Call for Submissions (Creatures)
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When I was small and stayed quiet
some animals came
new ones each time
and waited there near me
and all night they were eating the blackthey knew me they knew me
–From W.S. Merwin’s Animals from Mountains
nobody saw them
I watched how they watched me
they waited right there
nobody heard them talking laughing
laughing
Laugh they told me nobody will hear
When a cat studies you from her window, what does she see? Is the mollusk dreaming? Of what? Do herons have birth charts? What does the whale hope for his children? Does the spider’s awareness extend through her web? Does the jay in your neighborhood wish he could tell you something? Or, as Thomas Nagel put it plainly, what is it like to be a bat?
In April of this year, forty scientists and philosophers signed a new declaration on creature consciousness. The document emphasizes that consciousness may not require the same level of neural complexity as previously thought. It declares, in part, “…there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds…the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”
In the spirit of the new declaration, and in honor of what many ancient religions and Indigenous peoples globally have always believed—that animals and other creatures are conscious beings with their own subjectivity—Metapsychosis is now accepting submissions of essays, poetry, literature, visual art, and photography about creature consciousness.
This could be from the perspective of a creature, a communication between a human and a non-human creature, a person in their animal nature, an animal in their personhood, or any observations and musings on creature consciousness. Submit your work here.
Submission Deadline: August 31st, 2024
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