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The
Alternate Realities of Philip K. Dick
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected
Literary and Philosophical Writings. Edited by Lawrence Sutin. New
York: Vintage Books. 350 pages. Trade Paperback. $13.
Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was an American original, a brilliant mind often at
the edge of madness, who pumped out dozens of scifi novels and hundreds of
stories that probe at the tremendous questions: What is reality? When are
we real? He feared he’d be forgotten among the pulps but – partly thanks
to a series of Hollywood movies based on his books, starting with Blade
Runne and continuing through Total Recall and Minority Report
to A Scanner Darkly – he is much better known today than during
his lifetime. Vintage has produced handsome trade paperback editions of most
of his books, including his Literary and Philosophical Writings
(edited by Lawrence Sutin) some of which are more amazing than anything he
presented as fiction.
In
the nonfiction collection we see why Dick considered himself a
“fictionalizing philosopher” rather than a science fiction writer (though he
was one of the very best) or any other kind of novelist. With the passion of
the autodidact and the jump thinker’s ability to make connections where none
may appear to exist, Dick races between the Pre-Socratics and the I Ching,
between Pauli’s quantum theories and the Berkeley counter-culture, between
clinical psychology and Gnostic theology.
He
is driven by the fervent desire to know the Real World – the reality behind
the veil of appearances. He suspects that, if we can look for long enough
without blinking, we can get a glimpse of the Real World. On our way to
that, we may discover clues that the ordinary world we inhabit with our
senses and our ordinary minds is not to be trusted.
Dick’s fiction is filled with eroding universes, with reality constructs
that are coming apart. In his essays and journals, he returns again and
again to the idea that in our regular lives, reality is veiled; the big
stuff is hidden from us behind a curtain. What will we find if we go behind
the veil? Maybe we’ll find that we are actually dead, and living in a
Purgatory from which we will graduate only when we have passed the tests.
Maybe we’ll discover that we are living in one of countless parallel worlds,
and are constantly shifting back and forth between them (though we can’t
remember that because individual and collective memory is adjusted every
time we make the switch). In one of his metaphoric riffs, Dick suggests that
parallel universes are strung on a line at right-angles to time, like suits
in a closet, and God (aka Valis) puts them on and takes them off at his
pleasure. And then there is the darker thought that we could discover that
our consensual reality is a grand deception, a holographic son et lumiere
pulled down over our senses to mask something terrible going on behind the
curtain of the world, a ruse of extra-terrestrial colonizers, space-age
Nazis, or the evil archons of Gnostic cosmology.
All the stuff of marvelous speculative fiction, and yet for
the writer all intensely and urgently real. We feel a mind on the very edge
as Phil Dick shuffles his alternate realities. At the end of some notes on
Gnostic theology, he cautions that to grasp this stuff is to go insane. He
jokes that if he tells people what he has come to believe – that he is
living right now in Judea circa 50 AD, and is a member of a Christian
underground fighting the evil Roman Empire, which is still going on – he’ll
be put in a “rubber room”. Dick called himself “psychoid”, admitted to
paranoia and flirted with schizophrenia (though as far as I know none of his
shrinks ever diagnosed him as schizophrenic). He stopped taking
hallucinogenic drugs, but they may have left some strange trackways in his
brain. In his fevered pursuit of patterns and synchronicities as clues to
the reality beyond the veil, he strayed close to what a Swiss shrink (who,
unlike Dick, was no classicist) mistakenly dubbed “apophenia.” The word the
shrink wanted is apophrenia, which means “away from the mind”. [1]
The mislabeled condition (mentioned in the title of a rock song and in
William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition) is a disorder of
compulsive pattern recognition that produces paranoid fantasies.
The most extraordinary documents in Dick’s Literary and Philosophical
Writings are lectures that were either never delivered, or presented to
slack-jawed, stupefied audiences, and excerpts from the “Exegesis”, the
8,000-page late-night journal in which dialogued with himself during the
last years of his life (1928-1982). Many readers will prefer to read his
fiction as entertainment, without trying to fathom its sources, and there is
nothing wrong with that approach. In the best of his immense oeuvre (more
than fifty books) Dick has given us superlative work that requires neither
biography nor footnotes.
To my mind, The Man in the High Castle (which received the
Hugo award in 1963) is the best of all alternative reality novels that have
been published in this reality. The brilliance of this novel is that
the author is not content to give us a beautifully executed vision of a
world in which Germany and Japan won World War II and the United States is
divided into Vichy-like entities under their control. Within the alternate
reality of the book, the characters are reading an underground bestseller,
an alternate reality novel in which the Allies won World War II. And when we
finally get to meet the author of the novel-within-the-novel, and to grasp
the source of his “fiction”, the veil is pulled aside in a way that is
shocking and exhilarating (and won’t be given away here).
One reason for reading Dick’s Literary and Philosophical Writings –
even if you are content to know him only as a novelist – is that this volume
contains two previously unpublished chapters from a projected sequel to
The Man in the High Castle in which the Nazis are moving to prevent a
reality shift to a world in which they are not in control.
But for me there are compelling reasons for sitting up with Phil Dick, the
“fictionalizing philosopher” and independent scholar, as he reads and writes
through his nights on the border between genius and insanity. We are plunged
into the creative cauldron of a great and original writer. We learn how
dreams and synchronicity fed and fuelled his best work as well as some of
his strangest ideas. He tells how he used the I Ching to develop a plot, and
how he worked a dream into his novel Flow My Tears, Said the Policeman
– and then saw some of its scenes and characters appear in his waking
life years after the book was written. He recounts a recurring dream from
his early teens in which he returns, again and again, to a bookstore where
he is looking for an issue of a scifi pulp magazine with an article titled
“The Empire Never Ended.” Each time he gets further down the stack – but
develops the sense of dread that if he finds the issue he is seeking, he
will lose his mind. The theme of “The Empire that Never Ended” (now
identified as the Roman Empire) came home to roost with a rollercoaster of
visionary and synchronistic experiences in the writer’s life early in 1974.
Another reason for reading Dick the essayist is that we are in the presence
of a mind that is reaching far and deep to address those questions about
reality we cannot fail to ask, unless we are content to live in the
consensual hallucination of a reality TV show running 24/7. And in his quest
Dick is drawn to the roots of Western philosophy, the real philosophy
of the “lovers of wisdom” who were willing to make a round trip beyond the
gates of death and comfort to learn what they knew. Among Dick’s favorite
sources are the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. He gnaws on a fragment from
Heraclitus that hints at what quantum physicists, as well as shamans and
mystics, believe to be real. In the translation Dick uses, the line from
Heraclitus reads: “The latent structure is master of the obvious structure.”
The four Greek words (harmonie aphanes phaneres kreitton) could also
be rendered as “the hidden order rules the surface order” or (in the wake of
David Bohm) as “the implicate order controls the explicate order.” [2] I
suspect that Dick knew intuitively what Peter Kingsley’s work [3] has
confirmed with fresh scholarship: that the pre-Socratics knew in the manner
of shamans, through direct initiatory experience of the hidden order of
reality.
Gnomic fragments from the Greek shaman-philosophers nourished Dick’s
suspicion that there is a community of minds, across the ages, of those who
have gone behind the veil and returned. Ah, but that’s a hard thing, to go
beyond the curtain of the world and come back without being crazy in
appearance…or reality. All honor to Phil Dick, who risked the journey and
brought back wonderful gifts.
References
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The term apophenia
was coined by Klaus Conrad in 1958. He defined it as the "unmotivated
seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an
abnormal meaningfulness" and applied it to forms of reality distortion
that are present in psychosis. See Klaus Conrad, Die beginnende
Schizophrenie. Stuttgart: Thieme, 1958. Although he modeled the term
on “schizophrenia”, Conrad left out the R in the Greek stem φρήν (phrēn),
here meaning “mind” so his coinage – meant to categorize a kind of
nonsense – is itself nonsense.
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The fragment is
listed as LXXX in Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus:
An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Harmonie can of
course also refer to “harmony” or “attunement” (Kahn’s preferred
version) in the musical sense, which points to the ancient – and
hyper-modern – understanding that different dimensions of reality may be
related by resonance or vibration.
-
See Peter Kingsley,
Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995 and (on Parmenides) Reality. Inverness, California:
Golden Sufi Center, 2003.
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