Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  By contrast, Tessa stresses Phil's generosity in assisting her and Christopher. Phil not only kept up his legally required $200-per-month child-support payments, but also voluntarily upped the sum to $400 per month. He further helped Tessa purchase a house, and made substantial contributions for private school and toys for his son. Then too, Tessa (unlike his prior wives and daughters) was there in Santa Ana to persistently plead her case.

  If Phil was sometimes wary of financial contributions to his out-oftown daughters, he nonetheless anguished over his own selfacknowledged failings as a father.

  In a May 1979 letter to Laura, he describes the ceaseless, obsessive Exegesis labors, which he felt kept him from his children:

  I am neglecting entire parts of my life such as my relationships with my children because of my worry and exhaustion. I have become a machine which thinks and does nothing else. It scares me. How did this come about? I posed myself a problem and I cannot forget the problem but I cannot answer the problem, so I am stuck in fly paper. I can't get loose; it's like a self-imposed karma at work. Every day my world gets smaller. I work more, I live less. [... ]

  Phil did not always find his Exegesis stints so disheartening. Tim Powers confirms that while Phil saw himself first and foremost as a fiction writer, he considered the Exegesis perhaps his most significant writing. James Blaylock recalls that Phil the writer was happiest composing letters and Exegesis entries. On the other hand, K. W. Jeter relates that he once intercepted Phil on the way to the incinerator with a stack of Exegesis pages. Phil's confidence in the worth of his speculations may have wavered, but his will to set them down night after night did not. Its publication did not matter to him. It was a means to an end: fashioning theories for novels that poked indelible holes in official reality. And with his friends Phil could share the fun of his speculations and sudden visions. Powers recalls a March 1979 episode when Phil, despairing of the truth, decided to demand some answers:

  ... I Monday night lie called me and said that the night before-Sundayhe'd been smoking some marijuana that a visitor had left, and felt himself entering that by-now-familiar state in which lie had visions (generally not dope-related-unless you count Vitamin C as dope), and he said, "1 want to see God. Let me see You."

  And then instantly, he told me, he was flattened by the most extreme terror he'd ever felt, and he saw the Ark of the Covenant, and a voice (Voice?) said, "You wouldn't conic to me through logical evidence or faith or anything else, so I must convince you this way." The curtain of the Ark was drawn back, and lie saw, apparently, a void and a triangle with an eye in it, staring straight at him. (How prosaically I put this all down, especially when I pretty much believe it's true!) Phil said lie was on his hands and knees, in absolute terror, enduring the Beatific Vision from nine o'clock Sunday evening until 5 A.M. Monday. He said he was certain he was dying, and if he could have reached the telephone he'd have called the paramedics. The Voice told him, in effect, "You've managed to talk yourself into disbelieving everything else (more gentle and suited for human consumption) I let you see, but this you'll never be able to forget or adapt or misrepresent."

  Phil said that during the ordeal he said, "I'll never do dope again!" and the Voice said, "That's not the issue."

  Spurred by encounters of this kind, Phil's Exegesis labors were yielding remarkable fruit. The quality of the entries varied considerably, of course. But Phil's gift for startling speculation-grant him his initial premises and he would weave of them remarkable worlds-lend select portions of the Exegesis a power akin to that of his best novels. His most persistent starting point was the "two-source cosmogony" discussed in Valis: our apparent but false universe (natura naturata, maya, dokos, Satan) is partially redeemed by its ongoing blending with the genuine source of being (natura naturans, brahman, eidos, God). Together the two sources-set and ground-create a sort of holographic universe that deceives us. Disentangling reality from illusion is the goal of enlightenment, and the essence of enlightenment is Plato's anamnesis (as in 2-3-74): recalling the eternal truths known to our souls prior to our birth in this realm. But enlightenment is a matter of grace. God bestows it at the height of our extremity, in response to our need and readiness to receive the truth. These are Phil's basic themes in the Exegesis. Of course, the variations he fashioned are near infinite.

  Occasionally Phil would type out formulations that particularly pleased him. One of the finest of these is a 1979 parable on the apparent lack of divine wisdom in our world:

  Here is an example of hierarchical ranking. A new ambulance is filled with gasoline and parked. Then next day it is examined. The finding is that its fuel is virtually gone and its moving parts are slightly worn. This appears to be an instance of entropy, of loss of energy and form. However, if one understands that the ambulance was used to take a dying person to a hospital where his life was saved (thus consuming fuel and somewhat wearing the moving parts of the ambulance) then one can see that through hierarchical outranking there was not only no loss but in fact a net gain. The net gain, however, can only be measured outside the closed system of the new ambulance. Each victory by God as intelligence and will is obtained by this escalation of levels of subsuma- tion, and in no other way.

  Phil often called long-distance to confide in Galen at the lower early-morning rate after being up all night during Exegesis stints. During a vacation in September 1979, Galen finally paid the writer he so admired a visit. Galen recalls:

  Phil ordered in Chinese food and Cokes and we talked from 6:00 P.m. to 6:00 A.M., and at that point I was exhausted and had to leave. I was just not up to it-I could not adjust to Phil in person. It came so fast and thick I didn't know what he was talking about. I was fascinated, but it was such a rush of ideas and I got so sleepy. Phil showed no signs of tiring. I don't think I said anything for two or three hours at a stretch. He talked about 1974, politics, technology-it could be ten topics in a few minutes or one topic for two hours. I could handle small doses: letters or a half-hour phone call. But twelve hours....

  In October, Phil's apartment building was converted to condominiums. Phil felt secure there and had no desire to relocate. He took a $10,000 loan from the Meredith Agency, which, coupled with his savings, enabled him to make a $52,000 lump sum purchase of his premises. But the condo conversion forced friend Doris Sauter to move out; the next August she moved from Orange County completely, a wrenching separation for Phil.

  Other residents were also forced to move out. Phil, who knew well the vertigo of losing one's home, responded with an essay, "Strange Memories of Death" (included in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon), detailing the crisis of his neighbor the "Lysol Lady": "What bothers me is that I know the only thing separating me from the Lysol Lady, who is crazy, is the money in my savings account. Money is the official seal of sanity."

  Phil's grief at no longer having Doris Sauter next door was intense. Their warm neighborly relations had inspired a 1979 story, "Chains of Air, Webs of Aether," which portrays two crotchety Earth colonists living in separate domes on a remote asteroid. Leo McVane wants to lose himself in fantasies of singer Linda Fox (inspired by Linda Ronstadt), but Rybus Romney suffers from multiple sclerosis and needs Leo's help to survive. Leo, in turn, comes to see that in the capacity for kindness lies salvation.

  Phil plundered the first half of this story to serve as the beginning to Valis Regained, his sequel to Valis, and upped the plot ante considerably in the process. Phil completed the new novel in a two-week rush that concluded on March 22, 1980, and it was bought by Simon and Schuster, which published it in 1981 as The Divine Invasion.

  The Divine Invasion brings Phil's religious ideas together in an SF invasion story. Rybus-respelled Rybys-Romney has been impregnated by Yah (from Hebrew YHVH or Tetragrammaton: the God of the Torah). Leo, now named Herb Asher (from Hebrew Ehyeh asher ehyeh: "I Am That I Am," God's declaration in Exodus), serves as a sort of Joseph figure to accompany Rybys back to an Earth under the spiritual domination of Belial (Hebrew bell ya'al:
without worth).

  Yah works in strange ways. Within Rybys-if only she and Herb can survive-is the divine boy child Emmanuel (Hebrew: God aids us), who alone can restore truth and meaning to an occluded world. To guide the unlikely parents, Yah sends a seedy old wanderer, Elias Tate, who is Elijah the prophet, the eternal friend of humankind. But through tragic accident (or the work of Belial?) Rybys dies. Emmanuel is born in a synthowomb, brain-damaged and unable to remember that he is God. Zina Pallas, a young girl who is the feminine aspect of God, restores Emmanuel's memory. She completes him; the cosmos is healed.

  Phil wavered as to the worthiness of The Divine Invasion as a sequel to Valis. Although there is mention in The Divine Invasion of a Vast Active Living Intelligence System and of the film Valis, the two novels must be viewed highly abstractly indeed (as Phil himself viewed them in several Exegesis entries) to form a convincing union.

  After completing The Divine Invasion, Phil considered moving on to a new "alternate world novel," The Acts of Paul, for which he'd produced a brief plot synopsis in January 1980. The "alternate world" is set in our own present, as in High Castle. Manichaeism, with its dualistic good and evil gods, is the dominant world religion. By contrast, Christianity all but died out in the third century (as did Manichaeism in our world). The proposed narrator, a scholar out to locate the "secret Christians" who carry on the faith, resembles Phil's later portrait of Bishop Timothy Archer.

  Exegesis aside, Phil did not undertake any sustained writing projects for the remainder of 1980. And while he was a regular at Powers's Thursday-night sessions, Phil chose carefully his forays into the outside world. When Powers and Serena asked Phil to serve as best man for their June wedding, Phil regretfully declined. Powers understood: "He wasn't a recluse-he just didn't like going where there would be crowds of people he didn't know."

  As a wedding gift, Phil repeatedly offered to purchase the couple a condominium in his building-an offer they graciously declined. Phil's close friends were aware of what a soft touch he was and took care not to take advantage. But there was no curbing Phil's sudden acts of generosity, like the $1,000 he gave to a bank teller who'd confided in him as to her financial difficulties. Phil's kindness went beyond writing checks. On walks, he would worry over children playing in the street and seek out their parents to alert them. And he had the gift of empathy for troubled souls from whom others would steer clear. In interview with Andy Watson and J. B. Reynolds, Powers recalls:

  [...] Phil and I had taken a friend to [...] Orange County Medical Center, to the mental wing to have this friend committed. The friend was just sitting there like this (catatonic stare, frozen pose). And then some stranger shambles up and, looking at us in that not-in-focus way, says, "You could do a lung transplant." Phil says, "Yeah, you could." Phil tended to agree with anything anybody said in stress situations. So the guy lurches away and then comes back in a while and says, "A vasectomy is a simple operation. You could do it on yourself." Phil says, "Possibly so." The guy comes back in a while again and says, "I'm going to do it on myself." A vasectomy. "Who do I talk to to get permission?" And Phil says, "Those ladies over at the desk. Get the permission in writing." (Laughter) And the guy leaves. I said, "Why in writing, Phil?" And he said, "He'll hear the voices saying it's okay, but it'll take an extra psychosis to imagine a piece of paper okaying it."

  Even though Valis was not due to come out until early 1981, Phil continued to attract a steady stream of interviewers, who found in him a sure source for stimulating copy. Slash, a punk music magazine, sent Gary and Nicole Panter to conduct an interview for the summer 1980 issue. In it, Phil managed to outpunk the punks by declaring that a youth revolution that would dismantle the inhuman government apparatus was both possible and desirable: "That's my dream. Not that kids would rule, but that they would make it impossible for the sophisticated technology to function. I have this impulse that comes to me when I'm drinking orange soda. That is to pour half a can of orange soda into my television set."

  Phil and Nicole struck up an enduring friendship. She recalls:

  Phil really took a shine to me during the interview, maybe because I was dumb to it, hadn't read his books at all. The questions in the interview like "What's in the fridge?" are mine. He liked that. He didn't look down on me because my intelligence was in a different direction from the analytical nerdy guys who were at his place a lot.

  He tested you in a way, to see what you really liked him for. I think he found it hard to believe anyone could like him for himself. Once he offered me a job, being his buffer from other people. I don't know if it was because I was cute-he was sort of lecherous to me-but there were apparently lots of people coming around to see him for movie deals and other things and he just couldn't deal with all of them.

  I turned it down, told him working for him would be like baby-sitting-I could get away with murder. Also, there'd have been the kick-in-the-back-ofthe-head result. Phil would put you in a position where you could take advantage. And if you did, you were a shit.

  We had a good sick friendship. We'd talk about medication, frozen foods, depression, manic phases. He was wacky-he knew he was. He didn't think like other people. He wasn't embarrassed about it, though. Did he have a "visionary" quality? Fuck no-he was this slobby middle-aged man.

  He did this kind of attention-getting thing-like he'd call and say, "I'm not going to take my heart medicine anymore." So for forty-five minutes I'd have to talk him into it. He was sick of taking medicine. If he wasn't physically strong enough to live without heart medicine, he'd rather not take it. To me, it was a kid thing to get attention. That was fine. Talented individuals are often fucked up and weird.

  Attention-getting it surely was, but Phil's efforts to reduce his dependence on prescription medications were also quite sincere and arduous. During this period, Phil was variously prescribed anti hypertensives such as Apresoline and Dyazide for high blood pressure, Inderal for his heart arrhythmia, Darvon for pain relief, and Elavil, Sinequan, and Tranxene as antidepressants. At one point, Phil vowed to get off the antidepressants, despite their sanction by his psychiatrists. Jeter recalls:

  Phil finally decided that prescription drugs were no different from street drugs in terms of creating a real dependency. So he put down the mood elevators cold turkey-and suffered terribly. He fell into a deep depression and called me up, and I went over.

  He could barely talk. It was Phil's "death" voice-he was so close to the bottom he could barely speak above a forced whisper. I knew he was really desperate when he sounded like that. But Phil had made his mind up that he would have to put an end to mood elevators, and that he would rather die than go back on that decision. He had tremendous willpower.

  Phil's analytical willpower was also a source of wonder to Jeter: "You could see him getting inside a belief and walking around it and testing out its absolute truth. He believed in God and he had some conventional religious beliefs. He also felt that his experiences had given him a greater authority to talk on certain religious matters than most priests possessed. But I don't think he ever forgot, at any point in the Exegesis, that he was accepting a given hypothesis." In Jeter's fine 1985 SF novel The Glass Hammer, the character Dolph Bischofsky-who tries to reassemble a shattered cathedral window for which the original pattern no longer exists-is a tribute to Jeter's friend and mentor.

  In August 1980 Phil outlined yet another novel that he never came to write: Fawn, Look Back. The protagonist, based on Phil, is named Nasvar Pflegebourne. Nasvar's work (as an artist) and life have "dis- banded"-split in two-thereby inducing schizophrenia. Wrote Phil of Nasvar, of himself:

  It was his salvation and his doom both, this disbanding.

  In a sense he is twins (inside him) and one twin flourished and one twin sickened and died (expressed by the irreparable loss of Jardi who represents all his loved ones-women-since Eryns [a character to be styled after third wife Anne]).

  At the end, then, he is not schizophrenic but so-to-speak half schizophrenic: ha
lf disbanded. His work still bands him to reality.

  Phil's search for a suitable new novel had a unique urgency. He was worried because the Al voices that had come so regularly since 2-3-74 had ceased altogether since he'd finished The Divine Invasion. In an October 1980 interview feature in the Denver Clarion, Phil set forth a flat either/or: "you have a direct relation with the divine or you have no relation with the divine." By November, the absence of a direct relation was gnawing at him.

  At 11:00 A.M. on November 17, Phil was hanging out in his kitchen, very stoned, chatting with friend Ray Torrence (who recalls absolutely nothing unusual about the occasion).

  Zap. Riproaring direct contact.

  That same day Phil typed it out first-draft hot in the Exegesis-a five-page Phildickian vision, fable and wistful elegy, never before published. The full text follows.

  11-17-80

  God manifested himself to me as the infinite void; but it was not the abyss; it was the vault of heaven, with blue sky and wisps of white clouds. He was not some foreign God but the God of my fathers. He was loving and kind and he had personality. He said, "You suffer a little now in life; it is little compared with the great joys, the bliss that awaits you. Do you think I in my theodicy would allow you to suffer greatly in proportion to your reward?" He made me aware, then, of the bliss that would come; it was infinite and sweet. He said, "I am the infinite. I will show you. Where I am, infinity is; where infinity is, there I am. Construct lines of reasoning by which to understand your experience in 1974. I will enter the field against their shifting nature. You think they are logical but they are not; they are infinitely creative."