In an essay entitled "Blows Against the Empire“ (The New Yorker, 20 Aug 07), Adam Gopnik explores the life and writings of American science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) who is perhaps best known for having provided the adaptation source for Ridley Scott’s classic movie of dystopia, Blade Runner. While this movie can be seen as a dark and disturbing visionary dream, and as such, an influential cultural voice, the essay looks, among other things, at how Dick’s life was impacted by a moment of vision.
"In February, 1974, Dick, after having a tooth pulled by the dentist, and still high on the vestiges of sodium pentathol, opened the door of his house to get a prescription from a delivery girl – and had a vision that dominated and damned the last eight years of his life.“ No trivial experience, this! Like all significant waking visions, it had a profound impact upon the dreamer experiencing it.
Here is a description of what Dick experienced at that sightful moment. "The delivery girl visiting the already drug-addicted Dick was wearing a fish medallion; Dick casually asked her about it, and she fingered it to show him that it was an ancient Christian symbol. Dick had an overwhelming, numinous experience of 'unforgetting‘: he eventually saw (the vision came in bursts) that he and the girl were both early Christians in flight from Roman persecution and exchanging a coded language of gesture. He wasn’t seeing, Shirley MacLaine style, that he had been a Christian in an earlier life; the point was that he was one now. The entire phenomenal world around him was an illusion created by a fallen female God, twin to a good immaterial God; he was experiencing not a flashback but a flash-in. Sometime in the first century – he later pinned it down to 70 C.E. – the passage of time had been deliberately stopped by the Empire, the Black Iron Prison. There was no 1974; there never had been. It was still the year 70. The Roman Empire had never ended.“ What a powerful experience! Ancient Rome, God, time stopped: especially to an already drug-addled mind, this vision must have felt irresistible. It could not but instill a sense of importance and significance to the visionary’s sense of self. The challenge, of course, would be to integrate the vision into waking, consensual reality.
Gopnik explains that "Dick spent the rest of his life working out the complexities of this idiosyncratic Gnosticism, achieving, at last, a fantastically elaborate metaphysical cosmology – the central conception was of VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence system - that he placed (under the signature of his alter ego Horselover Fat: the Greek meaning of 'Philip‘ combined with the German meaning of 'Dick‘) at the end of a visionary novel, also called Valis (1981).“ Horse Lover Fat? It does seem that a vision that dominates years of a human’s life could at least result in a nom-de-vision that is a bit less clunky, a bit more, well, Blade-Runnerishly elegant.
This piece of biography demonstrates the allure as well as the pratfalls of visions and hallucinations. Whatever the vision that one experiences, the key is how it winds up informing the visionary’s waking life. Visions ungrounded in the world of other folk can become impediments to the dreamer living her life or entertainments that distract the dreamer from the business of living, like a drug. For Dick, it seems that he wound up spending the last years of his life chasing his vision’s high. It seems that he did not engage in reality-testing his vision, questioning its coherence or purpose. He seems to have continued to visit this trippy hallucination without questioning its value. As not all acid trips are insightful or profound, so, too, some visions are of less value than others.