Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  We are rewarded best by bracketing the various interpretations, the Exegesis per se, and looking at Dick’s project as a making of something, a creation of meaningful narratives to be read by other people, a reaching out. The term “cry for help” may sound a bit extreme, but it is not. It was during this black period of his life, most specifically in February 1976, when Tessa left him and took their son, that he attempted suicide via drug overdose, slitting his wrists, and carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage, all at the same time. Fortunately, all three plans failed. Setting aside the metaphysics and cosmology, what was Dick trying to say in his writing during this period—to Claudia, to Tessa, to his readers, and to posterity? And what whispered message was he straining to hear from his own precognitive unconscious? Arguably, he wanted to hear the same thing Morgan Robertson managed to hear, loud and clear, when news of the Titani c’s fatal collision with an iceberg splashed across the front page of The New York Times on April 15, 1912.

  Both in his Exegesis and in his private correspondence with friends like Claudia, Dick flickered between two basic stances on his experience: the secret persistence of the ancient world underneath the veneer of mid-1970s Orange County, and the idea that he was haunting himself from his own future. These are not incompatible ideas in the sense that they both point to our old friend Mister Block Universe, where the past still exists and the future already exists—and by implication, nothing is subject to alteration . Kyle Arnold attributes Dick’s living in a science-fictional world of endlessly shifting possibilities and uncertainty to his origin story and the death of Jane. But if his origin story propelled him to perpetually fabulate new possibilities for himself and for humanity, it was counteracted by his frequent precognitive experiences, which could have provided him with a needed sense of im possibility, a sense that there was no contingency, that history couldn’t just as easily have turned out differently, but that events are inscribed like an indelible record groove in the fabric of time and space. This, I believe, is the real latent meaning, the “unconscious” so to speak, of Phil Dick, the latent meaning that is obscured by the incessantly “shifting realities” for which he is so famous.

  In the deterministic block universe that Dick so often indexed in his Exegesis , it is not his fault that he got all the milk and that helpless little Jane perished, that he became addicted to speed and ruined five marriages, or that he was stuck in literature’s “trash stratum” while so many of his less brilliant, less talented, less original peers prospered. The constant slipping and sliding reality and uncertainty that so characterizes Dick’s fictional and interpersonal universe was not the reality he wanted; it was the one he wanted to escape. He wanted the unfreedom and thus absolution brought by radical determinism. In the block universe, none of the unfolding train wreck of Phil Dick’s life was his fault, and in the eternal record groove of history, like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence , those tragedies and disasters would keep being replayed and repeated, no matter what. In other words, his escalating precognitive experiences across the 1970s, as well as his growing sense (or true awareness) during this time that his works in the previous decade had been precognitive, may have secured from the universe exactly what Morgan Robertson’s prophecies did—a sense that “it is out of my hands.”

  It is necessary to add: This need of his, this bias, doesn’t lessen the possible truth or accuracy of his intuition about reality.

  “Shy and Gentle Creatures”

  Dick’s precognitive experiences may have also secured a sense of his own survival. Interestingly, some of his dreams in the aftermath of his “2-3-74” experience pointed distinctly toward things he would read or be exposed to in 1977 or later—creating a kind of bridge across the darkest year of his life, 1975 and early 1976, when the spirit had abandoned him and during which he made the aforementioned suicide attempt.

  In a letter to Claudia on December 9, 1974, Dick records a dream about being the “other world” associated with his “2-3-74” visions and being introduced to a race of “lovely creatures which man hadn’t yet destroyed, very shy and gentle creatures” 39 and being shown a piece of futuristic technology. “At one point in the dream I was reaching to take a plate on which was a piece of cake, but a small child, in a position of authority, told me firmly, ‘No, that belongs to Mrs. Fields.’” After awakening, Dick recalls wondering who Mrs. Fields was, and then “remembering” that she was a woman who had been abducted by a UFO with her husband one night in the early 1960s on a remote road and shown a star chart corresponding to Zeta Reticuli. Dick is wrong here: The woman’s surname was Hill (Betty Hill), not Fields. Mrs. Fields in fact was the name of a popular, widely advertised brand of cookies and brownies—a company that was not founded until a little over two years after this dream, in 1977. That his dream cake belongs to Mrs. Fields is certainly an interesting coincidence (skeptics will certainly call it that) if it is not a precognitive and typically “PhilDickian” conflation of the sublime and the “trash stratum” of consumer culture. But his misassociation of this cake with UFOs becomes odder, given another detail: “In my dream, the cake was all grooved, as if worked over by a fork…” He felt that the cake was really a kind of relief map, possibly of Florida.

  The same year Mrs. Fields began advertising her line of popular sweets, Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters featured a famous scene in which the main character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus), trying to capture an obsessive dream vision implanted by a UFO encounter on a lonely rural road (like Betty Hill’s experience with her husband Barney), piles mashed potatoes on his dinner plate and works them over with a fork to create grooves, and then does the same with a pile of mud in his living room—creating a grooved sculpture of what he will later learn represents Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It is literally a kind of map in relief. (Neary then desperately attempts to reach this location despite authorities’ attempts to turn back civilians.) The film culminates with a spectacular UFO landing, where Neary is introduced to a race of beautiful, childlike, graceful creatures and is lastly taken away in their spaceship, not unlike what Dick encountered earlier in his dream. 40

  Was Dick’s reading, moviegoing, and TV viewing (i.e., ads for cookies and brownies) in 1977 refluxing a little over two years into his past to appear in a dream he would excitedly share with his pen muse during his most intensely visionary-slash-psychotic period? There is no proof of anything here, yet this single dream from late 1974 seems like a constellation of ideas and images Dick would almost certainly have encountered and been excited by in 1977, specifically during a time of his life when, according to Tessa, he had become actively interested in the UFO phenomenon. 41 I have suggested elsewhere that in 1974 Dick also seems to have uncannily precognized a 1975 book by ufologist Jacques Vallee describing UFOs as a “control system,” which Dick probably read specifically during that bout of ufological interest in 1977. 42 This precognitive encounter with Vallee may have given Dick the name for his famous extraterrestrial control system, VALIS , which became the title of his autobiographical novel about his mystical experiences. 43

  Like Freud’s Irma dream, Dick’s December 9, 1974, dream gives every sense of representing interests and concerns from another, fairly specific point in his life—in this case, a happier point, over two years later. According to the fractal dream-logic we have seen before, the dream may have even represented its own precognitive nature. The piece of technology he had been shown by the “shy and gentle creatures” was something in or from the future that he was meant to bring back to the past. 44 Precognitive dreams often contain some “time gimmick” representing time travel, clocks, rearview mirrors, or the act of looking back retrospectively (see the Postscript for an example of my own). Was Dick’s renewed interest in life in the late 1970s, including UFO topics, imbued with a relief at having survived a particularly dark period, and was this what rippled back in his “brain line” as prophetic jouissance to form a dream in late 1974?

  Dick continued to correspond with Claud
ia Bush, although less frequently, for the rest of his life. It was in another letter to her dated February 25, 1975, a couple months after the “shy and gentle creatures” dream, that Dick reported possibly the most striking of his prophetic visions, although again he had no way of knowing it was prophetic. He describes trying to summon back the spirit that had left him, when he saw the following: “hypnagogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not a still: a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch.” 45 This inert figure was, Dick said, clothed in the skin of a fawn, like some ancient Greek or Roman sacrifice. Apart from the detail of the fawn skin, “in a living room between the coffee table and the couch” precisely describes how his own unconscious body was found after the first of the strokes in 1982 that ultimately killed him, at age 53. 46

  Phil logocentrism—Dick and the Future of Prophecy

  Because most of us mortals cannot accept or even imagine that we are ever seeing or feeling the future, we contort all our anomalous experiences to fit some version of commonsense linear causality. Dick, almost alone among writers, at least in his most lucid and insightful moments, saw through culture’s linear-causal mystifications, the no-saying of our cultural fathers. Just as he partly thought that ancient Rome was still alive behind the cheap-stage-set veneer of 20th century Orange County, another part of him just as compellingly thought he was haunting himself from the future. Again, he needed to believe in the Minkowski block universe, to forgive himself for Jane’s death and the rest.

  Jeffrey Kripal, in his study Mutants and Mystics , suggests that the connection between psychical phenomena and imaginative writing and art is a particularly close one 47 —although which came first, a career in imaginative literature or the tendency to have science-fictional experiences, may be impossible to specify. I argue that all creative people are “psychic”—that some ability to hear and record the faint resonating string of one’s prophetic jouissance as it extends through the glass block is what creativity is . Writers being avid readers, they are constantly drawing from ideas latent in their libraries and other media. Those in more realistic genres (e.g., Norman Mailer) may less commonly notice their time-looping relation to culture because their reading experiences may not ordinarily be exotic enough to serve as tracers.

  Resonances between future upheavals and present situations manifested in dreams and creative flow states may even be responsible for the very shape of culture, a constant cycling between precognition and confirmation. Kripal has argued that science fiction and comic books should be thought of as just our culture’s mode of expressing the same real, baffling, and socially distrusted dimension of human experience that in past ages produced the great spiritual classics of the world’s religions. 48 He notes that the history of religions is really “a long series of science fiction movies.” 49 It is no accident that the science fiction genre has been marginalized and rejected by most cultural gatekeepers for most of its history. As Dick’s alter-ego Horselover Fat remarks in VALIS , symbols of divinity initially appear in our world in the easily overlooked “trash stratum.” Science fiction is that trash stratum, and yet its power to shape society, in the long run, may be overwhelming. Indeed, Phil Dick may occupy a unique, special place at the juncture between the linear-causal classical worldview and the precognition-accepting landscape of the future. I think to understand his special role, we cannot shy away from considering the “accident” of his name. Remember, in psychoanalysis, there are no accidents.

  In the brain’s associative search system, puns—not only verbal but also visual, aural, tactile, etc.—are probably the most characteristic form of coincidence, forming the nuclei not only of our memories but also of attractor phenomena in the symptom space of precognition. (In dynamical systems theory, an attractor is a set of values toward which a chaotic system tends to evolve; attractors are also central to the retrocausal “syntropy” theory of Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vannini as future states exerting a backward pull on living systems in the present. 50 ) Dreams are practically built from verbal as well sensory puns—they are the real “bricks” of our dreams, and you might even call them the stem cells of synchronicity. But the individual unconscious is not the Jungian world of noble and poetic archetypes; it is a cringingly personal, Freudian world of low, schoolyard humor and wordplay. In such a world, there’s an awful lot in a name, especially one as suggestive as Dick’s. The associative networks in the brains of readers, and himself, will have made a special place for him because his name happens to be that of the Phallus. 51 I can’t help but feel that this is an important part of the Dick story, one that delicacy prevents most biographers and critics from touching.

  In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Phallus does not simply denote the male member; rather it is an emblem of the possibility of castration, of being itself under the sign of erasure, da as contrasted with fort. It is the spool that young Ernst repetitively tossed from his crib to experience the jouissance of his own presence. The constantly flickering Phallus is also a symbol of the impossible trauma of sexual difference (i.e., what does it mean, what did I do wrong [or right], that I am only a _____ [boy/girl]?). It also “stands for” (pun maybe intended) the father’s name as traditional anchor in the Symbolic order. Consequently, it is a virtual/absent emblem of the Real, the black hole around which that order revolves, producing in its vicinity the same time distortions that black holes in space can generate.

  For Phil, his dead twin Jane, a “dead Dick,” was an all-too-real embodiment of all the traumas, concrete and abstract, that are contained in this one symbol indicated by his surname. And his given name would have been a constant reminder of Jane’s emptiness, the fact that he got his fill of their mother’s milk, leaving Jane to starve. All these facts, these stupidly real puns, may have been like nails in his flesh, constant reminders of his origin myth, and his guilt. As a living and dying pun, Dick was a martyr to his own name.

  Again, life in America, and on Earth, becomes more PhilDickian by the year; and every year there is some new biography, some new account of Dick’s mysticism or his madness or just his quirks, and Hollywood continues to mine his books and stories for film—and more recently, TV—ideas. Could it be that history and culture converge more and more on Dick’s writings, increasing their prophecy quotient, precisely because of the associative attracting power of that name? In other words, while it may be Dick’s authentic precognitive abilities that contributed to his fame, it may be his name that made him so prophetic, in a kind of four-D feedback loop.

  Only time will tell what spiritual use might be made of the Dick myth by future generations, or what influence his writings and life may yet have on the religious landscape of America. The literary critic Harold Bloom argued that the “American religion” is essentially Gnostic, having much in common with the numerous heresies Rome sought to extinguish in the first few centuries AD. 52 It is a worship of the innermost spiritual self, the uncreated spark seeking to free itself from the bleak material world in which an evil or stupid demiurge had long ago imprisoned it. Dick came to believe it was his life’s mission to “restore Gnostic gnosis to the world in a trashy form,” 53 and indeed, readers of his fiction and especially his Exegesis may for the first time find their own hitherto implicit sci-fi Gnosticism articulated more clearly and directly than they have ever seen. 54 Despite or because of its painful origins, the Exegesis is probably one of the greatest, and certainly one of the weirdest, spiritual works of the 20th century. For one thing, as a spiritual text it uniquely satisfies our postmodern love of banality—Dick’s life fully embodied what might be called the banality of the spiritual . He was a visionary and a mystic, but also an ordinary, lonely, suffering guy in a cheap apartment with a crappy rug, trying unsuccessfully to date his college student neighbors. And in the end, he was slain not by the dark Gnostic forces of the Black Iron Prison or the conspiracies he so believed in and feared, but by high blood pressure.


  Musings about sparking a new religion may have been at the back of Dick’s mind when he was writing his Exegesis . Various writers have drawn comparisons between Dick’s mystical revelations and the Gnostic visions of L. Ron Hubbard. 55 Arnold points out that Dick would have been all too aware (and envious) of Hubbard’s weird success at turning science fiction into a religion with devoted followers. Dick’s mother had been a reader of Hubbard’s Dianetics , and living in California Dick would have encountered Church of Scientology members frequently. Fortunately, Dick lacked the money sense and guile to do much in the way of deliberate religion-founding. And his unreliability as a narrator notwithstanding, he was basically an honest chronicler of his experiences—he mainly wanted to understand them, not convince people of any single metaphysical picture that could provide the focus for a new belief system. Nothing in Dick’s writings suggests the easy answers that followers of new religious sects are often looking for.

  But it is not hard to imagine some future society, maybe in a thousand years, after a nuclear holocaust perhaps, where the Bible has acquired a further testament, the Exegesis , and the iconography of Christ on the Cross has been replaced by some stylized representation of the 53-year-old Phil Dick sprawled unconscious on the crappy rug, next to his coffee table. In that future religion, God will be VALIS (or Ubik), a face and a voice—perhaps our own—speaking to us from our own future.

  14

  The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past

  With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner … widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in … at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously “Can you see anything?”, it was all I could do to get out the words “Yes, wonderful things”.