The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
Page 19
With warm personal regards,
Philip K. Dick
[5:14]56 When I met Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote More Than Human, this good man said to me right off, "What sort of universe is it that causes a man like Tony Boucher to die of cancer?" I had been wondering the same thing ever since Tony Boucher died. So had Ted Sturgeon, although he didn't expect me to give an answer. He just wanted to show me what he—Ted Sturgeon—was like. I've found I can do that, too; let people know about me by asking that. It shows that I cared a lot about one of the warmest people who ever lived. Tony was warm and at the same time when he stood in the midst of a group of people, sweat came out on his forehead from fear. Nobody ever wrote that about him but it's true. He was terrified all the time. He told me so once, not in so many words. He loved people, but one time I met him on the electric train going to the opera and he was scared. He was a music critic and he did reviewing for the New York Times and edited a magazine and wrote novels and stories. But he was scared to take a drive across town.
Tony loved the universe and the universe frightened him, and I think I know where his head was at. A lot of people who are timid are that way because they love too much. They're afraid it'll all fall through. Naturally, it did with Tony. He died in middle-age. Now, I ask you, what good did it do him to be scared? He used to carry his rare old 78 records to radio station KPFA every week, wrapping them up in a towel so they wouldn't get broken. One time I decided to give Tony all my rare opera and vocal records, just plain give them to him as a gift of my loving him. I phoned him up. "I got Tiana Lemnitz records and Gerhard Husch," I told him. Tony replied shyly, "They are my idols." He was a Roman Catholic—the only one we knew—and that was a strong statement. Before I could get the records to him he was dead. "I feel tired half the day," he had added. "I can't work as much as I used to. I think I'm sick." I explained I had the same thing. That was eight or so years ago. The doctor told him he had a bruised rib and taped it up. Someday I will meet that doctor on the street. Tony got bad advice from everyone who could talk.
We used to play poker. Tony loved opera and poker and science fiction and mystery stories. He had a little writing class—this was after he was famous and edited F&S-F—and he charged one dollar a night when you showed up. He read your whole manuscript. He told you how rotten it was, and you went away and wrote something good. I never figured out how he accomplished that. Criticism like that is supposed to crush you. "Maybe it's because when Tony reads your story it's like he's reading it in Latin," somebody said. A whole dollar it cost. He taught me to write, and my first sale was to him. I still can remember that nobody understood the story but him, even after it was printed. Now it's in a college-level S-F course manual put out by Ginn and Company. There's only about 300 words to the story. After the printing of the story, Ginn and Company prints an impromptu discussion I had with a high school class about the story. All the kids understand the story. It's about how a dog sees garbagemen coming to steal the precious food that the family stores up every day until the heavily constructed repository is full and then these Roogs come and steal the food just when it's ripe and perfect. The dog tries to warn the family, but it's always early in the morning and his barking just annoys them. The story ends when the family decides they have to get rid of the dog, due to his barking, at which point one of the Roogs or garbagemen says to the dog, "We'll be back to get the people pretty soon." I never could understand why no one but Tony Boucher could understand the story (I sent it to him in 1951). I guess in those days my view of garbagemen was not shared universally, and now in 1971 when the high school class discussed it with me, I guess it is. "But garbagemen don't eat people," a lady editor pointed out to me in 1952. I had trouble answering that. Something comes and eats up people who are sleeping in tranquility. Like Tony. Something got him. I think the dog, who cried, "Roog, Roog," was trying to warn me and Tony. I got the warning and escaped—for a while, anyhow—but Tony stayed at his post. You see, when you're so scared of the universe (or Roogs, if you will) to stay at your post takes courage of the kind they can't write about because (1) they don't know how and (2) they didn't notice in the first place, except maybe Ted Sturgeon, with all his own love, and his total lack of fear. He must have known how scared Tony was, and to be that scared and for the Roogs to get you—it's so symmetric, isn't it.
However, Tony is still alive, I discovered last year. My cat had begun to behave in an odd way, keeping watch over me in a quiet fashion, and I saw that he had changed. This was after he ran away and came back, wild and dirty, crapping on the rug in fear; we took him to the vet and the vet calmed him down and healed him. After that Pinky had what I call a spiritual quality, except that he wouldn't eat meat. He would tremble whenever we tried to feed it to him. For five months he'd been lost, living in the gutter, seeing god knows what; I wish I knew. Anyhow when he was changed—in the twinkling of an eye; that is, while at the vet—he wouldn't ever do anything cruel. Yet I knew Pinky was afraid, because once I almost shut the refrigerator door on him and he did a 3 cushion bank shot of himself off the walls to escape, and clocked a velocity unusual for a pink sheep thing that usually just sat and gazed ahead. Pinky had trouble breathing because of his heavy fur and what they call hairballs. Tony had asthma terribly and needed it cold. Pinky would sit by the door to get the cold air from under the crack, and struggle to breathe. I will not write a teaser article here; Pinky died of cancer suddenly; he was three years old; very young for a cat. It was totally unexpected. The vet diagnosed it as something else.
I hadn't realized Pinky was Tony Boucher, served up by the universe again, until I had this dream about Tony the Tiger—the cereal box character who offers you cocoa puffs. In my dream I stood at one end of a light-struck glade, and at the other a great tiger came out slowly, with delight, and I knew we were together again, Tony the Tiger and me. My joy was unbounded. When I woke up I tried to think who I knew named Tony. I had other strange experiences after Pinky died. I dreamed about a "Mrs. Donlevy" who was incredibly tall—I could see only her feet and ankles—and she was serving me a plate of milk on the back porch and there was a vacant lot where I could roam at will, forever. It was the Elysian Vacant Lot, which the Greeks believed in, but just my size. Also, the day Pinky died, at the vet's, that evening as I stood in the bathroom I felt my wife put her hand on my shoulder, firmly, to console me. Turning, I saw no one. I also dreamed this dream: I had the album notes for "Don Pasquale" and at the end the conductor had added a note: five strings of cat gut, like a stave. It was a final hello from Pinky who was Tony Boucher; in the drama the album was an old 78 one, a favorite of Tony's.
Tony or Pinky, I guess names don't count, was a lousy hunter all his life. One time he caught a gopher and came up our apartment stairs with it. He put it on his dish, where he was fed, and the gopher ran off. Tony felt that things belonged in their place, an obsessively orderly person; his books were arranged the same way—each book in its exact place. He should have tolerated more chaos in the universe. However, he recaught the gopher and ate it.
Tony, or Pinky, was my guide; he taught me to write, and he stayed with me when I was sick back in 1972 and 1973. That's why my wife Tessa brought him over, because I had pneumonia and needed help and we had no money for a doctor. (I think now in that regard I was lucky; he would have told me I had a bruised rib.) Pinky used to lie on my body in a transversal fashion, which mystified me, until I realized that he was trying to figure out which part of me was sick. He knew it was just one part, around the middle of my body. He did his best and I recovered but he did not. That was my friend.
Most cats fear the clattering arrival of the garbagemen each week, but Pinky really more detested them than feared them. He hid out under our bed about half an hour before we heard them coming every Monday. He didn't show fear; we just saw the two unwinking green eyes under the bed where he waited the garbagemen out. There was no Pinky, just the eyes, waiting them out, the Bastards.
Four nights before Pinky
died, before we knew he had cancer—I started to say, before he had been diagnosed as having a bruised rib—he and Tessa and I were lying in the bedroom on the bed, and I saw a uniform pale light slowly fill the room. I thought the angel of death had come for me and I began to pray in Latin: "Tremens factos sum ego, et timeo," and so forth57; Tessa gritted her teeth but Pinky sat there, front feet tucked under him, impassive. I knew there was no place to hide, like under the bed. Death can find you under the bed; everyone knows that, even little kids. And it looks bad.
It never occurred to me that death was coming for anyone but me, which shows my attitude. I saw us all as painted ducks, on a painted sea, and thought of the Arab 13th century poem about "Once he will miss, twice he will miss/All the world's one level plain for him on which he hunts for flowers."58 We were as conspicuous as—well, anyhow finally I gave up praying, but I remember in particular I kept crying out, "Mors stupebit et natura."59 Which I thought meant that death stood stupefied, as if in surprise. (As in, "I was stupefied to learn that my car had been towed away." It means just standing there impotently. That is not what Merriam-Webster 3 says, but it is what I say.)
Pinky never noticed the pale light; he seemed awake, but dozing. I think he was humming to himself. Later when I slept, toward morning I dreamed a disturbing dream: the report of a gun being fired close to my ear: a shotgun blast, and when I looked I saw a woman lying dying. I went for aid, but got onto some kind of one of those electric trolley busses by mistake, along with 3 Gestapo agents (I dream that a lot). We rode around forever while I tried vainly to short-circuit the power cables of the bus, or trolley car, whatever it was; without avail. The Gestapo agents seemed confident and read newspapers and smoked. They knew they had me.
Letter to Claudia Bush, March 21, 1975
Dear Claudia,
Today is the vernal equinox. I can tell, because I am in my new house typing, and cool morning fresh air is billowing around me through the window at my left. I see a huge shrub through the glass windows which form the wall before me. Elton John is singing. The cats are weaving in and out of special tunnels they have found. Christopher broke his toy and then broke it again. This, really, no joking, is the day the spirit of Springtime revives, down deep in the cold ground; I feel him wake up. When he wakes, he sees once more, since his dream has ended; he sees and we, for a moment, can see with him—not just him but what he sees the world to be.
The tyranny is gone, I think. Last year powerful spirits of the ionosphere, even perhaps from as far away as the sun's corona, were dispatched to come here to intervene. They did so. They threw it down in ruins (Nixon is now a classic ruin). Those whom they seized upon for their good work (I am one) saw for a time the universe—or anyhow whatever part caught their attention—as it is. It is a vast cube, into which time moves in the form of pattern: not spatial (it acquires space only when it enters the cube), but dynamic and bubbly; it is alive. That is the future, a bunch of patterns being fed to us as we stand around within the space-time cube. At the bottom end, the used-up time extrudes, but is still real, still there. The cube in terms of the temporal extension is about four thousand years; its spatial extension is whatever is needed to play out the patterns on, for the benefit of living creatures. The purpose of it all—this feeding energy in, patterns in, at one end of the cube within which we stand yoked together, trapped within the cube like so many parts mounted on a circuit board—this energy presents "signals" which we experience as movement and events taking place within the cube. We respond, according to instructions fired at us from around us on all the six sides of our real world. The "signals" or events are incorporated into each of us as learning—learning by experience—and they permanently modify our brain tissue, leaving permanent although minute trace-changes in us. This way we store this information combining it and altering it, and we are prepared to transmit it again when instructed, to whoever we're instructed to transmit it to. Each of us is a vast storage drum of taped information which we purposefully modify, each of us differently. Thus, Beethoven produced symphonies which no one else could; the same with Schubert. But the symphonies did not really lie within either of them (Aristotle's entelechy idea), but rather were fed to each of them in discrete (broken constituent) form, in raw bits lacking connectives. What each of those Stations did was to link his selection of bits into gestalts (his idiosyncratic symphonies). He structured them as no other Station could. However, the raw bits were fed to him; in that regard he was receptive or passive ("Where do you get your ideas, Mr. Beethoven?"). In that he connected them into a new and unique whole he was active and creative. So Beethoven, as your representative station, was a part on a circuit board, linking incoming signals, modifying them, and then transmitting something modified. That everything received by him before (memory) and what he uniquely was (due to his experiences throughout his life) went to make up the nature of each output is obvious. Nothing could pass through Beethoven without becoming Beethoven—i.e., colored by him, in a way no one else could.
"Let's feed this through Beethoven," a spirit might be saying, taking some extra choice raw bits and then so feeding them into that one out of billions of possible stations. "That way it'll come out very good indeed." But the station burned out in a mere 48 or so years, and, alas, could not be replaced. Each station is unique. Can you imagine what it must look like, viewed in terms of its existence through all space and time? Imagine it as so many lights, each winking in a different color and rhythm; imagine it like the board which opens Ubik, but every human who ever lived represented on it ... except that when a station perishes, it becomes dark. It emits light no more.
It would seem that our combined total output forms a gestalt in and of itself, which is constantly retained (a permanent thing) as it is constantly added to.* Maybe somewhere God has a set of headphones on and is listening to our civilization (which is now global, making the piece he hears more unified). Output must be most extraordinary in terms of richness; also it must be unique. I think it pleases Him.
"Play it again, Sam," God murmurs, when it ends.
So around and around we go again (this is the Wheel we hear of in Hinduism).
You think I'm kidding. I hope I'm kidding. "'Play it again, Sam'"? Our entire civilization, again and again, because we sound so good? Naw, Claudia; what it is, it is like rolling a barrel up an inclined plank. The rotational time I spoke of (orthogonal time) is the rolling around and around of the cylindrical barrel (sp). The inclination of the plank and our movement up it—that is linear time. Both movements in space (expressed to us imperfectly as time) are obviously real. The rotational one accumulates along the manifold; we advance upward. Where does it end? Obviously it does, since the mere rotational time alone expresses the entirety of repetition, of cycles. The inclination of the plank and our moving up it—obviously that leads from point A which is never seen again, or anyhow not seen until we reach point B, which we haven't yet. If you will remember this barrel up the plank picture it will aid you. Also, the fact that we experience mass, weight, and must expend effort—these show that the inclination is great, do you see? We are distinctly pushing up. Oddly, no one before me has realized that the very drudgery of human (and of all) life indicates that we are rising; we think of rising as a weightless, effortless thing, but a more mature study (a non-fantasy study) shows that it must occur with actual expended effort. And we are certainly doing that. The whole goddam barrel is rising. One day it will reach point B, which probably jumps it—and us—into another universe entirely.
Using this model you can readily see that our instinctive drive to survive against all odds serves purposes not our own: it is to keep us rolling de barrel along and along and along and along. The universe keeps jabbing us with tropisms over which we have no control, the sum of which is: you need to do this; you must; you like to; you have nothing else to do. The last in that sequence is the truest. What the hell else is there to do, since that is all there is here, and that is why we are here? The "barrel," wh
en studied carefully, consists of the aggregate civilization pattern we're developing: all our ideas, our thoughts, the entire Picture we carry with us both inside our minds, in each monad-like mind, and externally, in our records. (But made real only when we go over the records; how real is a Beethoven symphony without one of us? We are part of the equation with it, and essential to it; half is on the record, but we are part of the playback equipment.) Finally, the barrel is ourselves, and when it reaches point B, and does whatever barrels do at point B, we will ourselves, inseparable from the barrel, pushing ourselves, then, and not some dead weight, some mere object—we will have arrived. Collectively and individually we will be quite something, a delight to God ... who will then turn off his equipment which projects this hologram of space-time, this cube, and lift the barrel (or cylinder) from the great computer of which this has been a part, a vital part, like a rod at a nuclear power station.
I think he then puts the rod-barrel-us out to pasture, which accounts for our various visions of heaven. We're like some horses who work, one of them saying, "You know, when our work is done, we go to a lovely green field where we play and do not do any work, and are fed and healthy," meaning that the owner, simply, puts them out to pasture. I guess we have a kind owner, who doesn't send us to the knackers. (Hell would be the tallow works. The atheist, in this model, doesn't look very intelligent; he says, "When we're through working here we just disappear. We go nowhere.")
What one must realize is that our combined fate, our joint soul, is involved; when I as an individual die, it is as if a cell in my body died; the organism (the barrel plus barrel-pusher) goes on. Viewed properly rather than from out of my head or your head or Richard Nixon's head, one individual is not an individual; John Donne was just stating a fact, about the mainland. Our heaven, or pasture, or whatever—it doesn't come when one of us individually dies, but rather, it comes when we, the connective barrel, has reached point B. Then the work ends.