I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prophecies of the Non-Organization Man

On an early Spring camping trip to Seeley Lake in Montana about twenty years ago, I took my canoe out before the morning mist had cleared. The sun was bright above me but visibility was only about ten yards at water level. Out of the still-calm water just ahead of the boat, a fish leaped. Before the fish had hit the water again, a bald eagle swept in and attacked it with both talons. But as the eagle struggled to rise with the fish, in through the fog dived a much larger golden eagle. Clearly panicked the bald eagle released his catch to the golden eagle and both flew straight up out of sight

My response was one of uncomprehending immobility. Had the last three of four seconds actually happened the way I perceived them? If so, what did the event mean? The second question came hard on the first. In fact the second question is what gave significance to the first. If the event had no import then it didn’t matter whether the fish and the eagles, and the mist and the watery sun were elements of a dream or reality. But if it were real, it was so unexpected, so improbable, so utterly personal that it seemed to demand an explanation beyond the biological imperatives of hunger and predation.

So the event became for me not a sign from the Great Sprit or an omen but a permanent, if not continuous, object of meditation. As such it is a focus of interpretation and re-interpretation. Most of these interpretations are fanciful but occasionally one will hit on an aspect of my personality with surprising sharpness and even harshness. I don’t think it is rash to call this sort of interpretation a revelation. And I don’t think it’s projective hubris to suggest that this is congruent with much of religious revelation which relies on natural symbols to communicate spiritual truths.

The difference between my revelation and that of religion is that I know that my interpretation applies to me. Others may find my revelation about myself to be useful in their own self-interpretation. But neither I nor they can make any credible claim to its universality, its stability, or therefore its truth, other than as a comforting, or disturbing, or simply surprising personal surmise. The steps from personal insight to communal recognition to general truth to religious doctrine are ones of pure and increasing power; they involve coercion at the most fundamental human level, that of language.

The enforcement of revelatory interpretation does not merely mean the promulgation of a definitive interpretation but also the fixation of every word and verbalized idea in such an interpretation. Doctrine demands the control over language and the authoritative designation of who are entitled to define its components. Since language is circular - words are defined only by other words - religious power is necessarily exercised through language, all of it, not just that used to formulate ‘sacred’ revelation. The Religions of the Book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - therefore are not mainly concerned with things spiritual but with things linguistic. Doctrine pretends to specify what to believe; but it really controls how to speak.

Philip K Dick was in permanent rebellion from his childhood against the high-jacking of language by religion -secular as well as spiritual. He knew from his own experience not only how entirely subjective the interpretations of events are, but more importantly how it was possible to manipulate others through manipulation of language. His favourite way to demonstrate how manipulation works was solipsism: the establishment of the questionability of the existence of minds other than one’s own. Solipsism. of course, is refuted by the very use of language itself since language presumes and is dependent upon more than one isolated mind.

But this solipsistic contradiction isn’t something that bothered Dick. His object wasn’t to deny other minds but to undermine the power that controlled other minds through religious language. He came to maturity at the time of the Red Scare and the McCarthy Committee on Unamerican Activities, the civil religion of the USA at the time. He was a member of a burgeoning consumer society in which the collectivist ethic of the corporate Organization Man of William Whyte was dominant and demanded a certain kind of public liturgy. He was a talented writer who, he felt with good reason, was denied entry into ‘mainstream’ literature because of arbitrary boundaries of genre, a sort of literary religious sectarianism. For Dick, solipsism was a therapeutic technique not a philosophical position. He knew it’s power because he experienced its effects constantly.

So Dick was a powerful writer; he was also neurotic, often obnoxious, an obsessive devotee of I Ching and a member of the 1950’s avant garde of California hippiedom. But he knew the difference between being powerful and wanting power. Unlike an L. Ron Hubbard, or a Jim Jones, or even a Richard Nixon (all his contemporaries), Dick never succumbed to the temptation of turning personal insight into a movement like Scientology, or a cult like the People’s Temple, or a political ideology like gun-toting, race-baiting, Orange County Republicanism. He plugged on resolutely with his strategy of literary solipsism. He applied it to the emerging drug culture of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary; and he even applied it to himself in his flirtation with Christianity. By keeping himself uncertain, through his writing, of the existence of other minds, he avoided the trap of power-seeking.

Carrère correctly identifies Dick’s central theme. It’s there in the title of his biography, although he never mentions the word. Essentially Dick has one consistent message in two parts: ‘You can’t know me and I can’t know you; so how about we stop projecting thoughts, motivations and intentions because they’re almost always wrong. And by the way, you’re not as autonomous as you think you are.’ This is prophecy in the best sense of the Old Testament - not prediction but assessment of the contemporary condition. It occurs in one way or another in almost all Dick’s work. In fact one way to look at his work is as a progressive articulation of this fundamental revelation. The genre of science fiction is ideal for Dick’s purpose because it can effectively undermine religious symbols which sit on the edge of consciousness while remaining definitively outside religious controversy, an especially important camouflage in a country as self-consciously religious as America.

But despite Carrere’s accuracy in identifying the essence of Dick’s technique, I think he does Dick an injustice in portraying Dick’s ‘mission’ as a product of his neuroses and somewhat unconventional family life. No doubt Dick appears driven to certain modes of expression that originally appeared in his childhood. But one can more fittingly describe this as consistency of vocation than working out of childhood trauma. Dick used the most intimate scraps of his relationships in the service of his main theme - something that understandably annoyed spouses and friends to the point of hatred. But what else could such a modern mystic - a functional misfit in any society - use as his raw material except his own relationships? And could he ever even approach that elusive horizon called reality without making them bigger, more serious, more dramatic than they appeared to others? Solipsism, after all, is a somewhat lonely business. It’s bound to be mis-interpreted.

Nonetheless, Carrere ‘gets’ Dick when he comments “Some people charm snakes; Phil Dick charmed ideas. He made them mean whatever he wanted them to mean, then, having done that, got them to mean the exact opposite.” In so doing he revealed the “perfidious betrayal or to the falsely familiar.” And for many, including me, he still does. It is not an absence of talent that prevented Dick from creating attractive and admirable heroes and heroines. He avoided such characters because they created the possibility for the establishment of cultic power. Like my experience of the events on Seeley Lake - a situation which certainly would have qualified as Phildickean in the 60’s - all Dick’s characters and situations are surprising, evocative, even bizarre; but they are never quite stable in their meaning. They tend to float and alight on various interpretations depending on the mood of the reader on a particular day. I like this technique as an excuse for meditative reverie. For this I am grateful.

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