by Gwen Lee
LEE: (laughs) OK.
DICK: Some guy who’s writing schmaltzy stuff.
LEE: He’s gotten a lot of, you know, some popular things.
DICK: Well, OK, name some guy who writes the most ordinary music but who makes a lot of money doing it. Can you think of—
LEE: Burt Bacharach.
DICK: Burt Bacharach! You got it. OK. This is the equivalent of Burt Bacharach but it is only a coincidental resemblance and any resemblance is merely in the mind of the attorneys who are litigating against this.
LEE: (laughs) OK, maybe we can think of another couple of ’em, make a composite sort of thing, you know?
DICK: OK, here’s a guy. His name is Ed Firmley. Ed Firmley writes screenplays for cheapo—no, he writes the music for cheapo science fiction movies. You know, these clones of Star Wars. And he makes a lot of money. But he has no original ideas. None whatsoever. And they have this really rotten science fiction film about this detective who’s tracking down these androids. And this guy is writing this schmaltzy score to go with this movie. And he’s well known, he makes a lot of money, but he has no original ideas in the entire world. OK? Now, it’s easy to track him down because he’s well known. They stick the biochip of the alien life form into his brain. OK, now, the bioform is alive and it is essentially the mind of the alien—he’s on that biochip.
LEE: He’s alive?
DICK: Yes, he’s on the biochip.
LEE: So he would become a part of this composer.
DICK: Yes. But he’s, he’s there in a passive way. He’s just— what they do is—the composer is on his way home from a bar where he spends half his time. So he’s on his way home and they just bop him on the head, you know, and they insert the biochip and he comes to an hour later and doesn’t know what happened, just thinks he got rolled by, you know, a couple of street people, and he goes on home. They make sure they take his wallet, you know, and so on. That’s another thing. Surgically they insert this biochip through their extremely sophisticated technology. You’re in on the ground—I hope—I hope this is recording because I may not remember this, man. No, don’t touch it, no, we don’t even want to go near it. We don’t—it’s turning, the light’s on and it’s recording. Oh, God, if it isn’t recording we’re doomed, man, ’cause I’m assuming—
LEE: It’ll only take but a second, OK? (checks machine) OK.
DICK: OK. Now. This guy has a passive biochip in his brain, which is simply there for the purpose of the alien to enjoy the music, using the man’s right hemisphere—
LEE: How did he get in there? Oh, all right—
DICK: How did it get in where?
LEE: How did the biochip get in the musician?
DICK: They bopped him on the head and performed surgery in the alley.
LEE: Oh, I’m sorry. I thought they just took his wallet. I—
DICK: No, I just said he thinks he’s been rolled by some street people. He comes home and he says, “God, I got a splitting headache. I’ve been rolled by some street people. I wonder if I should call the cops.” He doesn’t know they did microsurgery on him: use laser surgery to open up his skull, stick in the biochip, close it up, you know, pat the hair back in place, use a little, you know, Krazy Glue, and send him on his way. But now he’s got this biochip inside him which is alive. And is growing into his neural tissue, see. And it’s there—it’s not there for a harmful purpose. It’s there so it can enjoy music. You got to realize this is a transcendental religious experience that is only known to mystics on their planet. They are now in position to act as a symbiote with the human brain.
So now, this guy goes back to writing this dipshit music, you know, for these cornball science fiction films, you know, makes a lot of money, has a big house in Beverly Hills, you know, and all that kind of stuff. That’s gonna be a lot of fun to write about: just some young nudnick nitwit, you know, guy who makes a lot of money but has no real ideas, you know—he’s completely at the mercy of the studios. They tell him exactly what to do and he does it, you know. They tell him to write, you know, 400 notes, you know, 400 dotted eighth notes in a row, he’ll do it—he does whatever he’s told.
Now, here’s what happens. The biochip lives there passively for a while, and that is the psyche of the alien, it’s—but this guy does nothing but listen to the dullest music available on the planet. That is, he has constantly got his FM turned to KJOY. Got it? So pretty soon the biochip wearies of this, see, ’cause the biochip wants to hear everything that’s going on, you know, everything from the wildest experimental music of people like Brian Eno—shit, I could set this in the present, I don’t have to set it in the future.
LEE: It’s true.
DICK: Everything, from Brian Eno, you know, to, uh, Palestrina. Palestrina was the earliest, you know, Josquin Desprez, you know, Josquin Desprez to Eddie and the Hot Rods. You know, everything. Most everything. And the guy is just listening to KJOY every day, you know, writing the same kind of stuff. So, what is the biochip gonna do? Now, it’s grown into his neural tissue, right? So it’s hearing everything he hears but it takes it only about a week to figure out that it’s going to be listening to KJOY for the rest of its life.
LEE: And it’s aware of other forms of music, you know—it knows there’s something else out there.
DICK: Yeah, because it also has access to his memories and his knowledge and everything else. But it’s only intended to occupy a passive role, using him as an interface.
LEE: Wow.
DICK: Pretty soon it becomes aware that the guy is never going to twist a dial; like when he gets these—see, what happens is when the guy goes to parties and stuff and he—there’s other kinds of music; OK, it’s very easy for the biochip to pick up a couple of seconds of some other kind of music, you know what I mean? Like, for instance, suppose they go to a party and somebody has some old Bessie Smith records. The biochip gets to hear about one and a half minutes of Bessie Smith. How long is that biochip going to sit still for this kind of crap that this guy is listening to? KJOY, right? You hear what I’m saying?
The guy gets into his car, and he’s tuning the car radio, and for a moment he picks up, you know, a Mozart opera. And the biochip hears this. And this is a serious matter. Remember for the biochip this is a mystical experience. It’s like the top level of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He gets a glimpse—not a glimpse, see, it’s the audio equivalent of a glimpse. He gets an audio glimpse of God for a second and this guy turns past some really great music; whether—however you want to define great music. Let’s just say “important” music without saying, like, classical or experimental or avant-garde. But as the guy turns to KJOY, for some reason he goes through the intervening stations and the biochip is just furious at this, because it’s being cheated out of what it wants. Well, it has a remedy. There’s a remedy for the biochip and that’s to take control of the guy’s—
LEE: Take control.
DICK: Becomes active, and starts controlling his actions. Anyway, so what finally happens is that the biochip develops a system where it begins to feed the guy mathematical ideas which the guy then converts into music, so now his music that he composes—Well, by this time it’s got him playing every kind of music in the world for it. But it’s not content to do that because the guy’s still writing the same kind of schmaltzy stuff. So it begins to feed him—and here we come back to this thing where mathematics is the basis of music, and mathematics is the basis of the color equivalent on their planet. It begins to feed him complex mathematical concepts which he then converts into music which then pass back to the biochip, which the biochip then remembers. So it is now taking an active role in the creating of musical compositions. And we have all the plot things where this wrecks the guy’s career, you know. But on the other hand, he is now one of the most—if not the most—creative and original composers on earth. I mean, he is now writing music based on the mind of a creature from another civilization, on another planet, in another star system. And the common denominator is mathem
atics.
This idea came one time I was putting on a, uh, some chamber music one time, and suddenly I realized, “My God, this is essentially audible mathematics.” Because I had been reading a great deal of logic; I had been reading a lot of philosophy. I had been studying logic and realized I was hearing a form of reasoning. I suddenly grasped, I suddenly realized as the composer wrote the music in a linear way, that music is annotated in a linear way, like writing is, even goes from left to right. And all of a sudden I realized the composer was doing with music what I did with writing, and I had never realized it before, only it’s mathematical. And all of a sudden I realized like in Schmenkna, a particular quartet by Schmenkna—who’s not a very good composer but he wrote one quartet that’s incredible and I play it over and over again because I can’t figure out how he did it—I was listening to it one time and I realized it has something to do with mathematics, with ratios, relationships, you know, and values, so on, numerical values and so on.
But this guy is basing his music on a life form from another star system. But it has a common denominator, and that’s math, ’cause math is ubiquitous, number is number. Everyone in the universe—as Carl Sagan is forever saying, math would be, number would be, the lingua franca of the universe. That would be how one civilization would communicate with another. So, he as a human composer can handle its mathematical concepts. But the music that comes out is quite different from anything anyone had ever written. So very rapidly he becomes the equivalent of Beethoven, he becomes the greatest creative genius—I mean, like my Britannica says Beethoven was the greatest creative genius in any field in the human race that we know of. So, pretty soon this guy is no longer writing the schmaltzy stuff for the Hollywood films. He’s beginning to create great music and it’s extremely unusual music. Now, he doesn’t know why. He has no idea where these ideas are coming from. He has no idea he has a biochip inside of him. OK.
LEE: Right. The only one that knows is the aliens.
DICK: They know it, yeah, and, of course, being telepathic they are transmitting all that stuff back to the mother ship which is in orbit—they are getting it all down forever. Now, here is where the plot really gets heavy, ’cause the original idea I had was for a Beethoven/Faust character. This thing, this biochip has got the guy writing night and day on these really difficult compositions. He can’t just bat out the same thing over and over again. It is evolving through, uh, hierarchical layers, evolutionary layers of music where greater complexity, greater originality, greater artistic merit, whatever axis you want to describe— it’s evolving like Beethoven’s music did from period to period to period. It becomes evident very soon that this is going to kill the host brain. The host brain will die as a result of the stress imposed on it by having to do this. It is now writing music so complex that the stress on—(pause)
OK, now, the problem arises, now we get into what for me in a way is the most, the profound part of this projected novel. The fact that the pressure being exherted on the host brain by the biochip is beginning to kill the brain, literally.
LEE: The human brain does not have the capacity to—
DICK: Right, because you figure this thing is operating—I mean the figure in that article I read is ten to the twentieth power. And the guy is writing great music. And the music is evolving. Now you got to remember, this guy still does not understand why. Now one of the great plot developments of course is when he discovers he’s got a biochip in him. And the next part is when he discovers that there’s an alien life form on the biochip. Now the way he would discover he has a biochip in him is simply he would go to a doctor when he begins to get sick. And the doctor discovers the biochip. Because the biochip is an object and would show up on a—on a CAT scan. Or whatever they use. They don’t use CAT scans—they use brain scans. Well, let’s just say it would show up. And that they—the biochip is detected, it’s discovered. So maybe I’d have to set it in the future. OK, let’s set it in the future.
And then he learns the situation, that he has a biochip in him. That’s why all of a sudden one day he began to have volume. See, for him what he—you know—he’s sitting there one day and all of a sudden he gets an idea for a composition which is radical and different from anything he’s done before. And that’s the beginning. And then they just get better and more radical. But he doesn’t know why. Well, you know, this is almost like Flowers for Algernon. Have you read that? Where the guy who’s mentally retarded, they give him that science—you know— Charlie—it’s a little like that. And that’s OK because I regard that as one of the greatest stories. I saw the movie and bought—I read the story a lot, it’s one of the most tragic and touching things I ever read or seen. This is that story again, but it’s a little different. Because—here’s what I plan to do. At this point the biochip knows that its host—the symbiote, I should really say it’s a symbiote—knows that its host is aware of the situation and now communicates with him. And—
LEE: It’s on a conscious level.
DICK: On a conscious level. It, now, the moment Ed Firmley, the composer, discovers the biochip, the biochip then speaks to him. And says, “You are right. You do have a biochip in you.” And it comes out that it’s from another civilization. And the biochip says, “Have them remove me surgically. And you will live on.” And Ed Firmley says, “Yeah, but I won’t be writing any more great music.” And the biochip says, “That’s right, you’ll be back to writing those schmaltzy cornball nothings.” Now, and see what we have here, we don’t have an antagonist situation. We don’t have an adversary situation. This guy benefited from this music. He loved writing this music.
LEE: And he was receiving some critical acclaim?
DICK: Yeah. In other words, the act of creating the music was terribly rewarding to him. And the response from the world was terribly important to him. But it’s killing him. There is an easy answer. He went to the doctor knowing something was wrong and now this is the answer to the question of what is wrong. He’s got this biochip in him. The biochip simply says, “Have me removed, and, you know, arrange to have me transported back up to the mother ship.” Or, we can do that. I mean, they can do that, the aliens can do it. The guy says no. “I don’t want to give up the biochip,” he says, “I don’t want to go back to writing that stuff.” He says, “I would rather go on writing this great stuff till I die.” And the biochip says, “Well, your doctor is right. You have like about a month more that you will go and then you will die.” So it’s a very serious problem. And I can see a very great and tragic theme, in this book at this point for this man. Which is different from the Flowers for Algernon. Because there are no choices involved. Charlie Gordon when he became the high IQ—did not have a choice about whether to go back to being an imbecile.
LEE: Right.
DICK: This man has a choice. However, it means death. Now, there’s more ways to skin a cat than most readers realize. Because if the alien can be turned into a biochip, the human mind can be turned into a biochip. And the solution that we have is as follows: that Ed Firmley will be made into a biochip. And inserted into the brain of one of the aliens. And what you will get back in exchange is for what is essentially the death of his body—that is, his body will die but he will be made into a biochip—is he will be inserted into the brain of an alien and he will be able to do something that was denied any human before. He will be able to experience their world of vision and color. Their visual world and their color language.
LEE: A happy ending!
DICK: More than happy. It’s—it’s ’cause the theme of the book is Faustian. This man has by now in the novel risen like Faust. To levels of tremendous knowledge. Levels of tremendous creativity. But, like Faust, there is a price. The price is death. However, if he could be made—and he can be—into a biochip—he will go into an alien brain when his brain dies. As a biochip. And he will then experience their world just as the alien in his brain was able to experience his world of music.
LEE: So it’s like a heavenly exchange
.
DICK: Yes it is. It’s on a transcendental level in both cases. For him, this would be heaven for him, you see. He’s— the visual light world—the world of light and color and everything is to the humans what the world of sound is to the aliens. So he says, “OK—wait until we reach the last moment, you know, before there is —arterial sclerosis sets in. Whatever, we’ll just posit something else; arterial sclerosis might very well be what would happen, it might be something like that. But transfer me to a biochip and, he says, if you will then agree to insert me into an alien, one of your species, I will agree to go on another month. ’Cause see, now, by this point—see, this is why it’s not an adversary situation, this is a true symbiosis. True symbiosis is not the same as parasitism. A symbiote is half of a partnership. You have two symbiotes form symbiosis. That’s the difference between parasitism. So they’re both writing this music. The alien is giving the mathematical basis and he’s converting it into music. So that they’re joint composers.
LEE: Uh-huh. I have a question. Now does his biochip being inserted into the alien pose this same problem?
DICK: Yes. It will kill the alien.
LEE: Oh, sad ending.
DICK: That’s the ending. You guessed it—you guessed it— One of the aliens will have to sacrifice himself and die.
LEE: To do this.
DICK: Yes, and one of the aliens on the ship to whom we’ve been introduced is a character who already will agree to give up his life so that this guy, this human being who’s a member of another species can live on and that’s how the book ends. And—what do you think? And so we finally wind up with, we now see from Ed Firmley’s viewpoint what their world of color looks like. We’ve already seen our world of sound from the standpoint of the alien. At the very end we see their world through a human mind.
LEE: I like it a lot. It really brings out the whole thing where you can’t have happiness without the pain.
