A Letter From the Dark Haired Girl

Photo by Philip K Dick 1972.

Linda Levy has placed her entire correspondence with PKD for sale on ebay. She's also written up a very extensive recollection of her times with Phil. Her unflinching portrayal of PKD in the early 1970s is incredibly detailed and she writes extensively about both his charm and the deep psychic pain he seemed to be in.

Check out the lot here and read the .pdf file here.

One of the most interesting items in the lot is the letter Linda wrote to PKD before they met, when he was still in X-Kalay in Vancouver. Linda was a student at Cal State Fullerton and in her Chaucer class, Professor Will McNelly read a letter he received from PKD, which basically stated he had no where to live, and no one to talk to. Linda took it upon herself to write Phil.

While it's impossible to ever really 'know' Philip K Dick from this vantage point 26 years after his death, after much study I am starting to get a sense for the guy. And I know this letter must have totally blown his mind (click images to enlarge):



Can you imagine PKD's mood upon reading that letter? After he read it, he asked McNelly to have Linda pick him up at the airport (natch). He later described Linda waiting for him at the terminal in LAX as 'destiny in a mini-skirt.'

For those of you that are surprised by the price Linda is asking for these letters, check out this paragraph in a December 2007 Vanity Fair article about artist and collector Richard Prince:

"Prince is quite happy to discuss the prices of his exotic acquisitions, revealing that he recently paid “a little bit over $100 grand” for the only known first edition of Hammett’s The Glass Key in a dust jacket. Then there was the copy of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, inscribed to Dick’s fellow science-fiction writer Tim Powers. “I paid $150,000 for that,” says Prince. “I was more than happy to pony up—it’s an important book for me.”"

Beam Me Up Scotty, This Place Sucks!

Legendary Paranormalist Brad Steiger recently wrote an article for Alternative Perceptions Magazine, in which he quoted extensively from either a single letter or a series of letters he received from Philip K Dick.

The outtakes are pure Horselover Fats. Dick (apparently) wrote:

“These dominant DNA information packets would be disinhibited--induced to fire--in due time, depending on either synchronized inner biological clocks or pure chance stimuli. Or a combination of both, ideally. Thus even thousands of years later, the primordial civilization will be ’released’ in the minds of the astonished descendants who suppose themselves autochthones [aboriginal inhabitants] of the planet they now inhabit.

“The DNA packets in a given individual will tell him: 1) Where he is from; 2) What made up that original civilization, his civilization; 3) His true nature and faculties; 4) What he must do."

Well it gets pretty far out after that.

Steiger writes:

"During the course of our correspondence over the next few years, Phil told me that he had recognized the feminine voice that told him to read Revelation: The Divine Fire as the one that had spoken to him sporadically since his high school days. Eventually, the voice had identified herself as the Ruah, the Hebrew word for Spirit of God, Holy Spirit. She was, according to Phil’s understanding, a “tutelary spirit,” possessed of a “transcendentally rational mind.” The Ruah spoke to him in terse, succinct sentences, and communicated most often when he was falling asleep or waking up. He had to be very quiet and attentive in order to hear the brief messages that she relayed.

I had a revelation to share with Phil: The essence of The Divine Fire had been given to me in 1969 during a late night encounter with a hooded, monk-like entity. To silence my inquisitive--and startled--mind, the mysterious visitor had placed me into a deep sleep, but in the morning I arose with the complete outline of Revelation: The Divine Fire in my awakened consciousness. The book was published in 1973, about a year before Phil received the vision from the Ruah advising him to read it."

Dick seems to have had a lot of visions in which he saw the cover of a book of great importance but couldn't identify the title.

This Steiger fellow seems pretty well know. An Amazon reviewer writes of Revelation: The Divine Fire:

"Steiger interviewed a wide variety of people from respected scholars and churchmen, to everyday housewives and business men, to "Jesus people" and New Age channellers.

Then he examined the different types of contact and the different contents of the information recieved. He came to the conclusion that while some of the material seemed to come from conflicting sources, the vast majority appeared to be historically consistent in tone and content down through the ages- a universal theme coming from an outside intelligence."

The letter does sound like PKD and I'm sure there are similar thoughts in a Exegesis entry somewhere. I'd love to see these letters in their entirety. I wonder if Steiger would be interested in letting me see them - purely for research purposes.

Late in his life PKD seems to have promised just about everybody he was in contact with that he would come visit, but seldom traveled much farther than Disneyland. I can't imagine reading Revelation: The Divine Fire in its entirety, in fact, I'll just say it: I'm not going to. I'd like to believe that PKD was testing Steiger to see whether he would pick up on the feminine voice as a reference to Plato's Symposium, but Steiger implies in the article that PKD initiated their correspondence, perhaps indicating that Dick thought Steiger might have some answers.

More research is required.