While I was there in Metz we saw the French premiere of STAR WARS and I was amazed at the theological implications of what, in the film, is called “the force”. Have you seen the film? I then bought the novel. Beyond doubt there is a profound theological theme to it, and the audience is reacting to it. Also (and I tell you this witha certain hesitation) the description of “the force” in STAR WARS for unaccountable reasons resembles the entity or force which took me over during my religious experiences in March of 1974. That which I saw then, which I call VALIS or Zebra was a plasmatic energy. Read this quotation from the novel STAR WARS (p. 120):

“Remember, the force is omnipresent. It envelops you as it radiates from you. A Jedi warrior can actually feel the force as a physical thing.”

“It is an energy field, then?” Luke inquired.
“It is an energy field and something more,” Kenobi went on, almost mystically. “An aura that at once controls and obeys. It is a nothingness that can accomplish miracles. No one, not even the Jedi scientists, were able to truly define the force. Possibly no one ever will.”…

Somehow, PKD has never struck me as a really religious writer.  He writes about the fractal nature of reality – worlds within worlds, dreams within dreams – but this seems as much scientific as spiritual.  It’s just the way reality works.  That it’s also the way that mystics and Eastern religions describe reality is somewhat tangential – and his fascination with the Force seems to reflect that – the possibility of a provable God. So when I read PKD, I feel like I’m getting a sense of the nature of reality, rather than the nature of God. But this paragraph suggests I’m totally wrong about that.

Eugene, this is as good a description of what I experienced taking me over and guiding me; actually controlling me, in March of 1974 as I myself could write. Also, the character Luke hears the voice of the dead Jedi knight Kenobi, just as, when the plasmatic field which I call VALIS took me over I, too, heard a voice – that of my dead and resurrected leader, Jesus Christ. Whether George Lucas knows it or not, he in his film and novel is making the mystery of our religion real to literally millions of people, by using new names, new descriptions. I have no idea how conscious Lucas is, how deliberately he acted … or whether he was acted upon by God in his writing, as I think we all are to some degree.

Meanwhile, William Gibson on Valis. Total Dickhead has more:

R. Crumb is kinder:

Robert Crumb – The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick

Some background via Fusion Anomaly:

Nicole Panter met another friend, famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, when she photographed him for a _Slash_ interview. “My friendship with Phil was based on our shared neuroses and fascination with pharmaceuticals… and depression. It was a good friendship. A lot of people, guys especially, would just go down there and hang on his every word. I was _special_ by virtue of the fact that I hadn’t read his stuff.. After he died, I knew him so well by that time that I couldn’t bear to read it because it would have broken my heart.”

Another photo of the 1978 meeting – this time with KW Jeter and Gary Panter.

The (amazing) Slash interview:

SLASH: Are you anti organized religion?
DICK: Yes. Technically, I’m Episcopalian, but I don’t ever go. I’m interested in them because they’re a barrio church and they do lot of civil service work … technically I’m a religious anarchist.
SLASH: Is this Orange County?
DICK: Very Definitely … I bet that’s good beer. The Germs are breaking up, huh? The cat’s laughing at me … But Darby Crash is going to start his own band.
SLASH: Yeah, how’d you know?
DICK: I know … I know this stuff. Did I do that right? I sure like the Plugz. Now the beach bands like the Circle Jerks …
SLASH: Darby has a mohican now which brings up the kids you wrote about that modeled themselves after South American Indians or was it Africans. When did you begin to write about mutant youth cultures?
DICK: In my writing? TIME OUT OF JOINT in 1958.
SLASH: Were you a beatnik then … a bohemian?
DICK: I was all of those things. I knew the first beatnik. His name was Charles McLane … oh, the first hippy. I’m sorry. He was into drugs – that would be hippy.
SLASH: What made a beatnik, alcohol?
DICK: Some were into drugs. The difference was there was more of an emphasis on creative work with the beatniks. You had to write … much less emphasis on drugs.
SLASH: How far does a bohemian or lunatic fringe go back?
JETER: To the Bohemians in the twenties …
DICK: Wrong! Puccini’s LA BOHEME describes people who were poets and singers and who burned their pictures in the 19th Century. The furthest I can remember back is the thirties to the WPA artists paid by the government. They became the bohemian strata of the United States.
SLASH: What prompted you in 1958 to begin writing about this kind of youth culture? Kids with teeth filed to points?
DICK: Yeah, I don’t know. It wasn’t until ‘71 in a speech I delivered in Vancouver that I was consciously discussing the rise of the youth culture. I glorified punks “kids who would neither read, watch, remember, or be intimidated.” I spoke of the rise of a youth culture which would overthrow the government.
SLASH: Do you still think that’s the case?
DICK: I certainly do.
SLASH: Have you got a timetable?
DICK: What time is it now? (laughter) Any day now I expect to hear that swarms have entered the White House and broken all the furniture.

It has come to my attention that various mainstream news organizations are beginning to run an association between my 2007 performance piece/film, “Zeitgeist: The Movie” and the tragic murders conducted by an extremely troubled young man in Tucson, Arizona. They are also slowly beginning to bleed the obvious line between my 2007 documentary work, my film series as a whole and The Zeitgeist Movement, which I am the founder. Frankly, I find this isolating, growing association tremendously irresponsible on the part of ABC, NBC and their affiliates – further reflecting the disingenuous nature of the America Media Establishment today.

Make no mistake: The Social System is to blame for the rampage of Jared Loughner – not some famous online documentary which is known as the most viewed documentary of all time in internet history. Are the other 200 million people who have seen the film also preparing for murder sprees? I think not.

Really, it’s a similar argument being made be Sarah Palin and the right.  Her rhetoric didn’t cause the shootings.  Except there’s a distinct difference between speculation in a viral video and the rhetoric of a former vice presidential candidate who has a much different kind of influence.   In short, it’s more dangerous and needs to be called out.

Andrew Sullivan, who’s been pretty right on about this whole affair, I think gets it wrong on this issue:

9/11 Truthers are as ubiquitous on the far right as the far left, where government conspiracy theories thrive. But to a great extent, only the far right is obsessed with the central banking system.

The problem here is that it is lumping all conspiratorial rhetoric into the same boat – the mainstream right isn’t exactly calling out the Fed, except for the Ron Paul fringe.  However, Kucinich has also called out the Fed, as has Michael Moore in “Capitalism: A Love Story.”  But what Sullivan is doing is equating people who question the central banking system on the same level as those who call Obama a Marxist, and this just isn’t the case.

Paranoia about our currency (or the debt system as outlined in “Zeitgeist”)  isn’t really part of the mainstream dialogue.  And regardless, there is a difference between something that is conveyed in an underground movie like “Zeitgeist” and conspiratorial language coming out of the mouth of a major politician.  If a conspiracy theory is spouted by the likes of Glenn Beck and others in the mainstream media, this is far more legitimized than a video that’s spread virally on Youtube.  Just as Glenn Beck’s lunacy is justified by the millions of dollars he’s making, his listeners own paranoia is legitimized by Glenn Beck’s success.

Before you think I’m making an equivalency between Beck and “Zeitgeist,” I’m not.  The problem with the right’s rhetoric is how inaccurate it’s been – such as calling a drive to improve health care “tyranny.”  It’s this kind of overstatement that can be the most damaging, as it’s totally unhinged and will speak particularly to unhinged people.  And “socialism,” “tyranny”, etc. is the Republican party line. There’s a danger in making such broad inaccurate proclamations, especially since it deflects from very real problems we do have – such as the pervasive influence of corporate industry over government: something that Republicans enable while decrying “tyranny.”

This type of rhetoric on the right is separate from the message of a film like “Zeitgeist” – which has the major message: question the government, question dominant thought.  At its core, it’s an anti-fundamentalist movie, unlike the hard right, which encourages fundamentalism.  There are certainly some dubious things in the series, but really it’s a documentary, a work of art, which has different criteria than someone who’s running for office. On balance, “question the government” is a good message, even if it paints a scary portrait of where we’ve come.

But these are scary times – there’s no getting around that.  Republican hysteria is a reaction to that, but they’re just obsessing about the wrong things and very often outright lying.  When this lying becomes part of the political establishment, there’s a problem.  But it would also be progress if politicians were more open about the dangers of our current financial system, environmental damage, the military industrial complex, etc.  Because mainstream politicians will not talk about the true state of affairs there’s an opening for a movie like”Zeitgeist.”  Unfortunately, there’s also an opening for liars like Beck to stir people up based on the premise that the Democrats are at fault – as if our problems are that one-sided.

“Zeitgeist” too is full of hyperbole – I wish it would totally excise the section where it talks about people being microchipped for the New World Order.  This part just seems like total baseless paranoia.  But again, paranoia from an independent filmmaker is far different from Sarah Palin suddenly saying “Obama wants to implant microchips.”  For one thing, it’s sending paranoia only towards the Democratic party – but more importantly, everything Sarah Palin says is amplified by the mainstream, thereby legitimizing it.

Equating the influence of far right conspiracy theory with general hysteria in the political spectrum – as Andrew Sullivan has done – is to suggest we can never ask these questions about government, as if fringe ideas are all equally unhinged.  In other words, all conspiracy theorizing is as stupid and dangerous as Sarah Palin’s gun sight map.  It’s not – conspiracies happen and don’t often get the attention they deserve.  Just as – ironically – Sarah Palin’s map or Sharron Angle’s “second amendment remedies” comment didn’t get enough attention at the time.  The mainstream media ignores these very real dangers in the quest to maintain the status quo.  To be status-quo questioning is not to be a lunatic.

I guess I’m sort of feeling the heat, as I was grateful that Palin was being called on her bullshit as this story first unfolded, and now see the light being shone on things like “Zeitgeist” or Philip K. Dick – as if anyone who questions reality is crazy rather than a visionary.  It’s not unstable to question reality, it’s unstable to have no empathy, as is the case with Loughner – clearly a total lunatic.

This madness is only going to continue if we keep operating like this.  Really, there does need to be a “revolution” to change how society and government operates.  Unfortunately, an actual revolution would just look like a bunch of Loughners over and over again – a bunch of random, senseless killings.  A revolution of ideas needs to happen.  If you look at how “Zeitgeist” is portrayed in the Daily Beast, they refer to the movie as “attacking” Christianity.  That’s one perspective, but “questioning” would be just as accurate.  There’s justifiable anger in how one religion has dominated this country.  One does not have to be overly aggressive to think that – in fact, it’s healthy.

But so long as the mainstream is so intent on avoiding questioning itself, and instead replaces it with the baseless anger of the Tea Party, it’ll just amount to people screaming at each other, and, occasionally, killing each other.  The Tea Party are totally justified in their anger, they’re just directing it towards the wrong issues.  Anger is not the problem, violence is the problem, as well as rage based on misinformation. The Loughner story is only half about the shootings – the other half is the reaction to the shootings and how people went into their corners as if we’re in the middle of an ideological war.

Put that all together, and this isn’t an indictment of “Zeitgeist” or Dickian fiction – but of the mainstream: the news and politicians who don’t address the state of affairs with sobriety, or even rationality.  In that climate, it should come as no great surprise that the country is slowly losing its mind.

Ms. Dick, who does not suffer fools, recalls Point Reyes Station as a cow town, literally. She remembers the years with Phil, as she calls him, as mostly idyllic. He helped her bring up her three girls from her marriage to Richard Rubenstein, a San Francisco poet who had died suddenly. The couple raised fowl and black-faced sheep. Each morning Dick would walk through a barbed-wire-and-wooden-post fence and across a grassy meadow to a cabin he called the Hovel, where he did much of his writing.

Ms. Dick recalls wide-ranging, universe-spanning conversations, and lending books to her autodidact husband. In 1961, in the heyday of Freudian and Jungian theory, she gave him several books with introductions by Carl Jung. One, the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, would show up as a plot point in “High Castle” and guide its composition.

Ms. Dick says that while Dick was both agoraphobic and shy, he was a man of enormous personal magnetism. “He knew how to talk to people, to move their emotions and thoughts,” she said. “But he was too shy to go out into public. He could have been a great F.B.I. agent and a great actor.”

I interviewed Anne Dick here.  The rerelease of this pretty seminal book for Dick-heads here.

Update: the writer of the article has a nice supplemental blog post here.

If I had the money to burn, I’d do it, if only to rent it from her so she can have it back.  Go to her blog for more information.

The smallish turnout consisted of uber-fans and scholars (mostly SF nerds now doing drugs only occasionally) who have been reading, studying, and fanning out on PKD since before he went big, fans loyal enough to drive to the remote location high in the Rocky Mountains for the festival. With a turnout of about 30 people for the main talks and considerably fewer attending the group meals, certainly a similarly promoted PKD Festival in any large city would draw more people, but anyone could show up to that. This festival’s remote location weeded out all but the most hardcore of fans.

Read the whole thing. In it, he links to this: I want it -

Dick looked around his world with a kind of skinlessness. He existed in the world and it just permeated him. Mid-’50s America was overwhelmingly alive in his vision, in such a way that he saw it simultaneously as a present and as a future. He saw the makings of the late capitalist experience embedded in that mid-century triumphalist post-war moment. And it’s as though he experienced it all, in all its absurdity and its tragedy, as this overwhelming vision. And he just jotted it down as frantically as he could. And the books are so raw with that perception that they still feel like a desperate attempt to record an arriving moment. I think that’s the experience of reading Philip K. Dick. He seems to be frantically trying to transcribe an arriving reality that is urgent and totally fresh.

What’s missing from both the academic and pop movie descriptions you mention is that Dick is an immensely personal writer. In his own way, he‘s a Beat or a proto-Beat. He’s like Henry Miller. One of these gargantuan, slightly egotistical but insecure, garrulous personas that just pour themselves onto the page, and says: “Love me or hate me. This is what I feel. And these are the kind of women I find sexy. And oh my god, I hate them. They’re consuming me. And I feel really stupid today, but I’m going to tell you about….” And he just gives himself. And as anyone who’s ever tried to write literary novels or stories or a memoir can tell you – it’s not a small thing to pour yourself onto the page. And when it’s accomplished, totally, you end up with the kind of monumental writers that many people find also unpleasant or toxic or unreadable.

Yeah, I’m obsessed.  But it gets to the reason that I’m so much more moved by PKD than writers like Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson.  They’re good, and impressive, but they’re also lacking a certain nakedness.  To me.  Reading and reviewing Anne Dick’s memoir about Philip K. Dick drove home just how personal his far-out novels were.

Been meaning to link to this piece.

Dick knew that there had to be an FBI file on his activities because, as he told the Bureau in the letter requesting access to it: “In the early ’fifties, two agents of the FBI, Mr George Scruggs and Mr George Smith, approached me.”

Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.

And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis. On 28 October 1972, Dick wrote to the FBI and outlined his distinctly odd beliefs:

“I am a well-known author of science fiction novels, one of which dealt with Nazi Germany (called MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it described an ‘alternate world’ in which the Germans and Japanese won World War Two and jointly occupied the United States).

“This novel, published in 1962 by Putnam and Co., won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year and hence was widely read both here and abroad; for example, a Japanese edition printed in Tokyo ran into several editions. I bring this to your attention because several months ago I was approached by an individual who I have reason to believe belonged to a covert organization involved in politics, illegal weapons, etc., who put great pressure on me to place coded information in future novels ‘to be read by the right people here and there’, as he phrased it. I refused to do this.”

Part 1 and 3.

(via Dangerous Minds)

This happened, been better published in France than the States:

Incidentally I also received an email this week from Anne Dick, PK Dick’s third wife, who I sent my novel to, and who I interviewed.  She hasn’t read the novel yet, but a gracious note from the wife of Philip K. Dick restores some of my faith in the future.

From Philip Heying, photographer:

Your book is a page-turner. I burned through it in three days -finished it last Friday, which is really fast for me.

I found it both highly entertaining and plenty smart, with doses of humor. The Winchell family especially made me laugh, the way biting satire does -with fangs of truth.

For whatever my humble opinion is worth, I’d say it is a classic in the genre.

From Philip Persinger, author of Do the Math:

In the beginning… Oops. I didn’t mean to be so Biblical. I meant to say that as I started reading, I was very interested in how you were going to maintain, let alone, resolve the ambitious conceit that seemed to be your foundation. Little did I know that you would weave conceit into conceit.

The hyper-self-consciousness of the narrator’s narrative was the most problematic to me at the on-set and what I ultimately found technically the most pleasing in its resolution.

Since Philip K. Dick still remains on my super-sized to be read bookshelf, I was unable to appreciate any kind of homage there. But I did get a whiff of a little Brian Aldiss in a scene or two. Whether that was real or imagined, I do not know.

It is a complicated piece of work and as I’ve said interwoven. But what propelled me forward was not just the story line. It was your confidence. Your writing has strength of character. Even when the voice is insecure and afraid, the self-assurance of the writing moves the story forward powerfully.

I blasted through the book. I wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was enjoying the W Redux so soon after the damage was done. But I found it a great read.