"& Sutin - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)
* Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism (Albany State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 148-50.
Ripinsky-Naxon goes on to consider the archetypal symbol of the spiral specifically:
If we. . . recognize the spiral to be an archetypal pattern and its schematic representations as the labyrinth, then this conception may help elucidate our understanding of why this motif has been used to symbolize the unknown origin-point leading to the Hereafter, the cave, the tomb, and the womb of the Great Mother. The tomb, as has been noted, was constructed in resemblance of the body of the Great Mother, whose energy and procreative sexuality are conveyed through the element of the spiral.*
* Ibid., p. 150.
In this regard, note that Dick believed (see "If You Find This World Bad ...") that he sighted, through the vision of the Golden Rectangle, the goddess Aphrodite, or the sexual aspect of the Great Mother. As for the Importance of the Great Mother to Dick both philosophically and psychologically, the reader may consult his speech "The Android and the Human" in the present volume.
Again, the point here is not to seek to argue on behalf of Dick as an inspired seer, or even -- necessarily -- as a "sane" human being. (There is no proof possible as to the sanity or insanity of Philip K. Dick.)* Rather, it is to challenge the reader to resist labels and to plunge into the ideas expressed in the texts themselves, and to wrest from them what seems useful and vital without regard to predisposing diagnostic labels. One might further urge that readers suspend their tendency to read Dick's metaphysical writings with belief or disbelief foremost in mind. For Dick, as the writings themselves reveal, had no pointedly persuasive intentions with respect to the reader. In turn, those readers who refuse to worry over whether Dick persuades them on any particular points may find that he illumines any number of prospective paths for further exploration. There is a beauty and a visionary intensity to the possibilities Dick offers, as in "Cosmogony and Cosmology," a 1978 essay in which Dick sought to distill key concepts of the Exegesis. The divine form discussed is that of a righteous Godhead (akin to the redeeming Logos of the Gnostics) who has lost the memory of himself as the true creator and has ceded control of the earthly realm to a blind and ignorant demiurge or "artifact." This "artifact" (akin to the Gnostic Archon) holds all humans in its delusional thrall, and even the Godhead must struggle against it.**
* There is a considerable range of quality in the attempts to apply diagnostic measures to Dick's life and writings. Jay Kinney, for example, offers a thoughtful and subtle comparison between schizophrenic and shamanic states in his "Wrestling with Angels: The Mystical Dilemma of Philip K. Dick" (published in In Pursuit of Valis). In the writings of Gregg Rickman, however, diagnoses of Dick abound and are relentlessly flogged despite the highly inconclusive evidence. Paul Williams, the onetime literary executor of the Dick estate, provides a sound assessment of Rickman's egregious mode of analysis in his To The High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life (1928-1962) (Long Beach, Calif.: Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1989), of Dick as a potential victim of child abuse. See "The Rickmanization of PKD" in the "Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter," No. 24 (May 1990).
** For those readers who would insist upon viewing Dick as a "mad" charlatan tossing about ideas he could not comprehend as truly as might a "sane" and reasonable scholar, the following case study -- in miniature -- may prove illuminating.
The late Ioan P. Couliano, an acclaimed historian of religious thought who taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School and worked as a scholarly collaborator with the eminent Mircea Eliade, had occasion to examine one novel of the "Valis Trilogy" -- The Divine Invasion -- in his landmark survey of Gnostic thought The Tree of Gnosis (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Couliano's judgment of the thematic influences in that novel was intended to rebut those who, in Couliano's view, too carelessly cited Dick as an example of a "Gnostic" science fiction writer:
"A closer look at the novel shows that, indeed, Dick took inspiration from Jewish and Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature (especially The Vision of Isaiah), yet his novel, which describes the descent of God to the earth through the first heaven controlled by the troops of Belial the Opponent, and God's encounter with his wisdom in a kindergarten, makes no use of gnostic material."
Now compare this with an analysis by Dick himself, written in 1979, in the concluding pages of an unpublished outline of the novel in progress (then titled Valis Regained) that would become The Divine Invasion. Note that Dick himself recognizes the absence of a fundamental Gnostic good-evil dualism in this novel. He also makes reference to Isaiah (though his source is the Bible, not the apocalyptic text cited by Couliano):
"In the first novel, Valis, the protagonist Horselover Fat was obsessed -- and for good reason: His girlfriend had killed herself -- by the problem of evil. He finally came to the conclusion that two gods exist, which is to say a bitheism, each contending against the other. Although Valis Regained draws heavily on the bitheism of the Qumran people, it basically presents another view, not syntonic to Horselover Fat: monotheism, with the notion that evil has no true existence of its own but borrows its existence, or is lent its existence, from the one God. Valis Regained bases its theology on the extraordinary passage in Isaiah 45:6-7 [the capitalization is Dick's own]:
". .. so that men from the rising and the setting sun
may know that there is none but I:
I am the LORD, there is no other;
I make the light, I create darkness,
I, the LORD, do all these things."
Had Couliano taken the time to study the first novel in the trilogy -- Valis -- it is possible that his judgment as to the presence of Gnostic ideas in Dick's work would have changed. Nonetheless, the comparison of these two quotations is useful not only as a validation of Dick's knowing use of religious source material but also as a fair warning to all those who would paste a doctrinal label of any sort on Dick's work. Dick's viewpoints were multifold, indeterminate, and changeable; he cannot rightly be described by any "ism."
Observe how Dick, in tracing out the possibilities of this spiritual viewpoint, employs the narrative gifts of a fiction master to create a haunting parable of a fallen and amnesiac god who must wander for centuries through his own creations to win his own redemption:
He [the Creator] no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He has allowed himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim.
But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity.
One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance.
The artifact must be fought; i.e., disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) which has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change?
When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return.
If all of this seems impossibly speculative to the reader, it may be still more unsettling to realize that there is a direct parallel between the ideas expressed by Dick above and the cosmological theories posed by highly respected quantum physicists such as David Bohm. In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot offers a summary of Bohm's viewpoint on the "implicate" and "explicate" orders of the cosmos that is strikingly analogous to the Urgrund/artifact dichotomy posed by Dick:
As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. [Fellow physicist F. David] Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature. . . . According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself."*
* Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 79-80.
Dick was hardly an expert in quantum physics theories, though he did read in the field sporadically. As the essay "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" attests, he was especially interested in the concept of synchronicity posed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli (who worked in conjunction with C. G. Jung in formulating this theory). But the key parallels between Dick's writings -- both fiction and nonfiction -- and the current insights of quantum physics do not seem, based on the evidence of the Exegesis and other personal writings by Dick, to have been based on reading, but rather on an experiential grappling on Dick's part that proved synchronous, as it were, with the findings of the quantum physicists. For example, in his 1977 speech "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," included herein -- a speech that predates any widespread public discussion of the quantum physics notion that the known structure of the cosmos may aptly be described by the metaphor of a hologram -- we find Dick asking, based on his experiences of 2-3-74, "Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown?"
Nor is quantum physics the only field in which Dick's speculations find a revelatory context. Consider the concept of "fake fakes," which is put to use in so many of Dick's novels and stories and which is explored persistently in his nonfiction writings as well. Examples included in the present volume may be found in the outline for a proposed (but never completed) novel Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth, as well as in the proposal for a script (never written) for the television series Mission: Impossible and in the 1978 speech (likely never delivered) "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In essence, a "fake fake" is -- despite its seeming status as a mere contradiction that equates into "genuine" -- a radically new ontological category that takes on significance precisely because it perplexingly mimics (and even threatens to supersede) our "ordinary" or consensual reality. Hence the "fake fake" is no mere SF plot prop -- although Dick certainly employed it to dazzling effect as just such a prop -- but is also a commentary on the inundation of our world by mechanical and computer-generated simulacra.
In the field of art, Marcel Duchamp explored a similar range of ideas with his concept of the "readymade," a found object that Duchamp would ironically designate as a work of art, at times adding his own visual or linguistic touches (in which case the object became a "readymade aided"). In his 1961 essay "Apropos of 'Readymades,'" Duchamp broached paradoxes that serve to elucidate certain aesthetic possibilities of a world in which Dickian "fake fakes" proliferate. Wrote Duchamp:
At another time wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and readymades I imagined a "reciprocal readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board! . . .
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