The Shifting Realities of PK Dick Read online

  ** For those readers who would insist upon viewing Dick as a "mad" charlatan tossing about ideas he could not comprehend as truly as might a "sane" and reasonable scholar, the following case study -- in miniature -- may prove illuminating.

  The late Ioan P. Couliano, an acclaimed historian of religious thought who taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School and worked as a scholarly collaborator with the eminent Mircea Eliade, had occasion to examine one novel of the "Valis Trilogy" -- The Divine Invasion -- in his landmark survey of Gnostic thought The Tree of Gnosis (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Couliano's judgment of the thematic influences in that novel was intended to rebut those who, in Couliano's view, too carelessly cited Dick as an example of a "Gnostic" science fiction writer:

  "A closer look at the novel shows that, indeed, Dick took inspiration from Jewish and Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature (especially The Vision of Isaiah), yet his novel, which describes the descent of God to the earth through the first heaven controlled by the troops of Belial the Opponent, and God's encounter with his wisdom in a kindergarten, makes no use of gnostic material."

  Now compare this with an analysis by Dick himself, written in 1979, in the concluding pages of an unpublished outline of the novel in progress (then titled Valis Regained) that would become The Divine Invasion. Note that Dick himself recognizes the absence of a fundamental Gnostic good-evil dualism in this novel. He also makes reference to Isaiah (though his source is the Bible, not the apocalyptic text cited by Couliano):

  "In the first novel, Valis, the protagonist Horselover Fat was obsessed -- and for good reason: His girlfriend had killed herself -- by the problem of evil. He finally came to the conclusion that two gods exist, which is to say a bitheism, each contending against the other. Although Valis Regained draws heavily on the bitheism of the Qumran people, it basically presents another view, not syntonic to Horselover Fat: monotheism, with the notion that evil has no true existence of its own but borrows its existence, or is lent its existence, from the one God. Valis Regained bases its theology on the extraordinary passage in Isaiah 45:6-7 [the capitalization is Dick's own]:

  ". .. so that men from the rising and the setting sun

  may know that there is none but I:

  I am the LORD, there is no other;

  I make the light, I create darkness,

  author alike of prosperity and trouble.

  I, the LORD, do all these things."

  Had Couliano taken the time to study the first novel in the trilogy -- Valis -- it is possible that his judgment as to the presence of Gnostic ideas in Dick's work would have changed. Nonetheless, the comparison of these two quotations is useful not only as a validation of Dick's knowing use of religious source material but also as a fair warning to all those who would paste a doctrinal label of any sort on Dick's work. Dick's viewpoints were multifold, indeterminate, and changeable; he cannot rightly be described by any "ism."

  Observe how Dick, in tracing out the possibilities of this spiritual viewpoint, employs the narrative gifts of a fiction master to create a haunting parable of a fallen and amnesiac god who must wander for centuries through his own creations to win his own redemption:

  He [the Creator] no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He has allowed himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim.

  But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity.

  One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance.

  The artifact must be fought; i.e., disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) which has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change?

  When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return.

  If all of this seems impossibly speculative to the reader, it may be still more unsettling to realize that there is a direct parallel between the ideas expressed by Dick above and the cosmological theories posed by highly respected quantum physicists such as David Bohm. In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot offers a summary of Bohm's viewpoint on the "implicate" and "explicate" orders of the cosmos that is strikingly analogous to the Urgrund/artifact dichotomy posed by Dick:

  As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. [Fellow physicist F. David] Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature... . According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself."*

  * Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 79-80.

  Dick was hardly an expert in quantum physics theories, though he did read in the field sporadically. As the essay "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" attests, he was especially interested in the concept of synchronicity posed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli (who worked in conjunction with C. G. Jung in formulating this theory). But the key parallels between Dick's writings -- both fiction and nonfiction -- and the current insights of quantum physics do not seem, based on the evidence of the Exegesis and other personal writings by Dick, to have been based on reading, but rather on an experiential grappling on Dick's part that proved synchronous, as it were, with the findings of the quantum physicists. For example, in his 1977 speech "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," included herein -- a speech that predates any widespread public discussion of the quantum physics notion that the known structure of the cosmos may aptly be described by the metaphor of a hologram -- we find Dick asking, based on his experiences of 2-3-74, "Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown?"

  Nor is quantum physics the only field in which Dick's speculations find a revelatory context. Consider the concept of "fake fakes," which is put to use in so many of Dick's novels and stories and which is explored persistently in his nonfiction writings as well. Examples included in the present volume may be found in the outline for a proposed (but never completed) novel Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth, as well as in the proposal for a script (never written) for the television series Mission: Impossible and in the 1978 speech (likely never delivered) "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In essence, a "fake fake" is -- despite its seeming status as a mere contradiction that equates into "genuine" -- a radically new ontological category that takes on significance precisely because it perplexingly mimics (and even threatens to supersede) our "ordinary" or consensual reality. Hence the "fake fake" is no mere SF plot prop -- although Dick certainly employed it to dazzling effect as just such a prop -- but is also a c
ommentary on the inundation of our world by mechanical and computer-generated simulacra.

  In the field of art, Marcel Duchamp explored a similar range of ideas with his concept of the "readymade," a found object that Duchamp would ironically designate as a work of art, at times adding his own visual or linguistic touches (in which case the object became a "readymade aided"). In his 1961 essay "Apropos of 'Readymades,'" Duchamp broached paradoxes that serve to elucidate certain aesthetic possibilities of a world in which Dickian "fake fakes" proliferate. Wrote Duchamp:

  At another time wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and readymades I imagined a "reciprocal readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!...

  Another aspect of the "readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of a "readymade" delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the "readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.

  A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse. Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.*

  * Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Set) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 142.

  The "fake fake" of Dick and the "readymade" (and its permutations) of Duchamp are, at root, cognate ideas expressing the shimmering indeterminacy between originals and simulacra that is the hallmark of the virtual reality -- both as metaphor and as technology -- of postindustrial society. It was Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," who first clearly delineated this tension. But it was Philip K. Dick, in numerous works including the pointedly titled The Simulacra (1964), who first created a body of fiction that brought the tension to life. The concept of the "simulacrum" has since become a staple of postmodernist criticism -- thus the praise offered by Baudrillard of Dick's works as "a total simulation without origin, past or future."

  A brief note on the principles of selection of writings included in the present volume: The primary goal was to set forth the best of Dick's nonfictional efforts. But there was also the secondary aim of offering a representative sampling of his different nonfictional modes -- autobiographical; informal free flights of ideas (in the cozy obscurity of SF fanzines); critical examinations of the SF genre and of his own works in particular; and extended philosophical and theological analyses. In writing of his own life, Dick could range from brutal honesty to blatant fabulistic enhancements. No effort has been made in this volume to sort out "truth" from "fiction" in his autobiographical accounts. (Readers interested in one effort to do so may consult my Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.)

  There are, in addition, selections herein from Dick's fiction: (1) two brief excerpts from an early unpublished Dick mainstream novel -- Gather Yourselves Together (written in 1949) -- featuring autobiographical elements bearing on Dick's experience of reality; and (2) the two completed chapters of the proposed sequel to The Man in the High Castle -- tentatively titled, at one point, as To Scare the Dead -- which have long deserved publication, and, in addition, benefit from being read in conjunction with "Naziism and the High Castle" and "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen."

  For all selections, the year cited with the title is the year of first publication; or, if the piece is unpublished, the year in which it was written (in the case of the Exegesis, the year provided represents, in some cases, my best estimate based on internal textual clues); or if the piece was published significantly later than the writing thereof, the year it was written followed by the year of publication.

  At his best, as evidenced both by his fiction and by his finest metaphysical speculations, Dick joins the great creators of parable and paradox of this century -- a lineage that includes G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Rene Daumal, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Italo Calvino.

  Note to the Vintage edition: Two inadvertent errors in the dating of "The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle" and the Exegesis entry on page 328 have been corrected in this paperback edition.

  Part One. Autobiographical Writings

  The writings in this section have been grouped together by the fact that their content focuses exclusively or primarily on Dick's life. It will be obvious to the reader, however, that many of the writings included in other sections of this volume contain autobiographical elements as well. In his writings, Dick frequently drew upon events in his life to elucidate his ideas, and, in like manner, drew upon the ideas that most fascinated him at any given time to elucidate past events.

  The two selections from the mainstream novel Gather Yourselves Together (1949) vividly portray the psyche of the young and innocent protagonist Carl, who bears a close resemblance to the young Philip K. Dick. These are certainly not autobiographical passages, but they nonetheless offer insight into the modes of thought and feeling of the apprentice writer coming of age. This novel was published in a limited edition by WCS Books in 1994.

  "Introducing the Author" was first published (with an accompanying photograph of Dick) on the inside front cover of Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy (February 1953).

  "Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1968) was apparently prepared for the use of one of Dick's publishers. It is published here for the first time.

  "Self Portrait" was first published, according to Paul Williams, "in mid- or late 1968 for a Danish magazine or fanzine edited by Jannick Storm." It first appeared in English in the Philip K. Dick Society (PKDS) Newsletter (edited by Williams), No. 2, December 1983.

  "Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer," written in 1968, was first published in Eternity Science Fiction, Old Series, No. 1, July 1972. It was reprinted in the PKDS Newsletter, Nos. 22-23, December 1989.

  The two autobiographical sketches -- each titled "Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" and written in 1972 and 1973, respectively -- are published here for the first time.

  "Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" first appeared in The Real World, No. 5, February-March 1976.

  "The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" first appeared in Scintillation, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 1976.

  "Strange Memories of Death," written in 1979, first appeared in Interzone, Summer 1984, and was republished in the Dick essay-story collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, edited by Mark Hurst and Paul Williams.

  The 1980 epistolatory exchange with critic Frank Bertrand -- titled (in Dick's typed transcript) "Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview" -- was first published in Niekas, No. 36, in 1988. The version published here comes from the typed transcript in the possession of the Dick Estate.

  Two Fragments from the Mainstream Novel Gather Yourselves Together (1949)

  This was what happened to all the things that came out of the wet earth, out of the filthy slime and mold. All things that lived, big and little. They appeared, struggling out of the sticky wetness. And then, after a time, they died.

  Carl looked up at the day again, at the sunlight and the hills. It did not look the same, now, as it had looked a few moments before. Perhaps he saw it more clearly than he had a moment ago. The sky, blue and pure, stretched out as far as the eye could see. But blood and feathers came from the sky. The sky was beautiful when he stood a long way off from it. But when he saw too closely, it was not pretty. It was ugly and bitter.

  The sky was held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape. It cracked and was mended, cracked and was mended again. It crumbled and sagged, rotted and swayed in the wind, and like the sky in the children's story, part of it fell to earth.

  Carl walked on slowly. He stepped off the road and climbed a narrow dirt ridge. Soon he was going up the side of a grassy slope, breathing deeply and taking big steps. He stopped for a moment, turning to look back.

  Already the Company and its property had become small, down below him. Shrunk, dwindling away. Ca
rl sat down on a rock. The world was quiet and still around him. Nothing stirred. His world. His silent, personal world.

  But he did not understand it. So how could it be his world? He had come out to smile at the flowers and grass. But he had found something more, something that he could not smile at. Something that was not pleasant at all. Something that he did not like nor understand nor want.

  So it was not his world. If it were his world he would have made it differently. It had been put together wrong. Very much wrong. Put together in ways that he could not approve of.

  The silent bird, lying in the road. It reminded him of something. His thoughts wandered. What did it remind him of? A strange feeling drifted through him. This had happened before. This very thing. He had gone out and found something terrible. Something that did not make sense. Something he could not explain or understand.

  After a while he remembered. The cat. The dying old cat, with its broken ears, one eye gone, its body thin and dry with patches of loose hair. The cat and the bird. Other things. Flies buzzing around. Streams of ants. Things dying, disappearing silently, drifting away. With no one to watch or care.