Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (52 page)

There are, of course, also listed traits that miss Phil by a mile, such as "stern moralism" and "humorless sobriety."

For those seeking a reasonable diagnosis, temporal lobe epilepsy does the trick. One can even go so far as to group writers who may have been influenced-in their spiritual concerns-by the possible presence of temporal lobe epilepsy. Dostoevsky, who suffered from epileptic seizures, is one prominent example. But how far do such speculative diagnostics and groupings take us? William James draws the line this way: "To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life."

What "fruits" were there for Phil's personal life? Phil seldom doubted that 2-3-74 was a blessing. But he never claimed to have become a saint. A 1975 Exegesis entry makes this plain:

I. .] I am in no customary sense-maybe in no sense whatsoeverspiritualized or exalted. In fact I seem even more mean and irascible than before. True, I do not hit anybody, but my language remains gunjy and I am crabby and domineering; my personal defects are unaltered. In the accepted sense I am not a better person. I. ..]

But as to the lack of proper spiritual refurbishing in me ... perhaps we have too clear an attitude toward pious transformations as being the ones He wishes in us. Perhaps these are our standards for the very pure; after all, He would retain the individual, I think, and not force us all into one proper mold. I have been changed, but not in all ways; I have been improved, but not according to human standards. I can only hope I am obeying His will and not my own.

I do not conform to my own views of goodness, but maybe I do to His.

Tessa's perspective is similar:

I saw no personality change in Phil. If anything, he was more of what he had been before the experience. It did hold our relationship together, but it also tore us apart, in the end ]the marriage ended in 1976]. Just as Phil believed that someone was out to get him, to kill him, he came to believe that someone was out to kill his wife and child. Phil was so intense, immediately following a vision, that his presence in the room became a tangible thing, a thickness of the atmosphere. But he was only quantitatively different, not qualitatively different. There were brief periods, however, when Phil was not himself the way an apple is not a rectangle.

The events of 2-3-74 and after are unusual, even bizarre. There are scenes of tender beauty, as when Phil administered the eucharist to Christopher. There are instances of inexplicable foresight, as when he diagnosed his son's hernia. And there are episodes, like the Xerox missive, that foster skepticism. For some, the visions and voices will constitute evidence of grace. Others, both atheists and religionists, will doubt 2-3-74 for those very reasons. Saint John of the Cross warned:

It often happens that spiritual men are affected supernaturally by sensible representations and objects. They sometimes see the forms and figures of those of another life, saints or angels, good and evil, or certain extraordinary lights and brightness. They hear strange words, sometimes seeing those who utter them and sometimes not. [... ] we must never delight in them nor encourage them; yea, rather we must fly from them, without seeking to know whether their origin be good or evil. For, inasmuch as they are exterior and physical, the less is the likelihood of their being from God.

There are, of course, eminent examples through the ages of persons who did not fly from such signs. One such is Blaise Pascal. On the night of November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced a vision that he transcribed, sewing the account into the lining of his coat so as to keep it by him constantly:

From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve

FIRE

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

And here we come to the heart of Phil's 2-3-74 experiences. Certitude had he none. Oh yes, one can find numerous passages-in interviews, the novels, and the Exegesis-in which Phil advances a theory with the sound of certitude. But always (and usually quite soon thereafter) he reconsidered and recanted.

Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.

And how fitting that is. Mystical experiences are almost always in keeping with the tradition of the mystic. Julian of Norwich, a Catholic, perceived "great drops of blood" running down from a crown of thorns. Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist, visualized his guru surrounded by multifold Buddhas on lotus seats of wisdom.

Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SF-which exalts "What IF?" above all.

In 2-3-74, all the "What IFs?" were rolled up into one.

As Valis proved, it was, say whatever else you will, a great idea for a novel.

11

As 2-3-74 Ripens Into Valis, Phil Fashions New Theories Nightly Yet
Wonders-Meta-abstractions Be Damned-If Ever He'll Find The True Love
He Deserves (Who Doesn't?), While Slowly He Discovers (Sometimes)
Something Like Happiness Anyway (1975-1978)

Year after year, book after book & story, I shed illusion after illusion: self, time, space, causality, world-& finally sought (in 1970) to know what was real. Four years later, at my darkest moment of dread & trembling, my ego crumbling away, I was granted dibba cakkhu [enlightenment]-& although I didn't realize it at the time, I became a Buddha. ("The Buddha is in the park") [Al voice message]. All illusion dissolved away like a soap bubble & I saw reality at last-&, in the 4 1/2 years since, have at last comprehended it intellectually-i.e. what I saw & knew & experienced (my exegesis). We are talking here about a lifetime of work & insights: from my initial satori when, as a child, I was tormenting the beetle. It began in that moment, forty years ago.

PHIL, September 1978 Exegesis entry, just before writing Valis

My God, my life-which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience-is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories. Even down to the fake memories & identity. I'm a protagonist from one of PKD's books, USA 1974 fades out, ancient Rome fades in & with it the Thomas personality & true memories. Jeez! Mixture of "Impostor," "Joint" & "Maze"-if not "Ubik" as well.

PHIL, earlier 1978 Exegesis entry

(It is also obvious that I have let the world know [in Valis] that I went through some bad years, during the last decade. Future biographers will find their job done for them before they start. My life's an open book and I myself wrote the book.)

PHIL, February 1981 letter to agent Russell Galen

YOU'D suppose that, with 2-3-74 to ponder, life would be anything but dull.

But dull was precisely Phil's complaint as New Year's Eve 1975 rolled around. Next door in their Fullerton apartment building, a neighbor was throwing a big loud bash. Meanwhile, Tessa used the night to catch up on laundry, while Phil was left to pop Christopher's balloon with a cigarette as midnight arrived. In a letter two days later he railed: " I hadn't realized before how fucking dumb and dull and futile and empty middle class life is. I have gone from the gutter (circa 1971) to the plastic container. As always, I got it wrong once again."

It wasn't that their life was all that secure Phil would take in roughly $19,000 in 1974 and $35,000 in 1975, but a good chunk of that income was advances on royalties made by the Meredith Agency to keep Phil afloat between irregular royalty checks. Foreign sales were his mainstay: British, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese rights accounted for the bulk of Phil's real earnings in 1975. Tentatively, Phil and Tessa were beginning to nibble at the bottom end of the good life. Phil treated himself to the new Encyclopaedia Britannica 3, in which he read voraciously; citations to it in the Exegesis are legion. For Tessa, there was a new guitar and a fee-stabled horse. In March they moved from Cameo Lane to a rented house-Phil's credit rating didn't allow for a purchase-at 2461 Santa Ysabel in Fullerton. In April 1975, Phil popped for a red Fiat Spyder-his first sports car since Anne.

It felt good. And it gnawed at him. There was more. Phil wrestled with it in the Exegesis-handwritten as if to emphasize its provisional nature. In his fiction, Phil balanced his themes of "What is Human?" and "What is Real?" As to the former, Phil felt he knew the answer: kindness. But as to the latter, he never made up his mind. On this question, the Exegesis gave him room to fly-creating and banishing worlds at will.

From the nightly sessions certain key ideas began to emerge. One of these is "orthogonal time," which Phil discusses in a 1975 essay, "Man, Android and Machine." Orthogonal time is "rotary," moving perpendicularly to "linear" time. It contains "as a simultaneous plane or extension everything which was, just as the grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don't disappear after the stylus tracks them." In a March letter to Ursula Le Guin Phil honed the concept: Orthogonal time was "Real Time"-"without it, there would be nothing but illusion, nothing but Maya, so to speak."

In the spring, Phil received some welcome visits from friends and family. His daughter Isa was a brief houseguest, as was Loren Cavit, his loyal friend from the dark days of 1971. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who was then editing Arcade, made an overnight stop. He and Phil had first met in 1973, after Phil had written a glowing fan letter in response to a Spiegelman comic strip about Walt Disney coming back to life in a Tomorrowland world of robot presidents. Phil now proposed a collaboration; but the story Phil submitted in March 1975-"The Eye of the Sibyl"-was, like the 1974 Ubik screenplay, too intricate for adaptation to the intended (comic book/movie) medium.

In this same month came an unfortunate rift with Harlan Ellison. The circumstances were ideally suited to hurt Ellison's feelings. Phil and Ellison had socialized on an occasional basis since Phil's 1972 move to Orange County, but the friendship had grown uneasy. Ellison felt that Phil was jealous of his financial success and Hollywood connections. For Phil, there was some lingering, if unjustified, resentment over the reference to Phil's LSD use in Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions. Personal frictions aside, Phil had proclaimed that Ellison's story "The Deathbird" "will be read for centuries to come." It was hardly surprising that Ellison thought of Phil as an apt writer to contribute an essay to an Ellison tribute issue planned by F & SF. Nor is it surprising that, after telling Ellison he'd be glad to oblige, Phil declined in a letter to F & SF editor Edward Ferman (a friend of Ellison's), explaining that he hadn't been fully awake when Ellison called, didn't care for most of Ellison's work, and didn't do freebies. Ferman wrote back explaining that he'd intended to pay. Ellison, who regarded Phil's concerns over being paid as an affront to Ferman's editorial integrity, sent Phil a vituperative termination-of-friendship notice.

But all this fury with Ellison was by way of the mails. In daily life, tender feelings and reasonably good tidings prevailed. The long collaboration with Roger Zelazny finally bore fruit when Deus Irae was completed in July. The Entwhistle Books edition of Crap Artist also appeared that month: a published mainstream novel at long last. Driving himself full bore, Phil finished revisions to Scanner by August. This effort was fueled in part by Phil's desire to collect the final advance installment from Doubleday and repay a loan from Robert Heinlein, who'd already been an SF giant back when Phil first started reading the pulps. Heinlein and Tessa had established a friendship after meeting at a 1974 SF gathering. Phil hadn't attended, but a warm correspondence between the two writers ensued. During summer 1975, as the bank account bottomed out, Tessa asked Heinlein for a loan. While Phil was grateful, his wife's going asking for money shamed him. After Heinlein turned down a second loan request, the letters stopped. (When the two finally met in 1977, the encounter was brief and awkward.)

Meanwhile, Phil remained publicly circumspect on 2-3-74. When he learned that an essay on his work by Thomas Disch would appear in the December 1975 Crawdaddy, Phil wrote to Disch requesting silence as to 2-3-74. "I'm still having mystical visions and revelations (but that's our little secret, not for the readership of Crawdaddy who really wouldn't want to know anyhow, would they?)."