Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1977-1979

300 Pages·1993·18.939 MB·English

by  Philip K. Dick, Paul Williams (editor)

1977-1 979
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Edited by Don Herron
Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson
Underwood-Miller
Novato, California
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
1993
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK 1977-79
Trade edition: ISBN 0-88733-120-3
Slipcased edition: ISBN 0-88733-121-1
Copyright © 1992 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick
Frontispiece photo of Philip K. Dick © 1980 by Nicole Panter
Book design by Underwood-Miller
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
“The Death of A Toad” from CEREMONY AND OTHER POEMS, copyright
1950 and renewed 1978 by Richard Wilbur, reprinted by permission of Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
An Underwood-Miller book by arrangement with The Estate of Philip K. Dick.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without
explicit permission from the author or the author’s agent, except by a reviewer who
may quote brief passages. For information address the publisher:
Underwood-Miller, 708 Westover Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601.
Caution: These letters are offered for the insight they may provide into their
author; they cannot be considered reliable sources of information about any other
persons.
Special thanks to Allan Kausch for coordinating the preproduction of
these volumes.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
(Revised for vol. 5)
Dick, Philip K.
The selected letters of Philip K. Dick
Includes index.
Contents: v. [3] 1974. -v. 4.1975-76. -v. 5.1977-79.
1. Dick, Philip K.—Correspondence. 2. Authors, American—20th
century—Correspondence. 3. Science Fiction—Authorship. I. Tide
PS3554.I3Z48 1991 813’.54 “B” 89-25099
ISBN 0-88733-104-1 (trade ed.: v. 3)
ISBN 0-88733-105-X (slipcase ed.: v. 3)
ISBN 0-88733-120-3 (trade ed.: v.'5)
ISBN 0-88733-121-1 (slipcase ed.: v. 5)
Fore-Words: PKD Deconstructed and Reconstructed
by Robert Anton Wilson
I — “Could you, would you, with a goat7”
"Logic!” cried the frog. “There is no logic in this!” This is not a normal world.
— Mr. Arkadin — Batman
Long ago, when my youth burned green and wild with oats (as Dylan Thomas,
or a bad parodist of Dylan Thomas, might write) I picked up a sci-fi magazine
and read a very short story called “Roog.” The story described a dog’s “paranoid
suspicion” against garbage collectors, told from the dog’s point of v*iew, and it
* Philip K. Dick said in an interview once that he conceived “Roog” while watching a dog
and trying to figure out how the dog perceived/conceived/constructed his world. I also spend
lots of time watching dogs, and other animals, trying to intuit or deduce or guess what sort of
feeling and/or thinking they do. Like Finnegan (vide infra, dig?) I have come to the conclusion
that humans differ from other animals only in worrying about whether their opinions and
behavior can pass a Political Correctness test E.g. I remember once looking at a Kamodo
Dragon, on a TV nature documentary, while he ate a crab. The narrator identified this
particular Kamodo Dragon as “a male around 50.” As a male around 50 who also liked crab
for lunch, I felt an immediate empathy or “oneness” with this weathered veteran of the reptile
social order. I thought for a while about how much all males around 50 have in common,
besides irony. Then, when 1 wondered about the differences between Mr. K. Dragon and
myself, I realized that, most obviously, he had never wasted a minute in his whole life
wondering if other reptiles would think his behavior Politically Correct or Politically Incorrect
I regard that Kamodo Dragon as one of my most blessed Teachers and I hope that, like me, he
has reached 61 and still occasionally eats crab for lunch.
vj THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK
absolutely juiced my neurons. I felt as if I had just smoked my first pipe of
Alamout Black hasheesh (“We taking you higher”) all over again. I felt wigged.
I felt as if “illuminated from above.” I felt, in short, that the dog had talked to
me.
Well, that Trip occurred a long time ago—almost forty years ago, I
suspect—but I never forgot the name of the author of “Roog” and I never stopped
looking for anything else by him in print. In 1978 or ’79 I finally met him—Philip
K. Dick in all his beamish and batty beatitude. We both had reached our
mid-forties by then, and I think we shared the subterranean tremors that shift
male tectonic plates at that age. Specifically, as writers concerned with the
“abnormal,” we each wondered sometimes if we had absent-mindedly graduated,
somewhere along the line, from whimsy to lunacy. Phil had the persistent notion
that, in February 1974, he had made contact with some sort of Higher
Intelligence. Of course, as a card-carrying Postmodernist, he never really believed
that totally. I had the suspicion that I had also contacted a Higher Intelligence, in
July 1973.*Of course, as an initiated Deconstructionist, I also never believed that
totally.
I think most of my first conversation with Phil revolved, like some huge model
of a clock or the Newtonian universe, around one blazing center: his attempt,
within the rules of courtesy, to test me and determine how crazy he should consider
me. If he could pronounce me sane, I felt, he would feel more secure in accepting
the same verdict on his own condition.
I think Phil classified me as relatively sane (like most writers) and that helped
him, for that day, to accept himself also as no wackier than the rest of our
profession. Of course, if I know anything about Phil Dick, by the next day he
probably got around to wondering if the Empire had manufactured a Robot
Allegory Wizard and passed it off on him as a writer with the same initials, just
to confuse him further about the problems of “reality” and “normalcy.”
Phil always felt very perplexed about “reality” and “normalcy,” because he
couldn’t seem to get a hold of either of them.
* Phil’s Contact experiences and mine differed in all respects but two (1) both of us had
traditional mystic/pantheistic Visions in part of the Trip, and (2) both of us, oddly, had the
impression, at some point, that the communicating “entity” resided in the system of the double
star, Sirius. Both of us also subsequently regarded the whole matter with a mixture of excitement
at the possibilities opened to us and a high degree of cautious agnosticism about accepting any
one explanation of the phenomenon. As Finnegan wrote (Golden Hours, IV, 73), “One must
read David Hume extensively, ingest the ‘magick herb’ of which Abdul Alhazred hints, or speak
Gaelic fluently, to escape the Imperialist and dogmatic constraints of English grammar.” I meet
two out of three of those requirements.
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK vii
Phil reveals in this book (in a letter to John Van der Does, an old friend of
mine) that Alfred Jarry’s system of’Pataphysics played a larger role in his thinking
and writing than most commentators have noticed. (One who, finishing the last
page of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, turns at once to the first page of Phil’s UBIK and reads
on, will see the connection at once.) Perhaps Phil’s major perplexities and
existential agonies resulted from his failure to read Jarry’s great Irish disciple,
Finnegan, whose system of’P*atapsychology rests on the First Noble Truth (also
called Murphy’s First Fundamental Finding), “Nobody has ever seen a bloody
‘average’ man or woman; nobody has ever experienced a fucking ‘normal’ day.”
(Professor Finnegan actually heard this—in a minor epiphany—from one Sean
Murphy of whom nothing else remains on record except for a remark Finnegan
attributes to one Nora Dolan: “The only hard work the Murphy lad ever did
happened twice a night when he picked himself up from the floor after falling off
a bar-stool.”)
The Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal
(*C*SICON), of which I have the honor to serve as President and CEO, has
conducted numerous scientific experiments upon this matter and we have found
thus far no exceptions to Murphy’s First Fundamental Finding. * * * The average
and the normal “exist” theoretically (i.e. in a ghosdy way) as mathematical
abstractions, but nobody ever encounters them in human life. As Finnegan wrote
the day his second great Enlightenment first burst upon him while visiting his
friend Dr. Hoffman in Basel (April 19, 1943): “The very act of speaking or
writing the Saxon verb ‘is’ strengthens the British Monarchy.”
We have titled that the Second Noble Truth, of course.
* Usually mis-“corrected” into Parapsychology by well-meaning but ill-educated copy
editors. This has resulted in endless polemic against Finnegan by people who haven’t even read
his major works. See e.g. Sheissinhosen, Finneganismus und Dummheit, University of
Heidelberg, 1982, Werke, Vol. 2, p 230-270, Vol 3 passim and Vol. 7 p 3-989 (1987). A semiotic
similar to Finnegan’s appears in Michael Foucault’s L’Archeologie de Savoir, Editions Gallmard,
Paris, 1969.
* * Which you really must not confuse with CSICOP, an Imperialist cult devoted to vicious
and virulent anti-Finnegan propaganda, evidendy provoked by the ubiquitous
’Patapsychology/Parapsychology misprint which haunts all editions of Finnegan’s Golden Hours
(Vols I-XXIII) until the epic-making corrected edition of Gobbler (Golden Hours, Royal Sir
Myles na gCopaleen Non-Phenomena Institute, Dalkey, 1993.)
* * * All data remains in MS. as yet, but the Royal Sir Myles na. gCopaleen Theochemical
Institute, Poolbeg, promises to bring forth a collected edition of the best 666 papers by
researchers who, seeking everywhere on this planet for “normalcy” or “averageness,” have
found no empirical evidence of either. See, in this connection, Studies in Ethnomethodology,
Garfinkle, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1968.
viii THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK
The Sage of D*alkey (as we in CSICON always call Finnegan) would have
loved Phil Dick. Both agreed that “the Empire never ended,” although Phil found
evidence of it chiefly in American politics and Finnegan found it in the structure
of the neurolinguistic and logical structures the British have imposed on the
planet (See, for instance, Finnegan’s Semiotic Analysis of Various Translations of the
Necronomicon, Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Neuropolitical Institute, 1944, in
which de Selby argues that, just as anybody who uses the words “revealed truth”
thereby perpetuates what he called “Papist gossip,” * * anybody who uses the words
“objective truth” perpetuates “the Empire’s lordly lie of divine impartiality.” This
passage, p 69-93, includes the famous bon mot, “Logical Consistency and British
Imperialism must have had the same mother, because they look like twins to me.”
The O’Brien pronounced this “perhaps the most Gaelic sentence ever written in
the English language, and therefore the most subversive sentence also.”)
But perhaps I proceed too quickly into the Celtic Twilight Let us, as the more
earthy Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and look more closely at what
we have said. Jarry’s ’Pataphysics, begins with the dispassionate study of
* Dalkey: a small town on the south of Dublin Bay, so eccentric that as Sir Myles na
gCopaleen said, even the streets seem to meet by accident Finnegan lived there during the years
of his greatest philosophical and scientific investigations, having left Paris in 1937 after the
heartbreak he experienced when Sophie Deneuve, his one great amour, left him to engage in
stealthy combat with Gertrude Stein for the hot jungle love of Alice B. Toklas and the secret
formula of her wonderful Brownies. Sir Myles never left Dalkey in his life, and boasted of the
fact He founded his various Institutes, originally, not to publish Finnegan but to promote his
favorite (pre-Finnegan) philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, who had proven that the universe
doesn’t exist but God thinks it does. Sir Myles regarded Berkeley, Finnegan, Jonathan Swift and
William Rowan Hamilton as Ireland’s four greatest heroes, because they had undermined the
entire Logical Universe upon which British Imperialism rests. (Swift proved, in his dispute with
the astrologer, Partridge, that just because a man repeatedly denies that he has recently died, we
do not necessarily have to believe him. Hamilton invented quartemions, the mathematics in
which, contrary to what they tell us in school, x times y does not equal y times x.) Sir Myles’s
four heroes—like Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett (among others)—all illustrate the typical Irish
response to a Logician or an Englishman: which consists of “You claim that’s a proof? Sure,
you haven’t considered.... ” and then Logic becomes as full of pot-holes as the streets of Belfast.
* * In ’Patapsychology “gossip” signifies any verbal communication with a hidden agenda,
and “the instinct to gossip” explains most of what other, pre-Deconstructionist thinkers would
variously call “the search for truth” or “the impulse to play” or “the creative spirit” Thus, to
Finnegan, the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the theory of Natural Selection, Joyce’s
Ulysses, the paintings of Picasso, the Collected Speeches of George Bush, Phil Dick’s Exegesis
and even Finnegan’s own writings, all represent “state-specific gossip systems.” Compare
Garkinlde and Foucault, op. cit. and Korzybski, Science and Sanity, Institute of General
Semantics, 1948.
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK ix
non-repeating state-specific events—precisely those “eccentricities” that orthodox
science, and even Chaos Theory, seem unable to contemplate—and arrives at a
predicament of “baffled suspiciousness” characteristic also of Lacan, Foucault,
Fort, Derrida and modern philosophy in general; the same baffled suspiciousness, I
might add, that we recognize in the “method” acting of Brando, the stories of
Borges, the films of Bunuel and, of course, Philip K. Dick’s ouevre. One should
never confuse this Zen-like wariness with paranoia, the quite different state of
unbaffled (indeed, dogmatic) suspiciousness. Finnegan’s ’Parapsychology, similarly,
begins from the investigation of “preposterous memories”—things we think once
happened to us, but still can’t believe—and arrives at a position of astonished
agnosticism about all workings of the primate and hominid nervous systems,
including the human. (From this foundation Finnegan built his notorious rejection
of English grammar, the 24-“ hour” day, the 60-“ minute” hour, the system of
“inches, pounds, shillings, yen, dollars, volts, ergs, light-years, nations, ‘laws,’
‘commandments’ and other tribal gossip,” etc.)
Perhaps I can suggest the basic difference (in flavor if not in substance) between
Finnegan’s view (and mine) and that of Phil Dick by recounting and revising Phil’s tale
(later in this book) about Zebra and the alphabet soup. In the early drafts of VALIS,
Phil considered having Zebra—the hypothetical Higher Intelligence that disguises itself
from us, like certain insects, by perfectly matching and thereby blending itself into the
environment (the whole bloody environment, grok?) —almost tip its hand to one mildly
paranoid investigator by spelling out in his alphabet soup:
THERE IS NO ZE
This message, although (or because) incomplete, creates an Empedoclean
Loop. If the investigator believes the implicit message, “There is no Zebra,” he must
simultaneously and immediately doubt it, because only Zebra or God—any
difference between the two has now vanished—could send precisely that message
by precisely that medium. Such self-canceling prophecies fascinated Phil as much
as they have also captivated Zeno, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Foucault,
L*acan, Korzybski, Garfinkle and Hofstadter (to name a few ...)
A Finneganoid equivalent (or non-equivalent) occurs if one imagines the
alphabet soup spontaneously spelling out
COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY
Foucault op. cit. has had some interesting observations on this “sentence” (in
his labyrinthine and truly formidable discussion of the impossibility of separating
* According to the World Health Organization, approximately 100, 000,000 acts of sexual
intercourse occur every day on this planet That averages out to 4, 166, 667 per “hour,” or 69,
450 every “minute. ” I originally decided to mention this as a bonus to those scholarly types who
actually read the footnotes, but now that we’ve raised the topic, do you ever worry that somebody
else has gotten a lot of your fair share?