by Gwen Lee
LEE: Why don’t you keep a tape by your bed at night?
DICK: Well, I’d have to listen to all this claptrap is what I’d have to do which is even worse, ’cause to write it down—I write it all down and I just stick it away, you know, and never read it again. As I say, my problem arose when [I] picked up some of these things and started reading them over and they were too difficult for me to read over. I could invent them, but I couldn’t understand them after I’d invented them.
LEE: Now, this is a puzzle for you because your average reader is not going to be able—they’re going to, you know, take everything you say as the gospel truth, so—
DICK: Yeah, by the time it goes on paper it’s gotta be right. You see, I have to solve all these problems, you see. Well, OK, well, I’m—
LEE: For the reader’s satisfaction, or do you go for your own satisfaction first?
DICK: Yeah, I have to really be convinced. I studied Shannon. Shannon was the guy who developed the field of information theory. He was working for Bell Telephone, and he created a new field information theory.
(tape ends)
THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT
Part 2
January 15, 1982
LEE: OK, we’re ready to go here. So at this point would you like to discuss the new novel?
DICK: The unwritten one, you mean? Or the one that’s coming out in the spring?
LEE: Um … uh … either one. You know. Which one are you real excited about right now?
DICK: Uh—
LEE: You said you had a new outline since I was last—
DICK: Uh, yeah, right. Well, when I saw you last I had just started to get the idea for the new novel and it wasn’t really in a coherent form at all. Uh—but just within a short period of time it’s jelled quite a bit. And … uh … it—I saw my agent about it today. He said that, uh—I talked to him yesterday and I gave him some idea of it and I called him back today—and he said, “I got to thinking and I don’t think you can do it,” he said, “I don’t really think—” he said, “Are you sure you can do it?” Because what it would consist of would be, it would be from the viewpoint of a—a, uh, entity that was not human but from presumably another star system. Uh … and its view of us and our culture. That is, it would begin on another star system on a planet with a civilization quite different from ours … a civilization where there is no atmosphere such as we have, and as a result speech has never developed; they’re mute and they’re deaf. And as a result of the failure to develop, to utilize sound, they have no art that is predicated on sound.
Now, our art predicated on sound, of course, is music, and we take music for granted. Uh … but for them, since they do not employ sound, there is no analogue or correlate in their world for music. And what I want to do is, you know, the way we have, on our world, mystical visions of heaven, like at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and these visions generally are that heaven is light … the concept of light is always associated with the next world to us. In fact, uh, when I was doing the Bishop Archer novel, I started noticing that almost all the religions—it doesn’t really matter which one it is: it can be Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, it can be Sufism, it can be Judaism, it can be Christianity—continually you see the word “light” will appear in connection with the next world. For instance in the Fourth Gospel, you know, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” And John speaks of the light coming into the world and Qumran people use that dualism thing, light and dark, all the time.
Now, in this book, this planet, not having sound, utilizes color, uh, for language. Just as we use different audio frequencies, they use different color frequencies, you know, which are calibrated milli - microns by us, you know, so there are specific frequencies and so, for them, light is a utilitarian thing. Their world is one that employs vision and visual things entirely and no sound whatsoever. So, what I thought was, this is very interesting. Their normal world would be the way we envision the next world to be. So I thought: now what if I set the book on their planet and have a mystic of their species, that is, someone in their species and their civilization who is having mystical visions of this other world, only instead of having visions of light he has visions, he— they wouldn’t be “visions,” they would be some kind of, you know, experience, some kind of supernatural experience—of music, of sound. But they would have no word for this. They would have no concept of it, no word for anything. So it would be completely inexplicable experiences for him. And what he would be experiencing would be our world which—where sound is ubiquitous and music is the great art form developing out of sound. And I got to thinking: What if their world is our heaven and our world is their heaven? So for each civilization, the other one’s world is the way that they would view the next world, the afterlife, reward, heaven, paradiso.
So he’s having mystical experiences regarding sound the way human mystics have mystical experiences regarding, you know, light and vision, and so forth. And, then it finally culminates in one of them coming to our planet and discovering a planet, then, which is the quintessential summation of everything that all the religion teaches exists in the afterworld. It actually exists in this universe and is available through space travel; uh, but then the next problem is that these creatures are mute and they are deaf, and the problem arises is he finds—they find—the human civilization, you know, using sound and having developed music, but they can’t hear it because they are deaf.
’Course, now, see, that’s not all that great a problem. They can build transduction equipment—like right now for the blind a new device has been built, an experimental device that uses the phosphine activity in the eye, you know, optic neurons, you know, or like when somebody sets off a flashbulb in your face you’ll see an afterimage, you know, that’s the phosphines in the eyes. That actually is not a retinal image. That is, there are things in the eye called phosphines and they fire as a result of external light; they also fire as a result of pressure, like you can get phosphines to fire by rubbing your eyes. They will fire as a result of a nerve shock or they will fire as a result of radiation and they can even be made to fire on an individual basis. So now they’re working out ways in which blind people can literally see objects by, uh, technological devices that stimulate phosphine firings in their eyes so they actually see—they literally see; this is not a conversion of sight into another mode, it’s a conversion of one visual form into another. They don’t get as clear a picture, they get a very—they can see the outline of objects in the phosphine firings and it’s a great breakthrough. So I got to thinking what—what these creatures who are deaf and mute and have never had sound or music in their civilization could do is very easily—if they have the technology to come here, they would have the technology to build some kind of transduction equipment which would make these sounds audible to them. And I got to thinking, even if these sounds were audible to them, uh, music would be incomprehensible because music, really being absolutely abstract, really requires a kind of species bias toward the utilization of sound, which—which is lacking. They could hear it, though—
LEE: This mystic you’re speaking of, now, you’re talking— He’s supposed to be like the large guru who is leading a group of people on this planet.
DICK: Yeah.
LEE: Obviously has some following.
DICK: Yeah.
LEE: To keep going with this.
DICK: Yeah, in fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I hadn’t thought about that. Right. But he thinks he’s seeing the next world.
LEE: OK.
DICK: Like we, you know, our mystics think we’re seeing the next world.
LEE: And he’s possibly had the power to find this world.
DICK: Yes. They have the technology to send a spaceship here.
LEE: Oh, OK.
DICK: And he actually encounters what for them is the next world.
LEE: That’s quite a concept.
DICK: But, instead of a world of light as our next world— there’s a very beautiful poem, uh,
in the seventeenth-century poem that begins with, “They have all gone into the world of light,” meaning all his friends have died. Uh, “And I sit lingering here,” you know, and so on. So they have all gone into the world of sound, is what’s happened with this guy, and when people die they go into a world of sound. So he can—anyway, so they—
LEE: They are aware of the lack of sound.
DICK: Yes. I have to posit it somehow that, that in some way they know that through a gas, there can be a perturbation through a gas which will set up some kind of resonance at a given frequency that’s how they’d regard it, you see, they—they—would not have the idea of sound, they would have the idea of a wave form moving through a gas.
LEE: Like, we are not real clear about what—I am not real clear about the frequencies of color but I know it, exists.
DICK: Yeah, the visual spectrum is divided into millimicrons along what they call a Fraunhofer lines.
LEE: It’s the same idea.
DICK: Yeah.
LEE: They know it is there but they’re not really—
DICK: They’re fixed. Every—every color is at a given frequency, a number of millimicrons in the visual spectrum, you know—
LEE: I see.
DICK: —from ultraviolet to infrared. And it can be broken down into specific millimicrons. I mean you can divide the visual frequency into thousands and thousands of divisions, just as you can the audio frequencies. You know, we hear from approximately, uh, forty hertz up to about, well, eleven kilohertz 11,000 hertz. That’s about as far as most people hear. And you divide it up all the way through, you see. But, see, that’s not all we do with sound. We do a lot more beside just divide it up according to frequency. And their language is color. Color and patterns of color, which they transmit telepathically to each other, which is color utilized in patterns and in mathematical harmonies. So that, like, their annotation, their written annotation, looks like musical staves. I mean, it’s divided up according to frequency, which is a vertical axis—they have a horizontal axis and they have a rotational axis. And all these different colors, and very fine gradations of color, their vision is incredible compared to us. For instance, when he [their leader] comes to our planet he sees us as almost blind. He sees our—a study by him of our visual apparatus, you know, our optic system, our eyes and everything indicates that we can see but we see very badly. It’s what we think of moles, moles can see a little but they can’t see very much. And their analysis of the human species is: it is sighted—a sighted species, but their eyesight is very, very poor compared to theirs. That’s—that’s their only sense, really, without having any, you know, ability to hear—their visual powers are incredible. I mean, they can see variations in colors that we can’t see. You see, thousands of colors instead of maybe ten colors. They see thousands of colors. Like, for them, red—what we call red—for them would be hundreds of different colors. It’s what—Eskimos for instance have, uh, fifteen or twenty words for snow, each one defining slightly different condition of snow, you see.
LEE: They are just a different species of human type creature that has evolved in a different way of evolution.
DICK: Yeah, they’re somewhat humanoid. Yeah, they’ve kinda got one head and two arms and—and two legs. I mean, they’re not like, you know, a gelatinous blob. But they have—they are mute and they are deaf and they did not have an atmosphere. What they had was pockets. Each is in a self-contained atmosphere. So there’s no—there’s no collective atmosphere. Their planet had lost its collective atmosphere.
LEE: I think you went over this the last time, about how you came up with this concept. You were saying that, that the mathematic, musical, and color—
DICK: Color, right. Yeah.
LEE: Basis—
DICK: Where we go from mathematics to sound by Pythagoras, they went from mathematics to color. We have—the thing we have in common is mathematics. This is assumed that all species have a—have a—have a concept of mathematics, I mean if they’re evolved at all. Mathematics, number, quantity, is in all the laws that pertain to it, is universal.
OK now, but the thing is, even though they come here, they see us as virtually blind, basically. And they understand that we—we are causing perturbations in our gaseous membrane, which is our atmosphere, to occur, which we interpret as language, they know about that, they see our books, for example. They know exactly what we’re doing. And they can create, you know, technological transduction, so that our— our sound becomes visible to them and can be read in the form of, like, like an oscilloscope, you know, which is—that’s what an oscilloscope does. It renders sound into a visual wave pattern. They can do that, they can, we have—they can build one right away. And when you would talk to one of them, he would see it as a wave pattern. And he would be able to read it.
LEE: I think it’s marvelous the way you really know your characters. I mean, it seems as though you’re already very familiar with these people. And you—
DICK: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing that happened with the Bishop Timothy Archer novel, you know, was I fell in love with Angel Archer. And it destroyed me, like, to finish the book. Because she’s so smart and everything. Like I was telling you.
LEE: Seems as though you know these people real well.
DICK: Well, this is what my agent said. He said, how are you going to write about a creature on another planet with an entirely different apparatus, a sensory apparatus, who’s never heard anything in his life. In fact, I don’t even know of—you see, you got to realize, if you didn’t have ears, that you would not interpret a perturbation in an atmosphere as sound, because sound really refers to the—the membrane of the ear and, you know, the cochlea, you know, and all that stuff. That’s where sound occurs. Sound occurs in the ears. Sound does not occur in the atmosphere. It occurs essentially within the human being, and that’s Descartes’s great contribution to psychology and philosophy. Which is where that thing comes from where they say if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there, does it make a noise? And that—that joke question which comes up on the Johnny Carson show every once in a while didn’t exist before Descartes, which is, you know, the seventeenth century. Descartes was the person who formulated that; he said sound occurs in the human sensory apparatus. It doesn’t occur in the atmosphere. It occurs within the body.
LEE: That’s true. I hadn’t really thought about it.
DICK: Yeah. So they know that the atmosphere is perturbed, but they—that doesn’t give them any concept of sound. OK. Now, a transduction of music, they can read a score. We have already got a transduction of music, it’s called a score. We have annotation, you know, we write the music. Beethoven, you know, before they performed the symphony wrote the symphony down. So he can read the score. A completely deaf person can read the score. The point is, this gives him no idea of how it sounds.
I mean, uh, the last composer who was able to equally see music and hear music was Bach, who often wrote compositions on, like, three staves and there are no instruments that play on three staves. He just wrote them on three staves and read them visually. He’d look at the—he’d look at the score layer. And so that he played, it depended on how you wanted to play it—with an orchestra, a solo instrument, or a chamber group. You then broke the three staves up into however many staves, you know, depending on, well, it’s always two, it’s always treble and bass. Treble clef and bass clef. But however many instruments there were, they broke them up that way, you see, but the original manuscript would be, you know, three staves. Now, OK, they can transduce it, through some kind of electronic interface.
But the point I’m trying to get at is—is the conceptual thing. Music is a conceptual thing. Music is not just organized sound. It’s something more than organized sound. And I—I came across this when I was working on this proposed novel for Simon and Schuster, which they’ve paid me for, which I’ve got a due date on, as my agent pointed out today. I wanted to base my character on Beethoven. You know, Beethoven went deaf duri
ng the last part of his life, and he never heard his—his last period. I mean, he went deaf during the time he was writing the Pastoral Symphony. So really, everything beyond the—after the Pastoral Symphony, he never heard. Like he never heard the Ninth Symphony. And—and his finest music was written when he—when he was deaf. So he was able to write music while he’s completely deaf, and he never heard it. So Beethoven, a composer who writes quartets and sonatas and symphonies never heard any of them. And that kind of interested me. As a result of this his music became very abstract.
LEE: Uh-huh. Few people have said that since, either.
DICK: Yeah. It’s a very unusual, very unusual situation. OK, so they can get a transduction electronically. But they’re not going to be able to conceive of music, because it—music is a conceptual thing. And the first person who really studied the conceptional aspects of music was Schopenhauer. At which point Schopenhauer declared that music was the highest form of art, above all visual arts. Above architecture, painting, sculpture, everything. Because music was the most abstract. And he—he devoted years and years to studying how music was able to operate on the human being inasmuch as it contains no concepts. It’s purely abstract. Well, we know a lot more now because we know that the right hemisphere of the brain processes music. For instance, people who have suffered, uh, massive brain damage in the left hemisphere where the language centers are can still sing lyrics to songs when they can’t speak. Like, they—that I’m talking now, that would be wiped out, but they could go, you know, uh—
LEE: Oh, that’s interesting—
DICK: Yeah, they can still sing and—and you know, I guess they can if they—if they knew enough lyrics to enough songs they could just go on for the rest of their lives, you know, saying, you know—
