"Dick,_Philip_K._The shifting realities of Philip K Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

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. Dick7) 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 it8 .
6 Ibid., p. 150.
7 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).
8 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
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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,