Telepathy
Can you read what I'm thinking?
What is the brain? At its very simplest it is an organic entity that takes impressions from out there in the form of energy striking different organs of the body (eyes, skin, ears, nose, mouth/tongue), converts the energy into information, shuttles the information to a central processor, a black box homuncular body without organs sitting in an ecology of incomprehensibly frothing and turbulent hormones, and translates them into wholly different things in here - sensations, thoughts, flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarming, buzzing, tinnitus, acute labyrinthitis, vertigo. The brain is intrinsically a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible universes, always already "meta-physical."Phylogenetically, when the brain was simple, its expressive function was almost non-existent. There was a neat Kantian fit between animal and environment: the rules of the world out there, its physics, were not challenged by the rules of the world in here; there was a nice match. But then through some urgency that it is just as easy to discuss metaphysically or teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution, the brain exploded: human-like hominids started walking upright about 35,000 years ago, looking forward, using tools, colonizing the world, creating new social structures. The brain, like some imperial culture expanding outwards from a remote island, started projecting itself onto the world, terraforming the Earth in its own image and leaving in its wake a trail of nonbiodegradable tools and waste. The brain also started talking, depicting, enacting versions of its experience in cave paintings, ritual dances, gestures, and a grammar of grunts. It became self-conscious. It recognized a mismatch between the world out there and the world in here: Hey! The world persists; we die! Self-consciousness and the idea of death were born in one fatal stroke.
It is obvious that the powerful cybernetic loop among environment, culture, and brain that we recognize as uniquely human began sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago as a result of who-knows-which butterfly flapping who-knows-what-sort-of wings. Frances Hellige, a prominent brain researcher, describes the growth of this loop initiated by the development of language, with feedforward and feedback components, as a sort of "snowball effect" since it initiates a cycle of ever-widening gyres that eventually embraces and creates everything between the poles of culture and the biology of the brain itself, including physiological changes in the structure and size of different regions. In cybernetic terms, we call this a positive feedback loop. The cybernetic system (in this case, the human brain) sends information out into the world-culture-environment, which feeds newly intensified signals back into the (brain) system to destabilize the system anew; it, in turn, re-amplifies its message, like an oversensitive microphone, and re-broadcasts this message to the world until the universe screeches with the noise of the human brain echoed back to it, in it, a cyborg rock concert.
This process has also been called "the selective stabilization of the synapses" as a result of continuous exposure to cultural effects or stimulation.It is tempting to see the rudiments of an entire alternative brain emerge as it is exposed to the alephtav. The letters themselves open a space into which interpretation must be placed in the form of choosing the vowels. The reader takes an active role, looking not only to multiply possible alternatives, but to seek hidden unities beneath them. Now we can understand the intense and peculiarly multivalent hermeneutic practice of the Jewish Talmud and mysticism. Furthermore, with the ability to represent alephtav as the accusative case (which is so abstruse that it is not represented at all in English) and all other grammatical cases because the alphabet is a transcription (though in Hebrew only ambiguously so) of the spoken language, civilization now has at its disposal a new sophisticated means to display and preserve across space and time the act of languaging itself. Can you read what I'm thinking now, through that last nonsensical sentence?
That is, the text has a newfound capacity for self-reflexive statement, and can represent with greater plasticity and fidelity the consciousness or intentions of an author. One can "do" texts independently of actions in the world with extreme freedom. At the same time, the instrument is not completely efficient, so the reader is teased with this gesture at telepathic fidelity, and yet forced to disambiguate the messages sent this way.
So it is no wonder that the central metaphysical tenet - and indeed one of the only constants of Jewish metaphysical dogma (the phrase is almost oxymoronic because of the absence of a coherent dogma in Judaism) - in 3500 years of Jewish history from the time of Moses is the unpronounceability, the unwritability, and the unthinkability of the Name of G-d. Jews are traditionally taught never to write or speak The Name, even in another language. In English, for instance, one writes G-d. The arbitrary transliteration of the Tetragrammaton - the four letters of G-d's Name in Hebrew - YHVH - into "Yahweh," is a purely Christian imposition on a Hebrew that is indeterminate and unpronounceable as written. Even in devout prayers, Jews abbreviate the Tetragrammaton to YY and utter Adonay (meaning "Lord"). For non-liturgical practice, the letters are read Adoshem, a nonsensical combination of "Lord" and "Name" - or else one says "The Name."What at first seems like a fetishism is therefore a reiteration and reinforcement of a central cognitive tool (or at least distinction) of Hebrew literacy ... a metaphysic of multivalence, a transcendental ambiguity, a deferral of meaning to some locus that is never here, a disconnection between the spoken and the written authority, and a denial of presence. G-d speaks His Name and shows His Face, an actual Face, only to Moses, only once, and even then Moses turns away, only to watch the metaphorical presence of G-d recede from him. So rather than a cosmological model of knowability and tangibility - essentially the kind of idolatry we find in tech writing empires - the inefficiency of the alephtav develops a metaphysics of absence, of unknowability and of the unrepresentability of central truths.
You take apart the word and reassemble it; you pun gratuitously and obsessively. And in the ambiguous semantic territory opened up by this irrelevant, aleatory, trivial, and illogical play, in the proliferation of new words and signs and semantic content, you discover hitherto inconceivable correspondences and revelations. And although this method evades any sense of closure or finality, and although the method is peripatetic and irrational, it is epistemologically potent, revealing hidden relations and assumptions disguised by but preserved in the grammatological signs.
Curiously, Abraham Abulafia, the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist, prescribed virtually the same method for achieving telepathic communication with Schechina, the spirit of G-d. For Abulafia, the operation of this method was designed to put the mind in a hyper-excited state, to force it to new levels of openness and receptivity.
If you want to transmit your thoughts through space and time so that another person can inhabit them, the re-permuting and combining of the less than thirty elements of the alphabet, then offer directed imagination and telepathy, a multi-sensory and absorbing epistle, the On Beyond Zebra of consciousness.
The idea that a space can be opened in meaning through punning or mere word play, that the script itself contains mysterious knowledge revealed by aleatory interpretation and multivocal interrogation, is, of course, superstitious.