Korridorium

♫ Astral Short Cuts ♫

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87/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor of his house­boat and find my friend Norbu on the small ter­race as expected, hunched over the lap­top on his lap.

“Wikipedia!” he groans, and it sounds like a sup­pressed curse. I open the wine I brought along. I already know where to find the glasses.

“When you hit the outer lim­its, they’re all ter­ri­ble ide­o­logues.”

“What lim­its?” I ask.

“Well, the lim­its of sci­ence. Here, for exam­ple, the entry on Fred­eric Myers.” He points to the text on his dis­play, but with­out my glasses, I can only make out a blurry logo and a photo. “Myers was one of the founders and later pres­i­dent of the Soci­ety for Psy­chi­cal Research, which dealt with spir­i­tu­al­ist top­ics. He coined the term ‘telepa­thy.’”

“Does­n’t ring a bell,” I say, then quickly add, “The man, I mean.”

“But the Wikipedia edi­tors,” he con­tin­ues, unfazed, “leave out his most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion.”

“Well,” I ven­ture, “spir­i­tu­al­ism and telepa­thy aren’t exactly stan­dard Wikipedia top­ics.”

Norbu looks at me, shak­ing his head. “But they have to be. An ency­clo­pe­dia can’t just erase a part of real­ity sim­ply because the edi­tors and authors don’t like it.”

I clink my glass against his to buy a lit­tle time. “Aren’t they all com­pletely dif­fer­ent authors? I mean, after all, you’re a con­trib­u­tor too.”

Norbu gives a pained laugh. “Sure. But there are the deci­sion-mak­ers, a kind of priestly caste, and it’s mostly the ide­o­logues who’ve made it to the top. They cut out what­ever doesn’t fit their agenda, using flimsy excuses and prac­ti­cally war­like tac­tics.”

I nod to show under­stand­ing. “Like telepa­thy.”

“And every­thing that evades the sci­en­tis­tic creed.”

Sci­en­tific creed? I let Norbu get away with the con­tra­dic­tion and point a fin­ger to remind him of the old bearded man on his dis­play, star­ing out at me from the deep dark­ness.

“After his death,” my friend Norbu explains, “medi­ums all over the world received strange trans­mis­sions through auto­matic writ­ing, many signed ‘Myers.’”

“You mean he was reach­ing out from the, uh, realm of the dead?”

Norbu nods zeal­ously. “And not just that. The texts made no sense.”

“Aha,” I say with sat­is­fac­tion, “then it doesn’t need to be on Wikipedia.”

That earns me a glare from Norbu.

I take another sip of the red wine. Pretty dry. But that’s how Norbu likes it.

“Only inde­pen­dent observers were able to piece together the transmissions—like I said, tran­scripts from var­i­ous medi­ums across the globe—and sud­denly a pat­tern emerged. They all ref­er­enced each other.”

“Wow,” slips out of my mouth, “telepa­thy!”

Norbu shakes his head testily. “No, exactly not. Who­ever sent these mes­sages intended to rule out the pos­si­bil­ity that the medi­ums were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each other tele­path­i­cally.”

“So no telepa­thy,” I say, frown­ing. What then?

“Let’s apply Occam’s razor and go with the sim­plest expla­na­tion: After his death, Myers came up with a way to prove the sur­vival of the human psyche—through these scat­tered trans­mis­sions to dif­fer­ent medi­ums that only make sense when taken together. They con­tained infor­ma­tion very few liv­ing peo­ple had access to. And over roughly thirty years, that added up to more than three thou­sand texts. It’s just that none of it appears on Wikipedia—neither the Ger­man nor the Eng­lish ver­sion. Just like there’s noth­ing about spir­i­tu­al­ism in the arti­cle on ‘Auto­matic Writ­ing,’ and so on and so forth.”

Norbu looks at me expec­tantly. But I can’t really bring myself to agree.

“Maybe that’s for the best. What you’re telling me sounds pretty, uh, unset­tling. The part about the 3,000 trans­mis­sions.” I take a big gulp of wine and pour myself a refill. The longer I think about it, the more uncom­fort­able I feel under Myers’s gaze from his Wikipedia page.

“You’re just like them,” Norbu says, shut­ting his lap­top in dis­ap­point­ment. “What­ever doesn’t fit into your neat lit­tle world­view gets kicked out.”

“Speak­ing of which,” I say, “up for a game?”

The dis­trac­tion tac­tic is a resound­ing suc­cess: A short while later, we’re stand­ing at Norbu’s foos­ball table, replay­ing the lat­est Cham­pi­ons League matches.

It’s only on the walk home—a bit unsteady, but in good spirits—that I remem­ber this Myers fel­low again. Strange guy. 3,000 non­sen­si­cal texts? Sounds like some­thing from the inter­net age. With a blog from the after­life, he prob­a­bly would’ve achieved a lot more—and maybe even made it onto Wikipedia…

Occam’s razor:

Fred­eric Myers: