by Gwen Lee
LEE: Singing!
DICK: “Though the Philistines may jostle/I—I shall rank as an apostle/in the high aesthetic clime (sic).”
As long as—I guess Gilbert and Sullivan fall halfway between music and speech, so, ah, it’d be harder to know what happened to you. But, OK now, music, Schopenhauer said, is the—is the purest abstract art. I mean, it’s absolutely abstract. It’s not relatively abstract. It’s absolutely abstract. And there is no real theory as to how music is able to convey things. It’s interesting that people who like, uh, popular music in general, you know, who’d be listening to, uh, stuff like, you know, disco music and so forth—where that is the kind of stuff that turns them on—when they go to the movies, they hear a very sophisticated score without even being conscious often that they are hearing a very sophisticated score. That score is—is attached to the visual image, you know, the musical score is—is linked to it and is able to convey various emotions, moods, situations, and so forth, in an abstract way. And we don’t really know how that’s done, except, you know, they say research on the brain indicates the right hemisphere is able somehow to process this intelligibly. So now, these people who have never use sound, there is really no way they are—this is the whole point of my book—is that even when they are able to see a musical score, and even when they can transduce it electronically into something, they still are unable to grasp what’s going on. Except when they experience a religious breakthrough. And for them, it’s a mystical experience, which is completely incomprehensible.
Uh, imagine, for instance, now, you’re a creature on this planet which uses color for language—does not use words, has no sound, has never heard sound, knows nothing of its existence—having a religious experience, and hearing music. What is he going to tell the people around him he’s—well, he can’t even say he’s “heard” it because, see, even the word “heard”—there is no—there is no equivalent word in their vocabulary for “heard.” He’s experienced something for which there simply is no way he can communicate. Well, the thing is, they find their way to our planet and they find a whole planet of people who are living in what for them is a kind of mystical paradise, you see.
LEE: Oh—
DICK: Go ahead.
LEE: I was just going to ask, how does he manage to do this?
DICK: To—?
LEE: The mystic, the mystic, you know, how does he manage to bring this in a different technology and manage to find someplace that does have sound?
DICK: Oh, that’s just a plot problem. What I—What I—
LEE: Oh, you’re not that far along yet. I’m sorry.
DICK: No, no. What you do is you start out with the, uh, the exploratory, the exploratory ship. You start with that.
LEE: Uh-huh.
DICK: The ship is already on it’s way. And, uh, they’re saying, uh, we’re headed for a nine-planet, you know, system. Pretty soon we realize that it’s ours, you know. A class whatever—
LEE: So he’s having telepathic visions that are—
DICK: He’s having mystical visions, of—of the world that the ship is on it’s way to.
LEE: Right. But more of a—some precognition, maybe?
DICK: Yeah, well, I used that once in a book already.
LEE: Oh.
DICK: I’ll—I’ll work it over so I can get a different—I’ll gussy it all up so nobody will notice I’ve used it before. So, what I’m trying to get to in this finally is that they—to them we are incredibly spiritual people. Because to them our planet is like some incredible holy shrine. Because their mysticism, and their—their theology and their religion is connected with music. Although they don’t even know the word. They don’t have the word for sound, they don’t have the word for music. So they come—
LEE: So this is going to be a total theology thing for these people, this, this, uh—
DICK: Yes.
LEE: If he’s gonna create, I mean, quite a stir there.
DICK: Yeah, this is—this is a theology of a— of another planet, a race completely different—
LEE: Unbelievable.
DICK: Yeah. And—I have to work from the standpoint of this creature. First of all, who’s using color for language, and for whom, uh, an experience of the world—like that poem, “They have all gone into the world of light,” in that seventeenth-century metaphysical poem, meaning that they have all gone into the world of sound. OK. Well, now they actually encounter a planet where there is sound, and not only is there sound, there is music. Well, to them, this would be a sacred planet. This would be— this would be like—like finding God. The only problem is, they can’t experience it. Except one way. There is only one way it can be done. And this goes back to something I think I mentioned to you before. I mentioned—did I mention biochips?
LEE: Yes.
DICK: OK. That’s how it could be experienced. They would have to enter a symbiotic relationship with a human being. There’s no way an electronic technological interface would work, because music is conceptual. And the electric interface would only give them the bare bones. And the—and the proof of this is the following: Asians, who have never heard a full symphony orchestra, whose experience with music has been limited to, say, a few instruments, maybe five instruments at the most. If they’re taken into a symphony hall, to hear a Beethoven symphony, will literally suffer unbearably, and will run from the hall to hear 150 instruments playing simultaneously. Their brains cannot correlate 150 instruments. It can’t be done. They—what they hear in an incredible cacophony, this mass of inchoate, you know, clanging and crashing, you know, just like—it’s painful, and— and it has no shape.
LEE: I suppose that’s why Oriental music for us is so strange.
DICK: Yeah, like the No plays in Japan. I’m always, you know, seeing it on television. You know, the No drama, and their banging the gong, you know, the cymbals and the gong. I can’t figure out what the hell it means, what that stuff is.
LEE: Some of the Chinese music seems real strange.
DICK: And that’s right here on the same planet. Now imagine these people—
OK, but if they can patch into a human brain, in a symbiotic relationship, then they can use the human brain to conceptualize the music. You can see the music.
LEE: These biochips, are they a technological development of earth, or of these—
DICK: Oh, of the—everybody’s—everybody will have them, I mean, they’re—they’re—we’ve got them now, here in the United States, so any civilization that can build a rocket ship that’ll fly to earth, can—they’ve got biochips.
LEE: That’s going to be a—
DICK: That’s another technical device, you casually have one character say to the other, “Where did you put the biochips?” “I put them back in the cupboard where they belong.” That’s all you need to say.
LEE: Oh, I see. OK.
DICK: That’s how it’s done. See, it’s amazing how easy it is to write if you know how—if you know what you’re doing. I mean, it’s only hard if you don’t know what you’re—
LEE: How have you managed to assimilate all this information? I mean, you seem, you seem to be so up on everything. You just—do you spend a whole lot of time reading up on things?
DICK: Oh, somebody loaned me an article. (laughs) A friend of mine who is a physicist.
LEE: Over talking to you, you know, the last two tapes, and things and in the past—I mean, you seem to accumulate an incredible amount of information and you restore it well, you recall it very well. I’m just curious about how anybody does that.
DICK: Well, I have developed a hell of a memory. I really have—I’ve developed a hell of a memory. I mean, from doing all the research I’ve done. My memory’s real good. And, uh, I’m drawing on a vast reservoir of—of memory. I mean, it isn’t that I know a lot, it’s that I remember so much. I’ve learned pretty much, uh, to retain, you know, a large amount of what I take in.
LEE: I see. So, but, how many, like, would you say you donate so many hours a day to res
earch and reading? Keeping up on things, or is it more, is it a random sort of thing? Do you subscribe to certain periodicals and things in order to keep up on things?
DICK: My reading consists almost entirely of reference books—of nonfiction—I read very little fiction. In fact, I think you can say at this point I read no fiction. I just read references. Articles, magazines, books, stuff like that.
LEE: I see. You’re constantly adding to your—
DICK: Yeah, and what I’m interested in is information theory. This is—in fact, this is why the guy gave me the article on biochips, because he knows I was interested in information theory. And—and he himself finds it fascinating. And, see, the biochip is the greatest breakthrough in information storage that has ever happened in the history of this planet. And maybe—
LEE: And they have implanted them already?
DICK: No, no, no, no. They haven’t implanted it. They got—they can do it.
LEE: Oh, I see, your article’s—yeah, OK.
DICK: Yeah, they can do it, but they haven’t done it. There’s no reason. The—the biochip is alive; when it is implanted in the brain it will grow into the nervous system of the brain. It will grow into the neural tissue. Now the biochip processes information at the speed of light. Our neurons go very slowly, in comparison, I forget how slowly—real slowly, like 240 miles an hour, something incredible like that.
LEE: You’re right about the androids, they’re just going to be better than us all the way around.
DICK: Well, the biochip thinks—it can actually—it is— what the article said was that all the information of all the computers in the world could be stored in a biochip one centimeter by one centimeter square. Every extant computer we have—one centimeter by one centimeter. And I said—I saw him last night, and I said—I said, it was in a store, too, you know. I said, “Phil, I hope that wasn’t a joke article you gave me.” I said, “I hope there wasn’t a thing at the beginning that you didn’t Xerox which said, you know, this is the—want to see something really unbelievable, that might happen, you know, a million years from now— hope you didn’t just, you know, cut that off—” And he said, “No, that article is genuine,” he said, “I guarantee it.” In fact, I gave him a very valuable album back as a present for him giving me that. I gave him one of the most valuable albums I have as a present because I consider that article very important.
And we have, we have a one molecule deep layer of protein on this biochip. That’s all. There’s only one molecule deep. That’s—that’s as thin as you can spread it. And, it’s alive. And its—its speed will increase human intelligence to ten to the twentieth power. And, only the guy I was with last night said, “Well, that won’t help me any.” But—
LEE: Oh, OK. No, I read the article but it’s been a few days—As I remember—it’s like a combination of—of a biological life form plus electronic—
DICK: Yes. It’s got a coating over it, it’s got a conductive coating over it, yeah, which, I forget the name of it, but it’s a coating that’s conductive. See, they’ve got it down to bubbles, they were down already to the molecular level of information storage and retrieval. They were down to a bubble—what they call a bubble—so miniaturization, they had really made all the breakthroughs they probably ever had to go to in miniaturization, ’cause they were down to a molecular level. But the thing about this is, it’s alive, and it can reproduce. And we told a joke, we told jokes all night: like, uh, we were telling “Goodbye, Mr. Biochips” jokes and stuff like that, you know, and serving biochips and dip, and stuff like that.
This thing can reproduce, and it can divide and it can produce another biochip, it can produce a replication of itself. It can also grow into the human nervous system. They’ll probably attach it to some poor animal first. Which—it could be kind of interesting. ’Cause they—they could—the animal would think then to the twentieth power. And the first thing it’ll do is say, “God, everything looks quite different to me than it did a little while ago. Could—could you guys fix me some coffee? Can I watch the TV? (laughs) Is there anything around to read?” (laughs) Find, find, you know, uh, a, a chipmunk reading the Britannica very rapidly with one of these biochips in it.
LEE: It does present a whole, a whole different—
DICK: And the lovely thing is when, when the host dies you pull the biochip out, and it’s now got the host’s memories. Which you could then insert in another host.
LEE: Well, this is really—
DICK: And assuming this is not a joke article, I just hope to God this guy’s not over there laughing and thinking about me writing a book based on a nonexistent thing.
LEE: Now with recombinant DNA, that seems like a plus too.
DICK: I know, I know. We’re just, we’re just in a new world.
LEE: It’s moving so rapidly, it’s really exciting.
DICK: But for the purposes of my book the—the alien decides to biochip himself and insert himself as a symbiote into the human host brain. In the right hemisphere, which processes music. And there the human brain, the human neural tissue will, uh, conceive the music correctly.
This whole thing of conception is terribly important. We do not directly deal with the sense data. I— I’ve studied this for years. I mean this, this to me, this is where I live, this is—I am [unintelligible] when it comes to epistemology. We never get sense data directly. It goes through some kind of enormous methodological organizational system in our minds and brains that we have no understanding—there’s no real explanation of how this occurs. The first one to study this was Descartes, the one who studied probably the most profoundly was Immanuel Kant, who posited some kind of transcendental, transcendent self in each of us that we are not aware of, who organizes all our sense data in terms of time, space, and causation. See, you see, the alien creature would not have this structuring mechanism. He would hear just the raw sense data. And even if we heard the raw sense data, we would not be able to make any sense out of it.
We have some kind of tremendous structuring mechanism. This is why, for instance, when—when people who’ve never heard, like, rock and roll, you know, they were appalled at what they were hearing, you see, because they—they were not structuring, you see. And this is why, you know, like, uh, high school kids who listen to nothing, you know, but Johnny Mathis, for example—who I’m not puttin’ down—but I’m saying if they listen to Johnny Mathis and stuff like that—you know, the Everly Brothers— cannot understand what a symphony, what’s going on in a symphony. You see, there’s a, there’s a structuring that’s required by the—by the recipient himself, by his own mind, by his own brain—it’s probably on a brain level—to organize this material. Which is an interesting thing. Like, when, on—on certain kinds of drugs, the music gets real weird to you, because your brain now is organizing it differently.
I remember one time, I—the first time I took LSD, uh, I had my friend play only music that I was very familiar with […]—I had him play, I tried to think of music that was very innocuous. I mean, I didn’t want no sudden surprises. You know, no surprising stuff. I didn’t want any surprises. I didn’t want any loud noises, I didn’t want anything to scare me while I was on LSD, so had him play Beethoven quartets. So he just played Beethoven quartets. Well, I was sittin’ there and all of a sudden the music got real strange, and it got even stranger and it started to slow down, and the notes began to separate and the music stopped and just continued the last notes and played forever and finally turned into a spiny cactus that I could see and there’s a name for that and it begins with “s” and I can’t say it. I, I looked it up, it’s a word called like “syntheses” or something—you can look it up—it’s where you convert one sense to another, a sound into a, sound into video and video into sound, or something like that. Because of, I got that. So I saw the Beethoven quartet as a cactus. And with each, with each progression into the next measure, the cactus would grow more complex, so it was accretional. It didn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, uh, successive
any longer, it was accretional. And it grew larger and larger and more complex.
Well see, now, this is the thing that would confront the alien. He, he would never be able to organize a Beethoven symphony, no matter how long he tried. Simply because these people have never had that sense. Though they, they would hear it, they, they could hear it but they would not understand it, so he’s gonna use a human brain as his interface. And then when he receives it, he will, it will be organized for him by the human brain.
Now, the problem here is, does a human being want an alien in his brain as a symbiote? And I intend to make that a major question. Because now we switch viewpoints in the novel. See? I mean, you’re catching me when I’m actually organizing a novel. This is the most essential part of writing a book is what I am doing right now. We switch viewpoints to the human being who is a composer. Now, that host for a symbiote from this alien planet would be a person who is involved with music all the time and, and has enormously sophisticated mental faculties for processing musical information. In other words, the alien ship has landed way out in the boonies, or it’s in Oregon or something like that, so now they’re picking up, you know. Well, here’s the answer to one of your earlier questions. They’ve picked up our radio transmissions. We’re using radio transmissions already, so that’s sound.
LEE: How do they have the technology to pick up audio—
DICK: Well, they pick up the radio signals, they just don’t utilize sound. They use an oscilloscope.
LEE: Oh, I see.
DICK: So here’s this guy and he’s a composer. And I’m almost tempted to insert a certain amount of humor in this book. He’s something like a Woody Allen character, he’s kind of a loser composer. Now, he’s real avant-garde but he’s not making any money, you know. Or he’s very commonplace, or something like that. What shall we do? Let’s do it right now—let’s work the book out. We’ll have him be a very routine composer, but financially successful, because how are they going to find him, otherwise? I mean, how are they going to find some avant-garde composer whose music doesn’t sell? They would probably pick somebody, uh, like Mancini. The equivalent of Henry Mancini.
