Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  This contact with Aphrodite was the first of many encounters with divine female aspects-or, Phil sometimes said, his anima-through a voice that came to him in dreams or hypnogogic states. While Phil often called this the "Al" (artificial intelligence) voice, he ascribed to it a feminine quality and termed it not only Aphrodite but also Artemis/ Diana, Athena/Minerva, Saint Sophia (Holy Wisdom, the goddess of Gnosticism), and twin sister Jane-with whom Phil felt he was, at times, in telepathic contact.

  Exactly one year later, in March 1975, Phil typed out a paean to these mid-March visions and the unknown "it" behind them:

  March 16, 1974: It appeared-in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns-and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.

  March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw that the world did not compute, that I-and it-had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity, of the world, saying, "This cannot exist; it cannot exist."

  March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same instant, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power I saw suddenly the universe as it was; through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning Thing.

  On March 20, the action by which Phil freed himself was his handling of what he called, in the Exegesis, the "Xerox missive." Accounts of this event are provided in Radio Free Albemuth and, far more accurately, in Valis. Horselover Fat (who, in Valis, is also SF writer Phil Dick) has a dream about a Soviet woman-Sadassa Ulnawho will contact him by mail. "An urgent message fired into Fat's head that he must respond to her letter when it came." Fat confides to his wife, Beth (based on Tessa), his sense of danger. Then comes the fateful day:

  On Wednesday, Fat received a plethora of letters: seven in all. Without opening them he fished among them and pointed out one, which had no return name or address on it. "That's it," he said to Beth, who, by now, was also freaked. "Open it and look at it, but don't let me see her name or address or I'll answer it."

  Beth opened it. Instead of a letter per se she found a Xerox sheet on which two book reviews from the left-wing New York newspaper The Daily World had been juxtaposed. The reviewer described the author of the books as a Soviet national living in the United States. From the reviews it was obvious that the author was a Party member.

  "My God," Beth said, turning the Xerox sheet over. "The author's name and address is written on the back."

  "A woman?" Fat said.

  "Yes," Beth said.

  I [Phil] never found out from Fat and Beth what they did with the two letters. From hints Fat dropped I deduced that it was innocent; but what he did with the Xerox one, which really wasn't a letter in the strict sense of the term, I do not to this day know, nor do I want to know. Maybe he burned it or maybe he turned it over to the police or the FBI or the CIA. In any case I doubt if he answered it.

  Tessa confirms that for a week or more, Phil had been anticipating a letter that would "kill" him. When it arrived, he gave it to her to read but instructed her not to let him see it. Tessa summarized for him its form and content. She recalls:

  Certain words in the article [book review] were underlined, some in red and some in blue. All were what Phil called "die messages." Words like decline, decay, stagnation, decomposition. The book, it seems, was about the decline and fall of American capitalism. There was a return address on the envelope, a hotel in New York, but no name [Fat, in the Valis quote above, says there was a namej. As if Phil ought to know who had sent it, and as if he ought to write back to them.

  Phil suspected that the Xerox missive was somehow connected to his two-week amnesia episode in Vancouver in March 1972. The Mafia types in black suits had driven him around in the back of a limousine, asking questions he could no longer recall. What had been programmed into him? By whom? He feared that the juxtaposed Xeroxed book reviews were supposed to have triggered off something in him, but somehow failed. He confided his fears and speculations to Tessa, who writes: "I believed him. He always asked me, `Am I nuts?' I always said no. I still believe he was sane. Crazy people don't ask, `Am I nuts?' They know they're sane."

  Phil's sense of the Xerox missive threat was keen. It forced him into prompt defensive action. In the aftermath, there was a sense of freedom-karma broken-and of intense lingering guilt.

  As hinted at in Valis, Phil forwarded the Xerox missive to the FBI. In a 1978 Exegesis entry he noted that time was of the essence to parry either (1) KGB recruitment or (2) FBI loyalty-test fake KGB recruitment. "It took me 21/2 hours to phone the Bureau. That's a good (test) score [...] Don't tell me there's no God. The phosphenes began the week before; I was all ready for the damn thing when it came."

  Phil had an acute sense of something taking control of him to direct his response to the Xerox missive. In the Exegesis, he speculated that it was Thomas-no longer an early Christian but instead a thought-control implant by U.S. Army Intelligence-who guided him. Phil's alternate name for Thomas under this theory was "Pigspurt." Pigspurt or other, Phil's searing sense of his personality's being taken over led him, on March 20, to take the startling step of calling not only the FBI but also the Fullerton police. "I am a machine," lie told the officer who answered the phone-and then asked to be locked up. The police took no action.

  Phil shortly thereafter regained a sense of self-control. But he continued to believe-by virtue of the wisdom and guidance that he believed had been bestowed upon hinm-that placating the ruling authorities was essential to preserve his personal safety. And so Phil maintained contact with the FBI, writing several times to its L.A. office from March through September 1974. He was out to negate any possible doubt of his loyalty on the Bureau's part. The letters include defensive explanations as to why leftist critics valued his work and assurances that his letters to Soviet scientists engaged in ESP research were by way of trying to get them to rise to the bait and reveal themselves. (Phil's cautiousness was not entirely unfounded. In 1975, through the Freedom of Information Act, Phil learned that a 1958 letter he had written to a Soviet scientist had been intercepted by the CIA.)

  To all his correspondence he received a single response: a March 28, 1974, form letter from FBI director William Sullivan: "Your interest in writing as you did is indeed appreciated and the material will receive appropriate attention." But by the act of proclaiming his loyalty Phil obtained a great measure of comfort and calm. The dread that had afflicted him since the November 1971 break-in now lifted.

  But the guilt remained. Memories of the McCarthy era and of FBI agents coming to his and Kleo's Berkeley home in the fifties must have passed through his mind when Phil considered his actions. He had, in many of his SF novels-most recently Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said-decried the police state and the informants on which it relied. Had Phil become that which he despised? In a 1979 Exegesis entry he raked himself over the coals for his cowardice:

  I cooperated fully with my oppressors. There was no further degree to which I could be turned around-I went all the way, due to the override, & experienced a sense 1) of having done the right thing for God & country; & 2) a total loss of anxiety, of exculpation (naturally). Fred, of Bob/Fred [in Scanner] had totally won. I literally narked on myself! [...]

  Fear killed the rebel in me in 3-74 & I never regretted it, since it gave me freedom from fear. They got me. The intimidation worked-e.g. the hit on my house. [. . .1

  I am afraid of 1) the civil authorities (Caesar); & 2) God (Valis). Hence it can be said I am afraid of authority, of whatever is powerful.

  In his own defense, Phil would stress the magnitude of the peril and the direct command of a higher intelligence that had compelled him to contact the FBI. From a subsequent 1979 entry:

  So I turned to God & the Bureau, & financial security. Well, excuse me. I was a to
tally desperate person, which I no longer am. I can sleep at night okay [... ] I may not have done the ideologically right thing but I did the wise thing. [... ] My conversion was not so much a spiritual one as a conversion to the path of wisdom, correctly defined: how to survive. That was my goal: survival. I succeeded. In my opinion, Holy Wisdom [Saint Sophia] herself took over my life & directed me [... ] I lived a wild, unstable, desperate, Quixotic life, & would soon have died. Hence it is not accident that Holy Wisdom came to me; I needed her very badly.

  Be it noted that Phil was never so craven with respect to "authority" as he here accuses himself. As to "God," Phil challenged the concept every which way. As to "Caesar," for all his posturing to the FBI, Phil remained outspoken on the abuses of the Nixon administration-in essays such as "The Nixon Crowd" (1974) and in novels such as Radio Free Albemuth and Valis.

  Even after the Xerox missive crisis passed, March 1974 continued to hold its surprises. There were strange alterations in his daily life. Pets (including the beloved Pinky the cat) seemed more intelligent, even somehow attempting to communicate. And then there was the radio that played on even after Phil and Tessa unplugged it and put it in the kitchen.

  It all started when the radio began to abuse Phil with obscenities at night. In Radio Free Albemuth, protagonist Nicholas Brady undergoes the same treatment: " `Nick the prick,' the radio was saying, in imitation of the voice of a popular vocalist whose latest record had just been featured. `Listen, Nick the prick. You're worthless and you're going to die. You misfit! You prick, Nick! Die, die, die!!' " In interview with J. B. Reynolds, Tessa recalled: "The thing about that was that we both heard the music, and it was always between two and Six A.M., and the radio wasn't even plugged in. [...] But we still got Easy Listening music, only Phil kept hearing it tell him that he was no good, that he should die. And I didn't hear that. We gave up and plugged the radio back in again, because it was easier to sleep with music on."

  The most striking of all the changes was the advent of the pink light beams firing information into Phil's brain. While Tessa believes in the genuine mystical nature of Phil's experiences, she suggests that the silver-black Christian fish bumper sticker on their window may have played a physiological role here; but Phil began seeing pink rectangular images on the apartment walls even when he had not looked at the fish sign in sunlight. When it hit, the pink light beam was blinding, like a flashbulb going off in Phil's face. The beam was information-rich and full of spiritual surprises. At one point it instructed Phil in how to administer the Eucharist to son Christopher according to the rites of the early Christians. The ceremony is described in Valis:

  In March 1974 during the time that VALIS overruled me, held control of my mind, I had conducted a correct and complex inititation of Christopher into the ranks of the immortals. [...]

  This was an experience which I treasured. It had been done in utter stealth, concealed even from my son's mother.

  First I had fixed a mug of hot chocolate. Then I had fixed a hot dog on a bun with the usual trimmings; [...]

  Seated on the floor in Christopher's room with him, 1---or rather VALIS in me, as me-had played a game. First, I jokingly held the cup of chocolate up, over my son's head; then, as if by accident, I had splashed warm chocolate on his head, into his hair. Giggling, Christopher had tried to wipe the liquid off; I had of course helped him. Leaning toward him, I had whispered,

  "In the name of the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit."

  No one heard me except Christopher. Now, as I wiped the warm chocolate from his hair, I inscribed the sign of the cross on his forehead. I had now baptized him and now I confirmed him; I did so, not by the authority of any church, but by the authority of the living plasmate in me: VALIS himself. Next I said to my son, "Your secret name, your Christian name, is-" And I told him what it was. Only he and I are ever to know; he and I and VALIS.

  Phil felt certain that there was an entity communicating with him throughout 2-3-74, and one of the names he gave it was VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Valis bestowed information on Phil by means other than pink light. A series of tutelary dreams began in March, continued on nightly into the summer, and returned intermittently for the rest of his life. In a July 1974 letter Phil insisted that "the most eerie-and yet at the same time the most valid proof of what had happened, that indeed something real had happenedwere my continuing experiences while asleep. Soon after the eight-hour show of dazzling graphics I began to have what I do not think are dreams, since they are not like any dreams I have ever had or even read about." Phil believed that the information they contained had been subliminally encoded during the March 18 graphics display. In a June 1974 letter he described the dream flow:

  [. . .] I was hoping for increased neural efficiency. I got more: actual information about the future, for during the next three months [from March on], almost each night, during sleep I was receiving information in the form of print-outs: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers-sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes, oddly, in the form of a baby's cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningful information was written and typed, and finally galley proofs held up for me to read which I was told in my dream "contained prophecies about the future," and during the last two weeks a huge book, again and again, with page after page of printed lines.

  Information from the future? Phil had already, in Ubik and CounterClock World, posited a kind of Logos that moved in retrograde or backward time to bestow knowledge and salvation. And his research on 2-3-74 uncovered tantalizing physics research on tachyons, particles that move faster than light in retrograde time and could, theoretically, carry information from the future. Whatever the source, a basic problem remained: The dreams seldom offered clear guidance. Often the information came in the form of non sequitur language fragments (one of these, "Aramcheck," became a character's name in Radio Free Albemuth) or integer sequences. Some words and fragments proved to be Sanskrit roots or phrases of koine Greek (the language of the Near East in the time of Christ), such as "poros krater" (limestone bowl), "crypte morphosis" (latent shape), and "The Rhipidon Society" (rhipidos: fan; the Rhipidon Society plays a key role in Valis). There were also the terms "Fomalhaut" and "Albemuth," which Phil associated with the distant star-Sirius, he speculated-from which the information might have been transmitted. Then again, the koine Greek indicated that Asklepios, the god of healing, whose father was Apollo and whose stepmother was the Cumaen sibyl (the possible source of the "AI Voice"), might be his nightly tutor.

  In one dream appeared "singed pages," as if "the book had gone through a fire but had been rescued." Phil wasn't always sure that he wanted to take in what he felt he was being "forced" to read. Some of the dream texts pointed to ominous "religious fanatics" conspiracies that took in the deaths of Pike, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Meanwhile, hypnagogic voices offered enigmatic oracles. While falling asleep one evening in July 1974, Phil "heard her (you know, my anima, the sibyl), singing along with a choir: 'You must put your slippers on / To walk toward the dawn.' " In January 1975, also in a hypnagogic state, came "Saint Sophia is going to be reborn." (Alternative version: "St. Sophia is going to be reborn again; she was not acceptable before.") Readers of Valis will recognize these oracles.

  In addition, there were the dreams of the three-eyed beings. In Valis Phil writes of the dual identity character Fat/Phil:

  In March 1974 at the time he had encountered God (more properly Zebra), he had experienced vivid dreams about the three-eyed people-he had told me that. They manifested themselves as cyborg entities: wrapped up in glass bubbles staggering under masses of technological gear. An odd aspect cropped up that puzzled both Fat and me; sometimes in these vision-like dreams, Soviet technicians could be seen, hurrying to repair malfunctions of the sophisticated technological communications apparatus enclosing the threeeyed people.

  In the Exegesis, Phil drew pictures of thes
e beings and sometimes identified their third eye with the wisdom (ajna) eye of Hinduism and Buddhism. He also explored the possibility that they were aliens of superior intelligence who had, by means of satellite-fired information beams, contacted him. As to such theorizing, narrator Phil concludes, in Valis: "By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality." In real life, Phil was equally aware of how his richly associative mode of thought-in which there were no "dead" gods who could not be reborn in the human psyche-would sound to others. From a July 1974 letter which Phil included in the Exegesis:

  I can see myself telling my therapist this. "What's on your mind, Phil?" she'll say when I go in, and I'll say, "Asklepios is my tutor, from out of Periclean Athens. I'm learning to talk in Attic Greek." She'll say, "Oh really?" and I'll be on my way to the Blissful Groves, but that won't be until after death; that'll be in the country where it's quiet and costs $100 a day. And you get all the apple juice you want to drink, along with Thorazine.

  As this letter indicates, Phil was not one to lose his sense of humor, not even when it came to his own "divine" revelations. On the contrary, Phil always retained the ability to see just how loopy his experiences could seem. Not only could he laugh at them, he could also subject himself to fiercely skeptical questioning-as an Exegesis self-interview quoted later in this chapter will establish. Phil was neither credulous nor a fool. He held to no single set of beliefs as to what was happening to him. Yet he possessed the moral courage to treat it all seriously, as a source of possible knowledge, rather than dismiss it outright. In America, if you are unfortunate enough to have a spiritual-seeming vision, it had better conform to the doctrines of an established church. If it doesn't, you're crazy, simple as that. Phil knew full well just how his experiences would seem to others. But he was damned if he was going to deny himself a single avenue of speculation.