The Telepathy Tapes / World on Fire
building a sustainable future
I wanted my first newsletter of the year to be about The Telepathy Tapes. So, perhaps it still can be, though I write this amid the smoldering wreckage of Los Angeles, the city I was born in.
The Telepathy Tapes is a podcast about non-verbal autistic children having the ability to read minds. I don’t want to give too much away because the experience of listening and immersing yourself into this world is unique and, also, rather indescribable. The podcast attempts to first establish competency and then delve into the questionably supernatural.
Those like non-verbal autistic kids who exist in this world differently, or exist in their bodies differently, are assumed to be incompetent. (Ableism.) But, as many in the podcast reassert, these kids are indeed “in there” though they do not communicate like we do. It feels obvious and rather rude to assert “these people are people,” trapped in bodies that do not obey, but it is often revelatory, to the parents of the kids, their teachers. The presumption of incompetence has further silenced them, discredited them, and ignored them. How lonely, how isolating, an experience many disabled people feel often. (To really just make everything about everything, it’s all connected man, David Lynch spent the last few years isolated because people stopped masking around Covid and he already had respiratory problems, likely worsened by the recent smoke. How lonely, how isolating an experience.)
The main way many of the interviewed non-verbal kids communicate is through “spelling” — a process by which the non-speaker can indicate letters to spell out words, or in some cases do this with the help of technology like an iPad that can read out their responses. Through spelling, the kids confirm not only that they are “in there,” but that they have access to a vast archive of information, including the thoughts of those close to them. Part of this feels, at first, like an overcorrection for the damaging assumption of incompetence. But it soon becomes more, as the depths of how, and what, these kids are communicating about is explored. Parents and caretakers describe first their shock at their kids being able to access their thoughts and speak to them nonverbally, and then detail their experience of acceptance, of learning how to be conduits to these thoughts, emptying their minds and being ready to receive communication that comes through a different channel.
The most compelling part of the podcast for me was the concept of The Hill. The Hill is a location, a place, though it is not found on Google Maps. The Hill is virtual, or spiritual, or exists on a different plane, or in the mind only, or it is a hub of consciousness. Whatever and wherever it is, many spellers describe meeting each other on The Hill. Laughing with each other, talking to each other, communicating across language, space, time, corporeality. “We send thoughts like email,” one speller tells the host. Imagining The Hill as a solace: a community where spellers can freely communicate, but also find each other, makes me teary. They are not alone.
The Hill is a segue into a larger question the podcast rises: what is happening with telepathy? What if it’s not spooky mystic shit, but accessing a web in which we are all enmeshed? I.e. — What if consciousness isn’t individual? What if we are all brains in a vat?
While the concept of being inside the Matrix is terrifying and oft-memed about, there is also something strangely connective (in a mycelium way) about the possibility of a universal consciousness. Perhaps we aren’t alone with our thoughts, but are more intimately connected to those around us, those we love and those we don’t even know, than we might believe. Perhaps telepathy is less uncanny than it seems, perhaps it is merely tapping into our shared field of thinking and being. The spellers insist that what they can do is the future. That the way they view the world, communicate with each other and with the universe is the next step in our evolution. That we can learn from them, that we must learn from them, and evolve.
I have been thinking about this in the past week, as the city I love burns. Thinking about how those with perhaps the most access to the universe are also those most impacted by the physical realities of this fucked up world we live in, are most vulnerable to the hostilities of the social and environmental moment we are in. And what that means for the future, which already feels here.
Because it is not just the natural disaster, of course. It is the world we are in. It is the wars we are funding. It is the military we pump full of weapons instead of funding infrastructure to our cities. It is Amazon workers dropping off deliveries in evacuation zones, incarcerated firefighters on the frontlines. It is a civilian drone crashing into a water drop plane, reporters dousing flames on live TV and later repeating the word “looting” hundreds of times. It is about private firefighters protecting the ugliest mall in the world while the neighborhood around it burns, it is “Khloe Kardashian called out for excessive water usage after she took to stories to slam Karen Bass.” It is politicizing from every direction, the conspiracy theories, the denial, the failure to mention climate change. There is the fact that we are using private apps to track the fires, encrypted chats to discuss aid, comparing wording on GoFundMe’s so that people don’t inadvertently block FEMA aid with a wrong sentence. The banality of evil, the evil of bureaucracy. It is the inherent grimness in having to choose where to give money, in seeing all the people who need more, of needing the algorithm to boost, it is the sharing of theory while the city is on fire, the links to Mike Davis (RIP) but we are too busy staying alive, it is not knowing where to go, not knowing what is in the air we breathe. Every disaster movie starts here, you know. It is hard not to view the present moment through the imagery of Hollywood, of highly produced terror, everything cinematic, even the coming apocalypse.
There has been something going on at the same time the city burns, though, and that is the city simultaneously reknitting itself at the seams. Everyone I know knows someone who has lost everything, if they didn’t themselves. And yet everyone I know is also at work rebuilding, donating time and money and therapy and music lessons and babysitting and clothes and canned goods and air purifiers and masks. The city is still on fire and yet people are rallying, they are here, they are asking what their neighbors need. The grief is heavy, it cloys and hangs around as much as the smoke does. But this, that feeling of connectedness, of love — it is everything. We are not alone.
A quote I have seen a lot on social media: “community works faster than government.” Which, probably usually true. And also seems to more broadly point to the importance of mutual aid networks and doing shit yourself rather than waiting for our appointed officials to do something, because even the “good ones” let us down. But also, I have been wondering about the emphasis on speed. Because when the smoke dies down, will the interest wane also? And so while immediate assistance is necessary, what use, only, is speed? What about the long haul? What sort of world can we rebuild, slowly and together? What might The Hill look like, if we made it real?
Links:
spreadsheets for donation: Displaced LatinX families, Displaced Black families, Displaced Disabled Families
Reads:
LIVE UPDATES: Israel has killed over 117 Palestinians since announcement of ceasefire deal
Antony Blinken Kicks Out Journalist for Asking Questions About Gaza
Prison Labor in the Spotlight as Incarcerated California Firefighters Risk Lives for $5-10/Day
Much love xoxo
Shelby (and clem! she’s too busy for a photo) (she’s POPULAR) (wicked voice)
Idk, it really seems like that podcast involves many unqualified people (one of whom is an anti-vaxxer) and that what’s really dehumanizing is using pseudoscience to puppet autistic children. I get wanting to believe, it’s a good story, but it seems more for the parents and producers than for the kids.
Great piece, as always. The part here about community responding to disaster more efficiently than government, is something that became really apparent to me after reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Almost every disaster in modern history has unfolded this way. First, people on the ground come together to take care of each other. Then, the government steps in to make sure they’re taking care of each other in a way that meshes with the requirements of our capitalist system, and stamps out anything to the contrary. I’m not a libertarian by any means, but I think the present moment has continued to convince me that the strongest force we have against the horrors of climate change is simply taking care of one another.