A REVIEW OF Philip K. Dick: VALIS and Later Novels [A Maze of Death, VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer], edited by Jonathan Lethem, The Library of America, 2009.
It might be best when considering the chaotic life and writing of Philip K. Dick to simply start at the beginning.
PKD and his twin sister, Jane, were born six weeks premature in Chicago in December 1928.
His father, Joseph, worked for the Agriculture Department. His mother, Dorothy, had kidney disease resulting in poor breast milk.
The twins and their mother had scant medical support. In January 1929 Philip and Jane were rushed to the hospital suffering from severe malnutrition and dehydration. According to PKD, his mother allegedly gave more to him than his sister, so Philip survived but Jane didn’t.
Dick always felt guilty about Jane’s death, having taken her food. How might a young boy learn or imagine such a thing? Did someone suggest it to him or flat out say it? Or was it something his brain or mind manufactured with the materials at hand? Regardless, Philip kept her alive and relevant in his imagination, doing everything he could to bring her back: “She fights for her life & I for hers, eternally…My sister is everything to me. I am damned always to be separated from her/& with her, in an oscillation.” [823]
Dorothy divorced Joe when PKD was 5, and by the time little Philip was 8 he’d begun a life of never-ending emotional and mental challenges, having experienced a “childhood Satori,” being treated by a psychiatrist and writing his first story with fond maternal encouragement.
Interestingly, and perhaps coincidentally [or not], the shape of Dick’s imagination seemed a recursion of many mythologies across humankind [the material on hand] that had certain key elements in common, suggesting to Dick the possible existence of a shared monomyth or collective unconscious as the wellspring from which his conscious matrix sprung. And that well, according to PKD’s vision, was a vast active living intelligence system [VALIS]. One of the most dominant themes in his final novels revolves around saving women in distress [various manifestations of his dead twin sister] as a means of unifying the universe [and making himself whole again]: the divine syzygy/yin and yang are once again united rather than separated [until it’s time to separate again]. The dharma process of unification, redemption and at-one-ment is accomplished. Then, hopefully, one’s relieved of one’s karmic cycle and moves on; unless, of course, one is a bodhisattva…then the cycle begins again…and so does the “occlusion” we must clear away so we can re-member and re-cognize ourselves for what we are. Dick goes so far as to imply that he himself is a bodhisattva in his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. These fictions not only seem to have en-lightened PKD, relieving his psychic burden, but may also ease the same in certain, or perhaps uncertain readers, of whom there are growing numbers thanks to a greater common awareness of Gnosticism, chaos theory, holograph theory, information theory, quantum physics, string theory, Zoroastrianism, ancient aliens, etc. & et al, thanks in large part to the Internet, cable, movies, etc. Dick [as a meme, perhaps] has evolved—is evolving—from a troubled child into an autodidactic archetype, and in this sense his energy’s lingering or maybe even growing in today’s world where an increasing number of people are “connecting the dots”—refining their qualia—and projecting their mindful holograms for themselves, as there’s a growing sense of the status quo pursuing its own interests, not those of Dickheads or Dickheads-in-waiting who might take a contrary view.
Such PKD-based films as The Matrix, Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and The Adjustment Bureau—which register a level of paranoia that’s been growing since 9-11 and the explosion of social cybernetic spy technology—have gone a long way toward injecting the interconnected human mind with new-old mythic forms. The popularity of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, based on the 1980s Bill Moyers’ interviews, introduced many people for the first time to the ideas of Carl Jung, who Dick began reading at 16 [40 years prior to the TV show]. This knowledge, becoming more widespread as a result, broadened Dick’s potential readership. More people began reading him and he began seeming less crazy as time wore on. That Dick was writing 30+ years ago, one can’t help but wonder, especially after reading his later novels and some of his Exegesis, if he really weren’t some sort of prophet or medium or conduit of information injecting itself here from elsewhere. If you haven’t read Dick, that might seem a far out statement. If you have, you may argue it’s too tame. To write about Dick at all is to find the seam between over- and understatement and mem-brain it [sic], kind of like the “te” of the Tao te Ching in operation, language evolving virtue out of virtual phenomena. So, in an effort to keep Dick simple…
Prophecy
In VALIS, PKD writes of Horselover Fat’s belief that Christ “…[was] an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis.” [274]
This truly frightens PKD, because that means Fat, who’s PKD’s textual avatar, has come to the realization that life, consciousness and reality are all about “where time changes into space” and space into time. We’re portions of an eternal consciousness forever conceiving Itself and ourselves, macro and micro selves conceiving self into self in material terms via language. “I” am the in-formation of that language, re-presented by The Word [or intercessor, medium, membrane] allowing us to perceive the signifier/signified duality of language, our means of becoming, and the paradox that we perceive ourselves as simultaneously more than language, yet completely enmeshed in It. Each thing surpasses each other thing as a necessity of time. That’s the mind of God at work, according to PKD.
Dick also writes of Fat’s belief [meaning his belief] that we’re living in “apostolic times, but a layer of maya or what the Greeks called `dokos’ obscures the landscape. This is a key concept with Fat: dokos, the layer of delusion or the merely seeming. The situation has to do with time, with whether time is real.” [279]
I think that PKD ends up discovering that time is more than real, it’s reality itself. However, it isn’t actual because the actual thing, or space, is beyond time. Only once time, or information, is injected into space from elsewhere does anything matter. This becoming matter becomes what Wilhelm Reich called a “mechanico-mystical” complex or syndrome that informs all “mystico-fascist,” authoritarian ideologies that promote patriarchal domination. It’s exactly this kind of mindset that may have led his mother to give PKD more breast milk than his twin sister, if indeed that were the case and not something occluded by the evil loosing itself upon the world, which works to separate yin from yang, animus from anima, Dick from Jane.
The Metaphysical Apparatus
The world, according to Dick, is a “vast active living intelligence system.” He came to this realization after the events of “2-3-74,” in which Dick believed God communicated with him directly for a period of several weeks in the form of a pink beam of light. Dick realized that in this experience “his two space-time continua [the primordial twins; syzygy; the yin-yang] ceased to be separate and merged. And his two identities—personalities—[PKD and Horselover Fat—first and third person technique] also merged.” [271]
Now, Dick quotes from his Exegesis:
#14: The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world… “We are not individuals. We are stations in a single Mind. We are supposed to remain separate from one another at all times. However, Fat had received by accident a signal (the golden fish sign) intended for Thomas.” Thomas also gets Fat’s message and discovers Fat living inside him in ancient Rome. The language he’s hearing is English. [272]
As PKD re-members Horselover, Fat at-ones with Simon, meaning Simon is Philip and the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, has never gone away but still rules the world. Here in VALIS we have a revelation or apocalypse of orthogonal time, where Dick and Fat and Simon the Early Christian Roman are simultaneously existent being[s]. The world is an LP record and each of them [how many more of them exist?] merely represents different points in the groove. What matters, as in quantum physics, is where the stylus is…and it can be picked up and put down anyplace else on the album, illustrating the particle-wavelength paradox and Heisenberg’s uncertainty.
If I can say anything for certain about PKD’s work, it’s that uncertainty is its fundamental default position. Uncertainty requires a faith in process, not some ends outside of time. And we see this, perhaps, in Dick’s last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, in the way Bill and Timothy merge into the same person…the way Fats merges with Phil in VALIS…and that by extension and/or intension may actually recurse Itself with all humans, writing us in Its image: Your are me over there: I am you over here. They are us over there, we are them over here; etc. & et al. It is us everywhere, just dreaming each other, set across set into subset and sub-subset, etc. & et al.
Word-beings living a dream plasma…
SYZYGY
As established, everything revolves around the male twin[Dick/Animus/Yin/Demiurge/Yahweh/Heaven] saving his fallen twin sister [Jane/Anima/Yang/Sophia/Goddess/Earth], and unifying the divine syzygy, yin with yang, despite yet because of the edicts of the orthogonal time vortex that’s overtaken them as a matter of fate, not will, becoming will, not fate, until fate overtakes will again, etc.
It would seem we’re eternally recurring cosmic hermaphrodytes simultaneously existing in many worlds, according to Dick. In The Divine Invasion, the anima, Zina, claims her world’s as real as Emmanuel’s, a demiurgical character representing the animus. Emmanuel, the instinctive patriarch, argues against this woman’s presumption, claiming “I am He Who causes to be. You are not.” [542] He tells her she doesn’t understand, that he picks and chooses among potential worlds and decides which ones become actual. Zina tells him he’s made “poor choices,” to which he says her world and what she’s saying are all lies: It is wish fulfillment. You cannot build a world on wishes. The basis of reality is bleak because you cannot serve up obliging mock vistas; you must adhere to what is possible: the law of necessity. That is the underpinning of reality: necessity. Whatever is, is because it must be, because it can be no other way…I know it; I stake everything on this proposition. Here I stand or fall. [542]
Yet despite the chest-beating, Zina easily wins the argument. Animus can never win except by brute force…by taking the mother’s milk. Emmanuel feels as though he created Zina as his “disinhibitor,” who will help him re-member, something he can’t do on his own. And animus feels troubled when it senses anima’s greater psychological power. Animus gets an inkling of who Anima is, what she’s doing, when he realizes “it [time making space matter] is too much for me; even me. I can’t believe it.” But he must, because she’s the divine Goddess, the mother of the demiurge of whom the Gnostics speak. She is the one who’s truly all powerful…until she falls again and animus rises, seeking her recuperation. Thus goes syzygy, eternally recurring Itself…
DISINTEGRATING THE WHORL
The end of Timothy Archer shows it’s the search that matters, not the discovery. And that the reporting of what you find while searching is actually prophecy, especially when read in hindsight.
Dick reiterates his notion from VALIS that Christ was a fictional creation, but expands on that to suggest he may have been a psychedelic mushroom dealer, a kingpin in fact, whose 12 disciples distributed “the Word” throughout the land.
He uses the fictional discovery of the Zadokite Codex, akin to the actual discovery of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” at Nag Hammadi, as a source for this speculation. Timothy Archer, the Episcopal Bishop of California based on the actual bishop, James Pike, a close personal friend of Dick’s, believes the Zadokite Codex was the source of Q, the sayings of Jesus from the Synoptic Gospels, but pre-dated Christ by 200 years. The codex, according to Archer, associates Q with the Anokhi, a divine being that is actually a mushroom the Zadokites grew in caves by the Dead Sea. This means that the “body and blood” of Christ in the Holy Sacrament is actually a psychedelic fungus. According to Bishop Archer, the Zadokites made bread from the Anokhi and drank broth made from boiling it. In The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, perhaps Dick’s most erudite and philosophical novel, the narrator and other characters attain an earthy mental state of wildness where and when the old myths are no longer adequate and newer versions of these old myths must return, be recouped, re-membered, arisen and atoned for.
It now seems as if PKD, in the voice of Angel Archer [his dead sister], is prophesying his own early demise in the form of Timothy’s ruin. The preceding suicides of the bishop’s son and mistress [Dick had made several serious attempts on his own life] were precursors to Timothy Archer’s fall [he landed on his knees] and, perhaps, to his own actual death, or the ways he imagined it might happen.
Transmigration forms the climax of the self-destructive projections of Dick’s highly literary fiction, which is to say his reality, the actual state of his mind caught in time.
In both the VALIS Trilogy and PKD’s epic battle with cosmic guilt, we are able to see the human being heroically battling the gargantuan, biocentric forces of the cosmos. More than that, we are able to bear witness to postmodern humankind’s struggle to redeem itself for what it’s done—and ever doing—to the Earth.
Timothy Archer dies fighting his fate like a man. He chooses to do so, battling its memes/language/ideas as a living thing existing in its own right by its own means, using us as hosts [ends] the same way we consistently succumb to it, each signifying the other to its death.
Transmigration ends with Angel’s feet planted firmly on the ground. She writes that Timothy “died hard, which is to say he died hitting back. Fate had to murder him.” [767] She chooses to not believe Tim’s returned using Bill [the bishop’s mistress’ schizophrenic son] as a host, but agrees to take care of the mentally ill young man when he’s released, once again, from the mental hospital. And Angel, PKD’s surrogate, now wants to save the blond boy in distress, the way Philip always had a thing for dark haired girls in trouble. One must constantly choose flexibility if one’s to at-one with an irrational universe…becoming a grain of chaos blending into an inconceivable, macrocosmic super-order.
Some suggest that Dick, finally, believed everything that happened in his novels and to himself was pure insanity. PKD WAS DESCRIBING INSANITY, NOT GOD. God was real. God was sane. But PKD knew better. He experienced actuality as an irreal, insane matrix emergent from multiple dreams of multiple selves in multiple places at multiple times dreaming itself into existence…into mattering. Mind is the witnessing I/Eye inside here—the other side of this hologram/plasma/membrane/seam…and love for his sister was always the guide star through his madness, what got him through.
Finally, Dick, in the form of Angel Archer, seems to reject the apparent end that history would have contrived for itself in favor a more down to earth view, rejecting Timothy’s teachings and the religious impulse in favor of the material existence of a record store manager.
I hear Sophia from The Divine Invasion telling Phil that “Unless your past perishes…you are doomed. Do you know that?...Your future must differ from your past. The future must always differ from the past.” [349]
It’s called disintegrating the whorl, wearing down the groove, playing the song, breaking the record…as one must.
