by Eric Wargo
Robertson may have had more in common with Tiresias than just the nexus of prophecy and literal and figurative blindness. Consider Robertson’s strange story called “The Sleep Walker,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1903. In this tale, a man named Tom Beverton comes to dread the nightly attacks of his wife, first with a bucket of water, then with a curved, scimitar-like carving knife. Under the influence of a boring sea novel, she falls asleep and begins talking in the coarse, swearing tone of a buccaneer. Even after his wife puts the knife up on a high shelf, out of the reach of her sleepwalking self, it continues to exert a hypnotic power over her, repeatedly calling forth what seems like some buried male, violent personality. Meanwhile Beverton himself falls into a somnambulistic state and assumes the persona of a victimized woman. After Beverton throws the knife in a snowy field, his wife finds it in her trance and stabs him in the shoulder.
After Beverton recovers, a psychologist specializing in hypnotism (a character perhaps based on the doctor Robertson had visited for his real-life difficulties) tries to convince Beverton that he and his wife are acting out the telepathically received story of the famous Caribbean pirate Captain Henry Morgan and his captive sex slave Isobel, but with the sexes reversed. They were somehow picking up the thoughts of “ some strong, projective personality—some man or woman thoroughly enthused and interested in the history of the seventeenth-century pirates.” 22 Beverton listens to the doctor’s explanation but believes the truth goes deeper: Reincarnation is the real answer. They had actually been these figures in their past lives and at night were playing out their old relationship.
Eisenbud noted that “The Sleep Walker” is a pretty weird gender-bender for such a resolutely masculine writer. What he didn’t catch is that Robertson may in this story have been expressing a strange truth about how he secretly understood his own fickle creative gifts. In the volume, Morgan Robertson the Man , one of Robertson’s friends, an artist named J. O’Neill, recalled that the writer believed that he had telepathically acquired the writing gift, the muse, of a young woman he had known years earlier but who had been unable to make anything of her talent due to a lack of “stickativeness.” In other words, Robertson believed his fickle and inconstant “astral helper” or “psychic partner” 23 (in the words of another friend, Henry W. Francis) was specifically that of a female. He was effectively appropriating that muse telepathically, or allowing himself to be its vessel, because it was of no use to the woman anyway and he could profit better from it.
In his unconscious, was Robertson, who became a writer in the first place because of his failing eyesight, following the “archetype” of the sex-swapping prophet Tiresias? In our increasingly transgender era, should we speak of a Tiresias complex as counterpart to the Oedipus complex, and might it have some close connection to prophetic aptitude or expression? As we will see in the following chapter, the notoriously precognitive writer Philip K. Dick similarly felt that his sibylline creative muse was female, specifically his dead twin, Jane.
Whether or not alcoholism, the obvious “iceberg” the writer could not escape, drowned some more private and secret suffering related to sexual desire or even gender identity, Robertson clearly wanted fate to absolve him for some compulsion that he feared was a choice, and perhaps also give him the ability to free himself from that compulsion—an impossible, contradictory, ambivalent wish. His precognitive habit seems to have answered both needs. Eisenbud makes a very key observation in this regard, one that goes well beyond Robertson in its implications: “With such an ambivalent attitude toward fate,” he writes, “all one would need, it might seem, would be heads and tails on the same throw. But any good precognitive event provides just this, since … the metaphysical significance of such an occurrence is sufficiently in question to satisfy both schools.” 24 There was surely no better “precognitive event” than reading a New York Times headline about a sea disaster you had written a novel about 14 years earlier.
The psychoanalytic rule of thumb is that nothing is ever an accident. 25 The disasters and misfortunes that repeat themselves over and over in the lives of neurotics like Robertson look for all the world as though some higher power or cosmic theater director is testing them or just being cruel, but these situations are actually elicited by the neurotic in deviously subtle ways. For Freudians, the thematic consistency of the neurotic’s failures is always assumed to represent unresolved past situations confusedly haunting the neurotic’s present reality, governed by the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure principle. Instead of seeing things as they are, the neurotic sees replays of situations from early life and reacts accordingly, with predictably disappointing outcomes—the idiomatic “carrying baggage.”
The alternative possibility that a case like Robertson’s suggests is that some of our baggage comes from our future. Robertson seems all his life to have been confusedly pre sponding to a future upheaval, even a kind of near miss or close call (since, having written about it beforehand, the Titanic disaster was in some sense “his” disaster), but treating it again and again as a present reality, a disaster that had already occurred or was in the process of occurring. By the time the real thing happened, he himself was already sunk, “washed up,” and could not even successfully capitalize on what might have been the perfect advertisement for his precognitive gift.
What if something like this is true of many neurotics? What portion of ordinary human floundering and failure might really be attributable to misrecognized precognition, a kind of maladaptive prematurity of feeling and thought? We now turn to another deeply neurotic writer whose life even more clearly illustrates the painful temporal out-of-synch-ness of the strongly precognitive soul.
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“PS: What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is That I Can Often Recall the Future ” — The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick
Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here—which is to say now—but will be, and what we get is information about and from Ubik, as we receive TV or radio signals from transmitters located in other spaces in this time continuum.
— Philip K. Dick, Letters (1974)
S cience-fiction writers routinely forecast developments in technology and society—it’s their job. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted countless technological innovations, although it is hard to discern which of their predictions may have represented anything more than the ability to infer future milestones from then-current trends. Besides predicting the Titanic disaster, Morgan Robertson predicted the development of something like radar and even a Japanese sneak attack on America, although it is not clear that his precognitive faculty was involved. 1 Philip K. Dick’s visions of American consumer culture and the scrambled, fragmented reality it creates have been prescient in the same way. The cyberpunk writers he influenced are credited with having foretold our hyper-mediated, information-saturated lives, but it was Dick himself who saw how maddening and stupid a tech-saturated world (with its targeted advertising, robo-calls, and digital assistants that spy on us) might become. Year after year, life in America feels more and more like a Dick novel. And while he was not known as a “hard science” SF writer, he was no slouch in that respect either. Over a decade before John Wheeler coined the phrase “it from bit,” for instance, Dick was already writing about the universe as composed of information. 2
But this kind of social and scientific forecasting is not what Phil-Dickologists mean by calling the writer precognitive. 3 Rather, it is that he had a funny habit of predicting what we would now call memes —singular, often fleeting ideas and obsessions in popular culture, the kinds of things that made the cover of Time and Newsweek and Psychology Today as ideas or issues of the moment. It became increasingly apparent to Dick over the course of his career that he seemed to write about such cultural obsessions just before they occurred, and it was this that fueled his own evolving self-myth, that he was a “precog” right out of one of his own sto
ries. 4 Dick’s private life too was a tapestry of “synchronicity,” reflecting in some cases his precognition of significant events and upheavals. Even if none of his literary prophecies are as memorable as predicting an ocean liner disaster down to the name of the ship, as Robertson did, it is possible to document in Dick’s life and works numerous even more striking coincidences, in part because he left such a voluminous archive of letters and journals enabling us to cross-correlate events in his life with his dreams as well as with his fiction. Such a project is also abetted by a fast-growing number of biographies and reminiscences by his many friends, wives, girlfriends, and others who knew this deeply troubled writer well and can confirm, disconfirm, or otherwise add illumination to the sometimes bizarre time loops that punctuated his personal, creative, and spiritual life.
Dick’s 1969 masterpiece Ubik is one of several examples cited by biographer Anthony Peake. If any one of his novels embodies all the qualities (uncertain and shifting realities, etc.) that are thought of as “PhilDickian,” it would be this narrative about dead—or nearly dead—people stored in a state of hibernation or “half life” and an aerosol spray product (the Ubik of the title) that somehow reverses or retards time because of the “counter-clockwise spin” it imparts. Dick submitted the manuscript to his publisher in 1966, but he subsequently encountered the idea of time as a kind of spiral energy whose polarity or spin could be reversed in a translated 1967 article by a Russian physicist and parapsychologist named Nicolai Kozyrev. Dick was so struck by Kozyrev’s ideas of time as a “torsion field” that he thought it had influenced his own writing of Ubik three years earlier. Peake, who compiled many of Dick’s alleged precognitive experiences in his book A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future , sums up Dick’s reasoning about how an exciting reading experience could constitute the seed of prior creative inspiration:
PKD concludes that the source from which he based his own plots was from information drawn out of time (in this case his own future). This information was subliminally understood and acted as the stimulus for plot devices. In other words, he perceives something, an article for example, when he is 49 years old, and this idea immediately appears in his 46-year-old mind. The idea is so powerful that the 46-year-old PKD writes a story based upon its premise, or premises. 5
By itself, Dick’s hunch that he had precognized the article on Kozyrev, or the similarity of their ideas, does not prove that precognition was at work here. But the spray-can Ubik happens to be strangely similar to other memes in our culture that were also just around the corner when Dick wrote his story. For example, in the same self-consciously techno-babble passage that explains Ubik as reversing time through its counterclockwise spin, the fictitious aerosol product is also linked to the negation of an ordinarily protective aspect of the Earth’s atmosphere. 6 A few years after he published his novel, scientists linked chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol spray cans to the degradation of Earth’s protective ozone layer, and by the late 1970s spray cans had become a kind of “anti-icon” of the environmental movement. But again, this was not yet a glimmer at the time Dick was writing his story about an “ubiquitous” time-retarding spray-can product. William Sarill, a friend of Dick’s, has also pointed out that Ubik (the product) bears an odd resemblance to the original hype around the dietary supplement ubiquinol , now better known as coenzyme Q-10. 7 Although originally identified in a medical journal in 1957, it wasn’t until the 1970s that ubiquinol became the subject of research in Japan focused on its heart health benefits. It was then touted as having beneficial “age-reversing” properties when it burst on the alternative health and nutritional supplement scene in early 1980s, right around the time of Dick’s death. Ubik thus seems almost like a Dunnean-Freudian dream-image, condensing multiple cultural ideas that were just ahead in Dick’s (and America’s) future when the story flowed from the writer’s amphetamine-fueled brain in 1966. Was he somehow channeling his own future encounters with multiple pop-science memes in this one novel? 8
More striking than Ubik , consider a draft for a novel Dick wrote and submitted to his literary agency in October 1962, called “The First in Our Family”—about a small manufacturing firm that decides to branch out from making spinet pianos to building androids. Written in the first years of the Civil War Centennial celebrations but set two decades later, in the year 1982, the idea of Dick’s fictional entrepreneurs is that people might pay money to watch reenactments of the Civil War fought by robots. To interest investors, they produce two prototypes, one a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln and another of his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Both prove all-too-human; the Lincoln simulacrum fails to adapt to modern society because the real Lincoln (according to the story) himself suffered “schizophrenia.” 9
Various publishers rejected Dick’s manuscript, and thus it went unpublished and unread until end of the decade, when it appeared in serial form under the title “A. Lincoln, Simulacrum” in Amazing Science Fiction (November 1969 and January 1970; it was later published in paperback form as We Can Build You ). Consequently, there is no way it could have influenced the nearly simultaneous creation of one of the Disneyland theme park’s most iconic exhibits, their “animatronic” Abraham Lincoln. Publicly debuted in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair, Disney’s Lincoln robot became a permanent, well-known fixture at Disneyland in Anaheim California. When he read a newspaper article that Disney was about to display a robotic Abraham Lincoln, Dick was certain he had precognized that singular merger of high technology and American nostalgia. He says he clipped the story as proof of his precognitive abilities, and then went to visit the exhibit after it opened, “to look at the goddamn thing.” 10
The skeptical counterargument that will be made here is that the Civil War was on everyone’s mind in 1961-2, when Dick wrote his story, and thus it is perhaps not too coincidental that both Disney Corporation and a science fiction writer would come up with the idea of a robot simulacrum of this particular historical figure around the same time. More speculatively, one might suggest that Disney may have published somewhere their intentions to build an Abe Lincoln robot—which they did in fact conceive as early as 1962—and that Dick may have seen but forgotten it—analogous to Martin Gardner’s suggestion that Morgan Robertson might perhaps have seen such an article about the White Star Line’s intention to build a huge new ship called the Titanic in 1898. But there is no evidence of such a publication.
The coincidence, and strangeness, is actually deeper and more personal, however. Dick lived and wrote in the Bay Area, in Point Reyes, throughout the 1960s, when he wrote “The First in Our Family” and when the Disney exhibit went on display. However, in 1972, he moved south to Orange County, which encompasses Anaheim and Disneyland. In an interview in 1977, Dick recalled his astonishment at finding that a woman who lived in his apartment building 11 turned out to work at Disneyland, and to actually have the job of applying makeup to the animatronic Lincoln every night after the park closed:
You talk about synchronicity that governs the universe—coincidence which is meaningful … I rented an apartment in a building where one of the ladies living in the building worked at Disneyland. I said to her, “What do you do there?” She says, “I reapply the makeup to the Lincoln every night, so the next morning when the park is open, it looks real.” …
Can you imagine how I felt, finding I lived in a building with a woman who added a touch of verisimilitude to the damn thing? “Well, let me ask you a question,” I said. “You see this thing after the park is closed. How real does that thing seem to you to be?” And she says, “Well, I’ll tell you exactly how real it seems to me to be.” Now it’s important to remember that every part of all the rides are continually scanned by closed circuit television … So anyway, she says, “One time I was painting the Lincoln thing and one of the monitors was still on. The guy on the screen saw me and reached over and pressed the controls. And the thing stood up.”
“And what did you do, miss,” I asked.
“I take it … that you found a high degree of verisimilitude in this simulacrum.”
“Sure scared the shit out of me.” 12
The coincidence or “synchronicity” is more striking when certain details in “A. Lincoln Simulacrum” are considered. It is not one of the author’s most polished works. Frustrated at writing in a category of genre fiction that was so marginalized, he had in the early 1960s been attempting to write more mainstream works that less foregrounded the sci-fi elements—but this early attempt at such a hybrid is not cohesive. Although it delves a little into the fascinating idea of androids and their humanity—themes he would develop much more fully a few years later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep —it gets sidetracked midway through to focus on the entrepreneur narrator’s self-destructive infatuation with “Pris,” the mentally ill daughter of his business partner, whom they have hired to design their Lincoln robot. 13 Early in the novel, the narrator imagines Pris alone with the simulacrum, working all hours to give realism to their creation, and specifically applying paint or makeup to its face :
Pris, I decided, was probably at home these days, putting the final life-like colors into the sunken cheeks of the Abe Lincoln shell which would house all those parts. That in itself was a full-time job. The beard, the big hands, skinny legs, and sad eyes. A field for her creativity, her artistic soul, to run and howl rampant. She would not show up until she had done a topnotch job. … 14
And a few pages later: