The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Asked when this reversal to proper time direction might be anticipated, Dr. NK said, "By our wrong way time, fairly soon."

  "Then we must relive our recent past?"

  "Yes, we will move backward into it, but perhaps at quite a different rate; we might move more rapidly than we advanced, I mean, retreated through it."

  "People would stop dying?"

  "Oh yes—the entropic process, cooling, aging, wearing out, degeneration—all that would cease. Once we picked up time momentum the other way—we might overcome the Accidental-thrust time. Think of a person blown literally from his garage when his hot water heater explodes. In an instant he is in the next field. His rate of return to the scene is much slower. In our universe, the force of Accidental thrust time is weakening; we have no way to ascertain what the 'correct' rate would be going the other way, before this Accident took place. We are presently living within two opposite thrusts, working against each other, like two tides. Think, though, how slowly time moves for a child, especially a baby. Time is weak now but we might abruptly lock; this accidental wrong might suddenly stabilize."

  "Like the Bible says? Time will suddenly cease?"

  "Wrong-direction time—"

  "Sounds like the same thing."

  "It is possible," Dr. NK said, "that under regular process-conditions there is no time as we know it, lineal time, either way. We may find ourselves back in what we call our past without any interval; there may be no reverse lineal time, because lineal time is solely a result of the Accident, and once overcome—"

  "Not backward lineal time, in its place, but timelessness?"

  "I think we will see the damages overcome, when it is stabilized. Either we will lock into timelessness, then begin lineal reversal, which I conceive as natural—"

  "Or we may find ourselves jumped back 2,000 years."

  "Yes." He nodded.

  Plot: it turns out that the message which Albemuth is signalling Earth, the secret, is that our planet, solar system, us—we're moving backward in time and it's about to stabilize and change, and the jolt to us will be terrific. Our leaders know this but deny it. Time is about to end (lineal time) as a factor of life; it won't reverse, as in counter clock world, but our present will dissolve as all the accretion of at least 3,500 years will vanish, as if dreamlike. They never took place. Stability, and proper everything, will lock in at 1500 to 2500 B.C. (Is it possible that an explosion, that Cretean civilization, took place then?) All events since then are progressively less real, as time runs out of charge.... Jesus was the first messenger from Albemuth come here to tell that one day time would abruptly cease, to prepare us. Now Earth is full of messengers; they've made many of us so, due to our radio traffic which are energy; the noösphere, etc. And now is when it's about to lock, but to them at Albemuth, they're outside this kind of lineal time; it just is for them each year realer and realer (what we call Being). But they can penetrate at the place where our noösphere exists, which is circa 1960–1990. Our microwave et al. equipment receives and boosts their t-p signals, radio signals. Their help was there but is now artificially boosted for this generation.

  "What Dead Men Say."

  The Albemuth message, though, corrects Dr. NK's theory; there was no explosion, just that Being time slipped into lineal time for this solar system or planet ... hence myth of Garden of Eden days of every race on earth—it ended, we were cast out. The lineal time, which is the only time we recognize, is a slipped ontological coordinate of existence; each year should reinforce and totally renew, even add layers to each of us like patina; we should age in that sense, grow until each of us, qua entelechy, is perfected. "But what about dinosaur bones and all fossils?" we ask. Answer: Every art work breaks, even though it is complete. A bone China cup doesn't age, but an accident can occur to it. This is what happened to all life; eventually, like all artifacts, each form breaks, but the entelechy escapes the brittle crystallized form and reappears in plastic rebirth. There is also change—this isn't an unmoving, static world. But the processes we know as aging—the entropy of our world, and what we see of the cosmos (contrast cosmos with universe). Everything lost should at the end of each turn be as renewed as at the end of the 24 hour cycle of an electric clock. Something is wrong in our world; we lose. An equilibrium is gone: and we sense it as defeat failure illness age and finally death. Something is out of balance; the two time-forces aren't equal.

  What would we notice as this true (retro) time jumps in ratio? A slowing of our normal lineal time? No, the infusing into our aging world of a bright energy, pouring everywhere, sparkling, vivifying the living things and the unliving. We would see a living energy, a sort of shining sap which pours all over, sparkles; and it changes whatever it fluxes itself into like a plasma of n-ions. This is time, true time, plus energy time. It would roll back the accretions which are false, that is, it would roll back the least-Being accretions ... it would add vitality to the Real, and cause the false totally to disappear, as if never there. This is time beginning to reverse itself: a direction. Experienced as energy to Being, as disappearance of the irreal/illusion.

  These slowings and reversings would come in spurts. Not in a lineal fashion; that aspect is of wrong-way time. It would be like childbirth: in surges of energy outward onto the world. At Spring the cyclic life is at its peak; so reverse time would tend to peak with it.

  And we'd have—for those who were influxed directly—the eerie feeling that the clock had been turned back ... hundreds, maybe thousands of years, depending on how much of this energy—and it is energy—infused each of them. Each would vary from the others touched; moved backward—receiving more. It has a quantity (years back) and quality: what one sees qualitatively.

  The U.S. Intelligence psychiatric profile on Dr. NK shows that "he was taken over by Dionysus thus lifting him outside time and space," etc., like Nietzsche, but regards the experience as real.

  Letter to Claudia Bush, February 26, 1975

  [4:233]

  Hey Claudia—

  Identity—continuity—recognition—selfsameness.

  I got so loaded last night you wouldn't believe it.* It was my daughter's birthday and I phoned her 6 or 8 times and never got her. So I went to a friend and he gave me something to get me ripped.47 I was so fucking ripped. In chemo veritas, though (for your purposes). Listen, Baby. I am still ripped and it is tomorrow (that was today, when he gave it to me); we talked, and I said, man I can't take it anymore. Later as I was still taking it (the garbage out) he stopped me and handed me the good message. I squirreled it away for like until later and then I did it. I did it.

  Claudia, it hit me like a 1100 of brick fists.

  So I called in Tessa and said, "Honey, I am so stoned you would not believe it. I love you."

  "Then you must be."

  "Ask me questions. My unconscious is accessible."

  "Why did you have the experiences last March?"

  My answer: "I had nothing else to do."

  "What deity or force or presence took you over?"

  My answer: "Erasmus."

  "'Erasmus.' Who the hell—"

  (I had the most incredible shower of chuckling all over me, in the form of math symbols and Greek letters. I'd guessed who it was: he had played the most—to him—fun game. Ir leg, the two Sanskrit words. Not the meaning ["angry legion"] but a pun. Always puns, a million pun clues. "Ear leg." In the old days my brother-in-law and I made up this Swift: "I feel earassabiele, Tom said," or how-ever. "I feel as if my ear hurts and I need to see a proctologist," Tom said irascibly. There it is. Now, "ir leg" is to ear leg as Irascibly is to that Swifty. And "irascible" is a quasi-phononym for Erasmus. Ear-ass-mus. See? These were the first words which came to me in March and wow, last night. A shower of laughter, since finally I'd guessed. He hadn't counted on chemical aids.)

  "Who or what is/was Christ?" Tessa asked me.

  "The style we are drawn in," I said. "There is a person seated for artists to draw him; they have a 1.50 minute tim
e limit on their work. All draw him a little differently, all must finish fast and turn it in. Their work is crude, and each has a bit of the subject in it. Our world is that composite work of many artists, and we are those crude drawings with the minute and a half time limit. We do as well as we can, but it's like Disneyland where they do that, various portrait artists with one subject—or if they all had the same subject. It is like Disneyland—fast and not very expert, and still the subject sits and we approximate him. Someone else does the approximating; we are not the artists but the drawings. Hence Plato's concept of the cave and of the idea archetypes."

  "Is there reincarnation?"

  (I could remember a Saxon scene: an old man bending over me. But what I saw most, and always, as she talked to me, was the cross, in color: gold and red. Shining. And heavy and huge. You'd bounce back if you were a semi truck and hit it. I just kept watching it.)

  Then I sat for a couple hours and felt odd, not bad but odd, because all that stuff about Greece and Dionysus was crazy, based on the fact—Tessa and I looked him up—that Erasmus was one of the first Greek scholars. I "imagined" the world of Greece and all that stuff. Based on Erasmus' head. You see. Now he was laughing because the joke was on me. He'd read about Dionysus, I guess. He was a bookish man, knew nothing direct. His thoughts, his knowledge of Greece, I'd taken as real. I sat feeling foolish and listening to the phono most of the night. I had a good trip and finally went to bed. It was neat and I was happy and I used the time for personal insights, especially how my Muse had enjoyed the fun. (To him fun, to me—well, I guess fun. Oh yes.)

  Tessa: "Why Erasmus?"

  I said, "I am he."

  "In the past? In a former life?"

  "I am always Erasmus. I always will be. I was Dr. Jonson, once, later. But always Erasmus." (I could not explain it. About reincarnation I only said, "It takes place because it's easier." Tessa had asked, "Then there is a soul?")

  I also remembered having been a rat, in a cage. "Always I was ugly," I told her. "In Tears, the man waiting to be killed inside the wooden house in the dream at the end ... it's a rat. I saw my father kill an animal, come to kill it. The old man on horseback who says Taverner must die, he's my father." I thought about that for hours, how I loved and missed my father. I could see God, then, as a great old King Arthur, with Christian trappings. He could tell me when it was okay to break the law, which is what I needed: permission to do things that went against the queen's authority.

  Now, Claudia, obviously I used this event and the time in it conscientiously. During it I realized that in truth I saw the world in terms of pleasure denied me (sex and women) and over-reacted in terms of moral indignation, a moral tone to life ("overthrow the tyranny"). I saw, too, that esthetic awareness of music and art was my outlet my saving outlet; I really didn't see the world as a moralist did, but as an artist: I was capable of—and truly did—see aesthetically all the time; my real interest in women was as beautiful creatures the way cats are beautiful and Beethoven's music is. I saw one vast truth about the world: all views and all truths just scratch the surface; there are as many million truths and views and realities as there are freeze frames whenever a single cat walks across a single backyard—i.e., an infinity. And all beautiful. I saw that each different truth which I had held was beautiful, but that for each that I had held there were a billion more ... it was dazzling.

  Claudia, I will get to the point. Finally I went to bed and slept, feeling love for my wife and my cats and child, feeling the beauty of the world, and that all this had been a fun trip, a relief away from the responsibility which is killing me ... and then I had an insight, my own, based on all this. The "Benzene ring" to me in all this. I saw the orthogonal time axis, how it works; i.e., how we come to see time wrongly. What Joe Chip48 sees in the decay of objects back through the Platonic archetypes is correct, and the inference is correct, and it does show orthogonal time. That is what is valuable in Ubik, whether the Marxists know it or not. (I think they do, but on my trip I was so unparanoid it never occurred to me to wonder.) Joe Chip sees time properly. The orthogonal axis is the real one.

  I understood how we come to see time wrongly, or rather, we see it in its less real, secondary aspect or axis. Hence the perplexing opening line on [>] of this letter:

  Identity—continuity—recognition—selfsameness (the last refers back to identity but better expresses it, because we use the former about ourself, but the latter refers to things we encounter). This is real, CKB. I am sitting here at the crack of dawn writing you, and this is priceless; what it is, is:

  The two categories of a priori and empirical—they mislead us; they are Aristotle's "A or not A," a two-value system-view of the contents of man's mind. Throw it out.

  All things begin from outside (a posteriori). They enter the mind through the senses. (Note this doesn't conform to what I formerly held.)

  Our mind soon subtracts qualities (e.g., time, space, geometric shape like "square," number, etc.) and abstracts them from every and all incoming sense-objects. These we know not to be properties of any given sense object, and these are the a priori categories.

  We feel they are more real, but in fact they are just real about more things (more things are square than are brown, for instance).

  Now, here the error begins. We posit the one knowledge against the other, but the latter (a priori) is taken from the former. What is more important, though, is that all sense objects (we do Gestalt, into objects) go through an intermediate period as they pass from a posteriori (empirical) to a priori; totally abstracted of particuliarity. This is a process of necessary introjecting of each sense object for the purpose of identifying the sense-object when it is encountered again, because what must be kept cardinal here (and has been overlooked) is that each sense-object arrives within the purview of our percept system but then is gone. We must remember it because it may return. This requires that we identify it when it so does. (Hence memory and time, incorrect time are woven together.) We must recognize it in comparison to merely identifying it, which is to say, memory is to tie together sense object A via the introjected idea object which resembles it, to sense object B which is properly identified as the same sense object as A; both are the same, but a little space has come between. [...]

  Do you realize how many imagi we carry from the first week of our life on? How much of our empirical reality must be handled (like overnight—the whole world) this way? I assume that the "Claudia K. Bush" who sends me each letter is the selfsame one. These are automatic processes, but they lead us along a time-axis which is necessary to us for biological adaptive purposes; actually, we perceive this way because of its utility. In point of fact, growth (in the entelechy sense) doesn't take place along this axis, which is supplied only in the minds of living creatures.

  Item. The actual external time, or growth-change axis, is that which Joe Chip saw. Even if you, as a person, the child is not you, the child that was; she was one within the actual imprinting form of a little girl of that age. This is why we don't see as things are; there is a change; there is motion and growth; it isn't a static universe (as the mystics imagine). Time is real, but it goes orthogonally; what I have said here is why we see it at right angles to the actual causal axis or "real time" axis. Perception of time is at right angles to the time it perceives.

  Item. We've got to categorize (i.e., mentally function) this way; vide A Martian Odyssey by Stanley Weinbaum (Ballantine) in which the Martian bird classifies each store as being in a different category, like, there are no "birds," just bird one and bird two and bird three; it laughs when he speaks of "birds," calling them all by the same name. But think of the chaos—and I mean it—if upon each day arising we greeted the selfsame objects as if they were new (well, in Beckett plays, no, in an Ionesco play, the husband and wife don't recognize each other; see that one, I forget the title).

  Item. It is really true that billions of you exist, and billions of me exist—outside. But for utility, there must be (1) identifying
; (2) recognition; (3) creating of continuity and the concept of Identity, of perseverance (a key word in this) of Being. "Being" is a kaleidoscope. I've seen it. It's fun, but you can't add up your checkbook; worse, you can't tell if it's your checkbook; worse, you can't tell if it's a checkbook; worse, you can't tell if you exist as a continuing entity.

  Last night all this was set off (after I got loaded) by my going in to commune with the little wooden saint I own, which I'm sure I told you about. It was the swirl of colored vines running up his white vestment which told me I was having a trip: the color was so bright and the vines swirled so. But today I looked. And of course there are no vines. Just dots, unconnected, sort of tiny mandalas of color. Golly, the fucking color is there; the vines are not. I saw vines, and then learned that it was Erasmus.

  Tessa points out: "He's got a pun within a pun. 'Ir leg' could be like 'ir' meaning 'unreal' and 'leg' from the Latin 'in-lego,' or 'not gathered or brought together' (we changed 'in' to 'ir'). So 'ir leg' could be a pun on the ear-ass meaning, 'When you get to the bottom you will find that I haven't brought you together, you and Erasmus.'" While listening to the phono last night, I thought suddenly of the Wilhelm Muller poem "Das Irrlight," which means, "The False Light," which they meant to indicate, as a word, the flicker of the Aurora-like lights across the winter snow, which duped men and led them astray. "Das Irrlight" is one of my favorite German poems. "Will-o-the-Wisp" is the trans. I have here.