by Erik Davis
Needless to say, the ecstasy of communication still leaves one dazed and confused when the morning comes. That is our human lot, after all, to fall to earth. But to see just how dazed and confused a close encounter with the information eschaton can be, we need to turn to one of the most sublime and crackpot tales in the annals of techgnosis: the strange and visionary case of Philip K. Dick, who wrestled with the information angel and woke up battered and bruised, wondering if it was all just a dream. Or a trick.
Divine Interference
On February 2, 1974, Philip K. Dick was in pain. That particular day he did not care that his darkly comic tales of androids, weird drugs, and false realities were already recognized as some of the most visionary that science fiction had yet produced. He had just had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and the sodium pentothal was wearing off. A delivery woman arrived with a package of Darvon, and when Dick opened the door, he was struck by the woman’s beauty and the attractive golden necklace she wore. Asking her about the curious shape of the pendant, Dick was told it was a sign used by the early Christians. Then the woman departed.
All Americans who drive cars know this fish well, as its Christian and Darwinian mutations wage a war of competing faiths from the rear ends of Volvos and Hondas across the land. As a Christian logo, the fish predates the cross, and its Piscean connotations of baptism and magical bounty (the miracle of loaves and fishes) reach back to the time when the persecuted cult secretly gathered in Alexandrine catacombs. Ichthus, the Greek word for fish that’s often inscribed within the symbol, is itself a kind of code, a Greek acrostic of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” One apocryphal story claims that Christians would clandestinely test the allegiance of new acquaintances by casually drawing one curve of the ichthus in the dirt. If the stranger was in the know, he or she would complete the image.
For Dick, the ichthus was a secret sign of an altogether different order. Like the winged letter that appears in the “Hymn of the Pearl,” the delivery woman’s necklace served as a trigger for mystical memory. As Dick 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.24
Once Dick’s brain was zapped by the fish sign, it went on to host a remarkable series of revelations, hallucinations, and vatic dreams that lasted off and on for years. In one of Dick’s many accounts of his experience, these visions put him in direct contact with a force he described as a “vast active living intelligence system”—VALIS for short. In his 1980 quasi-autobiographical novel of the same name, Dick defined VALIS as a “spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex … tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information.” Sounding rather like a mystic’s take on the Internet, VALIS is in some ways the ultimate techgnostic vision: an apocalyptic matrix of living information that overcomes entropy and redeems the fallen world. In essence, Dick’s mystic glimpse differs little from The Starseed Transmissions that Ken Carey channeled only a few years after Dick’s VALIS experiences. But unlike Carey, who was content to simply transmit his cosmic information, Dick wove his visions into the tangled, complex, and far more human struggles of his fictions: strange, powerful, and deeply ironic fables concerning the psychic turmoil and hilarious double binds that ordinary humans find themselves in as they struggle for love and justice in a world ruled by the absurd simulacra and alienating tyrannies of postindustrial life.
Besides working elements of the events he came to call “2-3-74” into a number of his later novels, Dick also cranked out the “Exegesis,” a couple million mostly handwritten words that restlessly elaborate, analyze, and pull the rug out from under his own weird experiences. Published in an abridged version in 2011, the Exegesis is an alternately powerful, visionary, and disturbing document. Sparkling metaphysical jewels and inspiring chunks of garage philosophy swim in a turbid and sometimes depressing sea of speculative indulgence and self-obsessed hermeneutics in hyperactive overdrive. In his “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura,” which are excerpts from the Exegesis appended to VALIS, Dick crystallized the paranoid and redemptive themes of info-gnosis. Like Ed Fredkin’s computational physics, the “Tractates” hold the 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.”25
As we saw earlier, the notion of a lost Adamic language is an old one in Western esoteric lore. For Dick, the scrambling of the Adamic code meant that both ourselves and the world as we know it are “occluded,” cut off from the brimming matrix of cosmic data. Instead, we are trapped in the Black Iron Prison, Dick’s image for the satanic mills of illusion, political tyranny, and oppressive social control that keep our minds in manacles. More than a merely paranoid motif, Dick’s Black Iron Prison can be seen as a mythic expression of the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault, who showed that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all organized space and time along similar lines of rational control. Foucault argued that this “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn, and that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic touch-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. Though Foucault saw this as an eminently modern architecture, Dick’s religious imagination rocketed him back to the ancient world. Rome became the paragon of this Empire, and as Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.” The feverish Dick even recognized its archetypal lineaments in the Nixon administration.
In one of Dick’s myriad metaphysical scenarios, VALIS surreptitiously invades this spurious world of control to liberate us. Like the letter in “The Hymn of the Pearl” that lay on the side of the road, Dick’s God “presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer noticed,” so that “lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well.”26 Birth from the spirit occurs when this metaphysical “plasmate” replicates in human brains, creating hybrids Dick called “homoplasmates.” In VALIS, Dick claims that the last homoplasmates were killed off when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, at which point, “real time ceased.” The gnostic plasmate did not reenter human history until the watershed year of 1945, when the codices of Nag Hammadi were uncovered. Dick’s plasmate mythology thus injects the postwar world with the apocalyptic expectations of late antiquity, while spiritualizing the notion of an information virus. Though antagonistic atheists like Richard Dawkins use the materialistic idea of the meme in order to attack religion, Dick’s plasmate redeems the world through the very materiality of its infectious code.
However intriguing his visions, Dick obviously logged a lot of hours on the far side of kooky. Sometimes VALIS struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or spoke to him with a compassionate “AI voice” from outer space. Other times, Dick felt that he was in telepathic communication with a first-century Christian named Thomas, and at one point, the surrounding landscape of early-seventies Orange County “ebbed out” while the landscape of first-century Rome “ebbed in.” Dick also picked up strange signals from electronic devices, messages of salvation and threat trickling out of the old electromagnetic imaginary. Once, when listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the strawberry-pink light supposedly informed him that his son Christopher was about to die. Rushing the kid to a physician, Dick discovered that the child had a potentially fatal inguinal hernia, and the boy was soon operated on.
Clearly the bizarre events of 2-3-74 avail themselves equally to the languages of religious experience and psychological pathology, although they seem too fractured for the one, and too rich a
nd even visionary for the other. Dick himself recognized this ambiguity, and until his untimely death in 1982, he never stopped mulling over his VALIS experience, not only because he could never make up his mind, but because he recognized even in his looniness that metaphysical certainty is a trap. Unlike the whole disturbing march of mystagogues and prophets through the ages, Dick remained ambivalent about his creative cosmologies, and in this ambivalence he speaks volumes about the nature of religious experience in the age of neurotransmitters and microwave satellites. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and he accordingly refused to solidify his tentative notions into a rigid belief system. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefied his own revelations, writing with a skeptic’s restless awareness of the indeterminacy of speculative thought. In the end, though, 2-3-74 recalls 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, and metaphysical break-ins are generally indistinguishable from psychological breakdowns. Even if Dick suffered something like temporal lobe epilepsy (which his biographer Lawrence Sutin argues is the most likely somatic explanation), his earlier books prove that 2-3-74 erupted from his own creative daemon.
In 1970’s A Maze of Death, for example, a character’s quest for self-knowledge stages a techgnostic metafable that mixes “The Hymn of the Pearl” with Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The novel opens with a group of colonists congregating on a lush, leafy planet named Delmak-O. As soon as they arrive, the taped instructions that the colonists were promised when they embarked for the planet are mysteriously 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. For the reader, it is impossible to tell what is “really” happening, since each colonist also sinks deeper and deeper into his or her own subjective worldview, losing the ability to communicate with one another and to maintain a consensus about the reality of Delmak-O.
One cognitive map that is shared by all 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 describes a universe ruled by four deities: the Mentufacturer (the creative demiurge), 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 own attempt to “develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists.” The cybernetic underpinnings of this faith are symbolized by the transmitter and the relay network that the colonists initially use to send their prayers to the god-worlds.
Of course, this system almost immediately breaks down. The colonists then discover that only some aspects of their supposedly natural environment are organic, while others, particularly the insects, are technological. There are camera-bees, flies with speakers and musical tapes, and 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 afterward, Morley’s growing doubts about the reality of 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.…27
The remaining colonists soon come to believe that they are being used as lab rats in some debased social scientific experiment, and that the malfunction of their initial instruction tapes was deliberate. They conclude that they are actually on earth, inmates of an insane asylum who have had their memories erased by the military. These suspicions are confirmed when they spot uniformed guards and flying helicopters moving through the landscape of Delmak-O.
At this point, the colonists enter a full-fledged paranoid scenario, which includes many elements common both to pulp fiction and to actual conspiracy theories (Men in Black, blocked memories, “bugs” and other hidden surveillance devices). But Dick is not satisfied with this answer to the riddle of Delmak-O, and neither are the colonists, who still can’t explain why each of them is tattooed with the phrase “Persus 9.” Banding together, they approach the tench, an uncanny local creature who, earlier in the narrative, offered oracular I Ching–like answers to their questions. But when the colonists ask the tench what Persus 9 means, the thing explodes in a mass of gelatin and computer circuitry, initiating a chain reaction that 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. To maintain sanity as they drift to their certain doom, the crew had programmed their T.E.N.C.H. 889B computer to generate virtual worlds that the men and women would then enter through “polyencephalic fusion.” Delmak-O was based on a few basic parameters initially established by the group—including the same postulate that the author Dick claims he used to create the theology of Specktowsky’s book: that God exists.
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 media critic Neil Postman called “amusing ourselves to death.” Like the Perky Pat Layouts in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the T.E.N.C.H. symbolizes a culture based on “mentufactured,” or imagineered, distractions. In his later essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Dick explicitly applies the false worlds of his fiction to contemporary American life:
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.28
As I have suggested throughout this book, the gnostic mythology of the archons is in some ways an appropriate image of power in an age of electronic specters and high-tech propaganda, an environment of simulation and algorithmic control whose slipperiness can twist even the most noble of motives. For those so inclined, the mythology of the archons instills a hermeneutics of suspicion, one that questions the hidden agendas that lurk beneath the mediascape even as it runs the risk of lapsing into paranoia. And indeed, in both his fictions and his life, Dick could become quite paranoid about the invisible wardens of this Black Iron Prison. But like the Gnostics of old, Dick also flip-flopped in his vision of the archons. Sometimes he saw them as evil, other times as aberrant and selfish products of their own ignorance and power. The difference is crucial: The Manichaean notion that good and evil are absolute contraries sucks the self into a harsh and paranoid dualism, while the other, more “Augustinian” mode of gnosis opens the self into a continual labor of awakening that holds out the possibility of enlightening even the archons, who in the end are no other than ourselves. This is the story of Delmak-O, a simulation orchestrated not by a conspiracy of evil military scientists, but by people’s alienated desires and their unwillingness to confront death.
Though Morley’s gnostic quest for true identity succeeds in rending illusions, it appears to offer no ascent, only a frank awareness of the slow drift toward oblivion. But A Maze of Death is a Philip K. Dick story, which means that the story is never really over. Once Morley awakens on the spaceship, he 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 strange figure that calls himself the Intercessor. Morley doesn’t buy it. “But we invented you! We and T.E.N.C.H. 889B.” The Intercessor does not explain himself as he leads Morley “into the stars
,” while the rest of the crew find themselves once again stuck on Delmak-O.
As a literal deus ex machina, Dick’s preprogrammed savior makes for a rather dissatisfying conclusion to the narrative. On the other hand, the Intercessor does create a numinous gap in Dick’s otherwise bleak scenario, an ontological rupture that allows the phantasm, the simulacrum, to reveal its uncanny and potentially redemptive power. In a sense, Morley enters a different order of the virtual, one that exists above the technologies of simulation. This is the virtual that has always been with us, that needs no gadgets to intercede in our lives, that arises from the “arbitrary postulates” of our cultural software even as it transcends them. 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.”29
Sensing the potential metaphysical and political fallout of a society whose perceptions are increasingly engineered, Dick used his pulp fables to redeploy the old gnostic struggle for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell universe of technological simulacra. Despite the transcendental temperament of his later days, Dick did not follow other technodualists in condemning the flesh or the material world. Instead, the demiurgic traps in his novels are human constructions, figments we build out of media technologies, commodity hallucinations, emotional lies, and our desire to lose ourselves in a good tale. The life of authenticity begins when these illusions collapse. “I will reveal a secret to you,” Dick writes in the essay cited above. “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.”30
