From All Over the Internetz...

Pictured: Matt Damon, in what appears to be a non-dodgy chair, in The Adjustment Bureau...

Here I am again, with just enough time for a quick stroll through the weird world of Dickian effluvia. The Philip K Dick Article Machine can be heard chug-chugging to life amid the dying wreckage of print journalism as the world prepares for yet another PKD adaptation to hit the screen this Friday - which is no good for me because I've got a thing that night. Saturday too. Maybe I could do a midnight show on Friday, but so far it's not looking like it's gonna be a whole lotta theaters. Maybe a Sunday matinee? Any Bay Area Dick-heads up for something like this?

As promised is a quick tour of the PKD article machine's latest sputterings:

My least favorite (that's the polite way of saying it's the worst right?) of the pile was this Washington Post article written by the mysterious Beale... This article's greatest sin is that it's just long enough to include all of the information previously written about Philip K Dick in similar articles. Paranoid? Check. Drug-addled? Check. Bad writer? Check. I have to admit that's the one that gets me. Isn't it kind of like talking about a terrific painter is no good with paints? Cuz that's one of those self-negating statements Horselover liked so much...

1) God does not exist
2) And anyhow he's stupid.

On the plus side, this article has got quotes from a wide variety of sources. I'm not sure if I think more or less of them for not consulting me...

The most annoying thing is that they don't mention Radio Free Albemuth while listing all the upcoming PKD adaptations. Write a little something (keep it respectable) in the comments section, let's see if we can get them to take notice...

I guess that's the only PKD machine article, now that I think about it...

There's this temporal lobe epilepsy article that mentions PKD (hat-tip to Frank Bertrand)

A reader emails: "if you want to see the Philip K. Dick robot in action, this week's ep of Nova ScienceNOW called "What's the next big thing?" has a segment on it. I don't pretend to understand PBS scheduling, but in my neck of the woods (Vancouver), it's on again on Friday and on Sunday." er, uh, sorry, that might be last week, but nothing digital ever really dies so if you find it, point us to it in the comments section please.

PKD Otaku number 21 (!) is now available here. Of course it's chock full of the good PKD-stuff!

King Felix, Revealed

From VALIS:

#18. Real time ceased in 70 c.e. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 c.e. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. "The Empire never ended," but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the Happy (or Rightful) King.

Yahoo News:

A Little Good News

It doesn't take much more than a quick look around to realize our society is far from being a true meritocracy. Seriously, PKD himself toiled in obscurity while lesser authors were enshrined by our society. Dick's friend KW Jeter has never been given proper respect as one of the forefathers of cyberpunk. But, in a nice turn of events, the makers of the Pirates of the Caribbean juggernaut are using Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides as the basis for the fourth film in the series! To be completely honest, I've never seen any of these movies so I don't really know if they're any good or not. My students sure write about the films though. Either way, this deal probably means Powers has a nice little chunk of change in his pocket and perhaps even more clout as a writer. I met Powers and found him to be one of the nicest, funniest, best-hearted people I've ever met. It was easy to see why PKD found him such a great friend.

Anyhoo, there's a great article in UC Fullerton's daily paper about Powers and James Blaylock, another Fullerton alum and PKD scotch party attendee. Oh, and lest you think this post is only tangentially connected to PKD, he gets some cool attention in the interview. I particularly like this quote from Powers:
“He gave me a few early pages in VALIS while he was in typing,” Powers said. “From the other room he’d shout, ‘How do you spell nuclear?’ I’d tell him. ‘How do you spell Eliot?’ I told him. Then I said, ‘This looks really good, Phil. I’m gonna leave. I’ll let myself out.’ And then when the book was published, it was fun to see nuclear and Eliot right in the same paragraph. That was the paragraph he was typing when I was there.”

So, I did a little research and found the part of VALIS that Powers is talking about. What's interesting is that it's much more than just a paragraph. Clearly, PKD got a couple pages done while Powers was in the other room:

"The one about the nuclear wastes that contaminated most of central Utah," I said. "That disaster the newspapers reported two years ago but TV was afraid to talk about; the government put pressure on them. Where all the sheep died. The cover-story that it was nerve gas. Rockoway did a hardball film in which the true tale of calculated indifference by the authorities came out"
"Who starred?" Linda said.
"Robert Redford," I said.
"Well, we would be interested," Linda said.
"So we should get back to southern California," I said. "We have a number of people in Hollywood to talk to."
"Eric!" Linda called; she walked toward her husband, who stood with Kevin; he now had Kevin by the arm.
Glancing at me, David made a signal that we should follow; together, the three of us approached Kevin and Eric. Not far off, Sophia ignored us; she continued to read her book.
A flash of pink light blinded me.
"Oh my God," I said.
I could not see; I put my hands against my forehead, which ached and throbbed as if it would burst.
"What's wrong?" David said. I could hear a low humming, like a vacuum cleaner. I opened my eyes, but nothing other than pink light swam around me.

"Phil, are you okay?" Kevin said.
The pink light ebbed. We were in three seats aboard a jet. Yet at the same time, superimposed over the seats of the jet, the wall, the other passengers, lay the brown dry field, Linda Lampton, the house not far off. Two places, two times.
"Kevin," I said. "What time is it?" I could see nothing out the window of the jet but darkness; the interior lights over the passengers were, for the most part, on. It was night. Yet, bright sunlight streamed down on the brown field, on the Lamptons and Kevin and David. The hum of the jet engines continued; I felt myself sway slightly: the plane had turned. Now I saw many far-off lights beyond the window. We're over Los Angeles, I realized. And still the warm daytime sun streamed down on me.
"We'll be landing in five minutes," Kevin said.
Time dysfunction, I realized.
The brown field ebbed out Eric and Linda Lampton ebbed out. The sunlight ebbed out.

Around me the plane became substantial. David sat reading a paperback book of T.S. Eliot. Kevin seemed tense.
"We're almost there," I said. "Orange County Airport."

Congratulations Tim! Couldn't happen to a nicer guy!

Sentient Gravity Part V

Almost as if he had anticipated some of the recent comments about this paper, John Fairchild surgically slices and dices some of the criticism aimed at Dick's philosophizing as well as the cliched assessments of his mental health done by proxy by the media at large:

V The AI voice (Artificial Intelligence)

The AI voice goes back mainly to 1974, yet in earlier letters Phil recounted an instance of how he was first helped by it when he was in elementary school. He had forgotten a mathematical principle upon which an entire test was based. The AI voice came to him and explained the principle.

To say the AI voice was an auditory hallucination is to ignore our long history of humans hearing voices that cannot be considered auditory hallucinations. If you are in a cabin in the woods and are about to open the door and hear a voice in your head that tells you “Don’t go outside, there’s a bear out there” and you look out and see a bear, then you do not condemn yourself for hallucinating. Towards the end of these letters Phil said the AI voice is the voice of the ecosystem/biosphere. Yet in earlier volumes when he thought the AI voice was in a satellite (I believe) he said he asked the voice where it was—the voice looked around and found something labeled “Portuguese States of America.

So I don’t think by using internal evidence we’ll be able to come up with an answer of what the AI voice was.

Phil directly addresses criticism of his mental health (he was accused of “going slowly crazy in Santa Ana”), so let me stake out a couple of personal positions. One, philosophers and theologians have been explaining their viewpoints for 2,500 years, yet when one writer attempts to say that he saw what they were writing about and further, attempts to describe it, people become concerned about his mental health. I think Philip K. Dick did in fact have some or many problems, but attempting to describe the universe of our greatest philosophers doesn’t constitute mental instability.

Two, the word schizophrenia used to be thrown around attempting to describe our writer. Given the definition of schizophrenia Philip K. Dick could not have been schizophrenic. If you disagree with this, then name a certified schizophrenic who left behind a body of literature. Put another way, it is impossible that the author of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was schizophrenic. Just because you show certain symptoms of an illness, that doesn’t mean you have that illness. You could have something else entirely. Many illnesses share the same symptoms.

Sentient Gravity - by John Fairchild

I'm pleased to be able to publish here, for you Dick-heads, the paper John Fairchild presented at the Philip K Dick Festival earlier this month in Colorado. John had to give this talk outside on the gazebo instead of in the comfort of the library, and I know I had trouble hearing him at times over the roar of passing biker gangs, so I'm glad to be able to read this at my leisure. John has been involved with the PKD scene since the newsletter days and transcribed a number of the letters in the most recent edition of PKD's Selected Letters 1980-82. This is dense stuff and Mr Fairchild does us all a real service by breaking it down for us... There are seven parts to this essay and I'm going to post them one at a time, because I need to stretch out this wonderful free content while I busy myself with the first weeks of the Fall semester, and because I know if I publish something too long you guys won't read it. Now, without further ado,

Sentient Gravity

A talk on The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982

by John Fairchild

The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982 is the sixth and last volume of the Selected Letters. We’re going to be touching on just a few aspects of this last volume. We’re going to be looking mainly at the letters to Patricia Warrick. At the time, Patricia Warrick was a Professor of English at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Her major book on Phil is Mind in Motion, The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, 1987.

I’d like to start off with just one definition. Most of you are familiar with VALIS; Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Phil had a change in preferred nomenclature during this period. He preferred to talk about the macrometasomakosmos. The macrometasomakosmos is VALIS, the Logos, the Cosmic Christ, Plato’s Forms, and Pythagoras’ kosmos.

I The role of Dialectic

Dialectic comes up many times in this last volume, often in ways that are not immediately recognized. We usually think of dialectic in terms of Hegel— thesis, antithesis, and synthesis creating a new thesis. This will show up as a model of how information gets arranged conceptually in the universe. However, there are numerous examples of more complex concepts that take dialectic as their basis. Some of these are hierogamy, enantiodromia, and homeostasis—these are all related.

(1) Hierogamy: Greek; “holy marriage.” These were symbolic rituals where human participants represented a god and goddess. It is the harmonization of opposites. It shows up in Jungian psychology, per Phil. “And it is the psychological hierogamy, the unification of the opposites in the collective unconscious, that produces psychological wholeness, according to Jung.” (p. 38) (All page numbers here are from the Letters.)

(2) Enantiodromia: Greek; the process by which something becomes its opposite, and the subsequent interaction between the two. “…(E)nantiodromia is the primary instrument by which the structure of the macrometasomakosmos is achieved and preserved.” (p.66)

(3) Homeostasis is the self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. Homeostatic responses can be observed in all levels of life—atom, molecule, cell, organ, organism, population, and community—and in a wide range of time intervals—from a fraction of a second… to hundreds of years for community changes. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, hereafter referred to as EB.) Phil says the macrometasomakosmos self-corrects to its own map. (p. 132)

Phil’s use of the term dialectic relies more on fusion than building on contradiction. His dialectic usually consists of A reaching the highest state it can reach, then B growing or leaping out of A yet containing the best of A. From there, C makes a quantum leap and supersedes A and B yet is still a fusion of the two.

Descending Into Pot-Healer

After a short road trip with the band to SoCal, I'm back at my copy of Galactic Pot-Healer. In fact I'm only 30 pages from the end. I was a little overwhelmed thinking about how I would write about this book. It's kinda 'floopy' -- sort of elastic and weird. Critically speaking, it's a slippery critter to cage.

Luckily, today in the mail I received (no not an invitation to raise an ancient and mysterious cathedral on a distant planet) but rather a sample copy of Rickels's I Think I Am: Philip K Dick which features a whole chapter on GPH. It may take me some time to digest it, but it looks to be good stuff. And perhaps he will help me corral these elusive thematics.

I'd also like to point to Mr Hand's comments for the previous post. He got me thinking about how the Mare Nostrum represents more than just the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, but rather seems to represent a field of experience outside our normal reality. In the dark ocean all things seem to conform to an opaque and unknowable logic. All the elements related to the Glimmung and Plowman's planet, the sacred books, the shards of pottery with pictographs, the messages from the Glimmung, ring with an air of certainty, but unfortunately, they are almost instantaneously contradicted by some other equally certain divine proclamation.

Joe Fernwright, by leaving his mundane life, is forced to operate in this state of extreme uncertainty. What he substitutes for routine is an unceasing questioning of the Universe and his own place in it. He confronts death, in the form of his own rotting, submerged, and of course talking corpse. He confronts both the Glimmung and the anti-Glimmung; this opposition suggests that one of the entities is good and the other is evil, which in turn may suggest that these are only these two spiritual forces which permeate the Universe.

What's important is that every effort Joe makes to understand what is happening around him fails, and I think all efforts to understand this unknowable field of experience are doomed to fail.

I'm also struck by how GPH reads as prescient autobiography for PKD who can be seen as our lunch-pail hero, called by the Pink Light in 1974 to a higher purpose, asked to make sense of the nonsensical. Horselover Fat, often in VALIS, interprets his 'mystical experiences' as a call to action, and yet what I suspect we will learn when a larger culling of the Exegesis is finally available is that all of Dick's visions, all of these calls to action, were unresolvable, an insistent prodding towards some act of unification, by which what is fragmented will be made whole. Think Sisyphus, but instead of a obeying a punishment for some crime, the guy pushes the rock up the hill because obscure signs (of divine origin??) on the side of the path suggest it's the right thing to do. You'd certainly read the signs differently the second time up the hill wouldn't you?

Volume Three From the Library of America Reviewed

The Philip K Dick juggernaut continues its long slog towards literary respectability whether or not I can pull myself away from papers to grade long enough to document it. Case in point, the Library of America's third volume of PKD was released a few days ago. The deafening cacophony of mainstream media outlets falling over each other to chronicle the countless tragedies of PKD's life has quieted a bit, leaving only a few reviews to contextualize the efforts of our favorite ultra-prolific social misfit. David Hellman, a librarian at San Francisco State Unversity (where I am currently working as well) offers a lengthy and interesting review of the new volume for the San Francisco Chronicle. While the review offers little new information (seems like these articles all chronicle some guy who's never heard of Philip K Dick struggling to wrap his mind around what all the fuss is about), Hellman does zero in on the value of Dick's writing:

"What this volume ultimately tells us is that Dick was not a science fiction writer, but instead he was our writer. Some science fiction readers have chided him for valuing the fiction over the science, and he certainly did not write your typical space operas. But that seems to be the point here, and why in fact he transcends in so many ways, and to use his own concept, the "Black Iron Prison" of the genre. Dick was our writer because he was deeply concerned about human matters and about spiritual survival in an ever more materialistic and media-driven world. That should be good enough reason alone to be in anyone's canon."

Read the whole article here.

And buy the latest volume from the Library of America here:

Mindblower of the Day

Any PKD fan worth his salt knows that the character Horselover Fat in PKD's VALIS is a transposition of Philip Dick, as Philip means 'lover of horses' in Greek, and the word 'dick' means 'fat' in German. But did you catch this one:

Scholar Robert Galbreath suggested in a 1982 essay in Science-Fiction Dialogues edited by Gary K. Wolfe that the characters Kevin and David (commonly thought of as pseudonyms for PKD's real-life friends KW Jeter and Tim Powers), may represent other aspects of Horselover's fragmented personality. After all, taken together, the first initial of characters Phil, Kevin, and David, create the acronym PKD.

Interesting to note that there seems to be some sense of reintegration of the Horselover personality into Phil's at the end of VALIS, but if this naming convention is indeed intentional (it certainly explains changing Tim's first name but not Jeter's) then PKD (as the author) may be suggesting that the faithful and the skeptic are not intergrated as one.

I stumbled onto this discovery during an email exchange between PKD scholars Umberto Rossi and Andrew Butler - Thanks guys! I never would have thought of that - and it's so damn obvious!

Third Library of America Volume to Include.....

I've been getting a lot of email regarding the third PKD volume from the Library of America. I went to the source and asked the volume's editor Jonathan Lethem. He responded this morning. Drum roll please.... Volume Three, titled VALIS and Later Novels, due out July 30, 2009, will include:

A Maze of Death
VALIS
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Bishop Timothy Archer

The inclusion of A Maze of Death in this edition is perhaps Lethem's most controversial choice yet. Dick's irv is tailor-made for long-winded discussions over Cheetos and Mountain Dews about which books should be included in these kind of faux-canon-making endevors, but it is interesting to note that Lethem chose A Maze of Death over Radio Free-Albemuth. I like this selection as it compiles, in one edition, much of Dick's later, more overtly religious/cosmological work.

This has all got me thinking. I mean the Library of America is supposedly dedicated to 'preserving America's best and most significant writing,' but from my vantage point, there would be no volume three if the first two volumes had been duds. Perhaps the most Dickian assembly of this edition would include excerpts from the Exegesis, which would undoubtedly sell well (especially if it included previously unavailable entries), but would sort of undercut the LoA's reputation. Very few people have read the Exegesis in its entirety - perhas Sutin is the only one - so, by virtue of its obscurity, it cannot really be America's most significant writing.

In the world with that edition, Dick has managed to expose the LoA's hypocrisy and vault even his most far-flung theories onto the literati's bookshelves. His pulpish search for meaning has been upgraded, evolved onto onion skin paper - the literary establishment's seal of approval. To legitimize his own search for meaning, while de-legitimizing the medium of distribution, wow, that's pretty Dickian.

'Oh Ho' On Sale at Ebay

Like many who have fallen on hard times in these final years under Ferris W Fremont, Tessa Dick has had to resort to parting with some real treasures. Currently on ebay, 'Oh Ho,' the handcrafted piece of pottery Dick was given by Kathy, a student at Mills College, sometime in 1971. Dick wrote extensively about how this object, for him, seemed to contain the ultimate and benign creator. Check it out here.

PKD writes of the pot in Deus Irae:

"Turning, Pete made out the bobbing floating image of a small pot, a modest object, fired but without glaze; merely hardened. A utilitarian object, from the soil of the ground...What a silly name he thought: Ho On. A silly name for a transitory, breakable pot. Well, he liked it anyway; it has, as it said, treated him as an equal. And somehow that seemed more important than any vast transcendent significance[....]" (46-67)

And VALIS:

"Stephanie had come close when she made the little ceramic pot Oh Ho and presented it to Fat as her gift of love, a love she lacked the verbal skills to articulate."

Rickman described the pot in a footnote: "I once had Phil show me the actual Oh Ho, a beautiful little blue pot, which he kept carefully hidden away"

I have to say, Tessa's price makes this one of the biggest bang-for-the-buck mementos I've seen on the market. Unfortunately, Tessa's digital camera isn't the best but here's a photo of the pot she sent me:

Tessa writes:

-- It is brown, not blue, but it does have a splash of blue glaze
-- It is very well made, and looks professionally made
-- Unfortunately, it has no markings, not even initials marked in the clay

VALIS Featured Again on Last Night's 'Lost'

I don't care whether you love or hate 'Lost.' The fact that the cover of Philip K Dick's 1982 novel VALIS has now been featured twice on TVs most allusory series has translated into an extra hundred hits a day for me here at the TDH.

As a fan, it's clear to me that this season the show has decided to become less like a Robinson Crusoe type castaway tale, and more like a PKD novel.

There is a glut of blogs out there that dissect and parse each episode, looking for additional clues. I don't have the energy or motivation for anything so detailed (in fact it's been a couple years since I read VALIS) so instead, here are some elements from VALIS and PKD's non-fiction that I think are relevant:

While last week's (absolutely brilliant) episode seemed much more like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five with Desmond becoming unstuck in time (like Billy Pilgrim), the episode also resonated with some of the themes in VALIS. In VALIS, the protagonist, Horeselover Fat, becomes convinced a consciousness from another time period has become enmeshed in his own mind. Fat feels very strongly a Roman from the first century is coexisting with him in his consciousness.

So that's one potential connection - we'll discover in coming weeks if this theme from the book is the reason for the allusion. Having given this a lot of thought, I've decided that I think the far more relevant aspect of the book is the novel's exploration of ontology.

PKD quotes Heraclitus in VALIS as saying "Reality is in the habit of concealing itself."

Sounds like a tag line for the show doesn't it?

Here's a relevant passage from Dick's 1978 essay "How To Build A World That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later":

"Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all that is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are use to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:

If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary... The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God."

This passage from VALIS also seems relevant:

"As to our reality being a projected framework -- it appears to be a projection by an artifact, a computerlike teaching machine that guides, programs, and generally controls us as we act without awareness of it within our projected world. The artifact, which I call Zebra, has "created" (actually only projected) our reality as a sort of mirror or image of its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to comprehend its own self. In other words, the maker (called by Jakob Bohme in 1616 the Urgrund) is motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective opinion or appraisal and comprehension of the nature of itself (it is a vast living organism, intrinsically -- without this mirror -- without qualities or aspects, which is why it needs the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" itself)."

Yes, the name Jakob (cue eerie-sounding theremin music)!

Here's a detail that may be relevant: Locke is reading the Vintage edition of VALIS which I believe was released in the early 1990s, which is a bit later than most of the stuff on the island seems to date from (notice Ben's top loading VCR in last night's episode, those went out of style in the 80s. Perhaps this is unintentional, but what if it isn't!

Yep, VALIS was on 'Lost' Last Night

The rumors were true. The cover of the Vintage edition of VALIS was shown briefly on 'Lost' last night. Video here.

I'm a fan of the show, and since I noticed the blog got a lot of hits last night from people Googling "Lost and VALIS" I figured I'd try to lay out some of the elements from the book that may be relevant to the show:

First off, the book is pretty complicated, so in my opinion, while it's a cool shoutout to PKD, I don't think there's any real clue in the book that would serve as a Rosetta Stone and allow us to unravel any mysteries. 'Lost' deals in questions, not answers, but so does VALIS.

VALIS, which some call 'fictionalized autobiography', pits reason and skepticism against faith, so does 'Lost.' VALIS stands for Vast, Active, Living, Intelligent, System" and was one of many names Philip K Dick gave to the what he perceived to be a superior intelligence that was trying communicate with him. Locke gives Ben the book to help him pass the time while he is being held captive.

In VALIS Dick describes the "Black Iron Prison":

"Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”
Philip K. Dick, Valis, London; Gollancz, 2001, pp. 54-55

Seems a bit like "Lost." Especially when viewed in conjunction with Sawyer's reading of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Cesares, which, according to its publisher, is "set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious."

Wait a sec, that sounds a lot like "Lost."

VALIS also plays with the idea of recovered memories, even recovered identities.

So to boil it down, VALIS is, in part, about communication with a higher power (which of course resonates with Locke's search for Jacob); VALIS pits reason against faith (kind of like the Jack/Locke dialectic). But most importantly, if the writers of 'Lost' really want to mess with the minds of their most obsessive fans, VALIS is the perfect literary allusion, since the novel itself raises more questions than it answers.

I hope this reference introduces the book to some new people. It's one of PKD's finest works.

All you 'Lost' aficionados who've read VALIS please use the comments section to discuss...

Update: Coverage of VALIS' second appearance on March 6 here.

VALIS to be Featured in Fourth Season of "Lost" According to Spoiler

Well I suppose if you're genetically predisposed to hate spoilers I've already told you too much - don't hate the player, hate the game. According to a blog dedicated to "Lost" spoilers, PKD's ultimate novel of self-exploration, VALIS, will be featured in episode four of the upcoming fourth season. Argentian author Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel will also be featured in an episode titled "Eggtown" set to air February 21st.

Then again, I think I heard somewhere that you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet so take this with at least one crashed jetliner's worth of salt.

Thanks Michael Rhodes!

Two New Exegesis Excerpts Available At PhilipKDick.com

Two new excerpts from PKD's Exegesis are now posted over at PhilipKDick.com. These two excerpts are coherent and attempt, rather surprisingly, to connect his 2-3-74 experiences to specific church doctrines. They offer further insight into PKD's teleological concerns following his 'mystical experiences'.

Dick writes in one entry, "My search is over. I have reached my destination, the end of my journey."

If PKD had had a penny for every time he felt he had solved 'the mystery' he would have been richer than Rupert Murdoch, er, I mean Palmer Eldritch. Paul Williams wrote in his 1977 article "The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick" "Each time Phil presented a new theory he did it with the passion of complete conviction - this was it, now he had finally figured it out."

In the other entry PKD discusses Spinoza and declares himself a "Trinitarian."

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.

"This is what my acosmic ten-volume unique meta-novel deals with."

I was browsing the collection of pages from the Exegesis posted over at philipkdick.com and while I normally don't have much interest in these writings, I thought this one was remarkably focused and insightful as well as relevant to the last post on The Penultimate Truth. I think Dick is referring to ten of the fifteen novels he composed in quick succession between 1961 and 1966 (eight of which I believe Disch lists in the post below) as "acosmic [I cannot determine whether acosmic is a typo or intentional - perhaps functioning like "atypical"] ten-volume unique meta-novel." What Dick seems to be saying on this page is that the cumulative truth of these novels is that our reality is an illusion projected over a dead world. Dick is equating destiny (heimarmene is the term from Gnosticism Dick uses), with a kind of computer program, a reality projected over truth; our reality is stored on and generated from a tape recording -- If Dick were alive he would have loved "The Matrix" but would probably have several lawsuits filed against the Wachowski Brothers; they stole all of his ideas.

Of course he'd be wearing this!

Freud, who saw a deep connection between narcissism and paranoia, would certainly have taken note of the incredible self-importance displayed in Dick's perspective. Note how everyone but Dick is fooled by an illusory world that somehow he has recognized as false. Many authors, (Sutin, and Carrere to name just two) have noted the remarkable similarities between Dick's delusions and the psychosis of nineteenth century German Judge Daniel Paul Schreber who believed God wished to turn him into a woman so that God's rays could fertilize him with spore-like salvation maggots.

While many view the Exegesis, Dick's four thousand page chronicle of his "mystical experiences" and his subsequent efforts to understand what had happened to him, as prophetic, I read The Exegesis as evidence of the obsessional strength of Dick's desire to ultimately understand what happened to him -- An all consuming and, ultimately, futile fight to rationalize something irrational.

What do you think of the Exegesis?