Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (51 page)

I.] you see a pattern of events, and if you have no transcendent viewpoint, no mystical view, no religious view, then the pattern must emanate from people. Where else can it cone from, if that's all ...? I...] Turn it inside out, rather than just abolish it. That it's benign, and that it transcends our individualities and so on. The way I feel is that the universe itself is actually alive, and we're in it as a part of it. And it is like a breathing creature, which explains the concept of the Atman, you know, the breath, pneuma, the breath of God .. .

Phil was vouchsafed, in this annus mirabilis, one last key vision, of a Palm Tree Garden, in January and February 1975. In a 1981 Exegesis entry he wrote of "that other way of being-in-world that I associate with 2-74 to 2-75, what I call the Palm Tree Garden, or as I now term it, the Spacial Realm [. . .]" In the Exegesis, the Palm Tree Garden (PTG) is contrasted with the Black Iron Prison (BIP) of the Empire (reigning Authority) that never ended. Phil included his PTG vision in Deus Irae, his collaboration with Roger Zelazny. To Dorothy he wrote: "I walked about in it [the PTGJ for several hours, enjoying it exactly as Dr. Abernathy does [... J" The passage was written solely by Phil:

Dr. Abernathy felt the world's oppression lift but he did not have any insight as to why it had lifted. At the moment it began he had taken a walk to the market for the purchase of vegetables. [... ]

Somewhere, he thought, a good event has happened, and it spreads out. He saw to his amazement palm trees. I...J And dry dusty land, as if I'm in the Middle East. Another world; touchE,, of another continuum. I don't understand, he thought. What is breaking through? As if my eyes are now opened, in a special way. [. . I

Somehow goodness has arrived, he decided. As Milton wrote, "Out of evil comes good." [...]

Then, he thought, possibly the world has been cleared of its oppressive film by an evil act ... or am I getting into subtleties? In any case, he sensed the difference; it was real.

I swear to God I'm somewhere in Syria, he thought. In the Levant. [...] To his right, the ruins of a prewar [the novel is set in SF future time] U.S. Post Office substation.

Tessa recalls that spring day: "We were walking to the post office-a regular habit, with us. [... ] The post office [... ] was a Byzantine-looking brick building with archways and a false front that made it appear to be domed. During the day, the city around us took on more and more of the appearance of a first-century Roman colony. Phil kept seeing stone walls and iron bars where more modern structures and barriers actually stood."

In an undated typed page found among Phil's 1975 correspondence, there is a fitting overview to the year of visions and voices, wisdom and perplexity:

This is not an evil world, as Mani [founder of Manichaeanism, which equates earthly matter with evil] supposed. There is a good world under the evil. The evil is somehow superimposed over it (Maya), and when stripped away, pristine glowing creation is visible.

One day the contents of my mind moved faster and faster until they ceased being concepts and became percepts. I did not have concepts about the world but perceived it without preconception or even intellectual comprehension. It then resembled the world of UBIK. As if all the contents of one[']s mind, if fused, became suddenly alive, a living entity, which took off within one's head, on its own, saw in its own superior way, without regard to what you had ever learned or seen or known. The principle of emergence, as when nonliving matter becomes living. As if information (thought concepts) when pushed to their limit become metamorphosed into something alive. Perhaps then in the outer world all the energy or information when pushed far enough will do the same. Fuse into something everywhere (the force Ubik) that is sentient and alive. Then inner-outer, then-now, cause-effect, all the antimonies will fade out. We will see only a living entity at its ceaseless building: at work. Creating. (Has continual creation almost reached completion?) (Such dichotomies as big-small, me-notme will be transcended.)

The universe as unified information is, of course, a favorite metaphor of quantum physics theorists.

Those skeptics who would dismiss 2-3-74 as the symptomology of a stroke or the delusions of a psychotic should bear in mind (among other limitations of reductive explanations) that Phil could be as skeptical as themselves.

Consider this Exegesis self-interview by Phil, just after having been interviewed by Charles Platt in May 1979 for Platt's book Dream Makers. Phil made his own tape of the Platt interview; upon reviewing it, he was provoked into high courtroom drama, a cross-examination designed to impeach Phil's own integrity:

Listening to the Platt tape I construe by the logic presented [by himself] that Valis (the other mind) which came at me from outside & which overpowered me from inside was indeed the contents of my collective unconscious, & so technically a psychosis (it certainly would explain the animism outside, & the interior dissociated activity). But-well, okay; it would account for the Al voice, the 3 eyed sibyl, & the extreme archaism of the contents, & seeing Rome c. AD 45 would simply be psychotic delusion-I did not know where or when I really was.

Q: What about the resemblance to my writing?

A: The content was originally in my unconscious, e.g. "Tears" & "Ubik."

Q: What about external events? The girl? The letters?

A: Coincidence.

Q: & the written material? Huge books held open?

A: Verbal memory.

Q: Why would I believe that my senses were enhanced i.e. I could see for the first time?

A: Psychotomimetic drugs indicate this happens in psychosis.

Q: & kosmos? Everything fitting together?

A: "Spread of meanings" typical of psychosis.

Q: Foreign words I don't know?

A: Long term memory banks open. Disgorging their contents into consciousness.

Q: Problem solving-i.e. the Xerox missive?

A: There was no problem; it was harmless.

Q: Why the sense of time dysfunction?

A: Disorientation.

Q: Why the sense that the mind which had taken me over was wiser than me & more capable?

A: Release of psychic energy. [. . .]

Q: If 2-3-74 was psychosis, then what was the ego state which it obliterated.

A: Neurotic. Or mildly schizophrenia [sic]. Under stress the weak ego disintegrated.

Q: Then how could the phobias associated with my anxiety neurosis remain? e.g. agoraphobia?

A: It does not compute. Something is wrong. They should have gone away or become totally overwhelming. The impaired ego must have still been intact.

Q: Was my "dissociated" behavior [e.g., the Xerox missive, diagnosis of Christopher's hernia] bizarre?

A: No, they were problem-solving. It does not compute.

Q: Perhaps there were no real problems.

A: Not so. It was tax time.

From this point on, Phil, having considered the worst, rallied to his own defense. It cannot be said that he is convincing either in condemning his sanity or in exalting 2-3-74. Finally, the answer seems to lie in Phil's first and lasting loss:

A: Then the enigma remains.

Q: We have learned nothing.

A: Nothing.

Q: After finishing listening to the tape do you have any intuition or guess as to who & what the Valis mind is? (Later.)

A: Yes. It is female. It is on the other side-the post mortem world. It has been with me all my life. It is my twin sister Jane. [...] The other psyche I carry inside me is that of my dead sister.

For those yearning for a diagnosis to slap onto 2-3-74, good news: Temporal lobe epilepsy can induce seizures that are neither disabling nor obvious for purposes of medical diagnosis or the individual's own sense of something amiss. It can't be disproven that Phil may have had such seizures during 2-3-74-or other times throughout his life. And if he did, everything is explained-from the Al Voice to the endless Exegesis. Consider this eerily on-the-money description from a medical study:

Such "psychic" or "experiential" phenomena activated by epileptic discharge arising in the temporal lobe may occur as complex visual or auditory or combined auditory-visual hallucinations or illusions, memory "flashbacks," erroneous interpretations of the present in terms of the past (e.g. as an inappropriate feeling of familiarity or strangeness, the "deja vu" and "jamais vu" phenomena), or as emotions, most commonly fear. Penfield [...] called these phenomena "experiential," an appropriate term considering the fact that to the affected patients they often assume an astonishingly vivid immediacy, which they liken to that of actual events. Nevertheless, the patients are never in doubt that these phenomena occur incongruously, that is, out of context, as if they were superimposed upon the ongoing stream of consciousness, with the exception of fear, which is sometimes interpreted as fear of an impending attack. This insight clearly distinguishes these phenomena from psychotic hallucinations and illusions.

Not bad as a skeptic's schematic of 2-3-74. A standard psychiatric textbook includes the following as behavioral traits of patients suffering from temporal lobe seizures:

Hypergraphia is an obsessional phenomenon manifested by writing extensive notes and diaries. [...] The intense emotions are often labile, so that the patient may exhibit great warmth at one time, whereas, at another time, anger and irritability may evolve to rage and aggressive behavior. [.] Suspiciousness may extend to paranoia, and a sense of helplessness may lead to passive dependency. ~. . .] Religious beliefs not only are intense, but may also be associated with elaborate theological or cosmological theories. Patients may believe that they have special divine guidance. [. ]