This Newsletter Wants to be Your Friend
Dear Metapsychonauts,
This week on Metapsychosis, we bring you two new original pieces of writing, with accompanying artwork, for your reading pleasure and third eye’s delight. But before we get to those: a reminder that our Indiegogo crowdfunder is live and now is a great time to support our work. We really appreciate it.
Also, if you haven’t already, check out the video from our cooperative launch event a couple of weeks ago for some amazing performances from our community. It was such a special event, we really hope more people will tune in and get a taste of the experience.
The cosmically creative output continues in our journal this week. First, Marjorie Kaye contributes to our Creature Consciousness series with a weird speculative/science-fiction short story told from the perspective of an intelligent alien species, titled “Bird Brains.” Her story beguilingly begins:
The Amalians are said to be former hope of Oxsadians, a long extinct warrior people originally from the destroyed and desiccated Kamar System. The Oxsadians colonized Amalia, which at the time they believed had no sentient life forms, and they placed eggs of their making far under the surface. The Oxsadians created what they believed was a profound warrior species. But civil war erupted, and the planet was all but obliterated. Due to the elemental combinations of the planet including the abundance of rain and water systems, and the glowing, semi-sentient mineral river systems, the Amalian eggs eventually hatched as the ecosystem replenished and healed itself, and their genetic structure mimicked that of the planet. The Amalians emerged as a gentle, flying, bird-like opalescent people of extremely high intelligence. They are tall and willowy, and fluid in gender. They have never known war, preferring to settle conflicts with ingenuity. – From B. Keifer, “A History of the Inner Boundaries of the Santanian System”
Continue reading “Bird Brains.”
We are also proud this week to feature a new essay by Brian George titled “This Book Wants to Be Your Friend—L.E. Maroski’s Tips for Freeing the Genie from the Klein Bottle.” On this surface, one might be expecting a book review of Maroski’s recent publication with Untimely Books, Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language: Expressing the Unity and Complexity of Integral Consciousness. But of course, Brian George is not a surface-level writer. It might be more correct to say that Maroski’s book provides the creative spark or catalyst for George’s dancing with the depths, invoking our planetary metacrisis, the long aftermath of the COVID pandemic, and the strange function that literature can still play in our dealings with all of the above, as well as the below.
Brian begins his essay with a strange inversion—who is reading whom?
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?
And with that, we leave with our weekly invitation to join our community, leave a comment on any of our work, and, if you like what we’re doing, share these freely published literary gifts with your friends and social networks. Let this be the week you respond to the call. We especially appreciate your support for our crowdfunder, as it will enable us to continue publishing this journal, reach more readers, and do it all even better.
With gratitude,
But a fair warning: if you continue reading, there is no telling who’ll be coming back at essay’s end. Succumb to the lure of Brian’s language games within games at your peril. They are deadly serious. You have nothing to lose but your default-mode mind. If you know what’s good for you, you do not want to resist.
Marco V Morelli
Editor-in-Chief, Metapsychosis journal
@madrush on Mastodon
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