This matter has been bothering me for some days now, with no resolution yet. I dropped in on the Professor of Conventionally Impossible Languages to pick his brain.
‘What does it mean,’ I asked, ‘when a telepath tells you the image of a laughing horse with a long green mane, accompanied by the sound of a Harley backfiring? Only there’s some kind of synaesthesia involved, so that the whole scene tastes yellow.’
The Professor gave my question weighty thought. He specializes in the interpretation of anasymbolic sensory montages as a syntactic medium. This is what he says to you and me. To other experts in the field, he sticks his nose into questions about how telepaths talk in silly pictures.
When the thought had reached the optimum weight, or impatience softened me up enough to accept a silly answer, he said with great gravitas: ‘It means, I think, that the telepath is on drugs.’
‘Thanks large,’ I said sourly. ‘Most telepaths are. What I want to know is, which drugs? I want to buy up the entire world supply — and burn it. I will not be talked to like that again.’
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