Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (47 page)

But let's put aside theories for now and try first to determine just what happened in 2-3-74 and the months that followed. Be forewarned that Phil's experiences during this time simply do not fall into a neat, overarching pattern-to fashion one for them is to distort them irrevocably. They include moments of doubt, panic, and anguish such as to make them seem all too human. But there are also times of startling sublimity, not to mention sheer breathtaking wonder. They neither prove that Phil was crazy, nor do they establish the existence of a Saint Phil. In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel-which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was.

In attempting a plain narrative, this biography draws upon the first study ever made of the Exegesis in its entirety. Combined with letters, interviews, and the novels, a tentative whole can be formed. Phil never did set it all down in one chronological sequence, not even in Valis. And he seldom recounted any of the events without dropping in a new twist. But onward.

In February 1974, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published. It was his best-received novel since High Castle, earning Nebula and Hugo Award nominations and winning the 1975 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The money situation had improved somewhat, what with four-figure paperback resales of back titles such as High Castle. The family lived in a pleasant little apartment. Nearby U Cal Fullerton proudly housed Phil's papers in its special collections; now and then he even guest lectured. But Phil didn't socialize much. Somehow Tessa and his friends had not meshed, and Phil was always less gregarious when married.

Not a bad life, all in all, but for the fact that deep down Phil was scared silly. Later he would write in the Exegesis: "Although I can't prove this, I believe I was programmed to die in 3-74 [...]" Programmed by whom or what? Phil wasn't sure, but IRS woes were in there somewhere. He believed that his "civil disobedience"-joining the Ramparts tax protest during the Vietnam years-might cost him fifteen years in prison. And the April 1974 filing was coming up. Phil was broke and feared the IRS would seize his assets.

The fears ranged further. He worried that somehow he'd drawn the attention of the ruling authorities-U.S. or Soviet or both-by his writings. The just-released Flow could be read as a vision of Gulag-like prisons maintained by a fascist America. And Ubik had won the unwelcome praise of Marxist critics as a brilliant ungluing of capitalism. Other past works posed equally dire interpretive possibilities.

Phil needed extrication-grace if you will-fast. And 2-3-74 did the job, call it what you wish. Sometimes, as in this 1978 Exegesis entry, Phil went so far as to call it "total psychosis":

Yes, it was a mercy to me-I went over the brink into psychosis in '70 when Nancy did what she did to me-in '73 or so I tried to come back to having an ego, but it was too fragile & there were too many financial and other pressures; the hit on my house and all the terrors of 1971 had left their mark-& so, esp. because of the IRS matter I suffered total psychosis in 3-74, was taken over by one or more archetypes. Poverty, family responsibility (a new baby) did it. & fear of the IRS.

In February 1974 the fear was heavy within him. He also endured a mundane agony: an impacted wisdom tooth. During oral surgery, Phil received sodium pentothal; afterward the pain remained, though the pentothal seemed to linger. A prescription pain killer was delivered to Phil's door:

The doorbell rang and I went, and there stood this girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense; I stood staring at her, amazed, also confused, thinking I'd never seen such a beautiful girl, and why was she standing there? She handed me the package of medication [Darvon], and I tried to think what to say to her; I noticed, then, a fascinating gold necklace around her neck and I said, "What is that? It certainly is beautiful," just, you see, to find something to say to hold her there. The girl indicated the major figure in it, which was a fish. "This is a sign used by the early Christians," she said, and then departed.

What precisely happened on that February 20 after Phil had gazed upon the golden fish? Phil's accounts are piecemeal, but the long sequence of visions seems to have started this day, with a sudden triggering of what he experienced as past lives and genetic memories. Phil felt certain for the first time that he was-not as an individual, but as a spiritual entity-immortal:

The (golden) fish sign causes you to remember. Remember what? This is Gnostic. Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA (phylogenic memory). Very ancient memories, predating this life, are triggered off. [. ..] You remembe; your real nature. Which is to say, origins (from the stars). Die Zeit is da! [The time is here!] The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but you are not of this world.

Phil adopted a term first employed by Plato, anamnesis, to describe the experience of recollecting eternal truths, the World of Ideas, within ourselves. But what could account for the sudden anamnesis? Perhaps it was "the combination of the pentothal and the golden fish sign-the latter may have acted hypnotically on me: the combination of the metal and the sunlight." Then too, he'd been taking prescribed doses of lithium regularly.

Phil never settled on a physical cause. What mattered were the "ancient" or "phylogenic" memories. Always, they revealed the Roman world, circa first century A. D. (the period of the Book of Acts and the peak of Gnostic activity) as coexisting with our own modern world. It was as if linear time was illusion and true time was layered: simultaneous realities stacked one upon the other, the interpenetration visible to the opened mind. Phil's accounts of the newly revealed Roman realm varied. In this 1978 Exegesis entry, he became the Gnostic Simon Magus:

When I saw the Golden Fish sign in 2-74 1 remembered the world of Acts-I remembered it to be my real time & place. So I am (esse/sum) Simon reborn-& not in 2-74 or 3-74 but all my life. I must face it: I am Simon but had amnesia, but then in 2-74 experienced anamnesis. I Simon am immortal. & Simon is the basis for the Faust legend.

More often, however, Phil named this ancient personage Thomas (a first-century Christian) or Firebright (a spiritual force/entity of wisdom and light). While Firebright was of a divine nature, Thomas was quite human. Phil felt he knew that Thomas had been tortured by the Roman authorities who relentlessly persecuted the new Logos. Quite clearly, Thomas's plight paralleled Phil's.

Phil never settled on a name for the new, dual consciousness within him. His most frequently used term was "homoplasmate"-a bonding of a human and an information-rich "plasmate" life form. He further felt that this new wisdom or grace had been "programmed" in him by age four, and that it would save him. His "Prologue" to Radio Free Albemuth (w. 1976) explores a way this might have happened. A boy (almost four) gives a blind, bearded beggar a nickel and receives a piece of paper, which he hands to his father:

"It tells about God," his father said.

The little boy did not know that the beggar was not actually a beggar but a supernatural entity visiting Earth to check up on people. Years later the little boy grew up and became a man. In the year 1974 that man found himself in terrible difficulties, facing disgrace, imprisonment, and possible death. There was no way for him to extricate himself. At that point the supernatural entity returned to Earth, loaned the man a part of his spirit, and saved him from his difficulties. The man never guessed why the supernatural entity came to rescue him. He had long ago forgotten the great bearded blind beggar and the nickel he had given him.

In late February and early March Phil had a series of nightmares that compounded his dread. Some contained what he described as "flying monsters with horses' necks (dragons)." In one dream these dragons swooped down upon a young Phil who lived, in dreamtime, with a prehistoric tribe. As the dragons drew near Phil became his pet sabertoothed cat and hissed defiance-but found himself in a cage without escape. Tessa writes:

One night I woke to the sound of a large reptile hissing. I sat up and saw Phil lying there, still asleep, hissing. Afraid to touch him, I called out his name. I was scared, and getting more scared with every second that passed. I sensed that it was not Phil who was hissing, but some mindless beast that had taken over his body. I kept on calling his name, more and more urgently.

Finally, he stopped hissing. He cried a little and started praying in Latin, "Libera me Domine." [Free me, God.] It was something he learned from an opera. He kept repeating that and other prayers for half an hour, then fell asleep. I was awake for the rest of the night. Phil's dream had been so real to him that he thought it must be some kind of a memory trace rather than a dream.

Phil was living in a psychic caldron. What better way out than to turn up the heat? He'd read of new psychiatric research indicating that massive doses of water-soluble vitamins improved neural firing in schizophrenics. Phil speculated that, for an ordinary person, such vitamin dosages might heighten synchronous firing by the two brain hemispheres, thereby enhancing both left-brain practical efficiency and right-brain imagination. In Psychology Today Phil found a "recipe." The almost certain source is an article called "Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Vitamin Pills for Schizophrenics" by psychiatrist Harvey Ross in the April 1974 issue (which appeared, as magazines do, a month before its printed date). Dr. Ross's prescription for a young boy suffering from hypoglycemia and schizophrenic visions: a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet and, after each meal, 500 mg of niacin (vitamin B3), increased to 1,000 mg after the first week; 500 mg of vitamin C, increased to 1,000 mg after the first month; 100 mg of vitamin B6; 100 mg of vitamin B2; 200 IU of vitamin E; and a multiple vitamin B tablet. All the vitamins were water-soluble. In "experimenting" with the formula, Phil accidentally took seven more grams of vitamin C than called for. The end result, as stated in the Exegesis: "both hemispheres came on together, for the first time in my life."

Was it the vitamins that spurred the vivid March visions? Phil never decided on a single cause. The more he speculated, the more "disinhibit ing" candidates he found. After all, the vernal equinox was approaching, the time of Easter and Passover and the resurrection of the spirit. And somehow, in the weeks following the golden fish Darvon delivery, Phil found himself moved to burn, day and night, white votive candles before a little shrine he'd assembled in their bedroom, including an old wooden saint figure from the Philippines. Then he and Tessa purchased bumper stickers with the Christian fish sign-metallic silver with a black backing-and placed them on their living-room window. Sometimes, after looking at those stickers while the sun streamed through the window, Phil would see pink rectangular shapes: phosphene afterimages, they seemed.

Pale prefigurings of the fireworks to come. In a July 1974 letter, Phil described the visions that started in mid-March 1974:

Then [...] while lying in bed unable to sleep for the fifth night in a row, overwhelmed with dread and melancholy, I suddenly began seeing whirling lights which moved away at such a fast speed-and were instantly replacedthat they forced me into total wakefulness. For almost eight hours I continued to see these frightening vortexes of light, if that's the word; they spun around and around, and moved away at incredible speed. What was most painful was the rapidity of my thoughts, which seemed to synchronize with the lights; it was as if I were moving, and the lights standing still-I felt as if I were racing along at the speed of light, no longer lying beside my wife in our bed. My anxiety was unbelievable.

One week later, under similar circumstances, I began at night to see light once more. But this time quite different [... ] the little votive candle reassured me, as did the placid face of the 150-year-old wooden figure of a saint which had come from the Philippines.

This time I saw perfectly formed modern abstract paintings, which I later identified from art books as being of the type Kandinsky developed. There were literally hundreds of thousands of them; they replaced each other at dazzling speed [...] I did recognize the styles of Paul Klee and one or two of Picasso's various periods. [... ] So I spent over eight hours enjoying one of the most beautiful and exciting and moving sights I've ever seen, conscious that it was a miracle. [... ] I was not the author of these graphics. The number alone proved that.

In the following days I felt that [...] I must have been the involuntary recipient of an ESP experiment. That was most likely. I knew the dazzling graphics had come to me from outside myself; I sensed that they contained information and that somehow I was to respond. For over a month I sought ways of responding; I even wrote to an ESP lab in Leningrad, asking if they were involved in the long-range transmission by ESP of Modern Art graphics [i.e., paintings in the Hermitage collection]. No response. After that I sort of shut up about it and began reading.