Yes, mind reading. No, we’re not insane.
This site is an exploration of how we’ve mutated and evolved our way towards technologies that make mind-to-mind communication possible.
So apologies if you came here looking for testimony about getting thoughts directly and without mediation from one mind to another in the science-fiction, ESP, fantastical, magical, mystical, exquisitely romantic sense.
The telepathy I mean here is the only telepathy most of us have ever experienced: getting thoughts between minds by using a medium of communication: language, text on paper or the computer screen, voice over the phone… I call this Technologically-Mediated Telepathy, or TMT for short, and every time I refer to telepathy, this is the kind I mean.
In the coming months and years, I intend to pick up threads of telepathy I started to follow during my academic career. I published large swaths of what became the Telepathy Talmud project after a sabbatical year as a Fulbright scholar at the Technion in Israel (1993-94).
A very telegraphic hypertext version of the larger project appeared here in Mots Pluriels an Australian journal. Some of it showed up in bits and pieces in numerous dense publications (e.g. “Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash” in Configurations, a Johns Hopkins U journal.)
My thoughts then and now delve the origin of the alphabet as a model for understanding revolutions in communication technologies, the special idea of interpretation and telepathy with the Mind of God that the Hebrew alphabet initiates, flowering in several aspects of Jewish culture, but quintessentially the Talmud.
I also travel down byroads about the special meaning of the Hebrew letters aleph א and tav ת, the conquest of the electromagnetic spectrum, some science fictions that I believe help us chart the future, some other works of literature that illustrate that residue of ecstasy and denial of telepathy in reading, some very close and perhaps heretical or at least under-informed readings of the Talmud, and also some analyses of the very current future and far flung future of media. I will try to avoid politics, except when I don’t. I was even led to these rants, I promise, from my investigations of telepathy and the origin of literacy among Hebrew slaves. If you can’t wait for the story to unfold here, write me and I’d be glad to explain.
I am inviting you to get lost in this labyrinth, dear telepath, and if you have the time, like a fellow spider, drop me a sticky line at dporush@yahoo.com.
Also if you want a free copy of my book, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (Methuen/Routledge) ask me and I’ll mail one to you.
