for Homo Sapiens Radix. Regardless of whether something is being remembered, imagined or is a current event or activity, they perceive everything as the present. Conversing with them, we understand that they can connect as easily to something that has already happened as to something that is an imagined future — as if there were many possible lifelines they could switch between. [3]
Night is my favorite Day. [4]
Further speculation on the species
Radix follow fading, sometimes imaginary traces and stories, fading olfactory legacies of other beings.
Radix are searching and connecting through odour. They draw or write themselves into the world as they meander through the world. Their traces remain open, are without ends, are always an anticipated or fading present.
The smell draws us to where memory and possibility are intertwined. [5]
How much Radix is in Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we ask ourselves. [6]
References
- ↑
When they "come close" (this refers to physical proximity and the measure of "close" varies from person to person), the immune response
of those involved is suppressed. In this way, an exchange seems possible for mutual strengthening and to activate healing processes. Whether this takes place "concretely" via aerosols or is purely energetic in nature remains unknown. However, the transformations of olfactory clouds are concrete signs of these processes.
Radix humans seem to smell when another is "missing something" and they can keep each other in balance through this kind of exchange. How do they know if an approach is "healthy" or not? For ordinary Homo Sapiens Sapiens, this remains difficult to imagine.
We also ask ourselves, why do Radix people practice this form of exchange? Is it an automatism, a human-plant form of empathy or concrete solidarity? Is it exclusively a matter of subjective approaches? Is this how social agreements are initiated?
We do not know whether this system of exchange - or fusion - can also fail. It is to be assumed, as all exchange cycles can fail!
See also: Merlin Sheldrake, ”Entangled Life”, London: Bodley Head Pengiun, 2020; pp. 61-62 and 348 in the German edition. - ↑ Ibid. pp. 59: Although one's own identity is important, one’s self often merges gradually and in many shades into the other. Therefore, there is probably no binary, but countless nuances of what Homo Sapiens Sapiens call "gender".
- ↑ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ”The Mushroom at the End of the World“, Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. 45;
What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of motions over time? This sentence from Tsing's research perhaps describes most clearly what we could learn from the Radix people: They form networks of relationships in which they continuously reshape themselves and others through encounters. Openness and indeterminacy are the soft core of their understanding of life. - ↑ Emily Dickinson, Letters from Dickinson to Otis Phillips Lord, ca. 1883.
Night is my favorite Day - I love silence so - I dont mean halt (stop) of sound – - ↑ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ”The Mushroom at the End of the World“, 2015;
- ↑ What type of people are the Radix?
Sheldrake, ibid. pp. 141, German ed.: Some scientists use the term "holobiont" here. (...) "Their" interaction is always a mixture of competition and cooperation. (Writing "their" arises from the tendency of Homo Sapiens Sapiens to understand "individual" as a closed whole. Editor's note)
We can imagine a society of Homo Sapiens Radix as holistic, but not as exclusively peaceful.
See also:
Lynn Margulis, René Fester (Eds.): Symbiosis as a source of evolutionary innovation: Speciation and morphogenesis. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1991.
Holobiomics - aims to study holobionts of a system, their properties and the interactions between the symbiotic partners in their entirety.
