It would not be correct to say that the second time around, things are different from the first time around; both times are the same time, through an orthogonal intervention of needed information. Another axis of reality has to be imagined; first and second occur simultaneously in linear time. Which is to say, solution A abolishes itself as it fails and not after it fails; it is not attempted and then erased but both attempted, erased, and a second and superior solution employed simultaneously. This is as mysterious to us as the third dimension is to the flatland person.
What has happened is that the correction is not separated from that which it corrects, either by time or space, hence not by causality. The person is rescued by the merit of an act that he will not live to commit—an impossible situation from the normal standpoint. Perhaps it can be understood if solution A, which does not work, is supposed as occurring in a falsework or hypothetical, not actual, universe: a sort of tentative sketch off the canvas. Or what if it is supposed that no linear time elapses within the period in which solution A takes place; solution A occurs at a point rather than a line. The correction does not lag; it is as fast as the faulty solution that it overtakes. In other words, the faulty solution is overrun as it unfolds. This is impossible, but it is the case. It is like a spider who can only toss a web strand across a distance between bushes if he has already tossed a stand across that distance. The solution must precede the problem, and therein lies the mystery. How can it be? But it is so; the solution to the Xerox missive of 3-74 shows up in novels and a story I wrote as much as ten years earlier [most likely “Faith of Our Fathers”]. The problem is formulated; the right solution is formulated (especially in Penultimate Truth, and for all I know, it shows up elsewhere in my writing as well, places I have not as yet looked). The mind that is retracking its life has plenty of leisure time in which to formulate the problem and develop a successful answer.
About the Editor
LAWRENCE SUTIN is the author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. He is currently at work on a biography of Aleister Crowley.
1 I would like to thank Kleo Mini for permission to quote from Michael in the ‘Fifties, which offers a valuable portrait not only of Dick but also of the Berkeley milieu in which he came of age.
2 Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1981), p. 229.
3 Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Novato, Calif./Lancaster, Pa.: Underwood-Miller, 1991), p. 161.
4 Alexander Star, “The God in the Trash,” The New Republic (December 6, 1993), p. 34.
5 Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism (Albany State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 148-50.
6 Ibid., p. 150.
7 There is a considerable range of quality in the attempts to apply diagnostic measures to Dick’s life and writings. Jay Kinney, for example, offers a thoughtful and subtle comparison between schizophrenic and shamanic states in his “Wrestling with Angels: The Mystical Dilemma of Philip K. Dick” (published in In Pursuit of Valis). In the writings of Gregg Rickman, however, diagnoses of Dick abound and are relentlessly flogged despite the highly inconclusive evidence. Paul Williams, the onetime literary executor of the Dick estate, provides a sound assessment of Rickman’s egregious mode of analysis in his To The High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life (1928-1962) (Long Beach, Calif.: Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1989), of Dick as a potential victim of child abuse. See “The Rickmanization of PKD” in the “Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter,” No. 24 (May 1990).
8 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.”
9 Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 79-80.
10 Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Set) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 142.
11 I hope Jameson means drugs in the writing and schizophrenia in the writing, not in me, but I’ll let that pass.
Notes
Scanner Notes Jan 13 2002: Originally released in RTF only as 4.0. Fully Proofed with careful readthrough, italics intact.
Formatting Issues: All quoted sources are represented by an Arial 10 font size. All footnotes follow directly after the paragraph they are referenced by and appear in Courier New 10 to differentiate them from the linear text. Many of the paragraphs did not have tabs but instead an extra line feed in the DT, and so I have reproduced that effect throughout where applicable, except at the beginning of chapters where I used a Tab instead of a Big Letter. All [SIC] notes are by the editor, Lawrence Sutin. And yes, PKD’s paragraphs really are that long. Only one DT error found - changed “seved” to “served” in the line “The only purpose seved is in the healing of his condition”.
Conversion Notes (20/06/2014): Converted and formatted to .ePUB by antimist 20/06/2014. Corrected a few problems with quotes here and there, and converted the footnotes to endnotes. No text from the original source was removed.
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
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