Cordially,
Phil Dick
Letter to Claudia Bush, February 13, 1975
[4:163]
Dear Claudia,
It seems to me that one of the most important points that Angus Taylor36 makes about my preoccupation with Just how real is reality? is that one cannot sense that reality is somehow insubstantial unless somehow, unconsciously, one is comparing or contrasting that reality with a kind of hyper-reality; otherwise the intuition makes no sense. This shows how inexpert I have been regarding my own epistemological perceptions. What, over the years, I have seen (and put into my writing) I have judged correctly, the soap-bubble effect, so to speak, of the phenomenological world. I knew what it indicated about the world around me. Something lay beyond it, or something had constructed it, as a kind of set, or backdrop, or stage, which we all take to be real. But there it is again, the word “real.” If nothing else existed, no other universe, no other order of reality, then however insubstantial, even if dream-like, the world we see would by definition have to be given the name of The Real. It can only be less than real if something which is not less than real exists, and presumably in some true sense behind what we do actually see.† This realization seems to have surfaced now and then in my writing without me seeing anything more than a theoretical need to provide it, for my characters to discuss with one another what they saw, their insights about what they saw, what it all meant. And yet, as I said in my long metaphysical paper, what is true for one universe is true for all universes; if these insights are true for the fictional universes of my novels then, unless I am fundamentally wrong—in regard to perceiving the soap-bubble manufactured stage-backdrop effect around me—the further premise, or rather the most significant deduction from the premise of less-than-reality, must pertain to our universe, the one all of us are living in this very day.
That I never saw that all this had to apply to our world is a measure of the failure of the artist to discover the relationship between his art (or in my case the worlds within my art, the topic of my art) and life, his life, all our lives, our world. The first philosopher to prove beyond doubt that what our senses perceive as the Real World cannot in actuality be real (not probably isn’t, but cannot) was Parmenides. He also realized that this did not tell him, by any known process, what in its stead was real. He could prove only negatives, which we’re told can’t be done. He did this very thing, and went his way. I think that in my writing I retraced the ground which he traced and came to the same conclusions, but I had the advantage of knowing in the back of my mind (i.e., my unconscious or right hemisphere) about Plato’s concept of the idea universe, of which ours is a mirror reflection. You can see that Plato’s whole concept was dictated by what Parmenides did somewhat before him; if not dictated by a priori necessity, then sooner or later by existential experience, as in my case (I speak of my March 1974 experience). The criticism, which I remember using in Philo 10A, a survey course at Cal, was that “What value does this metaphysical Eternal Real World of Forms of Plato have, since we can never encounter or experience it? Doesn’t pragmatism show us that it is unnecessary to believe in it? All events can be explained just as well without it?” What I didn’t know was that after Plato’s time the Platonists and Neoplatonists developed methods of encountering that very real world of the Logos or archetypes, the plan (this is probably the best English rendering of logos) underlying all phenomena. Once they had begun to experience it, as I did quite by chance in March 1974, they re ally put an end to such bickering as I engaged in back in my college days. It is an index of the ignorance of our world today that my instructor’s answer was not, “But later on for eight hundred years people did experience Plato’s world of the Idea,” but rather was that if I was going to question all this, I should quit the class. I did so. I wonder what the ghost of Socrates would have thought when the instructor’s response was as it was.*
That for years (about twenty) I have alluded to the possibility of the entire Platonist System being accurate, and that eventually, without premeditation I actually experienced that universe lying behind ours, concealed within—yes, actually concealed within ours!—is a point of importance in the constructing of a new worldview to replace the old one which is shabby and cracking apart and fading away. This is why the various Marxist intellectuals have been coming here, writing about Ubik, discussing Empedocles vis-à-vis my writing. If I have, and indeed I have, stumbled independently onto Platonism without knowing what it is or what that stumbling upon, that refinding after so many centuries, signifies, then of course I have done something of importance, but not something original. It’s as if the formula for Coca Cola were lost for centuries and then someone invented a soft drink, began bottling and selling it, and an incredibly old man (Mel Brooks, maybe) tasted it and shouted, “This is coca COLA! I remember it from the twentieth century!” Imagine how disappointed the new inventor would be, personally, although probably the world would rejoice that Coke had been found again, resurrected from the trash of the gutter, etc., as Lem would put it, no doubt. A hideous power, buried for eons in the form of degenerate molecules. However, it would be striking to meditate on the meaning of all this if a large part of the intellectual community had decided, for almost four hundred years straight, that Coca Cola had never existed, that those in the dim past had only imagined it to be a part of their world. To reinvent or rediscover something which had been ruled nonexis tent in the first place . . . that is the secret weapon of truth: it can’t be suppressed, because of its nature; if it could be, it would be only opinion. In a very important way, this is how we define truth. People keep bumbling across it again and again. It survives even its own total destruction. Just as the power of Christianity lay not in the crucifixion but in the Resurrection (if Barabbas had returned instead of Jesus we would now be Barabbassians, I guess), then the same can be said for this: which I think can properly and precisely be termed Neoplatonism.
By the way—our new Britannica defines Neoplatonism as the sum total of all pagan (i.e., non-Christian) Western theological and philosophical thought, rather than a particular doctrine or sect. Wow. It was around the year 500 A.D. that Justinian closed all the schools which taught Neoplatonism; i.e., he forbade its teaching; he outlawed it. Golly; I have brought down Christianity, then. I have proved what Ted Sturgeon said in that Venus Plus X or whatever he called that Ace book; the Church kicked the asses of those who were right, and sold two thousand years of profitable lies in the place of what I am sure now was not only real and true but what they knew was real and true (vide what became of Erigena). How is the Pope going to take this? As the popes always have; by kicking someone’s ass. But in truth, in very truth, this is a shadow universe we see, a reflection in the mirror of another universe behind it, and that other universe can be reached by an individual directly, without the help of any priest or service or communion or even knowing what he is doing (the latter pertains to me, you understand; I was just trying out the massive hits of WS vitamins). God is as close as the wall beside me; is within the wall beside me, concealed by it, as if that wall is a paper mask.
“The workman is invisible within the workshop.”37 A Sufi saying, which to me says it all. The Sufis would point out, too, that you and I—we are portions of the workshop, not outside it somewhere gazing at it from an external standpoint. When you ponder this, you begin to understand, and the invisible body of God, the Kingdom or Garden, begins to grow and to blossom not only around you but in you.*
One thing that is a great relief to me is that since all this was known for a thousand years I don’t have to convince the world of it and even if they come in and set fire to my typewriter and chop me up into dog food, this realization will re-emerge for the reasons I gave, and to even further ease my burden, I’ve evidently said it in my novels and stories; well enough anyhow for ol’ Angus and other astute types like yourself to discern. The time bomb of awakening is already ticking away; we shall wake up, are doing so now.
The basic
scientific discovery of my vast metaphysic, which I had written you about, was my postulation of two times at right angles to each other, which I called vertical (which we normally perceive) and horizontal, which is the axis along which the objects in Ubik regress. Now I have the new Britannica, and, in looking up the article on time, I find that, yes indeed, it is speculated now that besides the regular time there may be a hypertime which would be orthogonal, a word I didn’t know; I looked it up and sure enough, it means at right angles. Also, someone (Kurt Gödel, I think the Britannica article said38) speculated that the orthogonal time might be curved, since time and space are regarded now as integral, and space does curve; this hypertime would curve back onto itself . . . and hello, Gracie Slick and “Hyperdrive.”39 The world of trash (e.g., S-F and rock) [has] done did it. The article said that it remains speculation, this orthogonal time, not for me is it, nor was it for Plotinus. So although I have discovered and invented nothing (which is “mu” in Chinese, and considered priceless40) I have at least found something. The trash (to fuse Lem and Jesus as coiners of metaphor) of great price for which a man sells all he has that he may acquire it.
[4:166] The forms (categories such as “transportation”) in Ubik regressed along the orthogonical time-axis, demonstrating (1) the existence of Plato’s exemplar forms and (2) orthogonic time—i.e., another time axis from the one we’re accustomed to.
In psychosis there is regression in the person: presumably from the adult back to child. The regression in me in March 1974, however, like the cars and planes et al. in Ubik was a regression along the orthogonical time-axis, the same as took place so that each form was replaced by a prior com pleted form; hence I didn’t become a child, the child I was, but a former man, an adult of the same age as mine, that is, level of personal entelechy completion. [ . . . ]
I never was that former man; as in Ubik the present form (me an adult 44 years old) rolled back to reveal the “crypte morphosis” concealed within, exactly as, say, the modern refrigerator rolled back to become—i.e., to be revealed as containing—the old 1937 turret top G.E. The modern two-door freezer-refrigerator never was that old turret top, except along an entirely different form axis, that of cooling/storage appliances per se.
As to why I regressed along the horizontal (orthogonal) time axis, which may be unique or nearly so in human experience—could be due to my having written/read Ubik and knowing about hypertime, or also, a current, unique weakening in some way of the vertical time force. Or both.
However, this view of it is a linear view, a straight-line view. Maybe a metaphor is more appropriate: such as, the seed within the fruit; i.e., the seed matures (an internal growth motion), which is to say, upward, outward, forward, to the surface; at the same time (a reciprocal action of withdrawal) the rotten fruit itself dies away and falls off, to reveal the seed within, the seed now being ready to open and cease its seed-stage growth period. This better expresses a two-way reciprocal action, without the unilateral concept of “regression” which alone is inadequate. Perhaps I did not retreat backward along any time line, but rather, Rome came forward. (Rome equals the world of Tears which equals the U.S. as it’s about to become; by logic, then, Rome equals the U.S. as it’s about to become.) This solves the mystery of why so much material in “Acts” is present in Tears*; it is because all that material describes a specific space-time continuum, that of Rome circa 100 A.D. In writing Tears I depicted simultaneously (1) the space-time continuum Rome c. 100 A.D. and (2) future America, which turned out to be almost America at this time (1970/74). What this depicts then is a moving-forward of Rome, not a regression on my part; if I were standing still, the same processes would be observed: i.e., the rotten external dokos fruit of this society falling away to reveal the seed within (the world of Tears which underlay/-lies our own). It is the iron beneath the pretty plastic. This is true revelation. The whole novel, not just the dream, is revelation, about our world, where and when we are (our true ontological underlying space-time continuum; its nature). [ . . . ]
Piercing the veil, seeing into the heart of our (present) world, I saw Urbs-Roma; it underlay/lies; it is the core, the seed within the fruit; what our world actually is once all the layers of delusion are stripped away. Seed, then, equals Being. Rotten fruit or veil equals surface appearance. Only the external trappings (the names) have been changed. Successive layers of reality are involved, a penetrating into the depths further and further. But time, too, horizontal time, is involved, because somehow these layers are arranged along that axis, since that is the form-completing axis. But progression, rather than regression? In terms of penetration to essence, to Being, past and future horizontal time fuse; this is circular time? In favor of this view: along this time axis there are the eternal edola, that which always reoccurs. The One behind the Many; the unchanging behind the flux. Well, that is what I saw; the One (edola) here was Urbs-Roma, which contained within it, as a sub-seed or rather a secret seed-within-seed, the Fish Christians at work transmuting/transforming metal to grief to love. (The progression in Tears.) Metal would equal power. Grief, loss. Love, a reaching out for to embrace what one doesn’t have or is. This identifies the horizontal time axis, orthogonal time, as the Logos time in which forms of an archetypal sort are there already and always complete, from which our world is stamped; this is not “time” as we know it, but eternity. Think of the orthogonal time as a circular drum continually rotating and as it rotates it prints out on the continually moving linear strip of our time of change the perfect forms; thus both times intermingle to form our world and our conception of “time” which is really these two times.*
If orthogonal time is circular then there is no regression along its axis in the linear sense; it would be a perpetual return, always a return; the direction of movement is one of depth, not length. That would be why to “regress” along orthogonal time one would still remain here in terms of vertical or linear time. If any sort of regression in orthogonal time were possible it would be simply away from being, traveling back down from reality to appearance, away from Plato’s real ideas or archetypes. In orthogonal time there is no before versus now versus after; there [are] only degrees of depth or truth or actualization of crypte morphosis. More so. More complete in pattern-emergence terms. Clarity. The outlines emerging as if developing together in totality from invisible to blurred to clear to absolutely clear, as if a lens were moving toward absolute resolution of an image always there itself never changing. I was not led back to Urbs Roma or even forward, but down to. It was/is/will be always there.
The only question left unanswered is, Why did the rotary incising drum of archetypal forms print out Urbs Roma instead of another form? Is that the only form it can print out? No, it prints out all the edola there are, as functions of the Logos-activity, but for our space-time continuum (USA 1974) Urbs Roma, specifically Rome of about 100 to 200 A.D., is the specific form/paradigm. If I had looked about me while up in the mountains of Canada I probably would have penetrated to some other essence, i.e., would have perceived another eidos. However, that this Urbs Roma c. 100 A.D. was what I saw shows me why Tears simultaneously is about Rome and about the USA of the 1970s to 1980s. They are the same eidos below, printed out from the same form. It is precisely this circular rotary motion which makes it possible for us to distinguish the fact that the elements there are eternal, since when they leave they reappear; hence cannot be destroyed, as can any given thing along the linear time axis. . . . One might say, There are two Romes. There is or was the phenomenal Rome printed out in linear time, which is now gone, like every other printed-out thing. But “Rome” the Platonic archetype still exists, outside of (our) time; that latter Rome is what I saw.
Letter to Claudia Bush, February 14, 1975
[4:172]
Dear Claudia,
If I were to say to you: “The universe which we perceive is a hologram,” you might think I had said something original, until you realized that I had only up-dated Plato’s metaphor of the images
flashed on the walls of our cave, images which we take to be real. The universe as hologram is more arresting as an insight, though, because the hologram is so strikingly like the reality which it refers to—being formed in ersatz cubic volume, for one thing—that we could take this to be more than a mere poetic statement. Also, we can more readily grasp a kind of elaborate mechanism underlying our perceptible universe; i.e., the enormously intricate forces which keep it intact.
I conceive our universe—the hologram—to consist of an infinite number of laminated layers arranged in sequence, but not truly in anything that can be called time or space. “Time” is our perception of our own movement as we are driven, as in the form of a worm or screwdriver, through these successive layers of laminations; instead of the film moving, so to speak, the audience moves. The pressure exerted on us to go through the laminations is time; the sense that there is genuine sequence of encounter arranged somehow is space.