About – Marcus Demetrius Link

My contribution to wholeness comes from my particular way of paying attention.
Mine is a pattern-saturated, slow-developing kind of consciousness.
It works a bit like a photographic plate.
It takes in everything that comes towards it and is unable to let a single thing be only that one thing.
I sit there staring out of the window as patterns start to emerge long after the initial exposure.

I am an autist.
In my case, autism means I experience the world through what the clinical literature calls monotropic attention:
a way of processing in which all my resources are directed into a single channel at great depth.

I am also characterised by alexithymia:
there is a whole lot going on in me, but I cannot answer “how are you today?” because no word or phrase is adequate.
I will tell you tomorrow, in great detail.

The dominant culture of the Western world understands autism along with other modes of consciousness mostly as a deficit, a kind of brokenness.
It is true that my way of paying attention is not suited to schools, employment, or daylight, and I struggle with most human relationships.

But given time, and enough darkness and quiet, my photographic plate starts to work on my “special interests” and reveals the structural correspondence between different ways of knowing the world.

I write as someone who holds brokenness and wholeness together rather than choosing between them, and who treats the symbolic and the literal as one plane rather than two. The work finds the sacred in the ordinary, and takes the ordinary completely seriously: a river, a footprint, a moon coming up over the moor.

Alongside the writing, I run Ecological Intelligence Ltd, a consultancy working at the intersection of regenerative agriculture and systems thinking, and I am part of Holos Earth Academy. As a hobbyist, I also design retro educational browser games with ecological themes at Uphill Games; the same monotropic attention that produces the books runs in a different medium there. I have been in Jungian analysis for many years and keep a long dream catalogue, which I treat with the same seriousness as any other source. I was born in 1978, grew up between Ireland and Germany, and now live on the edge of Dartmoor.

A short bio (fifty words)

Marcus Demetrius Link is the author of Keystones in the Patterns of Place, a philosophical history of three thousand years of Western consciousness. He runs Ecological Intelligence Ltd and is part of the Holos Earth Project. He is autistic, was born in 1978, and lives on the edge of Dartmoor.

A longer bio (one hundred and fifty words)

Marcus Demetrius Link is a philosopher, ecological thinker, and writer working at the intersection of cognitive history, regenerative agriculture, and depth psychology. His forthcoming book Keystones in the Patterns of Place draws on hemisphere theory, fractal mathematics, alchemical symbolism, Jungian psychology, and the science of ecological restoration to argue that the mythopoetic matrix and the ecosystem are identical at the level of deep structure. He founded Ecological Intelligence Ltd, a consultancy advising on the intersection of systems thinking and regenerative agriculture, and is part of the Holos Earth Project. He is autistic, with the monotropic attention that long-form interdisciplinary work requires, has been in Jungian analysis for many years, and keeps a long dream catalogue. Born in 1978, he grew up between Ireland and Germany and now lives on the edge of Dartmoor. A companion memoir, A Boy Called Wild: An Autist’s Imaginal Memoir, is also forthcoming.