Erik Davis on the Pink Beam

Well yesterday may very well have been the fiftieth anniversary of PKD getting zapped by the delivery girl's Jesus fish necklace, or whatever. The funny thing is that the deeper you dig into the timeline, the more out of joint it becomes. Maybe it wasn't February at all. On February 1, 1974, PKD writes to Jamis, "All I can recall about the entire month of January is that I had two molars and a wisdom tooth which had grown down and become embedded in my jawbone removed...." (74 SL pg 3.)

I got to spend part of the afternoon with High Weirdness author Erik Davis, as we riffed on Dick's visions for about thirty minutes in my class, before Davis had to teach the last class of his Stigmata course. 

The main idea I got out of all of this is that 2/3/74 is a kind of sacred uncertainty (if you rearrange the letters of the word "sacred" you get the word "scared"). For me the most important lesson of this radical uncertainty is that part of me wants to be certain, and that I have to work to keep from being certain. As much as I would like to believe that PKD concocted these experiences to fulfill some unmet need for significance, I have to save space for the possibility that something divine and revelatory happened. And I would ask that you check your own need for certainty as you explore your own ideas about what happened to Phil Dick. 

Davis put an old essay about the whole beam deal on his website yesterday. Davis writes: 

"Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. Like William Blake, another impoverished autodidact whose bubbling imagination was steeped in the Western visionary tradition, Dick approached his theophany (or “in-breaking of God”) as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist’s commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker’s sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought. “Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74,” writes Sutin in his Dick biography Divine Invasions. Sutin points out that mystics traditionally interpret their experiences within the faiths they are raised in. “Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SFwhich exalts ‘What IF?’ above all. In 2-3-74, all the ‘What IFs?’ were rolled up into one.”

So, When the Heck is 2-3-74?

PKD biographer, Lawrence Sutin, dates Phil's "pink beam" experience following a dental procedure when a dark-haired girl delivered some pain medication to Phil's door to February 20th, 1974. 

Sutin writes, "What precisely happened on that February 20 after Phil gazed upon the golden fish?" (210)

Sutin's source notes at the end of the book, usually quite thorough, offer nothing to substantiate that date. He points to a letter Dick wrote to Ursula LeGuin in 1973 that confirms the delivery took place in February. Phil writes, "... in February I had major oral surgery, and was home recovering, still under the influence of the sodium pentathol, and in severe pain." (SL 1974, 247)

So I asked biographer Gregg Rickman, who responds, "Phil refers to the Valis event as "2-3-74" many times in the Exegesis, as shorthand for the months of February and March." 

So, I asked PKD's friend Tim Powers who responded, "And I don't know if he talked about it to anyone right after it happened. I lost track of him for about a year right after he married Tess -- in fact I wonder if he was talking to anybody but Tess at that period!" 

PKD's friend Bill Sarill and ex-wife Tessa reconstructed the day as a Thursday, making it either the 14th or the 21st of February. 

As Erik Davis says, "There's too much noise on the line" to determine exactly what happened and when. Dick fans looking for certainty in life have obviously not been paying attention to Dick's work, which foregrounds this radical uncertainty the characters must work through. 

At the end of last semester a student asked if I had a time machine, where and when would I go. My answer without hesitation was "Orange County, February 1974." I've been thinking the last couple of days about what I would've seen if I'd been lurking outside PKD's apartment that fateful day. 

Would I have seen the pink beam? Doesn't seem like the delivery girl saw it, so why should I? Honestly, I'm not even convinced anything really happened. I could see PKD flashing on how intense it would be if it had happened and maybe moving straight to creating elaborate fictive narratives around it. But the flurry of activity prompted by the event (a million words of notes on the subject) suggests the truth of the experience for Dick, even if the ferocity and manic quality of the belief argues for skepticism. 

This is a long way of saying, take some time next Tuesday and think about the difference between what you know, that is your empirical experience, and what you are given to know through revelation, known as transcendental experience. Now deconstruct the false binary. Even in empirical experience our perceptions still leap this magical and mysterious chasm between external reality and our internal subjectivity, and in doing so, sure act a lot like revelation. And revelation has to be processed by the mind and made sense of, which involves all the standard tools of experiential thinking. 

In other words, this anniversary is a chance to inject a little of the mystery that animated the end of Dick's life into your own. 

Illustration from R. Crumb's "The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Dick."

It's 2-3-24... so what?

 In my class the other night, I got all excited that the 50th anniversary of "2-3-74" is "coming up" - we (meaning I) may even have mentioned how it was this very weekend. Of course in the clear light of not teaching a class on Zoom, I remember that "2-3-74" refers to February and March of 1974 and not the third of February. 

Sutin locates the date of the delivery and subsequent pink beaming on February 20th, 1974. Other sources suggest February 14th (my second birthday) or the twentieth. There are no letters from any of those dates in The Selected Letters. 

I can't find any sourcing in Sutin for his date, but I trust his research. Stay tuned, we should do something.... maybe we could all zap our friends and families with kitty laser toys at an appointed hour. 

Exegeting the Exegesis

I've been itching to dig into something a little deeper, dear readers, even as the end of the semester does its usual number on my brain. Articles about the Exegesis are starting to appear now that people have had a couple weeks to digest it (by the way, I'm not sure that's even possible in two weeks, but that's not stopping people). Anyway, the article that got me thinking was in the Spectator by Andrew Mckie, one of our regular readers from beyond the pond. In Did Philip K Dick Dream a Message From God? Mckie writes:

"Judging by these journals, however, what Dick thought was much more dangerous. He maintained that, in 1974, he had received a message from God telling him the modern world was a fraud, a simulacrum laid over a reality that had not changed since the first century AD. He understood, or came to understand as he wrote about his experience, that this might be a delusion, and that it might be understood as a metaphor – but, uncomfortably for modern sensibilities, only in the way that St Paul or St John the Divine might have been regarded as deluded, or that the Gospels should be read only metaphorically."

Yep. Here we go. As one of my friends said, pretty soon they're gonna have to stop saying Dick was 'casting endless theories' and they'll have to start talking about what those theories consist of. And when they do, hang on, because it's going to be a wild ride. Mckie contextualizes for us:

"But in one respect, PKD is out of step with the times. The Baudrillardians are happy to have him point out that time is an illusion; that the authorities are out to get us; that God can talk through cheesy television advertisements; and that, with the endless refractions of different media playing the same message back and forth, nothing is quite as it seems. But they are happy for him to do so just as long as it is a fun metaphor making an important point but not to be taken seriously."

It's the G-word folks - God, a relic that science fiction has been devoutly wishing to extinguish since the genre's inception. Indeed, Dick's religiosity later in life put him at odds with any number of science fiction writers including Ursula K LeGuin, Norman Spinrad, Kevin Jeter, Thomas Disch, and many others. While the highbrow literary atheists can tolerate Eliot, and the Fantastics put up with Tolkien and CS Lewis, Science Fiction has, as a genre, remained at odds with the theological, in fact this opposition is, in many ways, a science fictional religion in its own right. The Kids in the Hall have an amazing skit about this (watch it here and click to the 2:30 mark).

I can remember as like a twelve-year-old reading Asimov's Foundation Series in which characters say the word "Galaxy" in place of the word "God" and understanding, almost immediately, what was going on.

So the other day on Facebook, I saw that Radio Free Albemuth posted a link to Mckie's piece and almost immediately someone commented: "Wow that's such crap. Dick was incredible, but his having a stroke doesn't mean that god exists." When you think about that statement, it becomes clear, pretty quickly, that it's believing in God at all that's 'crap.' And here's where the rubber's gonna meet the road: the Exegesis is hardcore theological speculation, an endeavor that many in our current milieu feel to be pointless, and what's worse, the sign of a degraded mind.

But to take the God out of the PKD, is kinda like listening to punk rock quietly: what's the point? I'm not getting all deist on you. I actually am pretty open minded about the whole thing. Recently, I asked a class of students to raise their hands if they thought Wilbur Mercer, the savior character in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was real, and I was amazed when not a single hand went up.

PKD always gives you an out. Deities in Dick's work are almost always made manifest by the characters, rather than appearing in burning bushes or whatever. I mean there's always the chance that Horselover Fat is just a deluded idiot, a fool on a fool's errand, and so you can dismiss his devoutness as misguided. But then, like the commenter on Facebook, you have to invent some kind of physiological explanation for 2-3-74: temporal lobe epilepsy, a series of small strokes, amphetamine psychosis, etc. Sure those are possible, perhaps they are even more likely than the notion that Dick really did see God, and God really did talk to Phil Dick, but you cannot explain away Dick's enthusiasm for belief.

My impression of The Exegesis is that it signals a shift in Dick's interests as a writer. In fact, it may be the earlier composition of the novel Ubik that marks this change. Before Ubik, Dick's central pre-occupation as a writer seemed to be entropy and withdrawal, but with Ubik there is suddenly a focus on redemption and renewal, and, in The Exegesis, Ubik becomes short hand for this kind of salvation. In this way, Dick's career then comes to resemble the layout of TS Eliot's modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, wherein Eliot first catalogs the numerous ways the landscape has been made lifeless, dull, and dead, before ending with a meditation on rejuvenation through love and empathy (yeah, it matches that closely!).

So here's my prediction: watch for a lot more reviews to focus on Dick's "endless theorizing" in part because the theories are difficult to understand, and in part because Dick's religious attitude is so thoroughly at odds with our secular reality.

PKD's Bible For Sale on Ebay

Not pictured: actual Bible

OK, all you rich folks out there, we all know you don't pay enough in taxes, so how's about shelling out $6500 for PKD's old Bible currently listed on ebay?! It appears that Dick made several notes on the flyleaf of the front cover about "the resurrection, gnosticism, and the casting out of devils." Of course this would be amazing to own. As far as I know there has been no effort to catalog or reproduce PKD's marginalia (reading Darwin's marginalia was great fun for me in college). The seller seems legit and I can tell you that's definitely PKD's handwriting. So, who's in?

William Gibson has been tweeting some snark on the sale:

He begins:

GreatDismal William Gibson

"Honey! I just pulled the trigger on Phil Dick's speedfreak Bible, on eBay! Just a little over six grand!" #phildicksspeedfreakbibleonebay

then:

I'll write some really crazy shit in your Bible for *five* grand. Paypal.

then, in response to another tweeter:

@saddet Valis is either crazy or a crock, if you ask me. My money's on temporal lobe epilepsy, on my kinder days.

then:

@saddet The romance of literary madness is something that's gotten radically less interesting to me as I've gotten older.

then, presumably when people start asking him why he's being such a jerk, he writes:

When they published PKD's letters, they suppressed the ones where he told the FBI that people he didn't like were Soviet spies.

then:

I got to read them [Dick's letters] because I was writing the intro. So I wrote an intro protesting their suppression. Cowardly hagiography.

And finally this one:

@saddet And they were really *sucky* ratting-out letters, too.

As a fan of one of Gibson's short stories, I'm not shocked by his reaction, which seems consistent with lots of so-called skeptics who poo-poo Dick's religious experiences, most likely because they rub uncomfortably against the smugness of the 'non-believer.' My mom won't listen to heavy rock music, for basically the same reason, she's happy in her niche. However, my mom is not a novelist and so the act of shielding herself from stuff that might change her viewpoint is not quite so offensive to me, as it is when Gibson does it.

But then again, I used to kind of feel the same way - like the 2-3-74 stuff must be fake or BS simply because it did not fit with my materialist world view. Yay for me for evolving! Wag of the Finger to Gibson, who should be bigger than all this.

'800 Words' Hyped in Minnesota Star Tribune

Interesting article here, about playwright Victoria Stewart's 80o Words: The Transmigration of Philip K Dick, a play about the writer's 'mystical experiences.' Steward says, ""I was interested in how that religious experience made his life branch off into a new direction."

My favorite quote from the article is Stewart's who gives me hope. She's asked, "Is this crazy stuff?" (note to reporter Graydon Royce: the probity of your question is only surpassed by your specificity!). To which, she responds, "I wouldn't be surprised if in 50-plus years, we don't find that he wasn't so crazy. His understanding of quantum physics and being in someone else's dream, someone else's mind, may not be so far-fetched. So I'm slowly becoming convinced of his theories as I play the part."

The play is playing this weekend in Minneapolis. If you're a reader and live in the area, how about checking the play out, and then telling us what you thought?

More info here.

Pictured below the cast from 800 Words.

VALIS Discussed

I'll just admit it. I read VALIS again. The reason I hesitate to mention it is that I feel slightly guilty for not writing up some big post about my experience. It was at least my fifth time reading the novel, but it had been awhile and, in all honesty, the last time I read it I wasn't that into it. This time through the novel just completely blew me away and I ended up reading it in about four marathon sittings. Of course now I've got a book full of post-its I need to further research, but I just want to say the book was a real blast. Laugh out loud funny, and then at times, PKD took my breath away with casual phrasings that seemed within them to contain the totality of ways the world is fundamentally fucked up, distilling them down to a truly terrifyingly clear and potent poison (which in a uniquely Dickian way is also, of course, the antidote).

Like I said I didn't want to have to write some big thing about it, because I'm way too busy for long posts these days (in fact it's taken me almost three weeks just to write this one), however, a recent posting over at the excellent Gnostic info site, The Palm Tree Garden, motivated me to respond.

The article, How Many Worlds Do We Exist in Simultaneously "The Owl in Daylight" and the Life of Philip K Dick, (which can currently be found on the main page over at The Palm Tree Garden) covers (and uncovers) some recent news about the estate sanctioned bio-pic, (as well as that Pill Bullman one), and author Luke Valentine makes some interesting points about the kind of infinite regress Philip K Dick's life is becoming (I'm imagining in another fifteen years we'll see a space opera about bringing PKD's consciousness back to life so that future critics can hear his take on all these documentaries, adaptations, lawsuits, reviews, as well as his thoughts on the continuing presence of the Black Iron Prison).

Valentine writes:

"Which of the two films will capture Philip K. Dick? Dick is hard to pin down by anyone, whether moviemaker, literary critic, or avid reader. The lit crits sometimes accuse Dick of a cardinal sin in the fictional world, that of using the forbidden deux ex machina technique in the wormholes of his narrative action. Again, they miss the point. Dick's deux ex machina is a merciless mechanistic universe that eats up and spits out humans back into the worlds in which they find themselves trapped. Rather, the technique he most effectively employed is the mise en abyme, an infinite iteration, as though Dick and his protagonists are mirrors forever reflecting each other, each new iteration contained within itself smaller and smaller until Dick turns to another protagonist and the process repeats ad infinitum."

Valentine even plays backseat screenwriter and gives us this scene for the biopics:

"EXT. - FIRST CENTURY ROME - A CROWDED ROMAN MARKETPLACE - DAY. Philip K. Dick, attired as a poor Roman artisan, is frantically running from a pair of Roman soldiers. They almost apprehend him, but he pushes over a basket of fish and gets away. The Roman soldiers slip on the fish, and one of them falls in the street."

That's actually pretty good. I love the detail about the soldiers slipping on the fish. Perhaps they could speed the film up so that this scene was like one of those weird chase scenes on the Benny Hill Show. Sorry, I'm not trying to make fun of the scene, but there's something weird about imagining this. Aren't movies the ultimate Black Iron Prison, nothing but captivating illusion? PKD's mystical experiences are fascinating, and we can all imagine them in our own way but what will happen when a screenwriter and director's notion of these events is projected on a screen? Seeing a film is, in many ways, to submit to the tyranny of the director's vision.

Valentine then delves into the legal battle being fought over who owns the rights to The Owl in Daylight:

"Electric Shepherd received a letter from OverLook Press in which OverLook asserts some rights to "The Owl in Daylight", or to Gwen Lee's notes from her interviews with Dick based on their publication of "What If Our World Is Their Heaven?" Whether OverLook has any claim to movie rights is the sort of question that causes Hollywood producers and their lawyers to generate radioactive Blackberry waves, given that the story was Dick's and Lee was essentially taking notes."

Now, Valentine doesn't provide a source for any of this, so take it with a grain of salt, but it is interesting, and it becomes even more so after Valentine tackles the issue of inspiration:

"Dick's quest for identity is far more than clever artistic trickery begging for deconstruction. It belongs to a realm that transcends time and space, and though Dick found himself working with one of the great themes of his or any other day, pulling from his writer's toolbox point-of-view and perspectival techniques of the postmodern period, he was coming from and going to other directions entirely. His inspiration was more than literary. His was divine."

Well based on this it would certainly seem like OverLook is suing the wrong people, but this paragraph demands further analysis. What is inspiration? Where is it located? Was PKD inspired to write VALIS by his mystical experiences? Well it certainly seems that way, but if this inspiration was so complete why did Dick have to write Radio Free Albemuth first, only to have it rejected by his publisher?

If someone is inspired by something does the inspiration generate something wholly new in the inspired, or does the artist, once inspired, use his own faculties to create? While Valentine seems determined to conceive of VALIS as divinely inspired, I'm left wondering about Thomas Edison's famous quote: Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.