Douglas Mercer
July 27 2024
Neuschwanstein Castle (German: Schloss Neuschwanstein) is a fairy tale castle built in South Germany in the year 1864 by King Ludwig II. The King was a good friend of Richard Wagner whose operas inspired the design of the castle which is in the architectural style know as romanticism, that is it harked back to the German Middle Ages. The castle stands above the narrow gorge of the Pöllat stream, east of the Alpsee and Schwansee Lakes, close to the mouth of the Lech and Forggensee.
Sleeping Beauty Castle is a fake fairy tale castle at the center of Disneyland and it is based on the Neuschwanstein Castle. The version at Disneyland is the only Disney Castle whose construction was overseen by Walt Disney.
Sleeping Beauty is a European Fairy tale in which the Princess’ parents are told by a Wicked Fairy that if she pricks her finger on a spindle she will die (a spindle is a straight spike, usually made from wood, used for spinning and twisting fiber such as wool, flax, hemp, cotton into yarn. It is weighted at the bottom, middle, or top by spherical object knows as a whorl). When this happens the Princess instead falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years. She is finally awakened by the kiss of a prince. The Grimm brothers considered rejecting this tale from their collection as they thought it might not be authentically German but included it when they learned of the sleeping Brunhilde in the Volsunga Saga (old Norse).
Fantasia was a 1940 Disney animation film which originally called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice which itself was an elaboration of the Silly Symphonies concept, whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. Fantasia has music by Bach (Fugue in D minor), Tchaikovsky, a section based on Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Beethoven and another section about Walpurgis Night. So this film is a recapitulation of European folk tales, myth, and histories; but for it’s over vaunted advanced nature you can see in it the inevitable seeds of degeneration. What it does is it takes our great past and reduces it to the (literally in this case) cartoon level; looking back on it is crude and not only in a technical way; in it too are the seeds of the images and the template for the spurious “superheroes” we see today, mock imitations of the real thing; one need only think that when you say the word “superman” to people they think of a mild mannered reporter and truth, justice of the American way (or they used to); or a man flying with an S on his suit; they do not think of the ubermensch; that is if you can control minds with specious images you can control the world. In Disneyland you can see the debasement of all the European folk tales and also of the Alice books. Now Disneyland has become a massive conglomerate spanning the globe injecting false notions and evil lies into the minds of people. Mickey Mouse has in fact grown up a cow; but more than that is is a godawul small affair.
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Phillip Dick (phil: love, lip: mouth, words; dick dicther: poet / cock: Socrates I owe someone a cock, the cock crows three times, weathercock weather vane in Holderlin’s In Lovely Blue, it is the crow of the cock that scatters the ghost of Hamlet’s father) was an American science fiction writer of such novels as Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, The Man In The High Tower, A Scanner Darkly, The Minority Report, and a novel that the film Total Recall was based on. He went through the Identify Fracture Project (see The Poet’s Calling, White Biocentrism July 23 2024) with an attempted suicide and a descent into schizophrenia. According to his own account his central question was that of Rilke: what is real? (war ist wirklich?). He came to believe that the consensual world of reality, presumably shared by all of us, was in fact not real, but a copy or a copy of a copy, a fable or fiction or a fairy tale brought about by a mutual hallucination. That is he thought that life was a dream (see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Through The Looking Glass).
He believed that his brain was inhabited by a cosmic entity and that by accessing this entity one could see what was really real, this is the cybernetic filed of symbols and images that one must master in order to interpret properly. He called this entity VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System. As a science fiction writer he naturally inclined toward New Age theorems, or extraterrestrial entities and so called “cosmic triggers” thus introducing red herrings on wild goose chases, needless detours form the unbeaten path of the Royal Road (rod, word). In the end he finds no less a person than Jesus Christ (once and for all disqualifying him from the status of Poet). Though that is not to say that he did not delve rather far into the open field dredging up names like Horselover Fat (the horse being the emblem of the god, Fat Lady etc.). He also claimed that VALIS used disinhibiting stimuli to communicate, using symbols to trigger recollection of intrinsic knowledge (correct, more or less). In the end to his credit he valorizes the concept of the programmer (the one will all hues in his controlling).
“We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction—a failure—of memory retrieval.” (ram: random access memory, grammar).
It is a rule-based games involving symbols encoded in language, the symbols and the letters/words interact; but one must realize that no symbol is controlling, and certainly no person; for all of his acumen Dick turned out to be one of the laggards in the back of the class. He ignored his own advice that said all things ossified had to go, to make way for something new. Stafford Beers said of cybernetics that every player is the (limited) controller in the game but needed to be controlled also in order that the game not go out of joint. The controller is the creator, the one that Shakespeare said was the great corrector of enormous times, the grand decider, the one that heals with blood vengeance and cures the earth of the pleurisy of the people, the one controlling with all hues in his control all out rolling (Two Noble Kinsman 1613, Sonnet 20 1609). Eventually once the intelligence and information is poured out in sufficient quantity it will become possible for one to have interpreted the entire field correctly, align with the creator, and become a co-pilot as it were. Nietzsche lamented that it had been 2000 years and still no new god; but everything once said is now dead in the heart, and only the living word speaks. Even as only real birds sing.
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Dick’s most profound and final meditation on the game of reality was a short essay called How To Build A Universe That Won’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (see Building, White Biocentrism, May 19 2024).
“First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it.”
He opens at Disneyland spinning wildly and whirling on the teacups (Mad Hatter, whimsy, nonsense, what a small world this is/small world ride, see English Whimsy, White Biocentrism July 25 2024), and a reporter asks “unexpected questions” of him. After some desultory writing he soon begins his query into the nature of reality.
“What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later."
But this is only the surface; no doubt that the human creators of images are injecting fakes and forgeries into brains; but they themselves are fake and forgeries (you never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper) being debased currency. And it is the fable agreed on (Napoleon) which gives the world its specious quality.
“It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question What is reality? to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real.”
That is he is on the Quest; in novel after novel and story after story he was probing by angles oblique into the heart of the question, but was only coming up with more fakes; as one illusion passed away another turned up in its place.
“The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. When I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.”
The permanent landscape is real; but that was going long before the advent of the figure of Jesus Christ, so-called; indeed, in the essay he quotes the pre-Socratics at length and indeed uses them as his justification of the mechanism of how the fake/real split occurs. But then like a Jack-In-The-Box, aided by some spurious coincidences Jesus shows up right in the middle like some long-lost ghost showing up to wrap up the play.
In the essay he gives a long explication of how in one of his novels (Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said) he has a character named Kathy who is an imposter, she appears to work for the criminal underground but really is employed by the police. Then he himself meets (on Christmas Day 1970 he hastens to add) a girl named Kathy who is a drug dealer but he soon learns that she has a relationship with a police inspector, a man whom the author knew; then he is speaking to his Episcopal Priest and he tells him of an important scene in the novel involving a character named Felix Buckman who meets a stranger in an all-night gas station; on hearing of this scene the Priest become agitated and tells Dick that what he is describing is a scene from the Book Of Acts and what is more the person who meets the stranger is named Phillip in the book of Acts—the author’s own name. Dick states that he had never read Acts but that when he does he sees that his scene is an obvious retelling of the counterpart scene in Acts. And as he reads more he is even more puzzled, the plot or the interlacing plots thicken as it were. He says that in Acts the name of the High Official who arrests and interrogates Paul is named Felix, just like the character who is a High Official of the police. He says there is a conversation in his novel which closely resembles the conversation between Paul and Felix in Acts. The main character in his novel is named Jason and Dick soon learns that the name Jason appears in the Bible only one time, in Acts: in his novel Jason flees the authorities but in Acts Jason shelters a fugitive, an inversion; in Acts Phillip baptizes the stranger met on the road, but in the novel it is the stranger who comforts Felix on the road. He calls this a “quirk” the mysterious spirit who is at work in these correspondences.
“A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names.”
But he can begin to explain it; in fact he explains it, as far as it goes.
Then Dick is mailing a letter late at night and he sees man who says he has run out of gas. He drives the man to a gas station and while there he sees that the scene before him at the gas station is exactly the one he had in his mind’s or inner eye when he wrote the scene—glaring white light, pump jockey—down to the last detail. Dick reports that he was very shaken up by this encounter, having lived out a replica of a scene he has formerly only imagined. He then posits that there is a permanent underlying landscape to the universe and that we only inhabit a specious or spurious aspect of it.
***
I think we need to take the experiences that Dick had seriously, even while rejecting his conclusions. Dick was a serious man who thought about serious things, and even given his mental imbalance we can take his reporting at face value. There is no reason to think he is lying about the facts themselves. In his novels Dick spanned the gamut of the mind, androids who dream electric dreams, virtual reality, chips in one’s head that can create new memories and new lives, brainwashing, mind manipulation, living computers, he knew that the mind was infinitely malleable and only recognized what it was fed. And the “experience” he had convinced him that the mind bending was not at all, not even primarily, due to any technology, indeed that the technological manipulation of the mind was just a way of entering into what was really going on; that is this was no science fiction fantasy or new age hoo ha about “visualization” or a cybernetic template of a field, but was a flesh and blood thing of the mind and of words themselves, words and stories and images; that is he was discovering that the way the god works is by a Divine Invasion (the title of one of his last novels), or plays within plays (The Mousetrap, Hamlet-1603) or miniatures, of dioramas, or emblems or simulacra within simulacra, like those nesting dolls. Heidegger terms this the destinings that shoot out within destining, but until the final one happens they are still specious, if ever more real.
“Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I’ll do so, having gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentothal. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman — who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming goldfish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign. In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis — a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness. I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.”
It is eerie how close Dick got to the truth, he had the formal system down correctly but was sadly led astray by random occurrences to put Jesus in the middle of the plot, like a god from a machine. He is correct in saying that it the loss of forgetfulness (Heidegger simply terms it the “collection of memory”, or retreat from oblivion, Shakespeare speaks of those who are fat weeds on the wharf of Lethe) which leads to the final truth. It is not for nothing that the ghost of Hamlet's father repeats the refrain: remember. It must also be noted that many people wore those fish necklaces at the time (1974), they were particularly popular among the so-called Jesus Freaks.
The Christian myth or cult is a parasite that feeds on the truth, an empty not even pale imitation. It clings to it like a mimic and gets some of the symbols correct. It is the shadow or reality while itself being an imposter. Dick himself wrote this:
“I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.”
That is in the beginning was UBIK. UBIK is the brand name.
Ubik is from the word ubiquitous, the Latin Hic Et Ubique (Hamlet, 1603, Here, There and Everywhere, 1966).
The true Logos Doctrine emanates from Heraclitus (530 BC):
“Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it, not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it, at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves. Other men, on the contrary, are as unaware of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.”
That is the words of the god inhabit us from time immemorial and time out of mind, this eternal landscape (so to speak); it only needs to be activated. The use of the word “logos” in the notorious gospel of John is just another knock off, another fake and another imitation. Mature poets may steal but at least they use footnotes.
“There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.”
There is indeed, but to call this mind or intelligence the “holy spirit” stacks the deck; and note how he says that this so-called Holy Spirit has an exact and intimate relation to Christ. Intimate in the sense he means it means closely acquainted; close but no cigar as used to be said; it only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades and drive in movies; that is he was getting warm, very warm but was still all wet. That is I don’t trust anyone who cannot speak clear English. In fact of late I have come to think thinking clearly and speaking this language properly are one and the same.
He then wraps it all up by reverting back to the metaphor of Disneyland; having posited the imminent return of his savior he says that this visitation from the clouds will bring in the realization (the making real) of the world:
“And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.”
At the time of his death Dick was writing a book called The Owl In Daylight. Dick heard this phrase on television and took it to mean to be blind and to not understand. But he of all people should have known that our eyes are open but they might as well be closed, and when the Owl Of Minerva no longer flies at dusk but like dreams walking in broad daylight then it has become the lark. We need no ghost from hell to come back to tell us this.
***
Notes:
We are building a universe that won't fall apart the moment it is made, instead it will drift in and out, dissolve and concentrate forever.
For nearly a century, sodium pentothal was the undisputed king of anesthetics. Anesthesiologists were not, however, the sole consumers of pentothal, as psychiatrists used it to treat acute anxiety during psychoanalysis. The associated drug-induced inhibitions were attractive not only to psychotherapists, but also to a new generation of policing and Cold War espionage searching for the elusive truth serum.
Wisdom teeth: you have to have them all pulled out (Savoy Truffle 1969).
Dent is in identity (first known use was 1600) long before dental records were the only way to identify human remains. Dental structures are the hardest and most well protected structures in the body. These structures resist decomposition and high temperatures and are among the last ones to disintegrate after death. The principal basis of the dental identification lies in the fact that no two oral cavities are alike and the teeth are unique to an individual.
In the essay Dick turns to the pre-Socratics Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus for elucidation of the logos. The author fo the Gospel Of John notoriously borrowed the word logos to speak of Jesus, in the same way that the Christina cult took over the ancient rites and holy holidays of our people. For Dick to saturate his essay with these noble thinkers and then end up anti-climatically with Jesus is, among other things, a lapse of taste.
In the essay Dick curiously places a great prominence on the fall of Richard (Dick) Nixon, neglecting the history of this fall as one orchestrated by the Jews.
In a letter to his editor at Timescape Books, David Hartwell, PKD makes an informal statement about THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT: This second novel is not due until January 1, 1983, so I've got time. Right now I'm just physically too tired to do the typing. It looks like it's going to be a good book, too. It's called THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT. I’m now working very closely with the Ladd Company and, I'm on very good terms with them. In fact, that's one of the things that's worn me out. I've been so amped-up over BLADE RUNNER I couldn't work on THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT. It will be based somewhat (as I have discussed with you and Russell Galen) on Dante's COMMEDIA - and also on Goethe's FAUST Part One. In the future a scientist who is very old supervises the construction of an amusement park (something like the "lands" at Disneyland) of Berkeley, California circa 1949-1952 with all the various groups and subcultures of that time and place represented. In order to impose coherency on the Park he involves one of the planet's leading computers in the operation of it, turning this high-level computer into the mind behind the Park. The computer resents this, since it prefers to solve abstract, theoretical problems of the highest order. The computer pays the scientist back by trapping him in the Park and making him subject to its mind (that is, the computer's mind): the scientist is given the physical body of a high school boy, and he is deprived of his memories of his true identity (you can see the influence of Van Vogt on me, here, and also that of a number of my earlier novels). Now the scientist, trapped in his own amusement Park and subject to the mind of the misused (misused and knowing it and keenly resenting it) computer must solve the maze that the Park represents and find his way out of it by solving problems propounded by the computer and presented to him in sequence.
A Real Bird Sings
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Douglas Mercer
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