The Existential Cowboy

Rub

When our shoes rub, some take them off,

cast them away, and others grow calluses.

I have always preferred to go barefoot.

Stephen Brooke ©2025

The wild words can be observed in their natural habitat, yes, but I pen them with fences made of meter for you. Lines and rhymes (at times) hold them, the monkeys in their house, the reptiles safely behind their glass. They can not hurt you, reader. You can say you saw them, one Sunday afternoon. The kids read the signs explaining each.

Forgetting is too easy. All the faces I painted, all the women I loved, have blurred. Yes, even yours. Do you still have that portrait? Perhaps I could remember should I see it hanging on your wall. Or even tucked into some closet. For a little while I might remember then. You know I shall forget again, though, don’t you? Nothing lasts and soon I find forgetting is too easy.

Stephen Brooke ©2026

I have always veered away from the concept of telepathy in both my fantasy and science fiction writing. Why? Because it doesn’t work in the real world so I can find no basis for it to work in a created universe.

Of course, I’ve found ways to get around that. There is ‘assisted telepathy’ in the Jack Mack SF stories (written as Oliver Davis Pike). That is, thoughts can be ‘read’ by a computer via sensors and passed on to another person by reversing the process. This requires being attached to relatively bulky units and is not generally practical. It is, however, the means by which jump pilots communicate with their drive computers when traveling from star to star, so I had to include the ability to use the process for human-to-human communication.

That does open up uses for the technology which I have yet to explore. Maybe someday!

Then there is the ‘talking afar’ that has been part of my Izan fantasies from the start. This is something wizards and gods can do, and is essentially sending a part of ones physical being to another world to speak with someone. To be sure, they also have to have this ability (although one can, if talented and powerful enough, send nebulous dreams to those who lack it).

This meshes with the infinite worlds (or universes) that make up existence. Some humans have the inherited ability to enter those universes — not permanently — and interact there. Gods, for the most part, can travel through them without much restriction, but that’s another subject. Gods can also send part of themselves roundabout through other worlds to peep into mortal minds via a sort of melding. That is, the minds or brains occupy the same space simultaneously. Just surface thoughts, mostly, can be ‘read’ in this manner, but it does give them the ability to pick up any language almost at once.*

That ‘two-minds-in-one-place’ is the closest I come to true telepathy, and it generally requires the cooperation of both individuals, and that both have the ability to enter other worlds. Yes, a truly powerful wizard might be able to force it, and I’ve gone that way a few times. It is to be noted that both will know each other’s mind when it’s all over, so it’s not always an effective way of learning someone’s secrets. It has, perhaps needless to say, definite dangers for both.

For the untrained, or those who do not know they have powers, all this can lead to madness. One ‘hears’ the voices of other worlds, with no knowledge of how to shut them out. The tragic (more or less) King Hara’a of the Malvern Trilogy is one such.

Although I could, in theory, drop telepathy into unrelated stories, I have chosen not to. As I said at the start here, I don’t think it works and I’d rather not make up pseudoscience to explain it. I am not at all big on mental powers of any sort. Telekinesis? Nope, but a wizard might reach through another world to move something. Precognition? Well, I have dropped in prophecies and explained them, again, as wizard powers. If one can send oneself to other worlds, one might — if one had the rare talent for prophecy — also seek worlds through time. Again, this is not a mental power but an actual physical phenomenon, a part of the body traveling ‘elsewhere.’

And not a bit of it has anything to do with brainwaves or electricity or any other of the usual explanations for telepathy.

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Love will fade until you are not sure you ever loved. Try to believe you did. It is the lesser of hurts. Believe the moon remembers. It, too, kissed her once and passed on into the night. It whispers names you have forgotten. Names that fade like love.

You may wander my rooms, yet not find the secret passages. Believe they are there, Believe they lie hidden. Tap paneled walls. Seek cryptic clues along dim-lit cobwebbed halls. Any traps you find are of your own setting.

I really don’t exist, I’m merely an illusion I imagined once, a moment of confusion.

Each forgotten face is held up for inspection; every mirror holds its own fun-house reflection.

I looked into a room with my name on the door, but found that it was empty — who was there before?

Memories of morning mist obscure tomorrow, whisper who I’ll be, illusions I might borrow.

Am I just the shape I saw once in a cloud? The wind took but a moment to wrap me in its shroud.

Rodion Raskolinikov, the central character of Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ deludes himself into believing that he is a superior man and can use others as he will. Yes, he is also impoverished and resentful, but that is the central idea around which the author builds his story. Obviously, Dostoevsky disapproved of that sort of mindset, which had a certain popularity among the intelligentsia of his time — and still does. We see the same ideas put forth by men such as Thiel and Musk, people whose hubris leads them to think they know what is best for mankind* and who should be sacrificed for their goals.

Raskolinikov is redeemed but I fear his modern real life counterparts will never be. I’m not a fan, I’ll admit, of Dostoevsky’s moralizing and unrealistic ‘realism,’ but I’m in agreement with his central point. Even if he does bludgeon us with it almost as much as his main character bludgeons the pawn broker with his axe.