The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Page 18
The re-emergence of cyclic time would be the method of restoration. It is not logically evident that hyper or orthogonal time [OT] would of necessity be cyclic; at first I thought it was retrograde. However, it does differ from lineal time in that lineal time is only unidirectional (by definition). OT is two-way or many omnidirectional. Maybe you can hop on or into it wherever you choose. I am starting from the most extraordinary premise of all: that Roma c. 100 A.D. had just been here an instant ago, here in Fullerton 1974. Both, really, were present, one removed or the other superimposed. Or, one seen by my left brain, the other by the other. Two totally separate channels of empirical space-time information, a double exposure. Yes, very much like an accidental double exposure. I do feel that the antique images regressed—Rome to Hellenistic Greece to Attic Greece to Crete—which implies retrograde time. Maybe "cyclic" is the wrong word; maybe orthogonal time, a specific sector, is summoned through penetrating via the print-out back to the Form which incises: from cluster of phenomena to archetype. That is not from lineal time to any other time; it is from time to—departure and reentry? Again, Plotinus seems to grasp it best. That and the Christian "do this in anamnesis of me—" Do this and recollect; once more we are back there again at the timeless and eternal moment c. 46 A.D. We are really there now. Real time, genuine time, ceased after He left; after that it's been only process time: true "spinning your wheels" time. Only layer after layer of meaningless dust have accrued, which is to say, the substance, the essence, has not changed since Christ left our world. Not a day will have passed between when He left and when He returns. Perhaps He simply took me where He was going, where He is. I was—where? With Him. QED.
But if the subjugation of us, the Fall, is through the power of time, which means decay and death, then this abolishment of time, or lineal time, whatever, accomplishes what we yearn to see accomplished: time or lineal time was overcome, and all the accumulations of the centuries, the flux, the accidents, the phenomenal world, all faded out and it, that place and those events, faded into sight and I was totally caught up into them, both inside me and outside me: it was not a mere external spectacle, like a 3-D movie. I changed, too; to my deepest essence. I became a person appropriate to and commensurate with my reality. And it was not because I wished it; the first intimations were of the City of Cruel Iron, and I felt the fear natural to a society based on force and on a slave population—it was harsh and cruel beyond anything I've ever seen. No Arcady, that. Maybe the fruit with the seed inside is the best model; no time at all is involved in that. Fruit equals phenomenal world; seed equals the unchanging reality of the last days He was here. Is our changing world actually a sort of electron revolving in totally repetitious cycles around a nucleus, and that nucleus is the Crucifixion and the Resurrection? The mass of a body creates a warpage in space, so that a straight line is curved; thus planets' paths are warped into near circles (ellipses) around and around; that if they could think would imagine (as Spinoza would say) that they are traveling always in straight lines—but we can see otherwise; an invisible force keeps that straight line—makes that straight line into an endless repeating circle. Ah! Our linear time is exactly an analogy of the straight line of a small body near a dense star; we, as part of Earth, moving through time as the axis, do not realize that our time is being warped perpetually, back onto itself in a great circle, a vast cycle which will one day to our surprise, like an early sailor who sailed west across our oceans and eventually, incredibly, found himself back where he began—circumnavigated our round world which he did not understand was round ... it looked and felt flat; the universe looks and feels as if it extends analogously; Einstein showed us that space is curved through the force we call gravity; so time, unrealized by us, undetected by any of our earth-bound instruments, carries us inexorably in a sweep which we will not recognize (anamnesis!) until we actually see a familiar landmark. Suddenly there it will be: ahead of us in time will be something which we know from our historic record we left behind us in time. And this follows logically, since time and space are a nexus-continuum, cannot be separated. Thus orthogonal time: lineal in the sense that all objects move in a straight line through space, too; cyclic, if there is enough of what equals gravity in respect to time, whatever that force would be; analog of mass. As mass affects space, warps it, curves it, bends it—what would warp, curve, bend time, to bring it back? Equal to our sun, our nucleus: that moment Urbs Roma c. 45 A.D. We will call it the Second Coming; i.e., the Second Time around for us: and suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, like a thief in the night,53 when we least anticipate it. We will be back. For me, in 3-74 I was back. But I'm always pre-cog, a little. Do you think soon? And then the Perfect Kingdom, beyond that: as our old myths from every culture recall with such yearning: to go home again. To be back once more: The Day of Restoration of all things, through God. [...]
I believe I saw the Platonic Idea Forms, and there were many of them, and he was right; what we see here are copies, not the real actual source-thing. But they are active and alive. They are not static; they pulse with energy and life (cf. Bergson). It seemed to me, as I look back, that if anything what I saw was more change, more motion, faster, that the flash-cutting rate—but without that fast rate, recurrence. Recurrence, the eternal verities, the Forms, are within, an aspect of, the flux, and the more flux the more the Forms come into view. Both motion and stasis are illusion and real; both. If we think of an entelechy or a bunch of them, there would be change, growth, until completion; then—frozen, forever. These terms just don't stand for anything; they're just words. What I saw was not the static or unchanging versus change, but an incredibly live and potent total organism linked together everywhere, with nothing excluded from it, controlling through an intricate system everything which was, is and will be simultaneously, as Avicenna54 said. [...]
In truth, in very truth, the prophet, the authentic one, did not see events coming ahead in time; he saw into the heart, the true Being of the reality, saw into depth, not time. He writes about a memory of things which in fact all living men experienced, but none but he remember; that space-time matrix, when replaced with the new one, was accompanied by an analog change in their memories. They all had just lived through the events he described. The prophecies in the Bible describe the far past, the various prophets' pasts. Those events will never come; those prophets for some reason, God knows why, remembered how it was before the scenery got whisked away and new scenery whisked in place, and as fast as possible described their visions. God moves through time in retrograde from us; from completion back. We are not moving toward what the prophets (e.g., "Book of Revelation") contains; if anything, that was erased and recorded over and left behind. Still, those written documents of "prophetic visions" are priceless because they give us a fantastically valuable clue to the nature of reality, which is that no space-time matrix is real; it is an idea which God tries out and then abandons if necessary. The visions are the "also-rans," not predictions of the eventual winners. God decided against them, after trying them out. And synchronized our memories to go with the alterations.
I think God trusted these special men, these prophets; He let them remember or see, whatever—there was purpose in this, socially speaking, because they could with great sincerity forever tell their peoples of the power of God. Also, it was a sort of mercy to those particular men, a genetic kindness to leave these memory traces, because those men knew, as no other men could or would ever know, that the apparent substantiality of their world was an illusion, that God and only God existed, and He could dissolve their world and them at any moment. He allowed these prophets (and probably the ones we know of are only a tiny fraction of the total) to actually perceive in all respects that this is an interval period for us, probably a time of trial or probation, of testing, that the goals and awards and pains and striving and goods and gains of this world are not merely temporary ("You can't take it with you") but that reality lies beyond, that the grave is indeed the furrow in which the grains of w
heat are sown to grow and blossom into new collective life again later of another kind entirely—God showed them that indeed this is a play, a stage, a theater, that He lives and loves and is always with us. [...]
Somewhere in the libretto of Parsifal, Wagner suggests that the great holy magic which God casts onto the world is a protective veil of enchantment to shield humble, frail and timid very mild lives, so that we, being unable to discern them, won't hurt them; He creates the dokos, the veil, as an extending of His protection over them, for they have no other. Only we, the big crude cruel powerful strong hurtful creatures are visible. The veil is not to deceive us per se, but we must be deceived so that the little ones may live unseen, "untroubled by men, amidst the shadowy green/The little things of the forest live unseen" (The Bacchae).
Each living thing feels impelled to move (to develop or change or grow) but can't locate the source of that urge. From what I saw and understood from 3-74 on, there is a total Plan (the Logos) which superimposes as a vast static—complete—blueprint pattern over a space-time continuum universe, the one we experience empirically: the one our senses tell us about. The superimposition of the Logos-Plan pattern causes all material reality, this entire space-time universe, to experience a certain stress to be other than it is, a certain urging to become. This abolishes any static quality within the space-time universe; it is compelled to grow by a necessity of its own nature (v. Spinoza), which is the will of God or the thinking of God as He conceives the plan. (For Him to conceive it is for this stress to be placed on everything in space-time without lapse; it follows that all energies or forces or dynamic fields are manifestations to us of His mind at work, and we are becoming aware that rather than a universe of matter in motion this is a universe of interacting far-ranging unified fields; that totality of the fields is probably His Mind, since I think Him to be immanent in universe, underlying it rather than above or outside it.) God is not Time; God generates or urges all things into development that the plan completes itself in continual creation. All we know is that things happen. More accurately, God is the urging-forward force within all things, and all things (if "things" can be spoken of at all) are alive. The ontological matrix is a way in which His urging or thinking is manifested; so in that respect I think it's not time which moves forward, carrying us with it like a great tide, but that we are driven forward all of us together, animate and inanimate.* [...]
If there is a universe of anti-matter there may be a universe of anti-time; which would be retrograde time, or rather, elements moving retrograde to the matter—ourselves—which move forward in time. Thus time symmetry would be achieved this way. I saw this retrograde entity in late 3-74. Normally we see it blended with forward moving elements such as ourselves. At the height of my "mystic" experience, which is to say, my extremely heightened perception of reality, I saw my environment decline in intensity; whereas at the same time I felt an inner self, my entelechy I suppose (I didn't have the concept then), grow dynamically; the balance shifted more and more from outer to inner, which could be regarded as psychologically withdrawing my projections from external reality and regaining them and their energy within my own total self. At the peak of this I experienced myself as very real and moving through virtually nonexisting things which had become so vitiated and dim that I supposed—and maybe accurately, although it was so astonishing that I drew back from this implication—that all non-living objects around me literally drew their lives, their existences, from me and from other living entities. We animated them, yes, but animated what? What is meant by "them" when this animating energy is withdrawn? Mere signaling systems to inform me of sequential whens: a series of signals, in specific order, arranged in order to release changes in me. Time, properly understood, is merely an awareness of the procession of these little, weak cueing signs, their advance as we encounter them; but they do not move; they are pattern-arranged and we ad vance forward, up the manifold, from one to the next and the next. There is really nothing in them but minimal—economic—transfer of information that one particular now has replaced the now (or prior signal) before it. We advance from signal to signal. The signals are unmoving, totally inert. We are driven inexorably; none of us can halt himself in that motion from signal to signal, since each one of the signals carries with it transfer-information to last until the next: each hands us over, as it were, when its "now" has expired. There is no way you or I can refuse to receive the next signal, to keep from encountering it, and it is this inexorable but invisible, metaphysical but real momentum which we call Time. It's the same as destiny; it is the end or completion of our entelechy reaching back retrogradewise, through the system of signals and dragging each of us bodily forward to meet that end, that completion. [...]
This unitary organism which we call reality or the universe is most itself, most there, most alive, at completion, and since there is no time or time-force then it's there now drawing us toward it; we move, it stands still. Being more than the sum of all its parts, how can any one or even all of its parts resist it? How can the totality, the absolute pattern, be weaker or smaller than anything else? It would be like saying that before being assembled, the parts which go to make up a kit are somehow more effective that way, scattered about the living room rug, unconnected and unrelated to each other, not functioning at all, except in terms of the template or diagram which the workman is pondering, which accompanied them. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," and surely the whole exerts a greater influence on those parts than they do mutually on one another or on it, or each on itself. This must be why Parmenides understood that no matter how many "parts" he saw, how much diversity and change his senses reported, reality had to consist of a One, which was Unchanging. His sense saw those parts coming together to form that One, but the One, he knew a priori and by the most rigorous reasoning, must already be. It did not lie ahead along a time-line somewhere in the future; it ontologically lay beyond or behind or deeper within the many, now and forever. The pressure of time driving all the pieces to come together into the complete pattern is a sort of voice calling to them, a summoning to return; everything has already been there, since this lay outside time; anamnesis was a memory not of the past, of former time, but of ontology outside of time, of already-complete-then-now-later. A memory of all time unified; this memory stretched in all directions in time, and finally into none: into Being itself: into the heart which is alive. Empedocles supposed it to have been in the past because he remembered it; but if time is cyclic he remembered the future just as well, logically speaking.
Empedocles didn't actually remember having once been divine; he remembered that he was divine, would be divine. Here, verb forms mislead us; this is mere semantics. To remember immortality is to remember outside of time. "Long ago I lived forever. I knew everything and could not die, and I was perfection itself. But somehow something went wrong, I forgot, I'm down here." Anamnesis could be said to be memory of the future restored—even memory of the present.
He remembered what he was; he remembers what he is; he remembers what he will be. This recollection has nothing to do with the continuum of space-time. Memory is not a function of time, but of comprehension. Memory is to know; forgetfulness is to fail to know (cf. Plato).
"I remember" equals "I realize" or "I understand."
Also, "I remember" (anamnesis) equals "I become" (Being). Which equals "I am changed." (v. Paul: "Look! I tell you a sacred secret. We shall not all fall asleep [i.e., lie fallow in the idios kosmos, in ignorance]; but we shall all be changed, in an instant," etc.55)
Metamorphosis.
Letter to Phyllis Boucher, March 2, 1975
[5:12]
Dear Phyllis,
I have long thought about you, wondering how you are, and my having just now written the short enclosed piece, which is about Tony, gives me pretext to write you as well as the opportunity to extend this copy of the piece so that you might read it. My love and memory of Tony are combined in this, although I must admit in a rather
odd way; the reason is that this was commissioned by the Sufi magazine The Real World, which is a very good magazine. It is put out by Tony Hiss, who writes the "Talk of the Town" in the New Yorker, and boasts such people as Robert Ornstein in its staff; it is what they call (ouch) a class magazine. The paper is high quality, too.
I hope that you like this piece (they may not). They just accepted a poem by my wife Tessa, and then told me that they'd like to be able to get both of us together in an issue. So the heat is on me to Come Through (I've been working since seven-thirty A.M.). [...]
With deep personal regards,
Philip K. Dick
Letter to Tony Hiss, March 2, 1975
Dear Tony,
Enclosed is the piece I've been working my ass off for The Real World. I'm glad you liked Tessa's poem, and that as you say you're going to pub lish it in the next issue, but that sort of puts pressure on me to come through—I've been on this piece like as of today 7:30 A.M. at the typewriter. You asked for "short." What is short? I kept it short, I hope short enough. I offer you two possibilities if you wish to cut it:
(1) Just make cuts where you can or wish. I trust you, but I'll weep genuine tears because I kept it terse anyhow as it is.
(2) Okay—on my MS [>]: you could end the piece after line 10. (Final printed sentence: "That was my friend.") But it's a different piece this way, with the Day of Wrath scene missing; much limiteder, more milder.
I proofed like mad on this, as you'll see, to cut down on your work. An author to editor grammar query; you'll note. [...]