This Book Wants to Be Your Friend—L.E. Maroski’s Tips for Freeing the Genie from the Klein Bottle

Can a book dream? Does it want you as a friend, and may it even love you? Just how curious is this book about the basement of your psyche, about the childhoods you buried there? Why would a book want to inform you that your language and your vision are at odds? You are busy, this book is busy, everyone is busy. “I first became interested in language through the exploration of questions,” writes L.E. Maroski in Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language: Expressing the Unity and Complexity of Integral Consciousness. “I was fascinated by how we could know enough about what we don’t know to ask a question about it… I was also curious about why some people ask a lot of questions (ahem) and why some people do not.” With so many questions to ask itself, with so many cosmologies to turn and see anew, why should this book want you? 

In other words, why should this book want you, not why should you buy this book? What have you done for the world lately? Have you redesigned the grammar of the atom? We, your judges, didn’t think so. Maroski’s book is more forgiving. So, why should this book want you, you and not some other you, the you that you may know much less well than you think, the you that exists around you as you read this brief description, and why does this book desire to be read? 

To even begin to answer questions like the ones above, though, we would first have to stop referring to this—or any other book—as “it.” “Any good systems theorist will tell you,” Maroski writes, “that technology cannot save us from the metacrisis and that there also needs to be a widespread mindset shift. A mindset is the totality of assumptions, beliefs, and knowledge that together form how one makes sense of the world.” We readers should be the conscious ones—or so most Western traditions, up till now, have told us. A book should sit on its shelf—or in its yet to be printed file—minding its own business. A book is not an active presence. It is not an “I,” a “They,” or a “We.” We should not indulge in such a “category mistake,” lest we activate our ability to sort the living from the dead, an object from a potential revelation, a habit from what might open no more than a breath beyond it.

Are the eight billion or so other humans on the planet more like a “They” or a vast database of “Its,” or is this giving these unknown quantities, these mouths to feed, these would-be ideological contaminants, more credit than they deserve? You would think that such questions had been answered 79 years ago, at the end of World War Two. Aren’t we all alive together, facing the same moment? No, apparently not. Eugenics has made a comeback, the doctors of Unit 731—known officially as the Epidemic and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army—have been taken from their cylinders, and we have taught the sun to shine on only certain media platforms. The Global North has a bone to pick with the Global South. Why won’t they stay on their dried-up farms? The Untermenschen have grown too ambitious. Consciousness is from Mars. Matter is from Venus. Oceania will always be at war with Eurasia, and the Second Rome, Byzantium, will be rebuilt on the steppes of eastern Russia. What could possibly go wrong?

Maroski writes,

The Industrial Revolution and the mindsets and paradigms emerging from it exclude Life from matter. The developments from that revolution, which continued into the information revolution, helped to deliver us to where we are now—on the brink of a sixth mass extinction event, and in political and economic chaos, ill health, and facing global climate change. In other words, we are facing a crisis of crises, a metacrisis. This situation did not happen recently just because someone came up with a catchy name for it.

In this time of converging crises, I’ve been—in spite of a temperamental pessimism—shocked at the extent to which we haven’t risen to the moment, even though our very survival is at stake. In the early days of the pandemic, for example—when people in my neighborhood sang to each other from their doorways—I’d hoped that we might treat this as a test-run, as a preparation for even larger crises on the horizon. Could we “think globally and act locally”? Could we remember, as Maroski argues, that the limits of our bodies are not fixed? “A challenge to languaging the interactions of environment-host-microbe systems,” Maroski writes, “is that the microbes, the host, and the host’s environment are at different scales and levels, and they are not part-whole perspectives (as in a cell-organism system) but whole-whole perspectives. Systems biologist Denis Noble differentiates scale and level this way: ‘Scale is a matter only of extension, i.e., how large a part of nature is considered.’” As thousands-per-day died and podcasts found it profitable to spread theories, could we see through the fog of war?

“A single death is a tragedy,” starts a quote attributed to Stalin, who was actually paraphrasing a 1925 article on French humor. Whether said by Stalin to Churchill or written by Kurt Tucholsky in Vossische Zeitung, the punchline stays the same—“The death of millions is a statistic.” How much more invisible will be the deaths of several billion should the worst of climate predictions come to pass? What media would we trust? What emotion would we feel? How could we tell if any image had been doctored? Without some shift of focus, some still hard-to-imagine expansion of our sense of what our bodies are and where they end, our main concern might be our stomachs, with the emptiness we would find there. Where could we find a tree? Whose furniture would we break for firewood when all our efforts failed? Our mystic quest: to find our next few bottles of clean water.

If CO2 has increased by 150 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution, is this simply due to solar cycles, previously unlooked for and unknown? Did bats conspire to give us Covid, or did it leak from a Wuhan “gain of function” lab, or did Globalists design it as a bioweapon? It might be easier to grasp the Logic of the Void if we hadn’t subdivided our consciousness, if we hadn’t portioned out the light to so many who hadn’t earned it. There are experts who have wrestled with this problem.

How good it was of these Globalists to erect the “Georgia Guidestones,” on which we could read such inscriptions as “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” And, “Avoid petty laws and useless officials.” And, “Be not a cancer on the Earth—Leave room for nature—Leave room for nature.” How smart they were to then blow these up to destroy at least part of the evidence. We might need more petroleum to create the One World Body. Do you too feel this urge to declare war on Iran?

Studies have shown that magnetic nanoparticles—MNPs—can breach the blood/brain barrier, disrupting key enzymes and altering memory and behavior. There are profits to be made from such studies, none from stopping the contamination. We need our polyethylene terephthalate bottles, after all. How else would we carry our spring water? “That the sky is falling is not the problem of one person,” a Yoruba proverb tells us. If only it were not so tempting to find some group to accuse. With 8.2 billion other humans on the planet, with another 83 million being added every year, with the tools given to us by Google, Facebook, X, and Instagram, the moment calls on us to choose which half we want to blame.

Maroski writes,

One thing that seems to have eluded the prophets of the past is how deeply embedded the current mindset is in the very structures of language—not just the words, but the structures that shape how words can and cannot be combined. Although humanity has been through several mindset shifts in the past millennia, they have all occurred within a set of assumptions foundational to language structures that have not changed (or have not changed much) during that time… Solving problems using the same mindset that created them is like trying to fix a leaky pipe by using a tool that causes more leaks. How do we extricate ourselves from such a vicious cycle?  

Once, such arguments as Maroski’s might be seen as “academic.” Post-Covid, post-mass-death, post-the suicide of the Body Politic and its auto-cannibalization, post-the TikTok version of the Holocaust, post-the control of atomic arsenals by random algorithmic memes, perhaps such arguments should now be seen as “existential.” Had the time come to reexamine the microbiome of our speech? If the time was right, there was, perhaps, no forum left in which to do so. Was it possible for those with common “ends” to find some way to act together? Yes and no. If “what agrees disagrees,” as Heraclitus says, how could they not? “The waking have one world in common,” he asserts. “Sleepers have each a private world of their own.” It could be that the One Moment was eternal. Another had just come and gone.

When even those speaking English were not speaking the same language, when each ear heard a different word, when each eye saw a different landscape, it was difficult to agree on even the time of day. Cells of disinformation had metastasized. “Why are you hitting yourself on the head?” Moe said to Curly. “Because it feels so good when I stop.” There were billions to be made by preventing us from stopping. Who could find the time to read another book? Live free or die. Gather your rosebuds when you’re not a corpse. There was no point in forming a clear image of the inevitable, let alone in taking an x-ray of the dead genius of our language. Let the crises of tomorrow be sufficient to tomorrow. As with the countless thousands of past cultural collapses, with their libraries turned to molecules, cities swallowed in an eyeblink, arts utterly wiped out, whole lineages withdrawn into the vortex of a gene, we must cancel now what cannot later be avoided. We must work to prepare our amnesia in advance.

What to do when we’re out of oil—whether sooner or later—and no alternate source of energy can be scaled? What to do when a solar disruption wipes out most of the internet? What to do when there’s no power grid, no way to cool our nuclear reactors? What to do when the Atlantic floods most east coast cities? The closer we get to such a crisis, to a future in which we were supposed to travel to the stars, the more we resort to reflex tribalism, to nostalgia for a period that only existed on TV. We like to pretend that our actual future could be some safe continuation of the past, if only those we don’t like would behave.

Maroski writes,

Regardless of whether our ancestors were peaceful, the current situation has gone far beyond one tribe warring with another. It has even gone far beyond the world wars. We will always face challenges and death due to randomness and chaos in our environment from natural disasters. However, the local fragilities of our ecosystems will continue to create long-term anti-fragility unless we push ourselves to the breaking point beyond which our already fragile systems cannot recover. That defines the metacrisis I mentioned at the beginning of this book, the perfect storm of crises that we continue to help create.

Five years have passed since the start of the pandemic. Instead of growing, we’ve shrunk. We’ve fractured along fault-lines. We’ve freed ourselves from our shadows by allowing them to possess us. We’ve fought the “Global Elite” by fixing our eyes on the foreground, by not noticing when the far left ended up on the right, by not asking whether the Oligarchs financed all the parties. What crimes did we commit? Many hundreds. None at all. For really, when you think of it, how much does a noun weigh?

Five years passed since the future turned into a ghost. It was hard to tell. Or perhaps it was 5000. We weren’t immune to the wonders of neurolinguistic programming, the stealth technology of the verb, the use of slogans for the rearrangement of chairs on the Titanic, the replacement of one ancestral trauma by another. Were your fears dirty? We would make them clean. We decided to reclassify our occult tortures as “transgressions.” What fun to blame these on the parents of our victims, those too proud of their virtue. Since when did we say we wanted their advice?

We gave freely of our refugees. “Here, take them,” we said. “You are welcome. We’ll be sending billions more.” We showed how no rare earth elements could be trusted. No, when push came to shove, these elements would always let you down. Your cars wouldn’t start. Your solar panels would give you the cold shoulder. Your windmills wouldn’t turn. And yet, in spite of Earth’s unfairness, we found it within ourselves to prove the Power of Positive Thinking. We conjured massive data surveillance systems that did our thinking for us. There was no need to keep records. We changed droughts into floods. Granted one wish from the Wish-Fulfilling Tree, we asked to be blinded in one eye so long as our neighbors were blinded in two.

One day, our eyes opened. We were shaken from a dream. We didn’t like it. We couldn’t find our house. We didn’t know our name, how old we were, what continent we were from. Just when had we been shaken from this dream? The future had removed itself. It had somehow fallen through the past. It had been sucked into a keyhole. It had been tied into a series of incomprehensible knots. And yet, according to Parmenides,

One story of the path remains, that it exists. And on this path are a great many signs: namely, that being had no beginning nor can it have an end because it is firmly established, unmoved and eternal. It did not exist once in the past nor will it exist, at some point, in the future, since it exists at the same time all together, one and continuous. For what origin would you search? In what way and from what source would it increase? I dare you to think and to speak of that which does not exist.

“Peace,” says the wind. You have said too much. You have not yet said enough. The year turns. Even now, the first fetus grows.

What should we call the other eight billion or so humans on the planet? Are they a “They”? Are they your mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters? Are they guests at a lost table, a threat, a headache you didn’t ask for, a vast databank of “Its”? What exactly should you do with them, or would it be better to say “for them”? Are these eight billion more substantial than your passing moods, your wayward thoughts, than the memories you are soon to have, then lose, than the nomad who will one day find your melted laptop? What alien race produced it? By what god was it charged? If you listen, you can hear a soft drone in the background, a kind of discordant babble, which seems, as you pay attention, each moment more harmonious. A light flashes somewhere deep within your skull. You pause to note the passing satellite—a spark. The night itself seems to breathe. How wondrous is the desert. How good it is to be a nomad. There are many stars above you, just as many far below.

Maroski writes,

In fact, each of our bodies is a galaxy of someones, as we are home to millions of microbes, each with their own will to live. By seeing ourselves in different types of part/whole, whole/part, and whole/whole relationships, we can begin to see the connectedness across scales of magnitude and levels of organization. As our microbes are to us, perhaps we are to Earth, and as we are to Earth, perhaps Earth is to the Milky Way. Given such complexity, it becomes clear that existing language is not structured to handle multiple scales and perspectives, not to mention the consciousness of symbiotes.

Why won’t this book mind its own business, why do you seem to hear it before you’ve even read it, why is it so intent on spreading its fingers through your psyche? Not to worry, for this psyche may belong to other creatures. Some would die to protect you. Some would eat you. Their hunger may be no bigger, no smaller than an ocean. What did this book “desire” from its author? No more than it asks from you, its would-be reader, whoever, in this moment, you might like to think you are.

Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language—and who knows, perhaps even its author L.E. Maroski—invites us to freely explore beyond all us/them, now/then, wave/particle oppositions, to reimagine our relationship to the language that creates us, in which we move without pausing to notice we are moved. We can, Maroski suggests, find ways to work with what we don’t know as strategically as with what we do know. We can listen as well as speak. We can leap as well as judge. We can make a pact with uncertainly. We can, by becoming water within water, learn to trust that what we don’t know is also reaching out towards us. Perhaps our connection to the cosmos was never actually broken. Perhaps this book wants to be read.

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