by Gwen Lee
DICK: Oh, yeah.
LEE: So that it does bring out all the, you know, the human experience into—
DICK: Right. In my Angel Archer book she, her perception of reality, she says is—the two basic components of reality are pain and beauty. Pain and beauty are the two irreducible components of reality. Pain and beauty. In fact, I’m gonna get that—I have it here somewhere.
You see—this guy who is writing just this cornball music has now become not only a great composer, he is now conscious of real art, he is no longer a hack. I mean, that’s what he’s been really, he’s been a hack. I mean, let’s face it, the guy’s been just a hack. He’s been in it for money. He has this mediocre talent. He’s not experienced great art in terms of music. A human thing. But at the end he gets to experience their color, their color language, their color reality, their reality of light and color. Which would be equivalent to dying and going to heaven. Well, we can’t speculate on what would happen when you do die ’cause no one knows, so I mean that’s problematical. But this is for sure. By being inserted into this alien’s brain he will then see through its eyes and see what no human has really seen except maybe in a few moments when in an ecstatic, you know, trance.
And, yeah, “He who learns must suffer.” This is a quote from Aeschylus that she [Angel] remembers. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our own despair against our will comes wisdom to us, the awful grace of God.” But she’s thinking about this. She’d had this terrible, uh— infected tooth, I mean, where, you know, they have to do root canal therapy on her. Root canal irrigation and she just, and it broke out on a weekend. And what she did was she sat there all night drinking Jim Beam bourbon and reading Dante’s Divine Comedy.
LEE: Oh, no!
DICK: And she says, uh, “I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing. I read and I remembered. I did not read Howard the Duck or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comics that night. I read Dante’s Commedia, from Inferno to Purgatorio, until at last I arrived at the three colored rings of light, which is the Trinity. And the time was 9 A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson’s office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast not even coffee and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist’s receptionist. God save me from another night like that, but God damn it, had I not lived out that night, drinking and crying and reading and hurting, I would never have been born, truly born. That was the time of my birth into the real world. And the real world for me is a mixture of pain and beauty, and this is the correct view of it because these are the components that make up reality. And I had them all there that night, including a packet of pain pills to carry home with me from the dentist after my ordeal had ended. I arrived home, took a pill, drank some coffee, and went to bed.” See? And there’s quotations from—from—Dante here: three from when he sees the Trinity. “Three colors from its substance now appeared—” Excuse me—”Three circles from its substance now appeared, of three colors and each an equal whole”—that was Dante’s vision of God as the Trinity. And she says, “Most people, when they try to read the Commedia get bogged down in Inferno and suppose his vision to be that of a chamber of horrors. People head up in shit, people head down in shit, in a lake of ice.” And she goes on.
It’s really a—this is the high point of the book. OK now, see, this theme carries on into this next book now, that we’re talking about. Is that this guy has risen, this human, Ed Firmley, has risen to this— this ecstatic artistic vision. In terms of his own culture, his own civilization. Music. But has killed himself doing it. Now this is the—this is the paradigm of Faust. Faust reaches into a Godlike realm, grasps this thing and brings it back. But dies at the very moment that his hand closes on it. He both simultaneously gets what he’s looking for and dies. Death and victory become one event for the Faustian man. It’s incredible. This is the Faustian victory. If either occurs without the other it wouldn’t be Faustian. It would be something else. I don’t know what it would—you just die—I guess that’s just life, and you know that’s what—that’s the breaks, you know? If you get what you’re looking for it’s Promethean, I guess but, you know, the Faustian man grabs it and dies in the action of grabbing it. Now, he’s offered something else, he offered a kind of a quantum leap into the Faustian thing. He can transcend the entire human civilization, its species, and reach up into another species’ artistic vision. Which is color.
LEE: But with his biochips then I suppose it would be possible for the alien that he was transplanted into—this is like the third person. I mean the first feeling that the biochip comes up with is the musician. If he goes—he’s still existing, I take it.
DICK: Well, you know, I don’t know what to do with it. Now, I can work it either way. Now I’ve thought of the business of the direct reciprocal transfer, where he gets—where Firmley has his biochip that goes into the brain of the very alien who became a biochip in his brain, but that way we would have two of everybody. We have the person as the brain going on and we have the biochip version, so what we’re doing is cloning people. And I don’t like that because that gets awful. But once we start doing that it’s another clone novel. You know, where guys are cloning themselves. So what I’m going to posit is that when the biochip is actually an intact personality, the original brain is gone—’cause otherwise you could biochip yourself forever. You could create thousands of yourselves, you know. So this is kind of a mental cloning and I just cannot go that route because it’s too easy. It’s just too goddamn easy. You know—
LEE: You’d have to have a series—
DICK: There would never be any problem. No problem would ever arise for anybody once you could do that. I’ve got to set some kind of limits, you see.
LEE: Right.
DICK: So I’m going to say that when the alien biochipped himself, he died as an organic brain and lived on only in the biochip form. In order that—
LEE: So he gave up his life to experience this, to transmit it back—
DICK: Yeah, yeah, yeah—
LEE: So he’s like the Christ figure because he gave his life for his cause—
DICK: No! No. He gave it for his own delectation.
LEE: Oh—
DICK: He gave it for his own experience of human music. He did transmit it back but he’s the one who experienced it. So he was Faustian. The alien was the first Faustian one. Ed Firmley is now transformed into a Faustian figure. And now we have a second alien, and the second alien who really gives up his life. Of course now, we can add another ending, we can add—there’s still one thing left. If Firmley goes in as a biochip into this alien, then the alien is now the host for this biochip and they are in symbiosis: we’re back to the original situation where the alien goes in as a biochip and the [unintelligible] is reversed. The human is a biochip, the alien is the host. OK. Ed Firmley is in there, see, as a biochip and he sees colors and everything, and he sees language and all that. And after about a week he discovers that all this alien does is sit in front of a computer. He says, “This is not all that interesting. Let’s get back to the home planet.” And then he does to that alien what the original alien in the biochip did to him. He—
LEE: He pushes the symbiote out—
DICK: He pushes him, yeah, he pushes him out. Yeah. And so we really get to that ending anyway where he kills the alien. Where the alien dies, eventually, because Firmley is now putting such tremendous pressure on the aliens that the aliens, like—and they know it, they know it, when they do it. They know that when it gets into that brain and he grows out of the biochip into the neural tissue that he will begin to exert the same tremendous pressure because what you have is sensory hunger. You have hunger for stimuli. Which, by the way the brain does—the human brain does have an actual hunger for stimuli. Well, can you imagine Firmley in this alien brain? I mean, he would want to experience everything—it’s like
people coming out and saying, “I want to go to Disneyland,” you know, they want to go to Knott’s Berry Farm, they want to go to the Huntington Library, you know; when we went to France, for instance, we want to go to the Louvre—I mean, we can’t go there and not go to the Louvre. So he’s going to want to do all that stuff. You know. When he’s exactly—everything is now turned around, but the difference is that now they know—the alien knows when he receives, when he actually hosts the biochip, that this is gonna happen. Whereas, Ed Firmley of course did not know because he was not consulted when they stuck the biochip in him. But this—the entity—the alien is the true Christ figure, the second entity, not the first one. The second one.
LEE: But he, the, OK, but he was just going to be—have you decided yet? Is he going to be a random selection or is he going to be a guru with disciples, or is he just going be a computer technician?
DICK: I—I’m going to, uh, leave that open ’cause I don’t want to write the end before I get right to it. It’ll be—this is—I guess it’s OK—this is something I better check, you know, to develop. This is something I’m pretty sure about, you know, we’re [unintelligible] . Yeah.
LEE: Well, that’s what I mean, because you’re in different phases.
DICK: Yeah, I’m gonna leave it, I’m gonna wait till I get to the end and decide how they’re gonna handle it. You know. But I—I—
LEE: It poses some real interesting options you could use.
DICK: I’m going to leave those options open till I actually get to it.
LEE: Oh, I see.
DICK: But, I swear to God, you know, I was lying there when I—you know, Snoopy in his doghouse—(phone rings)—Oh, shit, it’s Tessa, I’ll get it. […]
LEE: Let’s hear more about you. OK. Your experiences of writing. We’ve heard about this new one—have you got a tentative title for it?
DICK: It’s got a title all right—it’s called The Owl in Daylight, you see.
LEE: The Owl in Daylight.
DICK: Yeah, it’s a folk expression from the South where the guys meet and he says that’s the—it means he’s—his judgment is clouded. An owl being blind in daylight. Owls cannot see in daylight. They become confused and they fly into things and get killed—it simply means a person whose judgment is clouded over. And I heard it on a TV program just as a line spoken by a character and it made a tremendous impression on me. “The owl in daylight.” And I wanted to write about a guy who pushes his brain to its limit. He’s aware that he has reached his limit but voluntarily decides to go on and pay the consequences. And then I realized that this is simply a restatement of the whole Faustian thing—is that this, in point of fact, is what the whole Faustian thing is about, that the consequences are ignored in the pursuit of what for a creative person is some kind of artistic vision. But it could be the same with money. I mean it could be, you know, the acquisition of property, it could be, could be.
I mean, it’s really the striving where the person becomes aware of whatever it is he’s striving for is the cost. You know, the ratio, like, you know on a graph where the cost rises in proportion to the output, is that the cost line is rising higher and closing the gap all the time, you know. So that you could look on the graph, you can see that those two lines are going to meet and finally the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line—the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line, you know. And this is something I’m beginning to realize about myself that, uh, although I think my writing is getting better all the time, my, my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be. I mean, and also I’m doing so much more research that the wear on me in doing a book is just—well, you hear people say, like, they can no longer drink as much as they used to drink, you know, and it’s—there’s not really that much difference. I mean, uh, for some people it’s very different, for some people it’s drugs, for me it’s writing books, and now—now it’s—I can still write well but the cost—I mean I can just see this graph in my mind, you know, where this cost line is going to finally meet the yield line and the the cost line is going to go above [the] yield line, you see, and it’s inevitable. And then you have—
LEE: Do you feel it’s imminent?
DICK: No. I don’t. I really don’t. I think that that’s one reason I—I haven’t done any writing for some time. I mean, I wrote the Bishop Archer novel last May.
LEE: Last May, OK. I was going to say ’cause you have quite a—several months—well obviously, since you’re just starting this new one, so it’s been quite a few months before you can—but you said that that almost killed you, you did have physical repercussions to that novel.
DICK: Yeah, I was bleeding internally. When I got finished I was living on aspirin, scotch, and potassium tablets. And, uh, we—I sent the book off. They had put me under a very strict deadline. They wanted it right away, they said right away if you’re really gonna do it, I mean, uh, we can’t get it put through if it takes a while. And I just sat down—and it’s a literary novel and I have not ever sold a literary novel. I’ve only sold science fiction novels and I started writing and on page three I realized I couldn’t do it. I mean, there was just no doubt that I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t a mental thing where I got a block, it wasn’t a psychological thing where I got panicked out; I just suddenly realized that I—I mean it just—there’s just some things you can do and some things you can’t do. And I showed the three pages to a friend of mine who’s an editor and a writer and we worked for hours trying to figure out how to do a fourth page, just get one more page, and he could see just no way to go on. And I then decided that I had to do it whether I could do it or not. Which is, you know, kind of odd, because if you can’t do it you can’t do it, but I just wouldn’t admit I couldn’t do it, and I did go on and I did write it and they did accept it.
I sent it off and […] was waiting to hear from my agent. He took it with him on his vacation, his summer vacation, and he was going to call from home—from his cabin or wherever the hell he went. And we were sitting here and I was drinking scotch, and all of a sudden I started bleeding and I knew it was from everything. I mean, I knew that I had written a book but I really wondered, you know, at that point if I was going to survive physically. And I never even told the doctor about it because I figured it was, you know, it’s like your headaches, when they start— it’s a coefficient of all the stresses, the fear of failure.
The fact was I turned down a very lucrative, uh, offer to do another novel, which would have been a strictly commercial novel, for a very large amount of money, and that having turned that down and did the literary novel, Bishop Timothy Archer novel, I all of a sudden was confronted with the possibility that I couldn’t write the Bishop Timothy Archer novel. So I had turned down a lot of money to do—and then gone on to do a literary novel for a very small sum and then found out I couldn’t do it. And I had come so close to failure, and at that point we didn’t know— my agent had called to say, you know, that he had started but was unable to read it. He read the first twenty pages and just had to put it down. He said that he’d never had that happen to him before. With a novel, ever, that he literally couldn’t read it, he found it unreadable. It was just too shocking—
LEE: Was this a literary novel or a science fiction novel?
DICK: Well, it’s literary. It’s set the day John Lennon died. It’s—the girl is driving, she lives in Berkeley and she’s driving to Sausalito to sit in on a, uh, a lecture on Sufism, which is Arab—Arabic mysticism. And she hears about John Lennon’s death and it makes her think about the death of her husband, and her best friend, and her father-in-law, and then the rest of the book is really her memories of those three people.
LEE: John Lennon’s death shook a lot of people.
DICK: Yeah, well, it starts out—it’s interesting, because this is something that I thought would resonate with a lot of people. It’s—the book starts out—it’s all told from her viewpoint. I mean, it’s almost as if it’s a diary by her. This book is—there’s a na
me for this kind of thing—epistolary or something. It’s almost like a letter.
LEE: Oh, I see, yeah.
DICK: It starts out: “Barefoot”—that’s the guy’s name— “Barefoot,” she says, “conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs 100 dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed, and I think I know why we are on this earth. It’s to find out that what you loved the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places, rather than by design.” And that’s how the book opens. And she’s just all messed up. And you don’t understand what’s the matter. Her thoughts are jagged and they—they’re chaotic and they’re bitter. They’re terribly bitter. She says, uh, “That was how I first heard Edgar Barefoot, who impressed me initially as a jerk-off with a little voice. . . ,” And so she’s this very, very bitter person and then, uh, the chapter ends where she thinks she says—I am in the last paragraph of the first chapter— she says, “I am the last living person who knew Bishop Timothy Archer in the Diocese of California. His mistress, his son, my husband, the home owner and wage earner pro forma. Somebody should, well it’d be nice, if no one went the way they collectively went, volunteering to die, each of them went Parsifal, a perfect fool.” And then it goes back to those days when those people were alive. And it goes through the events that led up to their deaths, and their deaths. Back to the moment the book opens, it recirculates back to that very moment that the book opened, so it comes back to the present.
Chapter fourteen is the next moment after the end of the first chapter. “Facing a smiling, a moon-white smile, Edgar Barefoot said—” So you’re back all of a sudden in the present. Then the rest of the book is now this teacher, this Edgar Barefoot, this Sufi guru—and then “guru” is not actually the correct word—it should be “fakir”—but anyway, he brings back her humanity. He brings her out of this state of, uh—she’s literally destroyed as a person by the death of these people, ’cause she never really cares about anybody or anything again. And so it is a literary novel. It is a novel about the crushing effect of death on a very intelligent, sensitive young woman who really loved her friends very deeply. And in writing it I’m really exploring the subject of the effect of the death of someone that one loves very much. The loss of a loved one. And it changes you and you’re dehumanized by it. That suffering does not ennoble. I’ve never really bought the idea that we are somehow better off for suffering. I show that all this happened, and it did damage her. She did not benefit from it, they did not benefit from it, so the real question then toward the end of the book is, “Did anything happen that adds up to anything?” and, uh, so the resolution of the book is tremendously important and it’s a very serious novel, although there’s some funny parts in it.
