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."

A Short Interview With Larry Sutin

Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions A Life of Philip K Dick, was the first published biography covering Dick's entire life [a point of clarification: Anne Dick actually completed her PKD biography/memoir, A Search for Philip K Dick, prior to the publication of Sutin's biography. Furthermore, it is clear after reading both that Sutin used a lot of Anne's primary information (interview tapes, etc) in his book]. Larry's been busy following the success of Divine Invasions, publishing Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley in 2002, A Postcard Memoir in 2003, and All is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West. I tracked Larry down and shot him some questions and he was kind enough to respond.

Q: Have you been keeping tabs on PKD's career, such as it is, in the years since the biography came out? What do you make of it, specifically, what do you think about the Library of America volumes?

A: I have been keeping tabs loosely on PKD's career, and I am aware that his reputation has grown considerably in the past twenty years. It does not surprise me that awareness of the quality of his work continues to spread. In part, but only in part, I think, that has been triggered by the number of film adaptations. The principal factor is that his best works are remarkable, and the techniques that he employed are now part of accepted 'mainstream' literary practice as evidenced by Jonathan Lethem and other writers. The Library of America volumes are only fitting, given what PKD accomplished, and the influence he has exercised not only in writing but in the arts, theater, and music both popular and classical.

Q: What kind of toll did researching his life so closely exact on you? What period of PKD's life did you find most interesting?

A: I enjoyed writing the biography. The toll came from the sense of responsibility I felt in getting it down right, not bowing to the pressures of those who wanted him incompetently and posthumously diagnosed and thus tucked safely into a category, or of those who insisted that 'their Phil' was the only true Phil. I tried to make sense of it all as best I could. I interviewed over one hundred people, read the Exegesis in its entirety, as well as the correspondence and other private papers. That was exhausting. The negative aspects of his life were no more difficult for me than the happier aspects--what I was going for was a detailed and accurate portrait, come what may. My own feelings were channeled into that task. I never rooted for PKD to turn out to be a certain sort of person. I was not surprised by the pain he experienced and sometimes caused. He was a human being.

Q: What was memorable about the project?

A: What is most memorable about the project to me, in retrospect, was the process of taking in so much and such disparate information. I was immersed in the complexities of a human life that was not my own. That was dramatic and exciting for me. I revelled in the complexities--my assumptions had to be put aside, and something more vital had to be discovered, a pattern that gradually revealed itself to me as a portrait painter, as it were, of a contradictory and extraordinarily creative man. I did not know what I thought and felt about him until the book was completed. Fun.

Q: What period of PKD's life did you find most interesting?

A: Believe it or not, I did not find one period of his life any more interesting than any other. My obsession at the time was to find out everything I could, and in that state of mind everything was interesting.

Q: In hindsight, are there any changes you'd like to make to the biography?

A: I have not reread my biography in twenty years. I am sure that there are places that it could be improved, but I did the best I could at the time and my passion now is for the books I am working on now. I'm a different person than I was when I wrote it, and I think the best favor I could do to my book at this point is to leave it alone.

Q: Is there something you think the general public gets wrong when thinking about PKD?

A: I think the general public has shown a great deal of appreciation for PKD's work--so the general public fundamentally gets it right. I would say that there still seems to be a common tendency to wonder over whether he was 'crazy,' which is not a question that interests me much--as I think that such a label is culturally conditioned, patronizing, futile, and enables a not too subtle distancing, by those who make the accusation, from the full impact of his lucid and powerful novels, stories, and essays. Also, I think people tend dramatically to overrate the influence of drugs on his writing. They played a role, but his essential vision came from his personal experiences, especially during his youth--as of course tends to be the case with us all.

Thanks Larry!