Alternate Realities

[coff...@aussieisp.com]

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference

by Erik Davis

Originally posted on the nettime server in the
mid-1990s

It was February of 1974, and the American
science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was in pain.
The man whose darkly comic novels of androids,
weird drugs, and false realities stand as some of
the most brilliant and visionary in the genre had
just had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and the
sodium pentathol was wearing off. A delivery woman
arrived with a package of Darvon, and when the
burly, bearded man opened the door, he was struck
by the beauty of this dark-haired girl. He was
especially drawn to her golden necklace, and he
asked her about its curious fish-shaped design.
"This is a sign used by the early Christians," she
said, and then departed.

Most of us who hit the freeways in the U.S. know
this fish well, as its Christian and Darwinian
mutations wage a war of competing faiths from the
rear ends of BMWs and Hondas. As a Christian logo,
the fish predates the cross, and its Piscean
connotations of baptism and magical bounty (the
miracle of loaves and fishes) reaches back to the
time when the harshly persecuted cult secretly
gathered in the catacombs of Alexandria. Ichthus,
the Greek word for fish often inscribed within the
symbol, is also a code, an acrostic of the phrase
"Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." One apocryphal
story claims that Christians would secretly test
the spiritual allegiance of new acquaintances by
casually drawing one curve of the fish on the
ground. If their companion was "in the know," he
or she would complete the fish shape.

For Dick, the ichthus was a secret sign of an
altogether different order: it was a trigger for
gnosis. As he wrote later in a personal journal,

The (golden) fish sign causes you to
remember. Remember what?...Your
celestial origins; this has to do with
the DNA because the memory is located in
the DNA...You remember your real
nature...The Gnostic Gnosis: You are
here in this world in a thrown
condition, but are not of this world.[1]

Following this event, Dick experienced a
remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and
dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a
"Vast Active Living Intelligence System" that he
defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a
"spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic
vortex...tending to progressively subsume and
incorporate its environment into arrangements of
information." Not a bad definition of the
Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming
information web far more intensely than today's
online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink
beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate
feminine "AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice"
speaking to him from outer space. Other times,
Dick felt he was in telepathic communication with
a first-century Christian named Thomas, and once
"the landscape of California, U.S.A. 1974 ebbed
out and the landscape of Rome of the first century
C.E. ebbed in."[2]

Like many an acid casualty (Dick himself preferred
amphetamines), Dick also picked up strange signals
from electronic devices, and for a time he
received "die messages" from the radio. This
should be no surprise; radios, stereos and TVs
feature prominently in a number of his novels,
where the war of signal and noise often takes on
metaphysical connotations. But Dick's paranoia
could turn itself inside-out and become divine
intervention, and once when listening to the
Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," the
strawberry-pink light informed him that his son
Christopher was about to die. Rushing the kid to
their physician, Dick discovered that the child
indeed had a potentially fatal inguinal hernia,
and was soon wheeled into the operating room.

Many more fantastic events played themselves
across Dick's nervous system, and he would
sometimes refer to the whole barrage simply by its
date, "2-3-74." As Dick himself recognized, 2-3-74
avails itself equally to the language of religious
experience and psychological pathology. And yet
the events seem too fractured for the one, too
resonant and rich for the other. As has often been
noted, 2-3-74 reminds one of nothing so much as
the ontological paradoxes of a Philip K. Dick
novel, where the spurious realities that often
surround his characters can collapse like
cardboard in the face of disruptive information
coming from another order of reality beyond the
local simulation. Even if Dick underwent something
like a temporal lobe epilepsy (which Lawrence
Sutin argues is the most likely somatic
explanation), earlier books like Ubik, The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Maze of Death
provide more than enough evidence that 2-3-74
erupted from his own creative daemon.

Besides, Dick himself could never make up his mind
about what happened to him, his broiling
considerations of the matter clipped only by the
stroke that ended his life in 1982. Besides
weaving elements of 2-3-74 into a number of
novels, including the masterful VALIS, Dick
cranked out what is known as the "Exegesis"-a
couple million mostly handwritten words that
restlessly elaborate, analyze, and pull the rug
out from under his experiences. To judge from
those portions that have seen the light of day,
the Exegesis is an alternately incandescent,
boring, and disturbing document, where sparkling
metaphysical jewels and inspiring chunks of garage
philosophy swim in a turgid and depressing sea of
speculative indulgence and self-obsession.

Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach
his visions with anything like certitude. Dick
distrusted reification of any sort (his novels
constantly wage war against the process that turns
people and ideas into things), and so he refused
to solidify his experiences into a belief system.
Like William Blake, another impoverished
autodidact whose bubbling imagination was steeped
in the Western visionary tradition, Dick
approached his theophany (or "in-breaking of God")
as artistic material, reworking it in his writings
with an artist's commitment to irony, craft, and a
political bite. Even in his private journals, he
constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with
a modern thinker's sense of the tentativeness of
speculative thought. "Indeterminacy is the central
characteristic of 2-3-74," writes Sutin in his
Dick biography Divine Invasions. Sutin points out
that mystics traditionally interpret their
experiences within the faiths they are raised in.
"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."[3]

In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the
"Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the
novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer
scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe
is composed of information. The world we
experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of
information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind,
process. "We hypostasize information into objects.
Rearrangement of objects is change in the content
of information. This is the language we have lost
the ability to read."[4] With this Adamic code
scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know
it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming
"Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are
under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's
terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of
political tyranny and oppressive social control.
Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire,"
whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick
recognized in the Nixon administration.

Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors
of industrialism into his image of "Satanic
mills," Dick's Black Iron Prison imaginatively
captured the "disciplinary apparatus" of power
analyzed by historian Michel Foucault.
Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions,
schools, and military establishments all share
similar organizations of space and time, Foucault
argued that a "technology of power" was
distributed throughout social space, enmeshing
human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that
liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups
of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put
it, "The Empire never ended."

VALIS invades this spurious world of control in
order to liberate us. For Dick, this "living
information...replicates itself-not through
information or in information-but as
information."[5] VALIS is a virus, a kind of
metaphysical DNA that encodes the Logos or "Word"
that opens the Gospel of St. John. Birth from the
spirit occurs when the information plasmate
"penetrate(s) the world, replicating in human
brains, crossbanding with them and assisting
them..."[6] Dick calls these hybrid humans
"homeoplasmates". At one point Dick believed that
when the last of the homeoplasmates were killed
off with the destruction of the Second Temple by
the Romans in 70 C.E., "real time ceased." The
plasmate reentered human history in 1945, when
jars stuffed with ancient gnostic codices were
discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

In order to snake its way into the Black Iron
Prison, "the true God" must mimic "sticks and
trees and beer cans in gutters." Dick's God
"presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer
needed," so that "lurking, the true God literally
ambushes reality and us as well."[7] Here Dick
suggests a kind of liberation info-theology, a set
of guerrilla tactics for our saturated data age:
stick to the fringes of the spectacle, pay
attention to marginal or discarded information,
and never let your beliefs get in the way of
surprise. Dick knew well that the political and
metaphysical search for secret orders of power
invites the black iron prison of paranoia, but he
also recognized that "Surprise is an antidote to
paranoia."[8]

Dick was well aware of the nuttiness of 2-3-74,
and when he turned to the problem of narrating the
event in VALIS, he split himself into two
characters: the narrator, a sober science-fiction
writer named Phil Dick, and a mad visionary named
Horselover Fat. The book itself is a hybrid, a
melange of autobiography and fantasy that's laced
with an encyclopedic range of philosophical and
religious information: citations from the I Ching,
Henry Vaughan, Heraclitus, Wagner, Xenophanes, the
Bible, Pascal, and, of course, the science-fiction
writer Philip K. Dick.

The first half of the narrative is a loosely
autobiographical account of Dick's/Fat's own "pink
light" experiences of 2-3-74. Then Fat and his
friends go to see a trashy B-movie called Valis.
Like kabbalistic scholars or acidheads who see
meaning everywhere they turn, Fat and his friends
uncover a host of subtle symbols and puns in the
flick, all of which seem to refer to Fat's
half-baked theophany. Here Dick the author implies
that the divine virus can infect you through the
process of reading and decoding the cultural
hieroglyphs scattered about the world. And since
the film Valis clearly emerges from the same pulp
ghetto that Dick himself wrote for throughout his
mostly marginal career, he sly hints that careful
readers of his own trashy paperbacks, with their
lurid covers and cheesy titles, may pick up far
more than they bargained for.

Once the novel VALIS is infected with the viral
messages of the film Valis, autobiography gives
way to fantasy. Half-convinced they've struck
metaphysical gold, Fat and his friends head to
Northern California to track down Mother Goose,
the rock band responsible for the movie. There Fat
and Phil meet the divine child Sophia (a gnostic
Wisdom figure who, like VALIS, is also a sentient
AI). As the SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson points
out, Sophia's message to the group is not more of
the hermetic esoterica we've come to expect from
the novel, but a simple, humanist revision of
Jesus' beautiful Sermon on the Mount. In her sane
and calming presence, Fat and Phil become one
person again, the split between vision and reality
momentarily healed.

But this is a Dick novel, and such resolutions
never last long. Sophia is killed, and Horselover
Fat divides once again from Phil Dick and flies to
Micronesia looking for the Messiah. At the novel's
end, Dick is left alone in front of his TV,
looking for secret messages from VALIS, strange
symbols in ads or subliminal match-cut montages.
"I sat; I waited; I watched...As we had been told,
originally, long ago, to do; I kept my
commission."[9]

The pathos of this image is remarkable, expressing
at once a postmodern ennui and a quiet hope for
the reinvestment of oracular meaning in the
flickering hieroglyphs of the monitor screen.
While Dick's erudite vision of living information
trumps anything you'll find in New Age bookshops,
the strength of VALIS and many of his other novels
lies ultimately in his compassionate portrait of
human suffering and the pragmatic, fragmentary,
and creative measures that humans resort to when
metaphysical solutions collapse before us. Though
sharing some gnostic SF notions with L. Ron
Hubbard's cosmology, Dick's characters are the
absolute opposite of the superheros of
Scientology; they are ordinary schlemiels,
bumbling Joes struggling with moral ambiguity,
poverty, politics, and psychological wounds. They
live in worlds where faceless forces of control
are dodged only through entropy and communication
breakdown, where commodities have supplanted
community, and where God lurks in a spraycan. In
such a world, the most divine communications
aren't transmitted in a pink blast of gnostic
data, but in that most telepathic of human
emotions: empathy.

***

Dick spent his last years in Orange County, living
only a few miles from Disneyland. For a writer
obsessed with the metaphysical tango between the
authentic and the artificial, the environment was
almost too perfect. Ambiguously characterizing the
theme park as an "evolving organism," Dick tied
its synthetic realities to both the global
developments of postindustrial culture and to the
ersatz constructs of his own books. As he pointed
out in his late essay "How to Build a Universe
that Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days."

...today we live in a society in which
spurious realities are manufactured by
the media, by governments, by big
corporations, by religious groups,
political groups...unceasingly we are
bombarded with pseudo-realities
manufactured by very sophisticated
people using very sophisticated
electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust
their motives; I distrust their
power.[10]

As Jean Baudrillard has argued into the ground,
simulation rather than representation has become
the defining characteristic of cultural signs and
artifacts in our time. For Baudrillard, the
objects of simulation transcends the binary
opposition of "authentic" and "fake," "original"
and "copy." The technological simulacrum creates
its own reality, which Baudrillard calls the
"hyperreal," a kind of ersatz parody of Plato's
ideal world of forms. For example, when you
download a printer driver from the Internet or
record a CD onto digital tape, you do not "copy"
the information so much as replicate a hyperreal
object.

For Baudrillard, the power of simulation only
further extends the reach of what Guy Debord
castigated in the 1960s as "the society of the
spectacle." The media have become a kind of
orbiting genetic code that "mutates" the real into
the hyperreal, thereby producing "social control
by anticipation, simulation and
programming."[11]Like Dick, Baudrillard saw
Disneyland as the archetypal hyperreal
environment, though perhaps the technophilic "Gulf
War" we watched through the dark glass of CNN,
with its smart bombs and virtual-reality pilot
runs, should stand as the most delirious thrill
ride yet offered by the new world order of
simulation.

As an exhausted rationalist, Baudrillard simply
abandoned himself to a morbid celebration of the
pixel apocalypse, giving up any notion of
resistance or transformation while ignoring the
messy realities that gum up the works of all such
grand intellectual scenarios. But Dick never gave
up his commitment to the "authentically human,"
the "viable, elastic organism which can bounce
back, absorb, and deal with the new." He also
recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls,
and that we are not so far from the spiritual
paradigms of the ancient world, with their
camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata
gods. And so Dick redeployed the gnostic struggle
for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell
universe of simulation. The world is a prison not
because of its materiality-which was the opinion
of the ancient Gnostics-but because of the hidden
orders of power and control it houses: the various
corporate, political, and ideological archons
herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic
worlds.

Dick's greatest novel of demiurgic media control
is 1964's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
In order to escape the dismal toil of their lives,
the colonists on Mars resort to Perky Pat Layouts,
miniature doll-houses complete with Pat and Walt,
svelte figurines resembling those postwar
archetypes Barbie and Ken. After gathering
together in their hovels, the colonists swallow an
illegal drug, Can-D, which "translates" them into
Pat and Walt's Baywatch-like lives for a painfully
brief spell. Some colonists view their virtual
trip as escapism, others as a religious experience
in which they lose the flesh and "put on
imperishable bodies" instead. A satellite owned by
Perky Pat Layouts orbits Mars, emitting a stream
of ads for new Perky Pat accessories, while the
DJs deal Can-D on the side. Even psychic powers
are exploited for commercial gain, as "pre-cogs"
working for PPL use their gifts to predict which
new accessories will be hits with the colonists.

As Peter Fitting points out, Three Stigmata paints
a world where "the liberatory potential of the
media and new technologies has been completely
debased." We are not so far from this world.
Increasingly Hollywood churns out, not films, but
events: virtual constructs that envelope us like
theme park rides and which seep into ordinary life
through spin-offs and a tsunami of merchandise.
Much of children's television fuses toys and
imaginative experience; kids (and their parents)
must buy their way into these worlds in order to
"play." Though distributed media like the Internet
hold out the possibility of democratizing the
imagination, high-tech simulation is expensive,
and crude corporate-run virtual realities have
started popping up on the World Wide Web like the
mushrooms of Wonderland.

But things get much worse for the hapless
characters in Three Stigmata. The industrialist
Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system
with Chew-Z, a new and stronger drug that competes
against Can-D with the slogan "GOD PROMISES
ETERNAL LIFE. WE CAN DELIVER IT." Chew-Z needs no
Layouts to work, but it also possesses the
distinctly negative indication of putting the user
into a universe which Eldritch controls, a
universe that is difficult, if not impossible, to
escape from. Dick paints Eldritch as a nefarious
and possibly alien figure, his "three stigmata" (a
prosthetic arm, eyes, and teeth) symbolizing what
Dick saw as the "negative trinity of alienation,
blurred reality, and despair" we all risk by
losing our capacity for empathy and by giving into
the technology of control.

Like the Gnostics of old, Dick flip-flopped
between viewing the demiurge and his archons as
evil, or as aberrant and selfish products of their
own ignorance and power. The difference is
crucial: the Manichaean notion that good and evil
are absolute principles sucks you into a harsh and
rather paranoid dualism, while the other, more
"Valentinian" mode of gnosis opens into a
continual transformation, an awakening that's
always on the fly. For the Valentinians of
Alexandria, the moment of transcendence is not a
E-ticket out of here but a signal fed back into
the maze of the churning world. As Leo Bulero, the
hero of Three Stigmata, writes with quiet hope, "I
mean, after all; you have to consider we're only
made out of dust...So I personally have faith that
even in this lousy situation we're faced with we
can make it."

In Dick's A Maze of Death, the gnostic quest for
self-knowledge leads beyond the paranoid web of
the archons into a theological meta-fiction out of
Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an
Author. The 1970 novel opens with a group of
colonists congregating on the lush, leafy planet
Delmak-O. When they arrive, their taped
instructions are "accidentally" erased. Much of
the remaining plot resembles Agatha Christie's And
Then There Were None, as one by one the colonists
are murdered or mysteriously die. It's tough to
tell exactly what's happening, since each colonist
also sinks deeper and deeper into his or her own
subjective reality, becoming increasingly
incapable of communicating with the others.

The one consensus reality widely accepted among
the colonists is the theology of A.J.
Specktowsky's How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare
Time and So Can You. Specktowsky's book posits
four deities: the Mentufacturer (the creator), the
Form-Destroyer (death, entropy), the
Walker-on-Earth (an Elijah-like prophet), and the
Intercessor (the Christ figure or Redeemer). As
Dick writes in a note that precedes the narrative,
this theology resulted from his attempt to
"develop an abstract, logical system of religious
thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God
exists." The cybernetic underpinnings of this
theology is symbolized by the colonist's mode of
prayer, in which a transmitter and a "relay
network" contact believers to the god-worlds.

Of course, this system almost immediately breaks
down. The colonists then discover that only some
aspects of the natural environment are organic,
while others, particularly the insects, are
artificial constructs. There are camera-bees,
flies with speakers and musical tapes, fleas that
endlessly reprint books. Examining a miniature
building under a microscope, Seth Morley discovers
amidst its circuitry the phrase "Made at Terra
35082R." Soon, Morley's growing doubts about
Delmak-0 produce a paranoid breakthrough:

[it is] as if, he thought, those hills
in the background, and that great
plateau to the right, are a painted
backdrop. As if all this, and ourselves,
and the settlement-all are contained in
a geodesic dome. And...research men,
like entirely deformed scientists of
pulp fiction, are peering down on us...

The colonists come to believe that they are part
of an experiment and that the initial malfunction
of their instruction tape was deliberate. They
conclude that they are actually on Earth, inmates
of an insane asylum who have had their memories
surpressed for some military experiment. Their
suspicions are then confirmed when they spot
uniformed guards and flying helicopters charging
around the landscape of Delmak-0.

The glimpse of these military-scientific "archons"
satisfies Morley's paranoid scenario, which
includes many elements common to pulp fiction and
to actual conspiracy theories (men in black,
blocked memories, pervasive surveillance devices).
But the colonists can't figure out why each of
them is tattooed with the phrase "Persus 9." So
they approach the tench, a strange animal who
earlier offered oracular answers to their
questions. After being asked the meaning of Persus
9, the creature explodes in a mass of gelatin and
computer circuitry, initiating a chain reaction
which results in the apocalyptic destruction of
the planet.

In the following chapter, we discover that Persus
9 is the name of a disabled spaceship hopelessly
circling a dead star. In order to maintain sanity
as they drift to their doom, the crew was
programming their T.E.N.C.H. 889B computer to
generate synthetic worlds based on few basic
parameters initially established by the crew -
including the same postulate that Dick used to
create Specktowsky's book: that God exists. The
crew then entered these virtual realities through
"polyencephalic fusion."

As postmodern allegories go, A Maze of Death cuts
to the bone. Incapable of altering the destructive
course of our dysfunctional technological society,
we resort to what Neil Postman called "amusing
ourselves to death." The gnostic quest for true
identity rends these artificial environments, but
it offers no ascent, only an awareness of our
slow, decaying drift toward oblivion. Though the
T.E.N.C.H. is another one of Dick's demiurges, a
figure for a culture-industry based on
"mentufactured" (or, as Disney puts it,
"imagineered") distractions, the machine's
programmed illusions are not the product of some
conspiracy of evil archons but of our own
alienated desires.

For obvious reasons, Morley feels depressed to the
point of suicide. As the rest of the crew prepare
to enter another simulation, he wanders into a
corridor where he encounters a figure calling
himself the Intercessor. Morley says, "But we
invented you! We and T.E.N.C.H. 889B." The
Intercessor does not explain himself, and leads
Morley "into the stars," while the rest of the
crew find themselves once again on Delmak-O.

Like most interventions by a deus ex machina, this
conclusion is not particularly satisfying on a
narrative level. But the Intercessor does create a
gap in Dick's otherwise bleak scenario, a liminal
space suddenly charged with the ambiguous power of
the simulacrum. It also suggests that the
arbitrary postulates of our cultural software can
still invade and transform the world. As the
British SF author Ian Watson notes, "one rule of
Dick's false realities is the paradox that once
in, there's no way out, yet for this very reason
transcendence of a sort can be achieved."[12]

***

The distant alien god of the Gnostics may be
nothing more than a metaphysical rumor lurking in
the back of metaphysical bookstores, but the false
god they called the demiurge is alive and well and
living in technoculture. Networked computer games,
Hollywood special effects, and virtual theme park
rides all seek, not only to just distract or
entertain, but to immerse us into new, concocted
realities. In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly
discusses "God games" like Populus and SimEarth,
which allow players to play demiurge, tweaking
creation by altering levels of carbon dioxide or
the rate of urban development. Kelly points out
that these games parallel the science of
artificial life, where researchers "grow"
synthetic life-like forms by introducing basic
rules of behavior and then letting whole worlds of
code evolve inside the computer. "I can't imagine
anything more addictive than being a god," he
writes. "A hundred years from now nothing will
keep us away from artificial cosmos cartridges we
can purchase and [then] pop...into a world machine
[in order] to watch creatures come alive and
interact on their own accord."[13]

Of course, novelists have been creating spurious
worlds for centuries, and before them bards and
shamans. Much SF writing-especially that "hard" SF
that aspires to the rigor of "hard" sciences-works
by establishing a set of axiomatic "What If?"
assumptions, and then "running" an
internally-consistent narrative based on those
parameters. As Dick writes in his "How to Build a
Universe" essay, "it is an astonishing power: that
of creating whole universes, universes of the
mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."[14]

But Dick yanked the rug out from under the
technocultural mania for producing ever more vivid
and life-like simulations. "I will reveal a secret
to you," he writes in the same essay. "I like to
build universes that do fall apart. I like to see
them come unglued, and I like to see how the
characters in the novels cope with this
problem."[15] As a creator of worlds, Dick was not
a proud and all-controlling demiurge but an ironic
Trickster, a Shiva with a "secret love of chaos."

But how does chaos and disorder fit into Dick's
various information cosmologies? Like Thomas
Pynchon, Dick was obsessed with the second law of
thermodynamics, and he coined words like kipple
and gubble to denotes the corrosive power of
entropy and its ability to render form into
formlessness. Along with Norbert Wiener, Dick
viewed entropy metaphysically, casting it in some
tales as evil incarnate or as the sign of some
cosmic Fall. In contrast to this, Dick later came
to laud the positive and "negentropic" (or
anti-entropic) power of VALIS's restorative
information. This makes good human sense: as
finite, far-from-equilibrium organisms, we are
whirlpools of order and information whipped
together for a time against the steady downstream
drift of entropy.

However, the pseudo-realities forged by the
archons play havoc with this Manichaen scheme. In
a world of manufactured illusions, the gremlins of
entropy-malfunctions, interference, decay-can
paradoxically liberate us by gouging holes in the
smooth surface of simulation; these corrosive gaps
create the space for breakthroughs and insights,
imaginative or real. In a number of Dick's works,
it is only the anomalous decay of objects that
alerts the characters that the false world around
them is not what it seems. Even the disguised God
of VALIS appears as "trash discarded, debris no
longer needed." In a sense, entropy is what kills
all our illusions, and this dark liberation
becomes even more important in a world of
potentially insidious, or at least overbearing,
technological constructs. As public spaces devolve
into theme parks or malls, where the creative
force of organic life is managed down to every
blade of grass, entropy-mildew, rot, decay-even
becomes the final sign of nature and its
spontaneous freedom.

As the original information theorist Claude
Shannon discovered, there is a curiously perfect
match between the thermodynamic equation for
entropy in physical systems and the one describing
the noise that crops up in information channels.
Similarly, Dick's fascination with real-world rot
and rust translated into a fascination with noise
and interference in the communication networks
that often link his characters.

In The Divine Invasion, a late Dick novel that
carries on many of VALIS' metaphysical themes,
electromagnetic noise play a liberating role. From
his private dome on the off-world colony
CY30-CY30B, Herb Asher transmits information and
music to the other colonist domes. His high-tech
entertainment system continually plays videos and
tapes of his favorite pop singer Linda Fox, whose
holographic posters cover the wall. But he keeps
picking up a soupy muzak version of Fiddler on the
Roof. Asher later discovers that he is actually in
cryonic suspension, where his inert body picks up
signals from a nearby radio station broadcasting
the Broadway musical. Like the spirits in
Swedenborg's afterworld, whose first order of
business is to convince incoming souls that they
are actually dead, the radio interference acts as
an Intercessor, calling Asher to wake up to his
actual condition.

By insisting on the liberating truths concealed in
crossed-wires and mixed messages, Dick serves as a
kind of spiritual godfather for media tricksters
everywhere, from graffiti artists to video
activists to hackers to hoaxers. In his prescient
1972 speech "The Android and the Human," Dick
spoke glowingly about young phone phreaks like
Captain Crunch, who built a blue-box that allowed
him to make long distance calls for free.
Anticipating the more frazzled edge of online
libertarianism and the ethical ambiguities of
hacker pranks and poachings, Dick went on to claim
that in "a totalitarian society in which the state
apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most
important for the survival of the true, human
individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it,
be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved
electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit
the gadgets used by the authorities."[16]

Dick was no futurist; his value as an SF writer
lies not in any predictions about the specific
technological course of human civilization (there
are few computers in his work), but in his
extraordinary intuition for the subjective
conditions of the mutating human self. So if
Dick's counter-cultural battle-cry sounds somewhat
dated in an era when criminal cartels, fascist
militiamen, and transnational corporations wage
similar tactics against the state, his spiritual
commitment to freedom does not. We cannot know
whether the virtual webwork now girding the earth
will become a holistic society of mind or a
playground for the archons, a "vast active living
intelligence system" or an infinite nest of Perky
Pat Layouts-and the likelihood that it will fuse
all of these possibilities, while producing enough
novelties and shocks to surprise all but the most
committed paranoids, only begs the question. Which
is simply this: What are the ethical "postulates"
that guide the self through such a world?

For Dick, one of these fundamental values was
simply compassion, the caritas of St. Paul, or the
empathy of Lord Running Clam, the telepathic
Ganymedean slime-mold in his Clans of the Alphane
Moon. We feel compassion for and in his
characters, ordinary flawed people struggling with
impossible emotional and ethical contradictions;
we recognize these people and their slapstick
dystopias; they are us. And yet Dick's point of
view was extremely alienated and critical;
questioning authority (even the authority of the
author), he shifted like an ontological nomad
between subjects and truths and positions of
power, constantly testing for the trap doors in
the theater of the world. His was not a gnosis
that knows, but one that seeks to know, or rather
dissolves its own convictions into the anxious
mysterium. Dick loved the seventeenth century
English religious poet Henry Vaughan, and I think
he may have seen himself in the final lines of
Vaughan's "Man":

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding
quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no
rest.

***

Footnotes:

[1]Cited in Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A
Life of Philip K. Dick, (Harmony Books, NY, 1989),
210.
[2]Philip K. Dick, VALIS, (Bantam, NY, 1981), 33.
[3]Sutin 233.
[4]Dick, 219.
[5]Ibid, 217.
[6] Ibid, 192.
[7]Ibid, 63.
[8]Cited in Paul Williams, Only Apparently Real:
The World of Philip K. Dick, (Arbor House, NY,
1986), 164.
[9]Ibid, 223.
[10]Phil K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe that
Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days" in I Hope I Shall
Arrive Soon, ed. Mark Hurst, Paul Williams (St.
Martin's, NY, 1985), 4.
[11]Ibid, 105.
[12]Ian Watson, "The False Reality as Mediator,"
in On Philip K. Dick: 40 ARticles from
Science-Fiction Studies, (SF-TH Inc., Greencastle,
IN, 1992), 67.
[13]Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, (Addison-Wesley,
Reading, Mass, 1994), 233.
[14]"How to Build", 5.
[15] Ibid.
[16]Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human,"
in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, ed.
Lawrence Sutin, (Pantheon, NY, 1995), 195.