The Universal Sweep of Death ↔ Life law of Nature
Raymond Westbury Maxwell, Jr.
Box 13897, Baden Station, St. Louis, MO 63147, 1972
Review by Alex Linhardt

All literate people can list two or three books that indelibly shaped their consciousness. It may not be the best book ever written, but it’s the one that exposed you to a new realm of literature, philosophy, and emotion. Maybe it was doing a report on To Kill a Mockingbird in Ms. Kellen’s class. Or reading Naked Lunch to impress that Starbucks barista in Marina del Rey. Or finding Notes from the Underground on a coffee table at your great-uncle’s sherry party on Nantucket. Or reading Thomas Wolfe on a military plane to the US embassy in Tirana while your fucking yuppie brother was getting high at some sherry party. Religious Studies! What bullshit!

Until this year, I always said I learned my greatest lesson about myself from reading The Making of Americans in high school. (Namely, I learned that I was a pathological liar who would maintain that I had read numerous modernist tomes at a very young age.)

However, earlier this year (right around New Year’s Day), I discovered a book that irrefutably altered every conception I have about the world. This must sound like hyperbole, but I mean it with full sincerity. Every other text falters under the conceptual density and semantic beauty of this staggering work. It’s not necessarily that this book is better than all others — rather, it has ruined the very experience of reading for me. My editor requested that I write about something more current. I replied that this was impossible. The only book that means anything in the modern age is The Universal Sweep of the Death ↔ Life Law of Nature by Raymond Westbury Maxwell, Jr. What is it about? Well, the title is self-explanatory. Or I sure hope so. Because I doubt anything else could explain it.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and this is sagacious advice when confronted by a book that appears to have a major typographical error in its title, and was somehow published by a St. Louis train station in 1972. Still, in its own quiet way, it’s as mysterious and insightful a book as Lucretius’ The Nature of Things, or Spinoza’s Ethics. I can’t overstate Maxwell‘s ambitions here: one of his ancillary objectives is to “void Time as a frame of reference to physical law.” It begins with an epigram:

It would be better for one inheriting duoinversive cognition to blind one of the two eyes, sever one of the two arms, obstruct one of the two ears or cut off one of the two legs rather than to deny one of the two inherited inversions. For a physically hampered organism can still witness its inherited duoinversive fluctuations as being in concert with universal physical law.

This is a confident and audacious introduction. It manages to appeal legitimately to both our sense of intuition and our rational judgment, while skirting across some deep abyss of dementia. You don‘t understand it, and then you don‘t understand why you don‘t understand it. On one level, the author sounds like he’s successfully solved the mysteries of dualism; on another, he sounds like a POW cyborg. The passage also makes tremendously cumbersome demands on even the most prepared audience: it flaunts a bizarre lexicon appropriated from some vague academic discipline (philosophy? psychology? biology?); it also asks us to make some sort of ethical valuation of whatever concept it’s attempting to posit as an axiom of consciousness. It would be like running up to someone and asking if they would prefer to submit to an amputation or a bifurcation of duoinversive cognition. Well, I don’t know, please just take my wallet!

And yet, despite these difficulties, the passage is still clearly coherent on some level: the style, the diction, the tenuous and unwieldy assemblage of genuine novelty, plagiarized terminology, and insane ranting. What does it remind us of? Can’t put my finger on it… This is why Maxwell’s putative thesis — that duoinversive, animate ↔ inanimate split entities form the contrapuntal mosaic of universal physical law, commonly expressed as twi Twin inverse effect — is only a bit of subterfuge. The true thesis is parodic and devastating: underneath every endeavor to apply logic to the mind and the universe is the shadow of absolute madness.

Sure, other great minds have constructed similar critiques of Enlightenment philosophy and analytical reasoning, but I can’t think of a more visceral and appropriate demonstration than Maxwell’s book. Here we have a brilliant author laboring intensely for decades to develop a plausible and self-sufficient system capable of elucidating the general patterns of consciousness and logic. And what did he come up with? Well, his life’s work was published by a train station and presented in such a way that even the most sympathetic and patient reader will remain incredulous. (The book’s myriad diagrams of cosmic and psychic dynamics contain symbols for “combWomb,” “lasers,” and “no symbols.”) Maxwell’s book is simply the most grueling and compelling example of absurdity that I can imagine. I suspect this is because we usually have to wait for subsequent generations of intellectuals and philosophers to illuminate the substantive defects at the core of each philosophical system. We need an Aristotle to understand why no sane person can be a Platonist. We need a Kierkegaard to understand why no sane person can be a Hegelian. But Maxwell refuses to wait. All of his sentences are transparently and verifiably untrue. There’s not a single sentiment that accords with anyone’s experience of existence and the world. Even Maxwell himself must have realized the utter frailty of his own philosophical edifice. Or, if he didn’t, it seems safe to say he was literally schizophrenic.

This is not to say that Maxwell is fatuous or incompetent. On the contrary, he’s clearly a genius who has spent a considerable amount of time refining and reconciling all the logical difficulties that plagued preliminary versions of his theory. Which makes the catastrophic failure of his enterprise so damning. Maxwell’s thoughts are patently ridiculous, ineptly expressed, and often inconsistent, and yet I think most readers will come away thinking all these problems with Maxwell’s thought are not really Maxwell’s fault.

The problems are with thought itself.

In effect, Maxwell has stumbled upon a series of propositions — 400 pages’ worth! — that are so egregiously incorrect and outlandish that, at a certain point, they transcend any individual man’s capacity for folly. They are language’s fault, or philosophy’s fault, or logic’s fault. Like the German peasantry, we must hold ourselves accountable. We must conclude that our faculties for effective communication and ratiocination are irremediably impoverished if they permitted this book to exist; any institution or phenomenon that contributed to the production of this book — whether literary, pedagogical, or scientific — must be categorically repudiated and abandoned. Consider the “twi Twin inverse effect,” the cornerstone of Maxwell’s entire philosophy. Even without getting into what a “twi Twin inverse effect” might mean, the phrase uses a word that doesn’t exist and a word that he never even pretends to define. It’s as though an obvious typo somehow mutated into the central concept of the book. One must wonder what other grand ideas from intellectual history began their lives as typos. Occasionalism? Skepticism? Imagism? Darwinism? All of them? Here’s a book that finally exposes the feebleness of man’s intellectual ambitions. It makes me wish ideas didn‘t exist. It makes me hate the very notion of education. It makes me wish I read books authored by rocks and twigs.

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