Because I’ve been philosophising. Because a friend I know is super into astrology, and it got me thinking. Assume my stomach bacteria are conscious; yes, their lifespan is tiny compared to ours, but ours is tiny on a universal scale here, so bear with me. Assume they are conscious. *I* know that I am conscious, and that I contain, as per the book, multitudes, and that those multitudes have an impact on my mental health, desires, cognitive ability and behaviours.* They, however, are ill-equipped to detect *my* consciousness. I am too big, too vast, for them to contemplate; even if they WERE conscious, WERE sentient, had the ability to, somehow, science (presumably with an oral history since writing things down is a dicey way to preserve them when you live in a bath of hydrochloric acid), how could they possibly engage with me in a meaningful way? How could they prove that I was an entity both influenced by but separate from them?
In short, I think they can’t. I can’t conceive of any meaningful way for them to communicate effectively enough with me, or I with them, such that we could establish mutual consciousness.
And so, if our microbes can’t prove our consciousness, how can we possibly assume that we can even detect, let alone prove, the consciousness of things far greater and vaster than ourselves? Unless, of course, that being or beings deigned to find a way to make their communication comprehensible to us, with our flash-in-a-pan lifespans and physics-limited perspective on the state of the universe. We can’t even get gravity to work simultaneously at small and large scales; what hubris we have to assume we can detect ‘other life’ in the universe unless it happens to fall within that narrow band of possibilities we are familiar with.
And so: sentient stomach bacteria, who live in a world that determines their fate, unaware that their entire world is a conscious entity all its own.
And in that setting, with its inherent tragedy stemming from a perpetual inability to communicate, what better story to transform** than Romeo & Juliet?
* Please excuse the slightly loose linking of study to keyword and allow me some poetic licence in my expression here. Thanks.
** It is, I’ll grant you, the least ‘transformational’ of the six stories in And Then I Shall Transform,*** but I like it and it came from a place of transformation, so there we have it.
*** You should definitely buy a copy, because you need to see if I managed to pull this story off or not 😀 hehe.