Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (32 page)

"Agnus Dei," she said, "qui tollis peccata mundi." She had to look away from the throbbing vortex; she looked down and back . . . and saw, far below her, a vast frozen landscape of snow and boulders. A furious wind blew across it; as she watched, more snow piled up around the rocks. A new period of glaciation, she thought ... A chasm opened before her feet. She began to fall; below her the frozen landscape of the hell-world grew closer. Again she cried out, "Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna." But still she fell; she had almost reached the hell-world, and nothing meant to lift her up.

Phil further detailed this acid vision in an August 1967 letter:

I perceived Him as a pulsing, furious, throbbing mass of vengeanceseeking authority, demanding an audit (like a sort of metaphysical IRS agent). Fortunately I was able to utter the right words the "Libera me, Domine" quoted above], and hence got through it. I also saw Christ rise to heaven from the cross, and that was very interesting, too (the cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow; the crossbow launched him at terrific velocity-it happened very fast, once he had been placed in position).

During the autumn, Phil contributed to Terry Carr's fanzine Lighthouse an essay entitled "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," which appeared in November 1964. In it, Phil proposed, quite shrewdly, that "hallucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so." He reasoned that hallucinations may simply be aspects of genuine reality that are, in daily life, filtered out by our Kantian a priori neural organizing categories (such as space and time). When hallucinations, however triggered, arise to confront the human psyche, there is an override of those categories-new perceptions come flooding in despite our best efforts to hold to our standard reality convictions. This override leaves us isolated and terrified. "No-name entities or aspects begin to appear, and, since the person does not know what they are-that is, what they're called or what they mean-he cannot communicate with other persons about them." Isolation, for Phil, was always too high a price to pay for any revelation (though he would wind up paying it again and again):

Real or unreal, originating within the percept-system because, say, of some chemical agent not normally present and active in the brain's metabolism, the unshared world which we call "hallucinatory" is destructive: alienation, isolation, a sense of everything being strange, of things altering and bonding-all this is the logical result, until the individual, formerly a part of human culture, becomes an organic "windowless monad." [...]

One doesn't have to depend on hallucinations; one can unhinge oneself by many other roads.

Ever since leaving Anne, Phil had been warding off solitude with might and main. Falling in love was the best method he had found. That December, in letters to Kirsten Nelson, he typed out (as he had for Carol Carr) pages of his favorite poems, including Yeats's "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" and verses from Lucretius, Euripides, Spenser and the libretto for Schubert's Die Winterreise. He even wrote a long poem of his own for her.

They talked so often on the phone that Phil bought an extra-long cord to allow Kirsten to sit more comfortably during their sessions. Having just emigrated from Norway, Kirsten was often lonely and un comfortable in social situations. She recalls: "I don't know that he exactly fell in love with me so much as he kind of adopted me. I think he cast me in the role of his dead sister. He felt he had to watch out for me." Phil was a most attentive caretaker: "One time I had a kidney infection and I was very ill. Phil called and I was home alone-Ray was busy. That got Phil very upset-he cooked me some clam chowder, came in a cab with the chowder from Oakland, took care of my kid, gave him a bath, put him to bed. "

But, as Phil well knew, there was no future for him with the married Kirsten. And Phil yearned not only to adore from a distance, but to have a wife by his side.

In early 1964 Phil had become acquainted with Maren Hackett, a brilliant woman who also attended St. Columba's Episcopal Church in Inverness. During one visit to Phil and Anne's home, Maren had brought along her stepdaughter, Nancy Hackett, a shy, attractive young woman with long dark hair. Now, late in the year, Phil again met Nancy, as well as her sister Ann, at a dinner at Maren's home. Phil was strongly attracted to both Nancy and Ann. To complicate matters further, Maren was attracted to Phil. But Phil soon focused his courtship exclusively on Nancy, who still felt attached to a boyfriend she had met in France during a year of study at the Sorbonne. During that year, Nancy had been hospitalized due to a nervous breakdown and had been forced to return to the States and the care of her family.

Nancy worried (as did Maren) that, at twenty-one, she was too young for Phil, who had just turned thirty-six. But Phil, drawn powerfully to this kind, beautiful woman, spared no efforts to allay their fears. During this time he composed a poem, "To Nancy," which began: "High flower, thin with / Instabilities of youth:" and ended with a Lucretian vision: "We are your atoms / You the friendly total world." On his birthday, December 16, Phil sent Nancy a letter in which he tried to play it cool: "Realize, I love you for what you are now, what you can give me and have already given me, not what you might or will give me-in other words, don't think about the future in your relationship with me; don't worry about some form of external ultimate commitment."

But by December 19, Phil was begging her to move in with him. Nancy wanted to pursue painting and poetry; living with Phil would provide her the peace and quiet and economic support to do that, as well as the companionship of "Jack [Newkom] and 1, plus about one dozen fellas and their girls [... ] who are always in the back house." And then Phil had the guts to lay it right on the line:

But mainly, as I said, I want you to move in here for my sake, because otherwise I will go clean out of my balmy wits, take more and more pills, get less and less sleep, eat worse, sleep not at all, be all hung up-and do no real writing. Since I left my wife I have done nothing of importance; I want to get going. and I need you as a sort of incentive and muse . . . someone to write for, because of . . . see? I want you to read my stuff as I write it and tell me if it's anv good; if you like it, then it's good, if not, then not; I need someone Out There to whistle back into the dark chamber. If you don't move in, I'm afraid I'll have to search for something else to keep me going. But what or wheregod only knows . . . it seems unlikely that it even exists. But one must try.

Phil, with three marriages behind him, knew he was facing a long shot. In a Christmas Day letter to Carol Carr he confessed: "Someday she (Nancy] will break me. I love her too much."

But braving the perils of love sure beats turning into a "windowless monad." By March 1965, Nancy had moved into the back cottage of East Gakville. In July 1966, they made it official.

Smack dab in the middle of the sixties.

A New Start, A Quiet Life, Then Everything Falls Apart Again-And
Phil Can't Find The Handy Spray Can Of Ubik That Could Make It All Cohere
(1965-1970)

Philip K. Dick (...J lives now in San Rafael and is interested in hallucinogens and snuff. [...I Married, has two daughters and young, pretty, nervous wife Nancy who is afraid of the telephone. I...I Spends most of his time listening to first Scarlatti and then the Jefferson Airplane, then "Gotterdammerung," in an attempt to fit them all together. Has many phobias and seldom goes anywhere, but loves to have people come over to his small, nice place on the water. Owes creditors a fortune, which he does not have. Warning: don't lend him any money. In addition he will steal your pills.

Pint., "Biographical Material" typed up in early 1968, presumably in response to a publisher's request

What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever-that destroys me. [...]

I promise myself I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this . . . and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.

PHIL., "Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968)

Taken as directed, Ubik provides uninterrupted sleep without morning-after grogginess. You awaken fresh, ready to tackle all those annoying problems facing you. Do not exceed recommended dosage.

Ubik commercial in Ubik (1969)

THE sixties was a decade that made a lot of big promises to those who lived through it with an open heart. Peace and love were everyone's birthright. Drugs could expand consciousness without the fuss and muss of spiritual discipline. Politics was a domain of evil only because those in power had been raised to act out of greed and fear. If you taught your children well, a future generation would arise that would rule benignly. It was only a matter of time.

It is easy, in retrospect, to deride the nave ideals of the sixties. More painful by far it is to contemplate what we have since become.

One of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" goes: "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." For some, sixties excess did just that. For others, as Blake foresaw in his irony, it led straight to Hell.

For a very slim few, it led to both-to Hell and back.

Phil was of this number. And confusing times these were.

For sometimes Hell seemed like Heaven.

And sometimes it seemed like he'd never get back.

Phil and Nancy, a loving new couple, each took joy in caring for the other. After all, they had both come through hard times in childhood.

Nancy's father was an alcoholic who could be very charming or very abusive. Her mother ended the marriage and took custody of the three children, including older brother Michael and older sister Ann. Nancy was her mother's special favorite-the youngest whom she loved to spoil. Briefly, through a second marriage, there was a stepfather on the scenealso an alcoholic and abusive. Then, in 1955, when Nancy was twelve, her mother developed a brain tumor. Tragically, she remained in a coma until her death in 1961.

These events dictated that Nancy's father resume custody. Fortunately, he had in the interim married Maren Hackett, who possessed great warmth and intelligence and took the children under her wing. But the marriage ended in divorce. Nancy, a good student but shy and withdrawn, was sent to a boarding school in San Francisco. She then attended San Jose State College. In her junior year she went abroad to study at the Sorbonne, where her classroom ordeals and those experienced by Phil at U Cal Berkeley seem to converge. Nancy recalls that, during that year, she experimented (as did most students in the sixties) with marijuana and other drugs:

It was enough to make me more and more out of it. I quit school . . . I couldn't sit in a class. All of a sudden, you feel like you'll die or go mad or something, like a gripping scare for no reason at all. You just feel like you have to get out of there. The classes were so big, I didn't feel I existed-like I was melting. I remember taking a picture of myself to make sure I was there.

Nancy was briefly hospitalized before returning to the States and moving in with Maren in her San Rafael home. (It should be emphasized that Nancy is today a successful career woman and loving mother. She no longer suffers from the difficulties that beset her before and during her time with Phil.)