by Gwen Lee
LEE: Do you feel you’d want to do a literary novel again? Since this next one is science fiction, do you feel more comfortable with this?
DICK: I really would—I have to admit that I don’t think that I would do another literary novel. I mean, I wanted to explore that topic ’cause I had a number of friends die that I was very close to. And that—it wasn’t so much that I wanted to write a literary novel, it was I wanted to write that particular novel. I did want to write about the effect of death of a loved one on you.
LEE: So the fact that it was, uh, literary just was a byproduct—
DICK: Essentially it didn’t—uh, yeah. But I mean, I just— you know I’m interested in intellectual ideas, in science fiction ideas, like the biochip is fascinating. I just—I can’t stop thinking about biochips and all—
LEE: Well, science fiction does not limit the imagination.
DICK: No, I mean that’s the great thing about it. Right. I mean—
LEE: It’s marvelous—that’s the whole thing—
DICK: Yeah, science fiction is a lot more fun. This was not fun to write. This book was not fun. I worked very hard and I did a good job; I think the book is OK. But I must say that it was the most arduous thing I have ever done. I have never worked so hard and produced so little in my life. I mean I could not in any way—
LEE: No, how do you mean by so little?
DICK: Well I mean I don’t have very much to show for it. I mean, I could have written five science fiction novels.
(tape ends)
2-3-74
January 15, 1982
LEE: (Laughs)
DICK: Are we on the air?
LEE: Yeah, we’re on the air now.
DICK: OK, far out! Shall I talk ’60s talk? Far out, I can dig it. Outta sight.
LEE: I can dig it, I can dig it—
DICK: Far out. Cool. That’s the least cool. I can dig it, I can dig it. OK, first question.
LEE: Well, I guess the first—
DICK: Do you want to get a little personality onto the tape? Or what?
LEE: That’s what I was looking for, a little bit of personality. Just the little casualness. That’s a good topic to bring up, the ’60s. Did you do a lot of writing in the ’60s?
DICK: Oh, yeah. In fact, in five years I published eighteen novels. (laughs) In five years, what a lot of stories!
LEE: Yeah. I mean you were saying earlier that you had to make a decision on your life at that time, whether you wanted to seek a new generation or take a little redirection.
DICK: Right.
LEE: This is when you went to, uh, Canada?
DICK: This was not—no, this was in 1964, when I left Anne. Uh, I was beginning to notice that, uh, I began to notice—I had begun to notice that there was serious differences in the ideology of those chronologically my peers, and the ideology of those considerably younger than myself. Perceiving this fact, I had to ask myself which ideology was most syntonic to my own temperament. With great reluctance I abandoned the burned-out old freaks that didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground and went with the kids. And I have never regretted it.
LEE: So what group, what age group of people do you identify with most?
DICK: Now or then? ’Cause it’s changed now.
LEE: Well, I suppose—well, are they the same?
DICK: No, I—I—
LEE: The same group of people, or are you still staying— you know, like, people that were then fifteen—
DICK: Oh, I see, have grown older. I see what you mean. No, uh—
LEE: I guess the Timothy Leary generation we’d call it—or the Dr. Spock generation.
DICK: Right. No, I don’t see much of that because they really are into property and professions and stuff like that. But, what I am into—profession stuff, you know, too, but—
LEE: You’re dealing more with a young group?
DICK: Pretty much, yeah. I mean, yeah—
LEE: I mean, like the eighteen to twenty-five—
DICK: Right, yeah. I was thinking especially in terms of my writing. You know, it’s—I seem to be able to communicate with them better than I can with the older people.
LEE: My God, you’re putting me over the hill—
DICK: Oh, I don’t—
LEE: (Laughs) Oh, don’t take it personally. No, I’m just telling you—I’m in the over-twenty-five group.
DICK: Well—
LEE: What [unintelligible]
DICK: (picks up plastic Yoda doll) “Gee,” it says.
LEE: It’s a real blow to find out I’m too old for Phil Dick. (laughs)
DICK: Hey, this—honey, would you tell me what that says? That can’t say what it says. That’s—that’s just dopey. (laughs) I can’t make hide nor hair out about that.
LEE: (laughs) He’s Yoda—it said—”Ready”—I lost it—it said: “Ready you are not.”
DICK: Who talks like that? (laughs) Who says “ready you are not”?
LEE: Yoda does.
DICK: Is that Jewish or something?
LEE: It’s Yoda. Yoda talks that way.
DICK: Nobody talks that way.
LEE: Well, Yoda does. Yoda talks that way.
DICK: I guess so. Does he say, “Ready you are not?”
LEE: “Ready you are not,” and then, comma, “No.”
DICK: He’s correct, now that I—
LEE: So when you’re writing you usually really go for the young group that you think is more open to your ideas?
DICK: Yeah, right.
LEE: Of course they are. They’ve got less biases, less thinking alike.
DICK: Yeah. And also I think younger people want more information shot at them. I mean—
LEE: Well, they have the time and the ability to assimilate it without so many other responsibilities tugging at them.
DICK: Yeah.
LEE: As you said, people of the 60’s generation with all the property and so forth, and like, myself, yeah, I don’t have the time I had to read before.
DICK: Right. I mean I don’t hardly read. I very rarely read a novel.
LEE: You know, your time is taken up with other things; you’re worrying about mortgages, am I going to be able to afford a house?
DICK: Exactly.
LEE: Will I ever even have one?
DICK: And if you have kids—
LEE: God, well then that just compounds it.
DICK: Yeah, yeah.
LEE: Yeah, it is, it’s real difficult for the older generation. They have to make an effort where it’s not so rough for the younger people. Which is great, which is the way it should be.
DICK: The only thing is like, I—I’m writing—what I’m writing now it tends to have a religious element in it. And now, I’m not really sure if that appeals to many people, but it’s something that’s become very important to me, this religious element in a number of books now. Based on an actual experience I had in 1974. I wasn’t really interested in it before then, and, uh—a very extraordinary experience. And, uh, I have been trying for eight years to figure out what happened and every line of reasoning and research that I take leads me back to a religious explanation. I mean, in other words it’s not something I just accept on faith; I studied and talked to people, I’ve written about it, I mean I’ve thought about it, you know, and I can’t break it down into anything but a genuine religious experience. And, uh, and it’s really funny because like I feel it saved my life but it saved the life of my little boy, too, Christopher. He had—
LEE: Was that the experience?
DICK: Well, yeah, he had an undiagnosed birth defect that would have killed him, and the doctor had didn’t know. He was just a baby, my little boy was then, see. And, OK, I’ll tell you. OK—I know it’s dopey, right? But this presence appeared and told me about my little boy’s defect—birth defect. Exactly down to anatomical details. And I ran in and I told Tess. No, first there was this flash of light, hit me right in the face and blinded me. It did. And it came out and all I could see
was this pink and I was listening to this Beatles tune on the stereo and all of a sudden the words rearranged themselves. And there was something outside me. But what I heard was the Beatles’ words rearranged. It told me that my little boy had this, you know, undiagnosed birth defect, and it told me what the birth defect was. And when I told Tess and I said, you must take him to the doctor immediately, it’s urgent, she went right to the hospital to the doctor, and it was true. He did have that defect and he scheduled surgery for as soon as possible. And, uh, this went on for years. This went on for a whole year. This presence would talk to me. And, it used scientific terms. And it used Greek terms, and it used Hebrew terms. And I mean, you know—
LEE: And it happened for how long?
DICK: For one year. From February 1974 to February 1975.
LEE: And then it just stopped.
DICK: It went in a beautiful, beautiful way. It showed me what’s called the Golden Section, which is a rectangle of certain proportions with a short end and a long end, 8 x 13. It showed me that and signed off, and that’s the great Golden Rectangle that forms the basis of the universe, that’s the base of the Fibonacci numbers. I didn’t know that then, I’ve researched it—that ratio is found throughout the entire universe, from snail shells and tiny things and the growth of human hair to extragalactic nebulae—and it signed off with that. And they, I read it in the Britannica, they said that the properties of those Fibonacci numbers are unknown. They seem to be the basis of the universe.
LEE: Huh!
DICK: And that’s how it signed off. And I saw it here and I saw it there and it was incredible. And I saw things, Gwen, that I’ve never been able to tell anybody except Tessa, and it was like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light hit him and he never could tell people everything and I—
It just, it all started when I was on Pentothal and a girl came to the door with some medication from the pharmacy. Some pain medication. And she was wearing a Christian fish sign. And I was dazed from the Pentothal and dazed from the pain and I saw the fish sign and a strange funk came over me and I said—now, I was in terrible pain you know and I’m reaching for the bag and I said, “What is that?” and it shone when the sun struck it and it blinded me. And she put a finger against it and she said this is a sign used by the early Christians and when she said that, I remembered, I remembered. Back all the way to the time of Acts. I remembered events that took place in the book of Acts. I remembered it all and just for a fraction of a second and then it was gone and then during the next month it began to break through. It broke through this world of the early Christians, and I saw it here and now. Saw it here and now. It was here. Some of us who are Christians and some of us who are not. And this terrible iron empire. And I found out that it is the name of the particular age that this is associated with, the age of iron. The Romans had designated it the age of iron. And I saw this—it was called The Empire—and I kept saying to Tess, I said, “Earlay, Earlay”—and it’s Sanskrit, and it means “angry soldiers.” I said, the Roman soldiers will kill us. Because we are Christians. The Roman soldiers would kill us. And I taught her—here, I’ll show you what I taught her, come here, give me your hand. OK, when you shake hands, go like that and describe two arcs, intersecting arcs, that’s the fish sign, that’s the fish sign. And there were other things that I knew, so that I could identify another Christian, without anybody else knowing. And other things like that. And I remembered sitting with the Eleven, with the Twelve, it was after Jesus’ death. There were only eleven of us. The Lord was gone, and he was about to return. And they were real happy, they were terribly happy. But he wasn’t with us, but we remembered—we could literally remember—we could remember the Lord. We were joyful. We were just incredibly joyful. And this lasted for a year, and that’s—and, uh, the presence that appeared to me identified itself as “Hagia Sophia,” Saint Sophia, and I didn’t know what that meant. And I looked it up and you know what it said it is? It’s a code name that the Roman emperor Justinian coined for Christ. It’s a name of a church, uh, in Turkey that the emperor Justinian built and he called it “Saint Sophia,” which means “the creative Logos” or “Jesus Christ.” And I had never heard that before. I didn’t know anything about that. And it identified itself as Saint Sophia.
LEE: Well, that’s real obscure. I’d never—
DICK: Right. Isn’t it incredible? I found it in the encyclopedia. He wanted to call it after Christ, but there was a custom that they named the churches after saints, and he discovered that if you took the Greek from the Sixth Psalm, “Hagia Sophia,” and translated it it became “Saint Sophia,” uh, that’s “holy wisdom,” is what that is. So it sounded like the name of a saint. But it really means “Holy Wisdom,” Hagia Sophia. And it refers to Christ and it’s from the Sixth—or no, I’m sorry, it’s from the Eighth Proverb. Yeah, the Eighth Proverb. Incredible. It’s just incredible. OK, it’s part of the cipher in the Old Testament, it refers to the coming of the savior of the New Testament. And after Jesus does come, then we can look back and see the ciphers in the Old Testament, like in Isaiah. But until Jesus comes, you can’t see them. They’re not visible. And this is the one that is visible to the people around the time of the Emperor Justinian when he said “Hagia Sophia”; in Proverbs it was referring to Christ.
LEE: How strange!
DICK: Yeah, so he called the church that—St. Sophia. And I had never heard of this. I only found this in one source that referred to it. Will Durant says that in his history books about the Middle Ages. And, and the voice said, “Saint Sophia was not acceptable before”— no, no, “Saint Sophia is going to be born again. She was not acceptable before.” That’s what it said.
LEE: “She”?
DICK: “Saint Sophia is going to be born again, she was not acceptable before,” and I didn’t know who Saint Sophia was; I was going, “Who cares about sainthood?” I’m looking it up and it says “the creative Logos or Jesus Christ, a code by the Emperor Justinian used to name a great church in Asia Minor, now a mosque in Turkey, one of the wonders of the ancient world.”
LEE: That’s real strange—
DICK: Yes, it is real strange.
LEE: Well, uh, so what does that mean?
DICK: Well, literally it means Jesus Christ is going to be reborn again, and soon.
LEE: Born again?
DICK: Yeah.
LEE: I understand that this time with a bunch of angels coming out of the sky.
DICK: Yeah, exactly. A multitude of the heavenly host.
LEE: I didn’t think he was going to stick around. I understood that all Christians are going to go right up.
DICK: You know, I can’t find that anywhere in the Bible. Do you know where that is? That citation and stuff, about the rapture? I—that rapture thing? I can’t figure out—
LEE: Acts, I think, chapter four. Do you have a Bible?
DICK: Oh sure, I got Bibles all around here.
LEE: I’m not positive about it, here, but I can take a good look at it—
DICK: Oh, I’d be real interested in it, especially if it’s in Acts. It’d be really, really great if it were in Acts.
LEE: Do you like Paul?
DICK: Yeah, but of course you know Luke wrote Acts, but, I mean, the second part, you know, of the Gospel according to Luke. But I love Paul’s letters. Especially the captivity letters.
LEE: I always thought he was a misogynist.
DICK: I know.
LEE: Which always put me off, I never cared for him much. How the heck do you read this thing? Oh, here it is. (reads)
DICK: Oh.
LEE: I’m still reading here.
DICK: Well, we’re checking outside notation here. I love Acts and Luke. I love where it’s so fluent, and so beautiful. And I always feel very close to him.
DICK: So in other words, it was as if I were—as I were in the book of Luke—it was if I were there. Like I was in that world. And, like, remember one part where I, uh, oh, King Herod said, “What is that noi
se out there?” And somebody says, “It’s the followers of John the Baptist.” And Herod says, “John? I beheaded him!” OK, I come to that part and I stopped and I said, wait a minute, they didn’t know how to write dialogue at that time in these books and I said, wait a minute, could it be the translation? OK, so I checked several other translations. And they—it was all that way and I thought, “Wait a minute. I’m a professional writer.” Now, I’m not arguing that the Bible’s a fake. I’m arguing something else. What I’m saying is that nobody who wrote in those days had the literary techniques which show up in the Gospels. As literary craftsmanship they did not evolve until centuries later. That is, if I were to read the book of, you know, Acts or the Gospel according to Saint Luke, and never read it before, and you asked me to date it, I would date it recently. I wouldn’t date it as an ancient book. I’ll give you another example, is where it says, “And Mary treasured all and Mary remembered all these things that Jesus had said and treasured them in her heart.” They didn’t know how to write like that. I mean, structurally, it’s like— it’s hard to explain. It’s where the observer is in relationship to the people that are being observed. And they only wrote from outside in those days, they didn’t know how to get into things and say, “And she treasured them in her heart.” They didn’t know how to write that kind of thing where they describe their thoughts, the inner world of characters. It did not exist in writing.
