"Horrors of War" Card #54

Jonathan Lethem just sent me a link to a super cool post over at a posterus blog called 'Now Hear This." The picture above is from the card mentioned in The Man in the High Castle. PKD writes:

'I am a collector,' Major Humo had explained. He had spent an entire afternoon searching among the heaps of old magazines in the store. In his mild voice he had explained something which Childan could not quite grasp at the time: to many wealthy, cultured Japanese, the historic objects of American popular civilization were of equal interest alongside the more formal antiques. Why this was so, the major himself did not know; he was particularly addicted to the collecting of old magazines dealing with U.S. brass buttons, well as the buttons themselves. It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation could ever be given. And high prices were being paid by wealthy collectors.
'I will give you an example,' the major had said. 'Do you know what is meant by 'Horrors of War' cards?' He had eyed Childan with avidity.
Searching his memory, Childan had at last recalled. The cards had been dispensed, during his childhood, with bubble gum. A cent apiece. There had been a series of them, each card depicting a different horror.
'A dear friend of mine,' the major had gone on, 'collects 'Horrors of War.' He lacks but one, now. The Sinking of the Panay. He has offered a substantial sum of money for that particular card.'
'Flip cards,' Childan had said suddenly.
'Sir?'
'We flipped them. There was a head and a tail side on each card.' He had been about eight years old. 'Each of us had a pack of flip cards. We stood, two of us, facing each other. Each of us dropped a card so that it flipped in the air. The boy whose card landed with the head side up, the side with the picture, won both cards.' How enjoyable to recall those good days, those early happy days of his childhood.
Considering, Major Humo had said, 'I have heard my friend discuss his 'Horrors of War' cards, and he has never mentioned this. It is my opinion that he does not know how these cards actually were put to use.'
Eventually, the major's friend had shown up at the store to hear Childan's historically firsthand account. That man, also a retired officer of the Imperial Army, had been fascinated,
'Bottle caps!' Childan had exclaimed without warning.
The Japanese had blinked uncomprehendingly.
'We used to collect the tops from milk bottles. As kids. The round tops that gave the name of the dairy. There must have been thousands of dairies in the United States. Each one printed a special top.'

Indeed, the card did have a front and a back. Here is the back:


When I have some more time, maybe I'll write about how interesting these cards are: wartime souvenirs that address the horrors and glories of war in hacky prose and garish illustrations. Or maybe I'll ask my dad if he remembers collecting any of this stuff. He was born a month before PKD (don't worry, Dr Freud has already been paged).

Here's a link to illustrations of the rest of the set.

More Thoughts On Maze

Reading A Maze of Death late last night, I just about lost it when the crew of the raft encountered the gelatinous Tench beside the river. What an amazing scene! For some reason the cryptic written responses provided by the Tench reminded me of an image from the beginning of the novel I haven't been able to shake. Ben Tallchief holds the punch cards encoded with the information about his assignment,:

"Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come."

A few paragraphs later, Ben elaborates:

"He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information--a piece he would much have wanted."

I don't know why this image stuck with me, but I know why I remembered it when the Tench began responding in cryptic riddles. Wikipedia sorta gets that the Tench answers with particular hexagrams from the I Ching, but there's something more at work. The Tench conceives of language as an object, that's why it can communicate with the colonists only through the same kind the assimilation it uses to duplicate wristwatches. Language isn't information transmitted verbally, but from the Tench's perspective language has form. Isn't it interesting to compare the Tench's responses to the encoded info contained on the punch cards? In both cases the reification of language is literal, and the resulting signal loss obscures the meaning of the communication.

Here are some of the I Ching chapters that coincide with the Tench's responses:

"There are secret forces at work, leading together those who belong together. We must yield to this attraction; then we make no mistakes"

"Often a man feels an urge to unite with others, but the individuals around him have already formed themselves into a group, so that he remains isolated. He should then ally himself with a man who stands nearer to the center of the group and can help him gain admission to the closed circle"

"Every step, forward or backward, leads into danger. Escape is out of the question. The danger comes because one is too ambitious."

Notice that both the encoded information on Ben's punch-card and the Tench's prophesies concern future events. I think it's important to pay attention to how texts are working in Dick's novels. Here, we see two examples where the future seems to be laid out, set in stone, beforehand, but even so, this future is inaccessible and therefore unknowable.

The Oracle Says, "You Want This Shirt"

I love it when people send me stuff I can blog about. It makes all this so much easier. Today I got a great email from one Alejandro Zamudio who, along with a 'team of designers and fans of Philip K Dick,' have developed an 'electroluminescent shirt inspired by The Man in the High Castle.'

Zamudio writes:

"Recently we have created a prototype of an electroluminescent shirt
inspired by The Man in the High Castle, by which dwellers of 1960s
San Francisco can cast hexagrams from the Book of Changes and
publicly display what the Oracle has said to them."

The group's website reads:

"The shirt itself is a very simple device that allows the 1960s dystopian inhabitant to obtain a hexagram that can be looked up in the Book of Changes. It also works as an active agent of randomness by publicly displaying the hexagram, thus giving onlookers an unsolicited random answer to a question that possibly hasn’t been asked yet."

Note to the designers: Please ask the shirt how I might get one. I want!