Copyright

First published in the United States in 2000 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

Copyright © 2000 by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Tim Powers

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-228-8

This book is dedicated to our mothers, Mattie Hurst Gype and Mae Helen Sauter.

FROM GWEN:

My first thanks is to PKD for his friendship, he was everything a friend could be. His intellectual generosity was boundless. He was as excited about the interview as I was. He made it an extraordinary experience.

Thanks to my husband, Wibert Lee, for his support of this project from its inception.

Thanks to David McDonnell at Starlog for his advice and support over the years.

Finally I would like to thank D. Elaine Sauter for her friendship, for bringing Phil into my life, for bringing life into this manuscript and getting it published. I am fortunate to have such a multi-talented friend!

FROM DORIS:

Thanks to my friend Gwen, who had the foresight to interview Phil, an interview which turned out to be the last record of one of the most gifted writers of this century. Thanks also for her support during and after Phil’s final illness; shared grief is so much easier to bear.

A heartfelt thank you to all the members of the Dallas Writers group, especially Jan Blankenship, Amy Bourret, Robert Burns, Victoria Calder, Will Clarke, Fanchon Knott, David Norman, Christine Phillips and Sandra Sadler, for their support and suggestions during the publications phase of this book.

Grateful thanks also to Lawrence Sutin for his kind words of encouragement after Phil’s death and during the preparation of this manuscript.

Gratitude also to James A. Padova, M.D., and everyone else at the Hematology-Oncology Group in Orange County who kept me going long enough to get here. And hopefully beyond.

And many blessings to Tim Powers, who told me in his Santa Ana living room years ago: you can.

FOREWORD

TIM POWERS

Less then two months after these interview sessions were taped, Philip K. Dick would be dead. He never lived to see the finished movie Blade Runner, and his proposed next novel, The Owl in Daylight, didn’t go much further than the musings in these talks.

But what talks! These conversations vividly bring back the recollection of spending an evening with Philip K. Dick. I’m glad the text hasn’t been edited to take out all the off-track remarks and the repetitions of “you know”—this is simply transcription, and it gives the reader the real sense of how the man spoke. His conversation was always fascinating, even when the beginning of a sentence, if not the whole topic, had been left behind in the mercurial free-association of his thoughts. I remember the pleased satisfaction I’d feel when I’d occasionally throw in what seemed to be a related speculation, and see his eyes widen and hear him say something like, “Yes, of course, and—” More often, I suppose, he would nod politely, say, “Yes, yes, but—” and then resume where he had left off.

Many of the conversations he’d have with Doris Sauter and K. W. Jeter and me were gonzo-theology, and while the rest of us were hampered with fairly fixed convictions, Phil would shift creeds almost day to day, like a fencer shifting among guard-lines.

And though he would shift his creeds—one day deciding that the real truth was to be found in Orthodox Judaism, the next day that the Gnostic Essenes had found all the secrets—he was never cynical. Well, how could he be? Something very big had happened to him in February and March of 1974, as he describes in this book, and he was on the one hand too honest with himself to minimize it and on the other hand too curious and erudite not to pursue it with his whole mind. Always the “minimal hypothesis”—the possibility that he had simply suffered some kind of psychotic episode—was objectively considered and eventually found inadequate to explain all the facts.

For some, though, the minimal hypothesis is satisfactory. I have read that Dick didn’t dare move from a shabby apartment, because he believed that was where God knew how to reach him; and that he was a misogynist recluse; and that he once killed a cat with the power of his mind. None of these, actually, is true—but the image of the crazed, mystical hermit-genius is an attractive and easily swallowed one, and people have a fondness for easy summaries, even if the summaries are wrong and the truth is something a good deal more complex.

I think it’s impossible to read these interviews, or Valis, or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and conclude that Dick was irrational. His sense of the absurd is everywhere as palpable as his bewilderment at his experiences, and he is at least as aware of the implausibility of some of his theories as his listeners or readers are. I remember frequently being convinced by some outre notion of his, only to be cut off in mid-credulity by his abrupt decision that the notion was based on faulty logic. His objectivity, his clear-eyed humor—his self-derision, even—were too briskly realistic to permit the cocooned egotism of insanity.

If these interviews are in fact not the record of a madman, though, they are at least the testimony—humorous and whimsical, but nevertheless clear—of an artist who is killing himself for his art.

As Doris Sauter notes in her insightful introduction, Dick did write each of his later novels in eight to twelve days. I remember him calling me up to come over to his apartment and read some early pages of Valis—he only emerged from his office long enough to give me some typed pages, and then he was back in there, typing away. I remember that he called to me to ask how to spell certain words, and it’s fun now to find them in the published text and see what part of the book he was writing as I sat in his living room— and eventually I called some comments to him and then let myself out. I believe he wrote Valis in twelve days; he must have eaten and slept during that time, but I’m certain it was not nearly enough.

It’s enthralling to hear Dick explaining how he wrote his books. Some of it is funny, as when he explains how to drop evidence of a technical development like biochips into a science-fiction story:

That’s another technical device, you casually have one character say to the other, ‘Where did you put the biochips?’ ‘I put them back in the cupboard where they belong.’ That’s all you need to say … See, it’s amazing how easy it is to write if you know how …

But only a few pages later we see him seriously address the constructing of a story. “Let’s do it right now,” he says, “let’s work the book out.” And for the next dozen pages we are privileged, because of Gwen Lee’s tape recorder, to hear Philip K. Dick actually composing the plot of his new book, snatching up ideas and trying out characters and conflicts in the crucible of his freewheeling imagination.

In a natural progression, and all too soon, he reflects on what his writing is costing him:

And this is something I’m beginning to realize about myself, that, uh, although I think my writing is getting better all the time, my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be … when I got finished [with The Transmigration of Timothy Archer] I was living on aspirin, scotch, and potassium tablets.

Less than two months later a series of strokes had killed him. As he foresaw, “finally the cost is going to be higher than the yield line.” The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was the last book he was to write, and in fact he died shortly before it was published— the “About the Author” page of the galley proofs describes him as still living.

I imagine that when he was young he thought of his writing as working for him—providing him a living, giving him the chance to express ideas; but before the end he had come to realize, and accept, that in fact he was working for his writing, and that if one had to be sacrificed to the other, it was his work that had to prevail. The cost line, ultimately, had to be ignored.

His cheerful humor here, and his unflagging curiosity and research, and his ever-patient, unfeigned interest in everyone he met, are bravely quixotic. They didn’t help when the vessel in his brain inevitably gave way before the ever-higher blood-pressure— but this vivid portrait of him survives. His novels and short stories are his splendid and costly work, but we’re lucky to have too this record of the man who killed himself to make them.

INTRODUCTION

The interview you have in your hands comes at the end of a long relationship. It is derived from interviews recorded several months before Philip Kindred Dick passed away on March 2, 1982, at Western Medical Center.

I had known Phil for ten years, first as a friend who helped me through a cancer diagnosis and then in a deeper relationship during the time we lived together. Phil’s ex-wife, Tessa, first called with the news of Phil’s stroke. (By that time, I had moved to Northern California.) I went down to Southern California soon after, spending the better part of a week at the hospital visiting Phil, calling his friends and his agent, Russell Galen, to inform them of Phil’s condition, mediating between family members, dealing with the cats, Phil’s property, and other practicalities.

During the time I kept vigil in the waiting room of the ICU, the interviews my friend Gwen Lee had taped were the furthest thing from my mind. I certainly didn’t know that they would become the last record of a man who was one of the leading literary figures of the twentieth century.

I was just worried about Phil.

I first met Philip K. Dick in the spring or early summer of 1972, when I was dating Norman Spinrad. Norman lived in Laurel Canyon, near Hollywood, and he would drive down to Tustin and pick me up. Then we would drive to Phil’s house in Fullerton, about twenty minutes away, and have dinner at a Chinese restaurant near Phil’s house with Phil and his then-girlfriend, Tessa Busby. We did this frequently in the roughly five months Norman and I were together.

When my relationship with Norman ended, Phil said that just because I was not seeing Norman anymore, it didn’t mean that we couldn’t be friends. So Phil and I stayed in touch. He continued to see Tessa, and I began a new relationship as well. But I would often go out to Fullerton from Orange or Tustin or Santa Ana and spend the evening with Phil and Tessa. Usually Tim Powers or some of Phil’s other friends would come over as well. We would discuss books, writing, religion, politics—you name it—for the evening.

I also introduced Phil to several of my friends, among them Gwen Lee, whom I had met in 1971 when we were both students at Santa Ana College.

Sometimes Phil would visit me, coming to my sister’s house in Orange or to my place, a small one-room apartment near downtown Santa Ana. It had a metal shower in the living room (the only room), and a bathroom. No kitchen, just a hotplate. Phil was appalled that I had no place to wash dishes except either the bathroom sink or the shower.

I was raised Lutheran, but it was in this apartment that I went through a quiet Christian conversion, the genesis of which was reading Daniel Berrigan’s poetry. I read the Bible and prayed, and began to attend Catholic Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in Orange. Several weeks later when I mentioned this religious experience to Phil, he was ecstatic. He told me of his own conversion experience of 2-3-74 (February and March of 1974). Those familiar with Phil’s life and work know that during that period Phil felt he was propelled back into the early Christian era and was given lifesaving information about his son, Christopher. Phil and I realized we had even more in common as we discussed our spiritual lives.

By January of 1976, Phil had helped me through quite a few painful experiences—the loss of my boyfriend, David Parker, in 1974, followed soon after by the death of several other close friends; the development of histiocytic lymphoma in 1975, and the subsequent chemotherapy sessions. Phil was always there to lend a hand, growing angry at friends who could not bear to visit me. “Love without guts is worthless,” he said.

Phil was now living in a rental house in Fullerton, and his relationship with Tessa was disintegrating rapidly—it was clear that his marriage was at an end. Phil soon proposed to me, but I turned him down—judging by the results of his last marriage (the fifth), I was reluctant. Phil was adamant, however, that the two of us should move in together. Our relationship had become quite serious, and Phil was worried about my living alone. I had suffered three seizures as a result of chemotherapy and, although the doctors assured me the seizures would not return (and they didn’t), Phil was not to be dissuaded. He also said he shouldn’t live alone because of his heart condition. Finally, in the summer of 1976, we moved in together.

Our apartment in Santa Ana was a moderately sized two bedroom—a big step up from my one-room efficiency. Phil’s cats, a beautiful tortoiseshell named Mrs. Mabel M. Tubbs (given to us by Gwen) and Harvey Wallbanger, a black part-Siamese, kept us both company. The apartment was on the top floor, the balcony looking out toward Civic Center Drive. On a clear night you could see the Disneyland fireworks.

However pleasant the place sounds, though, living with Phil was difficult. He needed constant company when he wasn’t writing, and complete solitude when he was. I was not used to the lack of privacy. I was also alarmed when Phil grew jealous of my male friends and even complained about the time spent with female friends. Although I loved Phil, I soon realized I needed my own space.

After several months the apartment next door became vacant, a studio that I could afford, and I felt the only way to salvage the relationship was to move. Over Phil’s protests, I left. Eventually, the apartment complex turned into condos, and having no money to buy, I was forced to find another apartment. However, even after moving out of Civic Center Drive, I continued to go over to Phil’s almost every night to cook dinner and watch a movie with him.

Although it was religion that in many ways brought Phil and me together, it was also what eventually split us apart. Soon after the death of my boyfriend David Parker in 1974, I had begun to attend the Church of the Messiah, an Episcopal church down the street from where Phil and I lived at the time. I had felt a calling to the Episcopal priesthood for some time, and after graduating from Chapman College in 1981—and with Phil and me remaining friends but the romantic era of our relationship over—I started the process for ordination. When the priest who had agreed to sign my papers for ordination moved to Northern California, I believed his impression of the diocese there as being more progressive and open to women’s ordination.

I knew that I would always be friends with Phil, no matter where I had to live. Phil, however, saw the move as abandonment, and refused to come up and visit. I was worried about him, worried that he wouldn’t take care of himself, and asked Gwen, who lived nearby, to keep an eye on him for me. I moved to Northern California, believing it to be the right thing, but cried almost all the way during the drive up to Yuba City.

Gwen Lee had been a journalism major in college. She wanted to reenter the field, so she needed a project—she wanted to interview Phil. Phil, always ready to talk, wanted to give Gwen the chance to interview him. She drove up from Carlsbad three times and spent the day with Phil, taping him as he spoke on a variety of topics.

The interviews began with Phil newly returned from his visit to Hollywood, where he was shown special effects and scenes from Blade Runner. He was ecstatic about the film; although he had had several books optioned, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the first book ever to go into production. Phil was overwhelmed by the moody dilapidated exterior, the extras, the special effects, the sets, and director Ridley Scott. Although he never lived to see the final cut in its entirety, he was convinced it was going to be a groundbreaking film, a view that has been confirmed by many film critics and fans since.

From the Blade Runner discussion they move on to how Phil creates his characters—including a loving rendition of Angel Archer—and insights into his creative process. His process was very unusual—and very taxing. Phil would not write for several weeks or months (usually months), and then he would get an idea for a novel and it would roll around in his head for a while. When he did start to write he would do nothing but write, nonstop. Phil could type very fast and would complete a novel in about eight to ten days. So he would rest up and gird his loins for the task. He would get up at 8:00 or 9:00 A.M., and he would write until the wee hours of the next morning, usually around 4:00 A.M., and then sleep about four or five hours, starting again the next morning. It was hard to get him to eat anything during this time—he hated, hated, to be interrupted while he was writing. He would just burn himself out and write for over a week straight, and then when the novel was done he would just fall into bed, exhausted. As a result, he became intensely attached to his creations, as he told Gwen about his experience after finishing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer:

“… the pain was so great at losing that woman as my friend that after I sent the manuscript off I discovered I was hemorrhaging. … From the pain, from sheer pain.”

However, before he would write the book, he would talk about it. He was one of the few novelists I ever knew who could talk about an idea and still write it. For a lot of us, talking tends to dissipate our energy, making it hard to write it down. Not for Phil. He could talk about something and then write it, and both activities had their own frenzy to them. As the discussion with Gwen moves to The Owl in Daylight, what would have been the next novel—the real centerpiece of this book—Phil gives us a glimpse of that creative frenzy, providing an outline of the plot and the scientific theory and theology behind it.

Phil finishes by talking in detail about his religious experiences, giving the background for his Exegesis, the work of his spiritual life. Phil was a devoted and, in many ways, brilliant student of the Gospels, although we had our share of arguments about interpretation. (The debate about “The Messianic Secret” in The Divine Invasion actually began as one of those arguments.) His study brought a new richness and depth to his last novels, and would have done the same, I’m sure, for The Owl in Daylight, had he lived to write it.

Phil was phenomenally quick-witted, and his sense of humor was legendary. In a lesser person this would be merely clever, but for Phil it was symptomatic of his mind, which was going faster than anyone else’s in the room. (When Gwen reads the synopsis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and says, “That the end of it?” Phil answers, deadpan: “Book is longer.”) He had named himself in one of his books “Horselover Fat”—the name “Philip” means “lover of horses”—and it is to Gwen’s credit that she “gave Phil his head” and let him follow his train of thought to its end, the way you’d let a spirited horse run free, only occasionally pulling in the reins.

Run he did. And what Phil said—the last we have on record— follows.

One of the bones of contention between Phil and me was the nature of the afterlife. I tend to believe in an afterlife in which we retain our personality. Phil believed otherwise: He had a dream— or vision?—of Pinky, his cat, being absorbed into some sort of cosmic consciousness and losing its identity. However, the fact remains that a person has an afterlife here, in this world, too. Phil has been gone seventeen years now, but his death has brought him anything but anonymity. His many books are still on the shelf of any bookstore; successful films like Blade Runner and Total Recall have introduced new generations of readers to his work (film versions of A Scanner Darkly and the short stories “Minority Report” and “The Paycheck” are also in production); his characters—Jack Isadore, Leo Bulero, Felix Buckman, Rick Dekard, Angel Archer, all of them—are as alive and breathing as any in literature.

Phil will never leave our hearts, the hearts of those who knew him.

Not the hearts of those who knew him, not the hearts of those who read him.

DORIS ELAINE SAUTER, M. Div.

June 16, 1999

BLADE RUNNER

Part 1

January 10, 1982

LEE:
OK, you son of a gun, don’t make fun of me now.

DICK:
Are you speaking to it or me?

LEE:
(laughs) No. To you, of course, to you.

DICK:
Gwen, as long as you’re taping this, I have to tell you I’ve always been in love with you.

LEE:
Well, I’ve always been in love with you too.

DICK:
Turn off the tape recorder and let’s get it on. (laughs) How does that sound?

LEE:
Uh-oh. Now Willie’s gonna shoot me.

DICK:
Oh, dear, well, no, no—

LEE:
He sent me up here.

DICK:
Listen, I thought of that. I thought of that. I plan to shoot Willie. (laughs) In fact, there’s somebody coming to Willie’s door at this moment with a gun. Oh, God, I had it timed. What is it now? Twenty-five of seven? About seven o’clock—

LEE:
He’s got an arsenal. You gotta watch that guy.

DICK:
This guy’s got a BAR.

LEE:
Oh. What’s that?

DICK:
Browning automatic rifle. And an AK-15. I don’t even know what an AK-15 is.

LEE:
Willie’s got a lot of BB guns and whatever else his dad left out. He ripped that off his poor dad. Anything that Dad leaves out disappears real quick. He has to hide the stuff that he doesn’t want Willie taking.

DICK:
Perhaps we should send somebody with a bazooka. That sounds like a musical instrument to me.

LEE:
No, you know what’s funny is that Willie’s always concerned about not finding a challenging chess partner. The only person who has ever been a challenge is his father, so I said, “Hey, Phil is real good at chess.” Willie just kind of said, “I don’t want to play somebody that’s really good. I don’t want him to make a fool of me.” I said, “Someday he’ll have to come up and play a game with you.” That’s your game, right?

DICK:
Well, yeah, but to me playing chess is like doing my tax returns. It’s something that takes a lot of time and is a lot of work, and if you get it right it’s good and if you get it wrong, it’s bad, but when I get it finished I have this great feeling of relief.

LEE:
Really?

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
Willie enjoys it. He really does. But he likes a challenge. He gets upset if he doesn’t get much of a challenge.

DICK:
I like games like poker and blackjack where you get some money.

LEE:
Oh, those are always fun, too.

DICK:
Where you get to carry something home with you. But with chess you get to carry nothing home with you except a lot of eyestrain.

LEE:
Well, sure. I never had the opportunity—I couldn’t ever give it that much time. I know the moves, but no strategy, you know. Oh, well.

Let’s see. Maybe I should read this: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep nominated for 1968 Nebula for best novel, Nexis Six Androids are almost human. A lack of empathy is their only flaw. Eight of them flee Mars to hide among citizens of developed—the populated—San Francisco Bay area. Rick Deckard, a police bounty hunter, must find and eliminate them. Difficulties arise because on a devastated earth, all life is sacred to the followers of Wilbur Mercer. Even subnormal chicken heads, electric animals, and androids could believe themselves human.” That the end of it?

DICK:
That’s the end of the synopsis, yeah.

LEE:
OK.

DICK:
Book is longer. (laughs)

LEE:
(laughs) I’m sorry. That was real quick.

DICK:
Hell of a novel, wasn’t it? Damn.

LEE:
You know that yellow book we used to get in college?

DICK:
Yeah, right, yeah, right.

LEE:
That’s always great in a pinch.

DICK:
Anyway, that’s the description and what follows here is the bibliography, is a listing of every different edition that’s ever been. Here’s some pictures of the covers. I don’t know if we can hold up the tape recorder and get pictures of the covers of some of the editions, you know. I’m now looking at a Japanese edition—

LEE:
How interesting.

DICK:
So it tells you all the languages it’s been published in.

LEE:
Oh. This is like your Official Book.

DICK:
That is. Yes. That took them four years to do that.

LEE:
How neat.

DICK:
They worked real hard on that. And there aren’t very many copies of it. I met the guy’s wife, and I was going with one girlfriend named Sandra at the time; the day I got this in the mail I had broken up with her and I opened this up, it comes in the mail, and I opened it up and it says, “To Sandra” and I thought some divine power had decreed that our relationship continue because this thing is dedicated to Sandra, but it’s the bibliographer’s wife. It’s not my Sandra, it’s his.

LEE:
His wife’s Sandra?

DICK:
It’s a different Sandra so I called him up and I said, “Can I tell Sandra that I dedicated it to her?” And he said, “Sure, you can tell your girlfriend it’s her.”

LEE:
Oh, that’s funny. That’s the way, you know, live and learn. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

DICK:
Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

LEE:
God, don’t you just hate trite little lectures?

DICK:
Well, I may look back and say that.

LEE:
That’s about all you can say for them. I couldn’t borrow this, could I? Is it your only one?

DICK:
Would you like to borrow it?

LEE:
I’d like to, if you’ll let me have it. I’m real careful with things like that.

DICK:
Sure, sure. I might have something stuffed in there that I might want to pull. Let me check, because I have a tendency to, yeah, here’s something I want to pull out. It’s a, uh, no, it’s that thing in the printout of books is what it is, it’s not contraband—it’s—it is here, I’m rattling it, you can hear the rustle of pages—

LEE:
Contraband, here? […]

DICK:
So now you’re asking Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That is the novel—give me the bibliography back and I’ll read into the tape recorder the different editions that it’s appeared in. OK, that, that came out in 1968, right?

LEE:
That’s what the book said.

DICK:
And we’re now going to look up the different editions. OK, here we go. It was followed by a German edition, 1969; Japanese edition, 1969; Dutch edition, 1969; British edition, 1969; German reissue in ’71; American reissue in ’71; Italian edition in ’71; English edition(paper) ’72; and a Danish edition in 1973; a Swedish edition, 1974; another French edition, 1976; another English edition in 1977; a Japanese edition, 1977; and a Dutch edition in 1979; and a Hebrew edition is being published in Israel, which is forthcoming; and finally, in connection with the movie, the Ballantine paperback. Now, the print run on that will be, had originally been set for half a million copies. Now, to give you an idea of how many copies that is, uh, a normal print run on a science fiction paperback book they expect to sell between 20 and 60 thousand copies, so 500,000 was—

LEE:
That’s just fine.

DICK:
Uh, so the average science fiction paperback novel in the United States sells between 20 and 60 thousand copies. As soon as it goes above 20,000 copies they make back their costs. And if it gets up to 40,000 they make a profit, make—anything beyond that is profit. This will be, this was to be half a million. Now, after Ballantine saw the ninety-second teaser that uh, the Blade Runner studio—”Blade Runner” is actually the trademark. In other words, there is a corporation named “Blade Runner” that is the title of the film but it is also TM, like “Frisbee.” The corporation is called “Blade Runner” and they actually copyrighted or patented the words “Blade Runner.” Which I guess means that every time you utter the word “Blade Runner” you owe them something. You owe them a little money, a nickel or a dime. Uh, somebody asked me if the movie was about ice skating, I forget who asked me that. I said, “No, it’s not about ice skating.” But, uh, the production studio issued a ninety-second teaser, which I’ve seen. And it is being shown in the theaters now. It’s hooked on the end of some fairly major movies. I think, one of the Jane Fonda films that’s out now. And, uh, it’s a dynamite ninety-second thing, because what it is, it’s like a little ninety-second movie. It’s like what happened as you went to the movies only they ran the film real fast, so the movie was over in ninety seconds. You know, you’re sitting there saying, “Wait a minute! That was a great movie but I don’t seem to remember too much about it.” So when they showed me the ninety-second teaser, it starts out like a movie and then it is cut, you know, from scene to scene, and in ninety-seconds, a minute and a half, it’s over. So I said, “Would you run that again, please?” So they ran it again for me, and it’s just incredible. You hear Harrison Ford’s voice over it, they call it a “voice-over,” and he says something like, “I was at Tyrell Associates Office—that was where all the action was.” Next thing he’s on the street walking with an lot of people and somebody hits him. You don’t get to see who hit him. He looks startled; apparently he doesn’t know who hit him, and then there’s this beautiful woman in a transparent raincoat running, and then there’s some kind of gunfire exchange, and after I’d seen it a second time I still did not know what I’d seen. I mean, they call it flash cutting, which is cut so fast that it registers subliminally. So your brain knows it’s seen a series of events but it doesn’t really know what it’s seen. So I says, “That’s a great ninety-second teaser.” And, when Ballantine saw it, the whole sales staff saw it and the president at Ballantine—and they liked it so they, I understand they’ve increased the print run from half a million to a larger number. And they’re right, because it’s gonna be a great film.

I’ve seen about twenty minutes of the film. That’s without the sound track. They’ve got this, uh, Vangelis guy to do the music. Who did the music for Chariots of Fire. And that was on charts in England. So, when I saw it, it was at Douglas Trumball’s studios in Venice. Douglas Trumball did the special effects. He did, you know, he did the special effects on 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the movie Star Trek. And uh, they showed us through the special effects studio and showed us the machinery and showed us how all the special effects were done, and—I’m not supposed to talk about that. I mean, this is something that you don’t, you don’t walk out of the major, the finest, special effects studio in the world and start telling everybody how they achieve the effects. And they said, “Do not walk out of here quacking like a duck.” I mean, “Don’t go all around about and say how these special effects were done.”

Then we saw the twenty minutes of the film, and it was on a seventy-millimeter screen and, uh, Ridley Scott, the director, was there, and he sat behind this thing, he would lean over and explain, you know, the continuity. This was not continuity. In other words, you would see a few minutes of a scene and then there would be a few seconds of black screen and then there would be another scene. They wouldn’t be directly related. He would explain the continuity. And, uh, they said, uh, you go out and quack like a duck about what you’ve seen and—something about a cement overcoat, I believe. (laughs) Something about floating upside down in the Pacific Ocean. So I can’t talk about what I saw, except to say that the opening is simply the most stupendous thing I have ever seen in the way of a film. It is simply unbelievable. I mean, they have camera angles that have never been used before, they’ve got special effects that have never been used before. Not only is Doug Trumball and his crew involved, but Sid Meed is involved in a central way. I mean, Sid Meed is a designer and he did the set designs. And they brought him forward so that his designs dominate the film. They literally dominate the film. The city that he creates is all set in a large city which is somewhat like Los Angeles. It’s probably more like Los Angeles than any other city. But it’s only called “The City.” And his, he, wrote the design, set, and then they were made into actual sets and went through the processing. And uh, I just couldn’t believe it. The girl that was with me, we just sat there and just couldn’t believe the opening. The, the, uh, it’s seen from a flying vehicle, it’s landing on the top of a 400- story police building. There’s this 400-story police building that dominates the landscape, which is absolutely my fantasy of what it would have to be like forty years from now. The movie is set forty years from now. And the fact that there is this titanic police building dominating the whole landscape is exactly the way I would imagine it would be like forty years from now. Millions of small buildings and this huge police building. And they’re landing, and they’re landing very slowly. And it’s just simply unbelievable. And it would explain to us how they would achieve these effects. And I, I just did not know—

LEE:
Was your impression that it’s—it’s more exciting than, like, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that was really a hyped-up movie considering its special effects, or even Star Wars?

DICK:
Well, now, with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all the special effects were at the end. I mean, if you missed the last ten—if you went to the bathroom during the last ten minutes, you got up and said, “Would you hold my popcorn for me, I’m going to be back in ten minutes,” you literally saw nothing at that point, if you missed that last ten minutes. But with this, the moment the film begins, you are in the world that they created, and it is not like a world that has ever been created before.

Now, the way they explained it was this: They said, in analyzing science fiction films special effects, they discovered that they had created un-lived-in environments. Everything was new. The ships were new, they had no dents on them, the paint was new, I mean the control rooms look like exhibits in a science museum, you know what a control room would look like. Well, these, these streets in this city, these buildings, are all lived-in buildings. In fact, there is a tremendous sense of dilapidation and decay; what happens when a building gets old, instead of tearing it down they just add more floors to it, so it gets taller and taller, like a termite colony. It’s incredible. It’s like a picture I had years ago, a print of Brueghel’s, uh, Tower of Babel and it just was like termites had built it, human termites had built it. And this is, it’s sort of like that. And the air is bad, I mean, it’s smoggy and it’s drizzling all the time. I mean, people are carrying oxygen tanks around on them ’cause the air is so bad. And it’s just, it’s just, OK, it’s like you took the wrong freeway off-ramp. This is an off-ramp that you did not want to get on when you were on the freeway. And you said, maybe this is my off-ramp— well, then, all of a sudden you realize that this is not the off-ramp you wanted. Because all of a sudden you’re on this street and there are all these people.

Now, these, these crowds are not actors. They are punk rock people that were brought in, and the second you see them you know these are not actors. Nobody looks that sinister. Except the people who are that sinister. I mean, this is sinister from the heart on out. In fact, Rutger Hauer, who plays the villain, the main replicant, I mean—they’re not called “androids,” they’re called “replicants,” they were called “androids” in my book, they’re called “replicants” in the film—said, that he really was having an awful time being more sinister than everybody who was walking around the streets. And after seeing some of the film I could see why. I mean, they just look absolutely—I mean you just figure if you tried to move amongst those people they would do something so terrible to you that you would not even know what it was. It would be something that you had never heard of that they would do to you, you know, something that was done to cattle—you know, like you hear these rumors of what flying saucers have done to cattle these people are going to do that to you—very strange things to you. By the time you get to the other side of the street.

There’s this one scene—I can talk about this because this has been shown, it was shown over NBC-TV here in a segment on special effects. And again it’s the woman in the transparent raincoat who’s trying to run through this crowd. And there’s just people everywhere. I mean, and they’re not going anywhere, they’re just wandering around, they’re just—and they’re not milling they’re—it’s like they’re all looking for trouble, with great—with a mixture of apathy and desire, you know. And she just cannot get across the street because of all these people. She collides, and you can’t even—I can’t even figure out what she collides with. All of a sudden you see her hit something and fall. There’s a phone booth there and it’s just—it’s just like everything that is awful about the city but at the same time everything that is fascinating about it. And, uh, the production studio explained that what they foresee in this city of the future—and this in many ways is a futurist projection—it’s not so much escapist, it’s kind of a futurist projection of what life will be like in every major metropolis forty years from now. Uh, that there will be these incredible racial ethnic groups, like, all the different Oriental countries, Laotian, you know, all the different, Indonesian, you know, Chinese, you know, Korean, Hong Kong, I mean, all these languages, this polyglot from Southeast Asia. And, uh, it’s grim but the way the production company explained it was the seamy part, you know, the tawdry part is infinitely more tawdry, infinitely more seamy than what it is now. But the glamorous part is infinitely more glamorous. And what happens is the street, the actual ground level has become essentially one vast access or service road to the city. The city is up in the air. And all the people on the outside, sort of the losers, are walking around on the street level. And all the beautiful people are up about forty stories. And when you get up forty stories it’s like getting through Dante’s Divine Comedy, going up through hell to purgatory to heaven. And they are just living great, I mean, they are doing fine up there, forty stories up, and then it becomes very, very glamorous.

So you go from this incredible thing with the rubble and the grit and the smog and the weird looking people and the incredible neon signs. I mean, those neon signs—I mean, the information that is fired at you in that film we were told you would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you. For instance, going past a drugstore, there are actual magazines, with actual covers, with actual articles, and the same with the newspapers. That the titles of the articles and the names of the authors of the articles and, uh, some of them never appear on the screen. Some are only seen by the actors. Uh, the actors enter an environment when they were being filmed. I saw some footage, of a couple takes of Ridley Scott, uh, I mean, uh, not Ridley Scott, uh, Harrison Ford, jumping down from a low building onto the ground level, and it was a world that he was in, it was actually a different world and we were told, yes, when they are in that set they are in that world at that time.

LEE:
Are we talking about now like a whole new environment or a whole new concept in filmmaking—is this a new approach?

DICK:
There’s a lot of really new things involved here, because they’re using all the special effects in such a way in order to subordinate them to the characters. By making them lived in. For instance, one of the scenes that Sid Meed drew up was, uh, Harrison Ford’s kitchen. He went into a lot of detail about that, just the kitchen. In fact, right there is Sid Meed’s drawing. (points to drawing) There is the kitchen and right above it is the actual set with Harrison Ford standing there. That is the kitchen, you see, there’s the set and there’s the drawing. The kitchen alone is like an entire control room on a ship except that it’s lived in. Uh, somebody had pointed out that it turned out that when Kubrick filmed 2001 that the people on the spaceship, that when the actors went to put on the uniforms they discovered that the name of the hypothetical manufacturer of the uniforms had been stenciled on the inside of the underwear part, as if they had actually been manufactured in the future. And this idea carries throughout Blade Runner. That the actors are really in a world when they’re acting. I mean, they are seeing newspapers that are there only for them to see, that will not appear on the screen. And, uh, in fact, one of Doug Trumball’s technicians showed us a painting, a background of some neon signs, and when you see the film you think you’re seeing neon signs reading “liquor,” and “laundromat,” you know, and “drug-store,” you know, and “7–11” but actually you’re seeing the names of the different members of the production crew, they wrote their own names on the signs, it’s their names. But see, this happens so fast on the screen that your brain can’t pick it up. George Smith, you know, Ed Brown, that’s what the signs say. So you go five times and you still can’t get it all—it just fires, it’s a tremendous information dump. And the—on the audience—and see, looking back on what I saw twenty minutes of, I saw, I realized that what we are entering is an information decade. We are in an information decade. Information is the lifeblood, you know, the metabolism of the modern world. And basically people will be going to this film as information junkies. I mean, they will be going in as information junkies. When they see the film, they’re going to see much more information than they can absorb and they really will want to come back, because information is a stimulus to the brain, and the brain loves to be stimulated. The brain actually, the human brain, craves stimulation. And this movie will stimulate the brain, the brain will not be lulled. Harrison Ford said himself, “This is not an escapist film.” It really is not an escapist film.

LEE:
It’s not comparable then to Raiders of the Lost Ark, or—

DICK:
Well, in some ways it is because [of] how they got action. I mean, Harrison Ford again plays a man of action. Uh, there’ll be a lot of gunfire exchange, and there will be quite a bit of violence. But there will be a lot more besides, there will be a great deal besides. Now I’ve read the screenplay—

LEE:
Have you received a rating on it yet?

DICK:
They’re going for PG. They started out for R and they’re going over it and changing it to accommodate PG, and that’s because they want to make it possible for the kids to come to the film alone without, you know, having to have an adult with them. But they’re not making substantial changes, I understand. Um, it—it’s going to be what they call “hard-core PG.” In other words, it’s going to border on the edge of R. So it’s not going to be just something like the Disney studios, heaven forbid, turn out, like The Black Hole, which just, I mean, nobody over the age of twelve is going to go to something like that. Or if they do they’re not going to enjoy it. But—

LEE:
What about, you know, your original book, does Blade Runner pretty well correspond with that? I mean, are fans going to be confused if they read the book first?

DICK:
Uh, OK. Now I’ve read the screenplay. Now I have not read the screenplay that they actually used in shooting, because they changed everything, as is quite common in films, throughout, and they did shoot several endings. Maybe I’m not supposed to say this, but they shot three different endings that I know of. And they’re still deciding which to use. So, Ridley Scott shot all the possibilities that could occur at the end. They’re all there. They’re all in the can, and he’s trying to decide which one to go with. Now, the screenplay is excellent; they brought in a guy who had done some award-winning TV documentaries. A guy by the name of David W. Peoples. And he did that Debolt family one, remember that? He wrote that. And he did that Trinity one on Oppenheimer. And, uh, he went over the screenplay and he apparently went back to the book and he made a great screenplay out of it. Now, there are a lot of differences between the movie and the book, and, uh, what I say about this is, having given long thought to it—uh, and I haven’t seen the complete movie, I’ve read the screenplay, I’ve seen twenty minutes of the movie, but there are substantial differences, there’s no doubt about that, because I discussed it with Ridley Scott—is that each reinforces the other. That is, if you see the movie first, and then you read the book, you will get more material when you read the book than you had had in the movie so that you would be adding material. Or, if you start with the book. Then you can go to the movie, and then you get more material. So they don’t fight each other. The book and the movie do not fight each other. They reinforce each other, but they are different. Now there were certain things in the book that were completely left out of the movie. Uh, the animals are left out, the electric animals. They, uh, the imitation animals are left out. Uh, in fact, animals aren’t really a factor in the movie at all. The sacredness of animal life. That’s out. And, uh—

LEE:
How long a picture is this going to be? They can’t fit in everything, I guess.

DICK:
No, no. The book had about sixteen plots going through it and they would have had to make a movie lasting sixteen hours. And it would have been impossible. And this is not how you make a movie out of a book. You don’t go scene by scene. I mean, this was the trouble with Death in Venice, for example. And you just cannot do it. It just won’t work out. Because a lot of the book consists of just long conversations. A movie moves and a book talks, and that’s the difference, you see. A book has to do with words and a movie has to do with events. But, uh, they cut out the part about Mercer, the savior, they cut that out. But they concentrated on the main theme, and the main theme is the hunting down of the replicants. And the effect that having to kill these replicants has on Rick Deckard, the detective, the attrition on him of killing creatures which although technically are not human, they are genetic replicants. They are official humans. And they are dangerous, uh, but he sees in them a certain beauty and a certain nobility. And, uh, he begins really to question, you know, what he’s doing. I mean, uh, this was really the main point in the novel, was where Deckard—the novel is set in a single day. In a single day Rick Deckard, the detective, tracks down all of the androids, as they’re called in the book, and kills every one of them, in that single day. So that it starts out with him getting up in the morning and it ends with him going to bed that night. During that one day he has “retired,” as the term is in the book, every android that has been assigned to him that day. And he wants the money very badly. He’s a bounty hunter, and he gets a set sum for each android that he kills. So the time is compressed in the book just to a twenty-four-hour period. But as he kills them, it becomes progressively more and more difficult for him, and he questions more and more what he’s doing. Until finally the distinction between him and the androids begins to blur. I mean, he is essentially doing something so awful that anything that they might do is equally awful.

LEE:
What is the motive behind this bounty hunting of the androids?

DICK:
It’s interesting in the book. The motive is that if he gets enough money he can buy a live animal. This is set after World War Three, and there are almost no animals alive. And animals are very, very valuable and they are a status symbol. And they have, like, animal row instead of automobile row—

LEE:
This explains the electronic animals.

DICK:
Yeah, right. So he wants to own a real live animal. And he’s got a fake animal, a robot sheep that grazes up on the roof of their condominium building. And it’s not alive, it’s just—it just goes through all the motions and all the neighbors are fooled and they think the sheep is alive and it’s just, you know, it’s got computer chips, you know, and, uh, (laughs) they even have these fake veterinarian organizations where—when your electric animal breaks down this thing shows up in a white coat, you know, and he looks like he’s a vet and he’s not. He’s an electronics technician. And they hustle this and they also have circuits built in when an electronic animal begins to malfunction it makes noises like a real animal. Like it gargles and wheezes and moans and its eyes roll up, you know, and it acts like its a sick real animal. So even when your animal malfunctions and it’s electric, you know, it still looks like it’s a sick animal.

LEE:
They’re not using it in the movie, though, that much.

DICK:
They’re not using it at all.

LEE:
Oh, not at all?

DICK:
No. they are not going to have animals. Animals are not functioning in the film.

LEE:
Oh. Sounds like an interesting part of the whole idea.

DICK:
Well, I kinda liked it. You know.

LEE:
Yeah.

DICK:
Uh, I liked the book, and I wanted to have the original novel rereleased, I did not want to do a novelization or have a novelization done based on the screenplay because I wanted to get some of this stuff about the animals—

LEE:
This is the Ballantine publication coming out?

DICK:
Yeah, that’s the Ballantine edition.

LEE:
Yeah, it won’t be based on the screenplay, then?

DICK:
It will be—the Ballantine book is exactly the novel that I wrote in 1968.

LEE:
It is?

DICK:
Precisely the novel I wrote. It’s simply a reissue of the original novel.

LEE:
Oh, I see.

DICK:
It will have all the things about the animals and all the things about this mysterious savior, Mercer, who has the miraculous power of bringing dead animals back to life which is like the ultimate divine power in a world where most of the animals are dead. Like, there’ll be a few cats, a few dogs, and so on. But some species are completely extinct. And everybody carries an animal book with them, like the Kelley Bluebook for cars, you know, and they are constantly appraising the cost and value of animals, which changes all the time. They look up and see what this month their sheep is worth, and they’re always going down to animal row and looking in the windows at the different animals and trying to work out down payments that they can buy animals on, get them home and so forth. They had to cut that out of the movie, because they wanted to concentrate on the hunting down of the replicants. So all the themes have to be carried by the actual contact between Rick Deckard, the detective, and the replicants, or as I call them, androids. And it really all comes to a climax between the detective and two particular ones: a woman, Rachael Rosen, who’s played by Sean Young, and that’s Rachael up there, and she’s an android, only she doesn’t know she’s an android.

That’s an idea that I invented years ago. I have a lock on that idea, that’s my idea. That’s one of the few original ideas I’ve ever contributed to science fiction. I mean, most of my ideas are rehash—but that was my original idea, was that a guy could be an android and not know it. And I wrote that in a story very early, 1953, that story came out in Astounding and it was called “Impostor” and it was about a man who was getting ready to go to work at a big scientific research project and all of a sudden he’s arrested by the FBI and told that he’s not Spence Oldham, he’s an android who’s been sent to earth to replace Spence Oldham to carry a bomb into this great scientific research place to blow it up. Well, he thinks he is Spence Oldham. Well, it turns out he’s wrong: he’s an android, he’s got a bomb inside him, and the trigger that sets off the bomb is when he says, “Good Lord, I am an android.” And that’s all it takes. As soon as he says that sentence, he blows up. Destroys the entire, you know, half the planet, see. But that was a very early story of mine. That was one of the first stories I ever sold, so that idea is now public property. I mean, this is used all the time in science fiction, it’s like time travel, you know, or you know, ecology, or anything uh, people are always finding out they’re androids like in the film Alien, remember, one of the crew members turns out to be an android?

LEE:
Oh, yes. I remember that.

DICK:
Well, you know, what can I tell you. You know, I invented that idea. Well, the next step is that the person doesn’t even know himself he’s an android. It’s like Alfred E. Newman saying, “Who, me?” You know, it’s like, “I’m an android—you’re kidding!” You know, so, but I have a lock on that idea, I invented it, you know, and anybody who wants to use that idea they got to come to me. Or, so my attorneys say.

So, in this film we have one of the replicants, doesn’t know it’s a replicant. I believe it’s Rachael. And she says, “I’m a what? I’m a replicant? Liar!” You know, and then they tell her she’s got all these implanted memories, you know, and everything, and she says, “Damnation, some days you can’t win, no matter what you do.” But, you know, she’s real pretty, you know, and this happens in the novel. This happens in the novel, so, you know, I’m not giving anything about the film away because it’s all in the book. If you have a lot of money you can buy a copy of the book. I was telling you before, the book is now unavailable, you know, it’s a collector’s item, because it’s been off the market—we held it off the market to release it in conjunction with the film. It’s been off the market for a number of years. It was withdrawn, and uh—

LEE:
So they will release the screenplay version of the film.

DICK:
Well, OK, they will release the original novel and they’ll release a photo book, that is, there will be shots from the movie and they will have, like, 7,500 words of text from the screenplay to go with the photos, you see.

LEE:
Oh, I see. Sort of like a synopsis of the movie.

DICK:
Yeah, something like that. They’re also going to release a comic book. It was really funny, my agent called me up and he said, “Hey, Phil, I can get you 10 percent of the gross on the comic book version of your book.” I says, “The comic book version?” I says, “listen, if I’m going to be cut in on ten percent of the comic book version of my book, which I regard as a very serious novel,”—I mean it deals with the problem of the sacredness of life, you know, and the value of life and everything,”—so I said, “If I’m going to get ten percent of the comic book rights, I must have one hundred percent of the suppository rights.” And then everybody got the impression that I was really angry and there was—there was a long period, there were rather hardball negotiations on this, but it all worked out fine: the novel will be reissued as it was originally written with logo tie-in—it will say “Blade Runner” on it and will have a picture of Harrison Ford, presumably, on the cover. Have you seen—I have a copy. I mean, I have a sample. Have you seen it?

LEE:
No, I haven’t.

DICK:
I have one right here. They sent me some material that—

LEE:
Are you pleased with Harrison Ford, is he doing a good job?

DICK:
Oh, he’s fabulous. He is absolutely incredible. There is the proposed cover, it may differ somewhat—there may be some differences. That’s, in other words, probably the only difference will be in the style of lettering for “Blade Runner” itself. They haven’t finalized on the type style yet, you know the way the letters look. Here are a couple of scenes. It opens up that’ll give you an idea. There are scenes from the film. Those are the punk rockers.

LEE:
I could have brought you a few.

DICK:
Hum?

LEE:
I could have brought you a few of those. We’ve got a few of those down there in Carlsbad. It’s strange.

DICK:
I know some punk rockers.

LEE:
Amazing. Willie’s new thing is K rock—KROQ.

DICK:
That’s what I listen to. That’s my station. Yeah. Yeah, I have my radios—all my receivers are set to KROQ— “The Rock” they call it.

LEE:
I tried to call them yesterday and tell them, I was really for them, and tell them I was a registered voter and I was twenty-nine years old and I was sticking up for the fact that—they are going to be picketed Thursday and Friday for playing “Johnny, Are You Queer?”

DICK:
Oh, I love that.

LEE:
Isn’t that adorable? I just love that.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
The moral majority is—

DICK:
Is that the Go-Gos?

LEE:
Pardon me?

DICK:
Is that the Go-Gos?

LEE:
I don’t think that’s the Go-Gos, I forget who that is. We have the Go-Gos albums, I don’t believe it’s on there.

DICK:
OK, OK. I like that, I think it’s pretty good.

LEE:
Yeah, I was trying to but I couldn’t get through to them—

DICK:
Now, see, there that’s one of Sid Meed’s designs. Here is the first time—

LEE:
Wow. This is neat.

DICK:
Isn’t she great? Goddamn. Isn’t she terrific?

LEE:
That hair is—she’s got big hair.

DICK:
My goodness. Can you imagine what that cost? This is the main villain, that’s Rutger Hauer. That’s the actor, you know, he was in the Soldier of Orange and was it Nightwing [Nighthawks]?

LEE:
Uh, here’s Harrison and—

DICK:
There’s Harrison kissing Sean Young. And it’s the first, as far as I know, I could be wrong, but this I believe is the first time this still has been released. ’Cause Harrison has the right to veto—he gets to see any still of his that gets released and he can decide if he wants it released. And there he is kissing Sean Young. And he appears to be pulling down the venetian blinds in the bedroom for less light or else he’s— (he gets up and leaves the room)

LEE:
What are these people doing here, the little bubbles?

DICK:
(from other room) Those are lewd ladies rolling around in fishnet stockings.

LEE:
So there is a bit of sex.

DICK:
A bit of what?

Lee:
Sex, in your movie, then.

DICK:
I can’t hear ya.

LEE:
(louder) Oh, I said, there is some sex in this movie?

DICK:
I can’t hear you. (returns)

LEE:
Now I can hear you!

DICK:
OK. There won’t be as much sex as I would like to see because I just never weary of sex. I think sex is really wonderful.

LEE:
You do?

DICK:
I mean, I think that it was invented by the divine powers to propagate the species. But they are going for a PG rating so I don’t know. Sex is not an integral part of the plot, I mean, unless you lump love and sex absolutely together; I mean he does fall in love with Rachael Rosen in the end, the replicant. And I don’t blame him, because she sure looks cute, and jeepers, I know I would like to meet her. I’ve asked several times when I’ve been in touch with the production company. I have a—

LEE:
You never got to meet her, then? Jeez—

DICK:
No, really, you know, golly! (laughs) What is the whole point of my writing these damn novels and selling these damn books, you know, if they’re not going to introduce me to the leading lady? There’s a beautiful shot, there’s Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks. Now I swear, did you ever see Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks? He’s apparently doing pretty well.

LEE:
That’s great. Yeah. He’s holding them right.

DICK:
Yeah. So, he’s real good from what I can see. I like him, anyway, I liked Raiders of the Lost Ark. I really enjoyed it. That’s somebody else’s book, and we don’t read that because we don’t care what becomes of their silly books. And this is going to be one of their main shots. Will be that shot. And he is Rick Deckard. I mean, in other words he looks exactly I imagined the character Rick Deckard will look like. And what they’ve done, I hope it’s OK to say this— in terms of what the company wants to be released and said, but they are retaining a lot of the elements of the great detectives of the forties. Uh, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. I mean, as you can see, he’ll be wearing the kind of trenchcoat and the oxfords, you know, and the kind of, well, it looks like a double knit or something pants, but, like, men’s, he’s got a tie on, and, uh, in a way he could be dressed for like the ’40s. Uh—

LEE:
The hair, and all.

DICK:
Yeah, right.

LEE:
It’s got now the punk, too, short hair—

DICK:
Yeah, they will be definitely be drawing on the Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade archetype, which is essentially an archetype.

LEE:
Well, he’s got that strong, rugged look. He’s not your pretty boy, which is a nice change, too. I really enjoy that.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
It’s a more believable character.

DICK:
Well, you know, they had another actor originally that they were going to use. I won’t tell you who he is, because I don’t know if that’s supposed to be said or not. I mean, I may be being a little more cautious than I should be, you know, but they did tell me not to shoot my mouth off when I’m interviewed and tell everything in the world, like how the film comes out, you know, all that, how the special effects were achieved, you know. But they had another actor who is, I think, one of the greatest actors in films. They decided they’d rather have Harrison Ford than him. And that was before Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out, so it didn’t have anything to do with the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. They felt that Harrison Ford was more this Rick Deckard. And from where I can see it, he really is. I mean, he is so much like him that friends of mine who have read the novel who are very familiar with the novel have come in and, you know, I have these prints up on the wall, you know, these stills from the film, and they just stare at the shots of Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford, and they just say, My God, I mean, it’s—And when I saw the ones of the girl, Rachael Rosen, I said, you know, if you had laid out 100 different women’s photographs, photographs of 100 different women, I could have picked her out of the hundred, she looks so much like Rachael Rosen did when I created the character. I mean, that—

LEE:
So when you create a character you have a definite idea of the person?

DICK:
Yeah, I have a visual image.

LEE:
They’re real to you.

DICK:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, to me, Rachael Rosen is absolutely a real person. And all of a sudden I found myself looking at a photograph of the very character that I created in 1968—or, it was ’67 when I wrote the book, ’68 when it was published.

LEE:
OK, that was a while ago. Did you base, or have you ever based, these on people that you knew or was it more or less a composite of different people that you experienced or a fantasy person that you would like to meet?

DICK:
Well, uh, I have a tendency to write about the same kind of woman over and over again, which is a real beautiful, cruel woman, la belle dame sans merci, you know. That’s—she is cold, very intelligent, very beautiful, just utterly heartless. And, the protagonist always falls in love with her and then she just destroys him in some hideous way that, you know, some unspeakable way, because she’s so intelligent that she can outthink him, you know. It was pointed out to me one time by one of my therapists that, uh, he said, “Golly Jeepers,” he said, “I count eight of these women in your actual life,” he said, doing a biographical workup on me. He said, “Good Lord, I’ve counted eight of them, I’ve now got eight written down here that fit that pattern and so evidently—”

LEE:
Your analyst has read your books?

DICK:
Yeah, this one had. And he said, “I don’t know, you know, which is cause and which is effect. There seems to be a complete homogeneity between the women you fall in love with and this character, this woman you write about all the time.” And, uh, he says that the woman always shreds the protagonist up, and, he says, “These women always shred you up and then you go right out again and get shredded up once more,” and I says, “I’m sorry.” And he says, “Right. That’s why you’re here.” So evidently, you know, there’s some interaction between my actual life and my characters but what’s causing this effect I don’t know. I mean, I’ve actually read books of mine where I could not tell, literally could not tell, if the women were based on women I had known, or—what the sequence was. I mean, reading one book and there seemed to be a description of one of my wives in there and, uh, down to the length of hair, and verbal mannerisms and kinetic build, you know, body build, the type of body. And it went on and on and on and I thought, I certainly used an awful lot of that particular wife in this book and discovered that I’d written the book five years before I met her. Which is really scary. I mean, that’s super scary, because when I met her I didn’t remember, it’d been five years since I’d written the book and I had no longer remembered the book. So I didn’t make the connection, and then the book—it took a long time for the book to get published and when it finally got published and comes out and I read it and I think, golly, that’s a description of this particular woman, and then I discovered, looking through my files, I wrote the book before I met this particular woman. In fact, there was one, one book that I did that was just incredible. I do not understand this at all. Uh, I described this girl, I gave her age, her name, her hair color, her job, the name of her husband, and two months later I met—

(tape ends)

THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT

Part 1

January 10, 1982

DICK:
[…] Now let’s see. What do you want to ask me? Oh—anymore about that topic or have we covered it pretty well?

LEE:
Um, I think we covered it. Well, yeah, we kind of got cut off there in the middle, but as you said you met a girl the same age—

DICK:
The same age, the same name. She had the same occupation.

LEE:
As in the book?

DICK:
As in the book I had written but had not even done the final draft on. I had written the book and put the manuscript away. And, uh, it was, the thing, was incredibly strange, that is simply unbelievable—it cannot be, but it is—is that in the novel, the woman appears to be doing something illegal and then finally we discover that she is a police informant. I met this girl, same name, same age, boyfriend the same name, and she appeared to be a drug dealer. And after I had known her for about a year—just pure accidental circumstances—uh, she had to admit to me that she was a police informant. That’s exactly what the girl in the book turns out to be, a police informant. Now I could have gone back to my own book and looked it up and found out that this girl was a police informant—if I just saw, you know, the parallel with the book, but I had forgotten. And only when I finally went to do the final draft did I notice that it was the same name, the boyfriend—in the book it’s a marriage, it’s the husband—has that name. But in real life it was the boyfriend. The boyfriend is the same name. And the age of the woman is the same. Details—and detail after detail is the same. In fact, I’ve even been—

LEE:
But there must be some term, you know, there’s precog—

DICK:
That’s the term, yeah—

LEE:
Remembering your—

DICK:
Precognition, yeah. That I’ve been accused of actually showing precognition. Uh, for instance, I had one book where I described, that I wrote in the ’60s— where it talks about, you know, Nixon being president of the United States and everything like that. Of course, there were ones where I was completely messed up, I even had the FBI and stuff like, I tried all the different combinations—but, uh, I do sometimes describe characters that I have yet to meet. And, I, you know, I now no longer tell whether the characters that I have written about are based on people I have known, or whether it works the other way, or how it works, but there is some connection, some essential connection between my characters and actual people. But I don’t really sit down and say—like, for instance, take you, you know—that I would put you in a novel. I might draw a characteristic from you, one characteristic from you and I might draw another characteristic from someone else. Now, if you read the book, then, you would identify the character as yourself, the other woman would identify that character as herself on the basis of that characteristic, you see. But characters in novels are composites. Now, the strangest thing of all, is my new book that’s coming out in the spring— and by the way, we are to regard this as an incredible coincidence—but last night, when I was talking to a friend of mine, I suddenly realized that I have four books coming out, within a month of the movie. And I thought, “Now that’s very interesting,” because—

LEE:
New books? This is not—

DICK:
Now, one is new, one is the novel on which the movie is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But they are also releasing two other books so there’ll be four books coming out between May and June at the time the movie comes out. Oddly enough, there’ll be four novels of mine coming out at that time. This one is the new one. Now, this one is a religious novel. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (pause) I just spat on it. I spat on my galleys. (laughs) This is what comes of drinking coffee while holding—

LEE:
Am I going to look like a fool on the tape now?.

DICK:
By doing what?

LEE:
Timothy Archer, I’m not familiar with him.

DICK:
He’s made up.

LEE:
Oh, OK.

DICK:
Oh, no problem.

LEE:
Oh, OK, good. (laughs) I thought I was missing something there.

DICK:
No, no, no, no. He’s—OK, now, this is my new novel. Now, the character, the protagonist, is a young woman. She’s in her, uh, late twenties. Her name is Angel Archer. And the entire book is from her standpoint, seen through her mind. It’s first person. She is both a character in the book and a narrator of the book. Uh, in other words—this is galleys.

LEE:
I know, but it’s neat. I like it.

DICK:
Yeah, it is. It starts out this way: “Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed. And I think I know why we are on this earth. It’s to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places, rather than by design.” OK, now, this is a woman, she’s in her twenties—I’m a man, and I’m in my fifties, OK. She’s graduated from the University of California—I did not. I went a month and was thrown out. Uh, she may even have a master’s degree; it’s a little vague but she, you know, evidently, you know, was a very good student. In the English department. I was never in the English department. I majored in philosophy. She’s—OK, now, here’s the strange part, now, this is impossible. Now, this cannot be. She’s smarter than I am. Now, the whole book is through her viewpoint; this is not just a character, the whole—every single thing that happens is seen through her viewpoint. She’s smarter than I am, she’s more rational than I am, she’s more educated than I am, and she has a broader vocabulary than I have, and she has—she’s acquainted with source material, books, that she’s read that I have not read. And yet everything is through her viewpoint.

LEE:
But now did you find this out as you wrote the novel, or before?

DICK:
Yes, as I wrote it.

LEE:
As you wrote it.

DICK:
Yeah. I just wanted to show it—I was forced to adopt this viewpoint, because I had—the book is about a very learned man, a bishop, Bishop Timothy Archer, it’s a very learned man, and in order to present him to the reader I had to have a viewpoint character who is smart enough to understand him. Well, now, that forced my hand right there. I had a very smart protagonist to see the Bishop through. Now, the Bishop is also very learned. The Bishop, he has a lot of education, he knows Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, you know, so she has to be very educated. Well, now, also, he’s complex, and she has to be very astute, so she had to be very rational. Well, pretty soon I wind up with a character that’s more rational. Now how can a person write about a character who’s smarter, more educated, and more rational than he, the author is? And has a better vocabulary. For instance, she—

LEE:
That’s what I’m asking you. Perhaps this is your special gift, here—

DICK:
There’s words that she used that I don’t use that I would have to look up the meanings to before I could write ’em down, ’cause I didn’t know what they meant. Like, there’s one part where she’s having an argument with a psychiatrist, he says something to her—it’s a beautiful scene at the end, because this is the scene where she blows it. Also, she’s got more guts than I have. She’s, uh, she’s very brave, and, uh, she is—also she’s got this incredible sense of humor, which I don’t have. I mean, she’s marvelous. She has this incredible dry wit which just goes over everybody’s head—

LEE:
I don’t—

DICK:
She’s got a better one.

LEE:
She’s better.

DICK:
Uh, this psychiatrist is bawling her out. He’s real furious with her. He thinks she’s responsible for mental illness in this guy that she knew, this young man that she knew. Uh, and he starts dumping on her, and she says in response, he tells her all her faults, and stuff, and she responds, and this is in the first person: “I said, ‘And you are full of recondite bullshit.’” I had to look up “recondite” to see what it meant. And it is the correct word. But I don’t use that word. ’Cause I don’t know exactly what it means.

But she, OK now, she’s a graduate of the University of California, the English department. Now, evidently what happened was that when I lived in Berkeley, I knew some women who were graduates from the English department. In fact, I had a girlfriend who had gotten a master’s degree from the English department. So, I knew her. I knew such a woman, who graduated from U.C. Berkeley, from the English department, she’d gone to Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship. But she’s completely different from Angel Archer. She had no sense of humor. She was very affected. Angel Archer is not affected at all. Angel Archer has tremendous insight. So, now, where did Angel Archer come from? There is nobody in my life or my thoughts, I’ve never known anybody like her. And, yet, to me she is as real—

In fact, you know, when the galleys came to me to read the galleys over I was breaking up with my girlfriend. And I was tremendously involved in this emotional relationship. And meanwhile I had to read the galleys. I mean, there was a time limit. In other words, here I was breaking up with a woman I love and meanwhile the goddamn galleys, you know. (chuckles) So this is horrible, you know, it’s like some kind of sentence to hell, you know—like, you know, on the one hand I’m getting these phone calls, you know, “How can you throw me away?” phone calls, you know, “How can you treat me like this?” And I’m trying to find typographical errors in the galleys. And I’m sitting here one night, and I suddenly realized that the character in the book, Angel Archer, was literally as real to me as my own girlfriend. And I thought, you know, I said, “This is absolutely impossible,” because there is no such person as Angel Archer. Then I wondered if that’s true with other writers, ’cause they have—I don’t know. I mean, I’m going to start asking around. Because I suddenly thought—now here we have a direct comparison. I mean, half my time is spent reading what Angel is thinking, this is all her thoughts, you know, her thoughts throughout—and she is literally real to me. And now, OK, where did she come from? She didn’t come from my mind. She did not come from my mind, because it’s impossible, unless I somehow contain another human being. But, in that case, I then contain a whole lot of other human beings, because I’ve written about many characters. I mean, she’s not the only person I’ve written about. So is my brain full of hundreds of subpersonalities? Well, uh, the Bishop, for example, is based on an actual bishop that I knew, and I’m not supposed to say who ’cause then they’ll all come in and sue. And there’s a big disclaimer in the front of the book. It says, “Warning! This book is utterly fictitious, you know, and none of the people ever existed, and if you think otherwise, uh, you’re wrong.” But it’s based on an actual bishop, that I actually knew. And this man was one of the most educated people in the universe. As they say, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and the Bible backwards and forwards. So he’s forever quoting things which I have no access to. Well, now in that case I simply looked them up. I mean, I just simply get out my Bible and get out books on the Bible and stuff like that and I remembered my actual friend. But with her there’s no model. There’s no [unintelligible] this person. And she’s smarter than he is. And that’s the incredible thing. As smart as the Bishop was, she had to be smarter to understand him. Because, you can never really have a protagonist that does not understand what’s happening, because then it’s like a camera with a defective lens. The lenses, you know, that have powers of resolution. To a very high degree. And the protagonist character has to have that same lens resolution quality. Especially the first person, like that. And she’s continually thinking about the Bishop. And she notices where he fouls up. Because she’s a very astute woman. And—

LEE:
Do you think you ever ran into this person, or do you think it might be a precognition from a former life? How do you go about—

DICK:
Well, you know, it’s bizarre—

LEE:
Reincarnation?

DICK:
It’s totally bizarre. In fact, I mentioned to my agent, I said I’d like to meet Angel Archer sometime. I said, she’s become so real to me. Now, here and now there’s something that is really not funny at all, this is really the tragedy of the serious writer, at least as far as my own experience. And I know it sounds like some kind of affected literary pain that, you know, is engineered by the artist merely to be able to say, I am a great artist. But it isn’t, it’s not the case. When I finished writing that book, the pain of losing that woman, and losing the sound of her voice and the sound of her thoughts was agony. Because all that time her thoughts had been running through my mind, her speech patterns, her cadences, her wit, her personality, and the day came when I typed the words “the end” at the end of that book and that voice stopped and that personality disappeared. And all I can do now is exactly what you or anyone else could do, is simply pick up a copy of the book. And get it back out of the book, and retrieve it from the book. But for a while I had her in my mind, and the pain at the end of writing it was just—the pain was so great at losing that woman as my friend that after I sent the manuscript off I discovered that I was hemorrhaging, gastrointestinal bleeding. From the pain, from sheer pain. I mean, I was literally physically sick from the shock of saying good-bye to Angel Archer.

LEE:
What about the android—in the movie now, I’m sorry.

DICK:
OK, the character?

LEE:
Yes.

DICK:
Rachael Rosen?

LEE:
Rachael Rosen?

DICK:
Yes.

LEE:
And did you feel any pain for her, if not—

DICK:
Well, now, see, for that character, I have a love-hate relationship. I’m afraid of her, but I’m attracted to her, ’cause she is, you know, a femme fatale to me. You know, whenever I see a woman of this kind, I seek her out, I’m a trophy to her. But part of me knows she’s gonna trash me. So all the time I am seeking her out half of me is running the other way, you know, so that I’m moving toward her and away from her. So my dialogue with women like this consists of “Hi, darling” and then I feel like popping her one. You probably noticed that earlier today. I mean, in other words, I’m in love with this woman, and I hate her guts, is what all my dialogue amounts to— you know, “Don’t leave me, you awful person,” is what it all amounts to. “You horrible person, you’re leaving my life.” But with Angel, it’s completely love, I mean, she was just, you know, everything that I admire. The wit, the intelligence, you know, the variation, the tremendous self-analysis that she shows. But I get mixed up with women that—

LEE:
Is she a part of yourself?

DICK:
I don’t see how she can be. I don’t understand it.

LEE:
You don’t find any correlation of your own characteristics, or with your own experiences in the past?

DICK:
Only, only—

LEE:
Is she a feminine version of yourself?

DICK:
No, she’s not even an opposite from me. You can’t even say that. She is kind of an idealized self. She’s kind of what I would have liked to have been. She is what I would have liked to have been. And there’s no problems with the sex thing there. Because for an author, an author has to write from the standpoint of both male and female—any author has to do that—I mean, in other words, if you can’t do that, you’re doomed. Because then, all books by women would have nothing but female characters and all books by men would have male characters—

LEE:
That’s true.

DICK:
You see, and nobody could write about children or animals, you see, so that would be that. But, uh, she’s to me an ideal human being. And, and, uh—the thing about Angel is that she is able to—when the Bishop dies, because he does die in the book, and the whole book is really a eulogy to his death, to this man who died, that she loved so, he was her father-in-law. And the book is nothing more than, when we first encounter her, the Bishop is already dead, and she is shattered. She is demoralized, shattered, and reduced to a kind of very rigid, very—almost a kind of bitter quality. And then we discover why. I mean, we go through the flashbacks and discover, you know, that at one time she had this father-in-law, you know, that she had this close relationship with, and he died. And from then on she was never the same. And then the last part of the book is a Sufi guru who brings her back to her full humanity again, reawakens her soul, which has died. I mean, she says when the Bishop died that her soul died with the Bishop. And she goes—it starts out going to this seminar and she goes, you know, perfunctorily—I mean, she doesn’t really think she’s getting anything out of it. And she does, she comes back to being what she was originally. So it’s a study in the death of a—a pointless death. The Bishop dies a pointless death. I mean, it is just a pure accident, I mean there’s no, you know—it is one of those things which could have been averted and yet at the same time was absolutely destined. I mean, it was one of those incredible things. But the Greek word for “chance” is the same word as for “fate.” Chance and determinism were the same word: anonche in Greek. In fact, it’s not known which they meant or if they even distinguished the two.

But the whole book is not really about the Bishop’s death but the effect of his death upon Angel and what it does to her. And at that point, when she heard over the TV that he’s died, uh, her thoughts begin to change. You notice an actual change in her thoughts. They begin to get rigid, brittle, and cold, and mechanical. And she turns into that android figure which is my metaphor for the dehumanized person, as you know, who is someone who is less than human—that essential quality that distinguishes a human being is essentially compassion or kindness, that—it’s not intelligence. An android—or in the film Blade Runner it’s called “replicant”—can be very intelligent, but it’s not really human. Because it’s not intelligence that makes a human being; in my opinion it’s the quality of kindness or compassion or what - ever—you know, the Christians call “agape.” And this is what Angel loses when the Bishop dies. And she loses that quality of kindness. She no longer can love. She loses the capacity to love. She does not love again. But she is not even aware of that. That’s what’s happened to her. She knows something terrible has happened to her, she knows she’s somehow become like a machine, but she doesn’t exactly understand what it is.

LEE:
It sounds as though your books kind of write themselves for you.

DICK:
Yes. Once I get started. There’s those two years before they start writing themselves where I’ve got to figure out what—

LEE:
Did you ever experience writer’s block?

DICK:
Yes, but for me it’s a blessing. Because I’m an obsessive writer, and if I didn’t get writer’s block I’d overload, short-circuit, and burn out right away. I once did sixteen novels in five years, sold every one of them. And, uh, yeah—

LEE:
That’s a lot of work.

DICK:
Plus a lot of stories, too, plus a lot of stories. And, uh, they were all publishable. They all sold. Sixteen novels in five years. And if I didn’t get writer’s block, I’d die. I mean, it’s the greatest relief to me. Now, most writers they get writer’s block they become frantic, they just literally—

LEE:
Does it last a long time when you get it?

DICK:
I’ve had it for several years, yeah.

LEE:
Oh, really? That long?

DICK:
Yeah, but to me, it’s always a blessing. Because I know that on a unconscious level my mind is sorting through all different possibilities and a day will come when I will know how to begin. And the second the first sentence is down on paper the book has begun.

LEE:
I think when I first met you you weren’t writing at that time. In ’74? ’75? Around there?

DICK:
Well, you would have met me in ’76. ’Cause that was after I left Tessa. ’Cause I met you through Doris.

LEE:
Is it that—

DICK:
Did you know? Was I with—

LEE:
No, I knew you before you broke up with Tess.

DICK:
You did?

LEE:
I met you once or twice.

DICK:
Oh, OK, that would be before ’76.

LEE:
So I think it probably was maybe ’75.

DICK:
Oh, yeah.

LEE:
But [… ] to know you, coming over here and so forth, yes, it probably was ’76.

DICK:
Well, I was experiencing a writer’s block but not really. I had some experiences that I didn’t know how to write up and I, uh—this is almost a redefinition of writer’s block. I’ve had some experiences I don’t know how to write up. I mean, that’s almost a—if you looked up, “What is a writer’s block?” it means that the writer has something, you know, that he knows about but he can’t figure out how to write about it. Although, I suppose it’s possible that writer’s block could consist of not having anything to say, and could occur at any point, but for me it’s just a question of how to say it, how to go about it. OK, now, the book— I’m under contract to write a book, at this point. I’ve been paid for it. If I don’t get it, they’re gonna come kill me. So, uh, and I’ve been warned I have a deadline, but I have blocked out when the deadline is, because I don’t want to think about it.

LEE:
That would be a stress factor on your writing ability.

DICK:
Well, since I almost died writing that Angel Archer book, I mean, I value my hide more than I value my career. And I will write this book, but they may get it late. But, I’ve cut out—it’s almost as if that joke about if God can do anything, can he make a ditch so wide he can’t jump over it? Or can he create an object so heavy he can’t lift it? You know, is—after I finished the Angel Archer novel, I was convinced I could write anything. You know, I was convinced that I could— well, if I could write from the standpoint of a character smarter than me, more rational than me, more educated than me, funnier than me, I said OK, I can do anything. So I said, now, what comes next? What’s the next hardest thing? And she’s younger than me, she’s a woman, she’s younger, everything—God, I can do that! I can do anything. Well, let’s see, if I can do anything, what would be the hardest job of all? And I thought about that, and I said, I know what I’ll do.

Now, every writer who’s any good is tempted at some time in his career to do a version of the Faust story. Because, I mean, it is almost the paradigm of the writer. Faust and the writer are almost the same person. A good writer is Faustian. And this is what led James Joyce to write Finnegan’s Wake, which no one can understand; he just couldn’t leave it alone. He said, “I can write anything—I wonder if I can write the most difficult book ever written, or will ever be written?”

LEE:
I don’t know—he had some tough competition.

DICK:
So, he, you know, he stayed in that category, so I says OK, now I will do the Faust story, but it’s been done before. A number of writers have done it before. So what I’ll do is I’ll create a character based on Beethoven and Faust together. ’Cause Beethoven, I was looking at my Britannica one time and it said Beethoven is the greatest genius the world has ever seen. And then it goes on to explain why.

Now, that would make an interesting character. The greatest genius, creative genius—not intellectual, creative—genius the world has ever seen. That would make an awfully interesting character. So I started to study the life of Beethoven. And trying to figure out in what way he was a genius. And I thought I would create the synthetic character based on Beethoven and Faust both, where the character strives for the absolute ultimate. So then I had to define what the absolute ultimate was. If you took the greatest genius, creative genius, the world has ever seen, what for him would be the absolute ultimate? This is—this is—it’s not as easy as it sounds. The first one, you’ve got to get into the mind of the greatest creative genius in the world. And then you’ve got to think what for him would be the ultimate task. Well, somewhere along the line in doing this, I overreached myself. I—my notes became too complex for me to understand. I started taking notes that, when I looked them over, the concepts were too complicated for me. It wasn’t the words, it was the ideas.

LEE:
This is what you got from the background thing, dealing with—

DICK:
Building up the character, right. Yes.

LEE:
Oh, I see.

DICK:
I was building up this character, right, yes. I was building up as an intellectual thing, that is, he would be an intellectual genius—it wouldn’t be creative genius but intellectual genius in terms of conceptual intelligence, but not—

LEE:
Did this frighten you after a while, trying to deal with it?

DICK:
No, it didn’t frighten me. I got to the point where, uh, I discovered that I was now dealing in concepts which were so difficult that—I was finally dealing in concepts that were too difficult for me to, to understand. Although I had conceived of the concept in the first place. I then, I went back and looked over the notes—

OK, I’ll give you an example. Now one of the greatest insights in ancient philosophy was by Pythagoras. One time [he] was walking by a blacksmith’s shop. And he noticed that the anvils, when hit with a hammer, the smaller the anvil, the higher pitched the sound. So the bigger anvils make a low-pitched sound and the little ones make a higher-pitched sound. Now that’s interesting. Why should a small one make a higher-pitched sound than a bigger object? Wait a minute, he says. These are musical intervals. The sound the anvil emits when struck is a musical sound. There is no difference between an anvil being hit with a hammer and a musical instrument. This is not— everybody knows that if you divide a string in half, on a stringed instrument, you jump one octave up. I mean, that’s a definition of an octave, is that it is an absolutely even division of a string. See, it doesn’t matter what scale you use, it’s always one octave— that is the definition of an octave. So Pythagoras was standing there in the blacksmith’s shop, you know, I can just see him there, a rolled up copy of the Free Press under his arm, you know, and he’s saying, “There’s something significant here.” And all of a sudden he understood the relationship between music and mathematics. That all the intervals in a musical scale are mathematical, in other words, and can be expressed by number. Very well.

Now, all of Greek philosophy had been an attempt to figure out what the basic substance of the universe was. Was it made of fire, air, water, whatever, you know. Kitty litter, whatever. There is some substance that was, you know, old shoes, you know, just anything. Leftover tires, for instance, you know. There was some basic substance. And he said, “I know what it is. It’s mathematical ratio.” Well, so he was right, he was correct. All modern science is quantitative. It all takes it for granted that there is no qualitative basis, there is a quantitative basis. So this has enormous significance for science, but not immediately—it took a long time. You see, because this is just one theory amongst a number of theories. But he then equated music and mathematics. And he went on then to say that the basis of the universe was mathematics and music together, because music and mathematics are two versions of the same thing. So he taught—that was where the term “music of the spheres” comes from. He then said that moving bodies emit music, but we don’t hear it because we hear it from birth and we’re not conscious that we’re hearing it. But we are hearing a constant music.

And, by the way, there have been some tests lately, there’s a recording called “An Eighty-Foot Wire” or “Music by a Long Thin Wire”—I thought this was a joke recording. It’s an eighty-foot wire, they strung an eighty-foot wire out and they played a single tone through it and then they recorded it, but the eighty-foot wire did a single oscillation. The oscillation never varies. The oscillation [is] absolutely steady, the pulsations fed through the wire. And they recorded four LP sides. During those four LP sides, that wire creates the most incredibly beautiful sounds you’ve ever heard. And it doubled back, the sound[s] would come back and overlay each other, and there will be intervals of exquisite beauty. This is just an eighty-foot wire. We, we want—

LEE:
Was it a particular metal, or—

DICK:
No. Copper. Yeah. With one tone fed in, that’s all. Once that tone is fed in, in no way is that tone modulated in terms of amplitude, in terms of frequency, in terms of pulsation. No changes are made, the wire does it all and it creates music of incredible beauty. Just incredible.

So OK now, he said this is going on all the time. Here’s what I did: I says, OK. Music and mathematics. What would be a—if you wanted to create a triad, what would be the third constituent of a structural basis of the universe? It’s 2,300 years ago [2,500 + years] that he did this. What would be the third constituent in the sequence: music, mathematics, what would be the third? Now what follows logically— nobody’s been able to figure it out, nor even do I know that anybody’s even tried to figure it out. Well, I came up with what I believe is the next sequence, and the next unit in the sequence—

LEE:
OK, now, what would that be? You’re going to tell me, aren’t you?

DICK:
Well, yes and no, because unfortunately (laughs) I burned out as a result of envisioning it because I envisioned it in my mind, like I see my characters you know, when I’m writing I actually see them. I saw this in my mind, in my mind’s eye, you know how you do, I saw this, and it consisted of a musical score in which the notes were arranged entirely mathematically. Which is OK so far, I mean there’s nothing that hasn’t been already done, but the third factor was color. Now, all color is of a particular frequency. They’re measured in what’s called millimicrons. The Fraunhofer lines, from B to F, or something like that. So every given color is at a particular number of millimicrons and can be calibrated right down to the millimicrons. So within the spectrum, the visual spectrum, like, in red, there’s a whole range of millimicrons, there’s many many reds. Just many, many, many. I don’t even have an idea of how many there are. But, you see, this is an exact mathematical ratio, as there is in sound. Music is a vibration at a particular frequency. Color is a vibration of a particular visual frequency.

LEE:
I don’t really see color—

DICK:
Well, color is my choice, you see. So I conceived of an object existing along three axes—color, mathematics, and music simultaneously. That was the last I ever did, on that book—

LEE:
I didn’t want to sound stupid, but that was what was going through my mind, was color.

DICK:
Well, see, it’s logical because it does have, you know, a frequency and for instance what you could do is you could transmit information in terms of color. And you would, what you would have to have is a transmitter, you see, which would encode the information at exact visual frequencies, like frequencies of light. And then at the other end, simply it would extract the same way, it would be a duplicate, just like a telephone works.

LEE:
How do you, how do you see these things together?

DICK:
Well, when you—yeah, I did and it was really—

LEE:
They tried it up at, uh—

DICK:
The Laseriums—

LEE:
OK, well, a laser. It was nice but it wasn’t quite the same thing.

DICK:
No, this would actually be the idea that I had, was that conceptual information could be transmitted simultaneously as color, music, and mathematics. And this would permit abstractions in the impossible to us now. So what I did was, I dreamed up—I said OK now, if the abstractions, the conceptual abstractions permitted by the triune or trinitary structural basis is beyond our powers now, I will have to start with the annotation and work back to the concept. So I envisioned an actual sequence of color, musical stave, staff, you know, and annotation. And then I tried to extract the concept back out of it. And of course it was impossible, because by my very definition this is not thinkable to us. ’Cause you don’t have the three constituents, we only have the two. And I just couldn’t go on anymore. I had now thought, I had literally thought of a concept which I could not think of.

LEE:
So, OK, this is the book you wrote.

DICK:
This is the book I’m allegedly writing. It’s called The Owl in Daylight.

LEE:
The Owl in Daylight?

DICK:
Yeah, The Owl in Daylight. It’s a folk expression meaning a—I heard it on TV, a guy in the Ozarks said, “I’m the owl in daylight” and he meant that he was unable to understand. ’Cause the book is about the inability to understand. And I have now created a concept that I don’t even understand, my own concept. I can’t put it into words.

LEE:
But you could always think up something. But it’s got to be logical. Since you’re dealing with mathematics, and, uh, sound and color.

DICK:
Dealing with concepts, mainly, uh, I conceptualized myself out of business, what I did. I developed—well, for one thing, I tested out my ability to reason. My ability to reason was really affected—I had a terrible time, I did real bad in school in geometry. Which, you know, which measures your ability to reason deductively. You start with, you know, a theorem, and you need a premise and all that stuff and you work deductively to whatever conclusion. By the way, Angel Archer can do that. So, I had a long sequence in there when she reasons deductively, and I can’t do that.

LEE:
Maybe you should transpose yourself into her.

DICK:
I can wear a wig and a dress, and a pair of—and a beaded purse and earrings, and says, “Hi, I’m Angel Archer and I can think real clearly.” Uh—

LEE:
Uh, mentally, let’s do it that way. We don’t have to do it physically. (laughs)

DICK:
But I, I, uh—

LEE:
Have someone play to part of her, to give you feedback, if that’s possible.

DICK:
But I checked out my ability to reason, I remembered that in Greek philosophy there’s a fragment, the first extant fragment before Plato that amounts to anything. It’s part of a poem, by Parmenides. And that’s the only really large fragment that exists before Plato. And it’s a logical argument. And it’s a very difficult logical argument. It’s so difficult, in fact, that there’s supposed to be an error in it. But even today, 2,500 years later, they can’t do it, the authorities can’t agree what the error is.

LEE:
It’s difficult, I bet, for—

DICK:
No, this is Parmenides.

LEE:
Oh, I’m sorry.

DICK:
No, the first one before Plato is—

LEE:
He was the original.

DICK:
Yeah, Parmenides.

LEE:
He was the father of philosophy.

DICK:
Well, no, the father of philosophy was Thales. That was the first philosopher, you know, was Thales. Parmenides came just before Plato. In fact, Parmenides was alive when Plato was alive. Parmenides was a very old man when Plato was educated. And there’s one dialogue called “Parmenides” by Plato.

LEE:
It’s been years for me—

DICK:
No, to me it was yesterday morning. So anyway here’s a Parmenides argument and it’s a real difficult argument. It’s so difficult that there is an error and they can’t agree on what this error is, even twenty—2,400 years later, they can’t agree, you know, they say he made an error but they can’t figure out what the error was. And this error got ahold of Plato. Plato spent most of his time trying to figure out what the error in Parmenides’ argument was. And, so I decided to read over the entire argument, and see if I could spot the error. Well, I was now reading an argument that had baffled some of the greatest minds of the history of Western civilization. Well, I have—it turned out that I had to learn some Greek. So I did that, I learned the Greek alphabet and I learned particular key words. Then I had to learn specialized Greek words that had been used by philosophers at the time of Parmenides to deal with this particular argument. So not only did I have to learn—

LEE:
You have done quite a lot of work on this.

DICK:
Yeah, well, I thought, “This is real weird,” I says, because I can’t quite understand what the purpose of what I’m doing is, you know, all this. Uh, and I thought, I’m now getting into concepts—I got into, I got onto one concept that Aristotle had said he could not make any sense out of it at all. He could not figure it out. Now, he was reading it in the original Greek, so he had no linguistic barrier. And I’m working this concept over, I’m looking it over, and I say, he’s right, this concept is self-contradictory. It is actually what they call an oxymoron. An oxymoron is something which contradicts itself. You don’t have to know anything but the statement to know that it is wrong, because it contradicts itself. So then I got into—OK, that’s an oxymoron, and this statement was an oxymoron. It was by a—

LEE:
And you found what you feel is the contradiction in a certain phrase, or—

DICK:
Yes, I found it was not in Parmenides, it was in an answer [to] Parmenides. I still can’t find the error in Parmenides, I’ve given up on that. I’m not sure there is an error, in fact, and that’s another thing—

You know, I wish to go on record: If this tape is preserved for antiquity I want to say that I have studied Parmenides’ argument and I can’t find the error in it. But I have studied the answers to Parmenides, and the answer that has been accepted for 2,300 years, and is the basis for all Western science, contains an error. And that error has now been discovered by twentieth century quantum mechanics. Uh, physicists. People like Heisenberg, Pauli, all those guys who are working on quantum mechanics. I discovered by chance, I discovered absolutely by chance. I was reading the answers to Parmenides, I happened to come across an obscure philosopher named Leucippus that I’ve never heard of. Nobody’s ever heard of Leucippus. Nothing is known about Leucippus but he and Democritus together wrote an article answering Parmenides. And there is an error in their answer. Their answer, however, their solution was picked up by all of Western civilization. Because it was such a profound argument. It was, however, erroneous. It was a beautiful argument but it was wrong. And Aristotle was the first one to notice it was wrong. He said, what Aristotle said, he said this makes no sense. He says, the technical term is “unintelligible.” This is unintelligible. So I studied the Greek words, I learned the Greek words, you know, five particular Greek words—

LEE:
You did this on your own?

DICK:
I just sitting around, I got nothing else to do, I’m not reading Howard the Duck, you know, I’m not watching MASH, I’m studying the argument of Leucippus, Democritus, you know, Parmenides, and Plato.

LEE:
Not just a little MASH once in a while?

DICK:
Maybe just a little, and also something to drink, you know. Holy God, now I start thinking, if there’s oxymoronic assertions that contradict themselves, there are—

LEE:
Oxymoronic, is this your word?

DICK:
No, no. It’s not my word. At least, let’s hope there is such a word because I’ve been using it for some time. Well, “moron” means “stupid,” it’s the Greek word for “stupid,” it carried over into English. I said, there also must be self-authenticating statements. If there are self-contradictory statements, which by their own intrinsic nature contradict themselves and prove themselves false, there must then, it logically follows, be self-authenticating statements. Immediately I thought, what would a self-authenticating statement be? A totality when the predicate is presumed in the subject. The old use of the word “totality.” It asserts nothing. It’s like a sentence, “All horses are horses,” is what it boils down to, you see, the predicate is the same as the subject. OK, now, then there’s—that’s different from a synthetic statement, saying, like, “All horses are brown,” ’cause brown is not implied in the word “horse.” So I said, now I wonder if there’s a self-authenticating statement. And immediately I thought of a self-authenticating statement. And a self-authenticating statement is not predicated on anything and it’s not a totality. And this raises up St. Anselm’s argument for—his ontological argument for the proof of the existence of God, which has been discredited for centuries—allegedly discredited. I thought, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” It is taken for granted by all the modern thinkers, including religious thinkers, that St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is spurious, but according to my argument, my reasoning, it’s not spurious. It’s self-authenticating. At least in theory it’s self-authenticating; it can be self-authenticating; I have to go back and examine it, but there can be such a thing as a self-authenticating statement. And if there can be one there can be more than one. There is such a category as self-authenticating statements.

LEE:
Because I am, God exists.

DICK:
That’s Descartes, that’s Descartes, so all of a sudden I start thinking back—because this is how my mind works—of a problem that arose during World War II, in the transmission of a cipher out of German occupied Europe, into England by spies from the Allies, that were behind the lines in Germany. And they have little radio transmitters and they transmit, you know, information about German troop movements and stuff, you know, military information to England. And they had these big radio antennas that would pick it up. Now, every once in a while the Germans would overrun one of these transmitters in Holland—a lot of them were in Holland, France, and Belgium along the coast and Germans would overrun it. So they had to build into the cipher material something by which the cipher spy could identify himself for sure, so if he was overrun and anybody else used his transmitter—as the English— and they would know he was overrun, you see. In other words, if you kicked open the door and shot the spy, he had his codebook—his codebook would be lying there, the cipher book—and his codebook would be lying there, you couldn’t then pick up his codebook and transmit because he would have some way of always proving that he—to the English receiver, to the British Intelligence back in England. And this became a major problem because it did happen one time, a very serious overrun occurred in Holland where they overrun the cipher card. They picked up these codebooks, the Germans did, and they transmitted the most loonedout material to England for years. And the English never caught on.

So what the Germans wound up doing is whatever things they were short on—trucks, you know, whatever they needed, parts of some kind, ball bearings and that kind of stuff—they would transmit a request for these parts. They’d say we really—you know, the underground, the French, the maquis, they’re called now anti-German underground—needs ball bearings in this particular size, whereupon the RAF would fly over and parachute down ball bearings to them. (laughs) Germans were restocking their shortages from England that way, by overrunning the cipher book. So this was a very serious problem, I thought. Now that’s interesting. Genuine information would then have to contain some self-authenticating factors, you see, because it works in cipher situations. So I tried to analyze what would be a self-authenticating factor in a cipher transmission. Well, the point of all this is that one day I got up and I was burned out—

LEE:
Yeah.

DICK:
One night I went to be thinking all these things. What I thought was cadence sequences where the cipher would have—like in scansion, in poetry, you know, where you have iambic pentameter “—dump— de—dump—dump, the rolling rocks, the shivering shocks”—OK, you can say, “cadences,” you see, and, uh, I was thinking what I would call cipher verification systems. So I go to bed that night and I’ve had about sixteen cipher verification systems in my mind that would, you know, validate the cipher transmitter as being correct. But I woke up the next morning and I couldn’t even fix coffee. I had shorted out somewhere during the night. Somewhere during the night my brain decided that it’d had enough of all this. So as a result the book has not yet been written. And I—

LEE:
Why don’t you keep a tape by your bed at night?

DICK:
Well, I’d have to listen to all this claptrap is what I’d have to do which is even worse, ’cause to write it down—I write it all down and I just stick it away, you know, and never read it again. As I say, my problem arose when [I] picked up some of these things and started reading them over and they were too difficult for me to read over. I could invent them, but I couldn’t understand them after I’d invented them.

LEE:
Now, this is a puzzle for you because your average reader is not going to be able—they’re going to, you know, take everything you say as the gospel truth, so—

DICK:
Yeah, by the time it goes on paper it’s gotta be right. You see, I have to solve all these problems, you see. Well, OK, well, I’m—

LEE:
For the reader’s satisfaction, or do you go for your own satisfaction first?

DICK:
Yeah, I have to really be convinced. I studied Shannon. Shannon was the guy who developed the field of information theory. He was working for Bell Telephone, and he created a new field information theory.

(tape ends)

THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT

Part 2

January 15, 1982

LEE:
OK, we’re ready to go here. So at this point would you like to discuss the new novel?

DICK:
The unwritten one, you mean? Or the one that’s coming out in the spring?

LEE:
Um … uh … either one. You know. Which one are you real excited about right now?

DICK:
Uh—

LEE:
You said you had a new outline since I was last—

DICK:
Uh, yeah, right. Well, when I saw you last I had just started to get the idea for the new novel and it wasn’t really in a coherent form at all. Uh—but just within a short period of time it’s jelled quite a bit. And … uh … it—I saw my agent about it today. He said that, uh—I talked to him yesterday and I gave him some idea of it and I called him back today—and he said, “I got to thinking and I don’t think you can do it,” he said, “I don’t really think—” he said, “Are you sure you can do it?” Because what it would consist of would be, it would be from the viewpoint of a—a, uh, entity that was not human but from presumably another star system. Uh … and its view of us and our culture. That is, it would begin on another star system on a planet with a civilization quite different from ours … a civilization where there is no atmosphere such as we have, and as a result speech has never developed; they’re mute and they’re deaf. And as a result of the failure to develop, to utilize sound, they have no art that is predicated on sound.

Now, our art predicated on sound, of course, is music, and we take music for granted. Uh … but for them, since they do not employ sound, there is no analogue or correlate in their world for music. And what I want to do is, you know, the way we have, on our world, mystical visions of heaven, like at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and these visions generally are that heaven is light … the concept of light is always associated with the next world to us. In fact, uh, when I was doing the Bishop Archer novel, I started noticing that almost all the religions—it doesn’t really matter which one it is: it can be Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, it can be Sufism, it can be Judaism, it can be Christianity—continually you see the word “light” will appear in connection with the next world. For instance in the Fourth Gospel, you know, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” And John speaks of the light coming into the world and Qumran people use that dualism thing, light and dark, all the time.

Now, in this book, this planet, not having sound, utilizes color, uh, for language. Just as we use different audio frequencies, they use different color frequencies, you know, which are calibrated milli - microns by us, you know, so there are specific frequencies and so, for them, light is a utilitarian thing. Their world is one that employs vision and visual things entirely and no sound whatsoever. So, what I thought was, this is very interesting. Their normal world would be the way we envision the next world to be. So I thought: now what if I set the book on their planet and have a mystic of their species, that is, someone in their species and their civilization who is having mystical visions of this other world, only instead of having visions of light he has visions, he— they wouldn’t be “visions,” they would be some kind of, you know, experience, some kind of supernatural experience—of music, of sound. But they would have no word for this. They would have no concept of it, no word for anything. So it would be completely inexplicable experiences for him. And what he would be experiencing would be our world which—where sound is ubiquitous and music is the great art form developing out of sound. And I got to thinking: What if their world is our heaven and our world is their heaven? So for each civilization, the other one’s world is the way that they would view the next world, the afterlife, reward, heaven, paradiso.

So he’s having mystical experiences regarding sound the way human mystics have mystical experiences regarding, you know, light and vision, and so forth. And, then it finally culminates in one of them coming to our planet and discovering a planet, then, which is the quintessential summation of everything that all the religion teaches exists in the afterworld. It actually exists in this universe and is available through space travel; uh, but then the next problem is that these creatures are mute and they are deaf, and the problem arises is he finds—they find—the human civilization, you know, using sound and having developed music, but they can’t hear it because they are deaf.

’Course, now, see, that’s not all that great a problem. They can build transduction equipment—like right now for the blind a new device has been built, an experimental device that uses the phosphine activity in the eye, you know, optic neurons, you know, or like when somebody sets off a flashbulb in your face you’ll see an afterimage, you know, that’s the phosphines in the eyes. That actually is not a retinal image. That is, there are things in the eye called phosphines and they fire as a result of external light; they also fire as a result of pressure, like you can get phosphines to fire by rubbing your eyes. They will fire as a result of a nerve shock or they will fire as a result of radiation and they can even be made to fire on an individual basis. So now they’re working out ways in which blind people can literally see objects by, uh, technological devices that stimulate phosphine firings in their eyes so they actually see—they literally see; this is not a conversion of sight into another mode, it’s a conversion of one visual form into another. They don’t get as clear a picture, they get a very—they can see the outline of objects in the phosphine firings and it’s a great breakthrough. So I got to thinking what—what these creatures who are deaf and mute and have never had sound or music in their civilization could do is very easily—if they have the technology to come here, they would have the technology to build some kind of transduction equipment which would make these sounds audible to them. And I got to thinking, even if these sounds were audible to them, uh, music would be incomprehensible because music, really being absolutely abstract, really requires a kind of species bias toward the utilization of sound, which—which is lacking. They could hear it, though—

LEE:
This mystic you’re speaking of, now, you’re talking— He’s supposed to be like the large guru who is leading a group of people on this planet.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
Obviously has some following.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
To keep going with this.

DICK:
Yeah, in fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I hadn’t thought about that. Right. But he thinks he’s seeing the next world.

LEE:
OK.

DICK:
Like we, you know, our mystics think we’re seeing the next world.

LEE:
And he’s possibly had the power to find this world.

DICK:
Yes. They have the technology to send a spaceship here.

LEE:
Oh, OK.

DICK:
And he actually encounters what for them is the next world.

LEE:
That’s quite a concept.

DICK:
But, instead of a world of light as our next world— there’s a very beautiful poem, uh, in the seventeenth-century poem that begins with, “They have all gone into the world of light,” meaning all his friends have died. Uh, “And I sit lingering here,” you know, and so on. So they have all gone into the world of sound, is what’s happened with this guy, and when people die they go into a world of sound. So he can—anyway, so they—

LEE:
They are aware of the lack of sound.

DICK:
Yes. I have to posit it somehow that, that in some way they know that through a gas, there can be a perturbation through a gas which will set up some kind of resonance at a given frequency that’s how they’d regard it, you see, they—they—would not have the idea of sound, they would have the idea of a wave form moving through a gas.

LEE:
Like, we are not real clear about what—I am not real clear about the frequencies of color but I know it, exists.

DICK:
Yeah, the visual spectrum is divided into millimicrons along what they call a Fraunhofer lines.

LEE:
It’s the same idea.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
They know it is there but they’re not really—

DICK:
They’re fixed. Every—every color is at a given frequency, a number of millimicrons in the visual spectrum, you know—

LEE:
I see.

DICK:
—from ultraviolet to infrared. And it can be broken down into specific millimicrons. I mean you can divide the visual frequency into thousands and thousands of divisions, just as you can the audio frequencies. You know, we hear from approximately, uh, forty hertz up to about, well, eleven kilohertz 11,000 hertz. That’s about as far as most people hear. And you divide it up all the way through, you see. But, see, that’s not all we do with sound. We do a lot more beside just divide it up according to frequency. And their language is color. Color and patterns of color, which they transmit telepathically to each other, which is color utilized in patterns and in mathematical harmonies. So that, like, their annotation, their written annotation, looks like musical staves. I mean, it’s divided up according to frequency, which is a vertical axis—they have a horizontal axis and they have a rotational axis. And all these different colors, and very fine gradations of color, their vision is incredible compared to us. For instance, when he [their leader] comes to our planet he sees us as almost blind. He sees our—a study by him of our visual apparatus, you know, our optic system, our eyes and everything indicates that we can see but we see very badly. It’s what we think of moles, moles can see a little but they can’t see very much. And their analysis of the human species is: it is sighted—a sighted species, but their eyesight is very, very poor compared to theirs. That’s—that’s their only sense, really, without having any, you know, ability to hear—their visual powers are incredible. I mean, they can see variations in colors that we can’t see. You see, thousands of colors instead of maybe ten colors. They see thousands of colors. Like, for them, red—what we call red—for them would be hundreds of different colors. It’s what—Eskimos for instance have, uh, fifteen or twenty words for snow, each one defining slightly different condition of snow, you see.

LEE:
They are just a different species of human type creature that has evolved in a different way of evolution.

DICK:
Yeah, they’re somewhat humanoid. Yeah, they’ve kinda got one head and two arms and—and two legs. I mean, they’re not like, you know, a gelatinous blob. But they have—they are mute and they are deaf and they did not have an atmosphere. What they had was pockets. Each is in a self-contained atmosphere. So there’s no—there’s no collective atmosphere. Their planet had lost its collective atmosphere.

LEE:
I think you went over this the last time, about how you came up with this concept. You were saying that, that the mathematic, musical, and color—

DICK:
Color, right. Yeah.

LEE:
Basis—

DICK:
Where we go from mathematics to sound by Pythagoras, they went from mathematics to color. We have—the thing we have in common is mathematics. This is assumed that all species have a—have a—have a concept of mathematics, I mean if they’re evolved at all. Mathematics, number, quantity, is in all the laws that pertain to it, is universal.

OK now, but the thing is, even though they come here, they see us as virtually blind, basically. And they understand that we—we are causing perturbations in our gaseous membrane, which is our atmosphere, to occur, which we interpret as language, they know about that, they see our books, for example. They know exactly what we’re doing. And they can create, you know, technological transduction, so that our— our sound becomes visible to them and can be read in the form of, like, like an oscilloscope, you know, which is—that’s what an oscilloscope does. It renders sound into a visual wave pattern. They can do that, they can, we have—they can build one right away. And when you would talk to one of them, he would see it as a wave pattern. And he would be able to read it.

LEE:
I think it’s marvelous the way you really know your characters. I mean, it seems as though you’re already very familiar with these people. And you—

DICK:
Yeah. Well, that’s the thing that happened with the Bishop Timothy Archer novel, you know, was I fell in love with Angel Archer. And it destroyed me, like, to finish the book. Because she’s so smart and everything. Like I was telling you.

LEE:
Seems as though you know these people real well.

DICK:
Well, this is what my agent said. He said, how are you going to write about a creature on another planet with an entirely different apparatus, a sensory apparatus, who’s never heard anything in his life. In fact, I don’t even know of—you see, you got to realize, if you didn’t have ears, that you would not interpret a perturbation in an atmosphere as sound, because sound really refers to the—the membrane of the ear and, you know, the cochlea, you know, and all that stuff. That’s where sound occurs. Sound occurs in the ears. Sound does not occur in the atmosphere. It occurs essentially within the human being, and that’s Descartes’s great contribution to psychology and philosophy. Which is where that thing comes from where they say if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there, does it make a noise? And that—that joke question which comes up on the Johnny Carson show every once in a while didn’t exist before Descartes, which is, you know, the seventeenth century. Descartes was the person who formulated that; he said sound occurs in the human sensory apparatus. It doesn’t occur in the atmosphere. It occurs within the body.

LEE:
That’s true. I hadn’t really thought about it.

DICK:
Yeah. So they know that the atmosphere is perturbed, but they—that doesn’t give them any concept of sound. OK. Now, a transduction of music, they can read a score. We have already got a transduction of music, it’s called a score. We have annotation, you know, we write the music. Beethoven, you know, before they performed the symphony wrote the symphony down. So he can read the score. A completely deaf person can read the score. The point is, this gives him no idea of how it sounds.

I mean, uh, the last composer who was able to equally see music and hear music was Bach, who often wrote compositions on, like, three staves and there are no instruments that play on three staves. He just wrote them on three staves and read them visually. He’d look at the—he’d look at the score layer. And so that he played, it depended on how you wanted to play it—with an orchestra, a solo instrument, or a chamber group. You then broke the three staves up into however many staves, you know, depending on, well, it’s always two, it’s always treble and bass. Treble clef and bass clef. But however many instruments there were, they broke them up that way, you see, but the original manuscript would be, you know, three staves. Now, OK, they can transduce it, through some kind of electronic interface.

But the point I’m trying to get at is—is the conceptual thing. Music is a conceptual thing. Music is not just organized sound. It’s something more than organized sound. And I—I came across this when I was working on this proposed novel for Simon and Schuster, which they’ve paid me for, which I’ve got a due date on, as my agent pointed out today. I wanted to base my character on Beethoven. You know, Beethoven went deaf during the last part of his life, and he never heard his—his last period. I mean, he went deaf during the time he was writing the Pastoral Symphony. So really, everything beyond the—after the Pastoral Symphony, he never heard. Like he never heard the Ninth Symphony. And—and his finest music was written when he—when he was deaf. So he was able to write music while he’s completely deaf, and he never heard it. So Beethoven, a composer who writes quartets and sonatas and symphonies never heard any of them. And that kind of interested me. As a result of this his music became very abstract.

LEE:
Uh-huh. Few people have said that since, either.

DICK:
Yeah. It’s a very unusual, very unusual situation. OK, so they can get a transduction electronically. But they’re not going to be able to conceive of music, because it—music is a conceptual thing. And the first person who really studied the conceptional aspects of music was Schopenhauer. At which point Schopenhauer declared that music was the highest form of art, above all visual arts. Above architecture, painting, sculpture, everything. Because music was the most abstract. And he—he devoted years and years to studying how music was able to operate on the human being inasmuch as it contains no concepts. It’s purely abstract. Well, we know a lot more now because we know that the right hemisphere of the brain processes music. For instance, people who have suffered, uh, massive brain damage in the left hemisphere where the language centers are can still sing lyrics to songs when they can’t speak. Like, they—that I’m talking now, that would be wiped out, but they could go, you know, uh—

LEE:
Oh, that’s interesting—

DICK:
Yeah, they can still sing and—and you know, I guess they can if they—if they knew enough lyrics to enough songs they could just go on for the rest of their lives, you know, saying, you know—

LEE:
Singing!

DICK:
“Though the Philistines may jostle/I—I shall rank as an apostle/in the high aesthetic clime (sic).”

As long as—I guess Gilbert and Sullivan fall halfway between music and speech, so, ah, it’d be harder to know what happened to you. But, OK now, music, Schopenhauer said, is the—is the purest abstract art. I mean, it’s absolutely abstract. It’s not relatively abstract. It’s absolutely abstract. And there is no real theory as to how music is able to convey things. It’s interesting that people who like, uh, popular music in general, you know, who’d be listening to, uh, stuff like, you know, disco music and so forth—where that is the kind of stuff that turns them on—when they go to the movies, they hear a very sophisticated score without even being conscious often that they are hearing a very sophisticated score. That score is—is attached to the visual image, you know, the musical score is—is linked to it and is able to convey various emotions, moods, situations, and so forth, in an abstract way. And we don’t really know how that’s done, except, you know, they say research on the brain indicates the right hemisphere is able somehow to process this intelligibly. So now, these people who have never use sound, there is really no way they are—this is the whole point of my book—is that even when they are able to see a musical score, and even when they can transduce it electronically into something, they still are unable to grasp what’s going on. Except when they experience a religious breakthrough. And for them, it’s a mystical experience, which is completely incomprehensible.

Uh, imagine, for instance, now, you’re a creature on this planet which uses color for language—does not use words, has no sound, has never heard sound, knows nothing of its existence—having a religious experience, and hearing music. What is he going to tell the people around him he’s—well, he can’t even say he’s “heard” it because, see, even the word “heard”—there is no—there is no equivalent word in their vocabulary for “heard.” He’s experienced something for which there simply is no way he can communicate. Well, the thing is, they find their way to our planet and they find a whole planet of people who are living in what for them is a kind of mystical paradise, you see.

LEE:
Oh—

DICK:
Go ahead.

LEE:
I was just going to ask, how does he manage to do this?

DICK:
To—?

LEE:
The mystic, the mystic, you know, how does he manage to bring this in a different technology and manage to find someplace that does have sound?

DICK:
Oh, that’s just a plot problem. What I—What I—

LEE:
Oh, you’re not that far along yet. I’m sorry.

DICK:
No, no. What you do is you start out with the, uh, the exploratory, the exploratory ship. You start with that.

LEE:
Uh-huh.

DICK:
The ship is already on it’s way. And, uh, they’re saying, uh, we’re headed for a nine-planet, you know, system. Pretty soon we realize that it’s ours, you know. A class whatever—

LEE:
So he’s having telepathic visions that are—

DICK:
He’s having mystical visions, of—of the world that the ship is on it’s way to.

LEE:
Right. But more of a—some precognition, maybe?

DICK:
Yeah, well, I used that once in a book already.

LEE:
Oh.

DICK:
I’ll—I’ll work it over so I can get a different—I’ll gussy it all up so nobody will notice I’ve used it before. So, what I’m trying to get to in this finally is that they—to them we are incredibly spiritual people. Because to them our planet is like some incredible holy shrine. Because their mysticism, and their—their theology and their religion is connected with music. Although they don’t even know the word. They don’t have the word for sound, they don’t have the word for music. So they come—

LEE:
So this is going to be a total theology thing for these people, this, this, uh—

DICK:
Yes.

LEE:
If he’s gonna create, I mean, quite a stir there.

DICK:
Yeah, this is—this is a theology of a— of another planet, a race completely different—

LEE:
Unbelievable.

DICK:
Yeah. And—I have to work from the standpoint of this creature. First of all, who’s using color for language, and for whom, uh, an experience of the world—like that poem, “They have all gone into the world of light,” in that seventeenth-century metaphysical poem, meaning that they have all gone into the world of sound. OK. Well, now they actually encounter a planet where there is sound, and not only is there sound, there is music. Well, to them, this would be a sacred planet. This would be— this would be like—like finding God. The only problem is, they can’t experience it. Except one way. There is only one way it can be done. And this goes back to something I think I mentioned to you before. I mentioned—did I mention biochips?

LEE:
Yes.

DICK:
OK. That’s how it could be experienced. They would have to enter a symbiotic relationship with a human being. There’s no way an electronic technological interface would work, because music is conceptual. And the electric interface would only give them the bare bones. And the—and the proof of this is the following: Asians, who have never heard a full symphony orchestra, whose experience with music has been limited to, say, a few instruments, maybe five instruments at the most. If they’re taken into a symphony hall, to hear a Beethoven symphony, will literally suffer unbearably, and will run from the hall to hear 150 instruments playing simultaneously. Their brains cannot correlate 150 instruments. It can’t be done. They—what they hear in an incredible cacophony, this mass of inchoate, you know, clanging and crashing, you know, just like—it’s painful, and— and it has no shape.

LEE:
I suppose that’s why Oriental music for us is so strange.

DICK:
Yeah, like the No plays in Japan. I’m always, you know, seeing it on television. You know, the No drama, and their banging the gong, you know, the cymbals and the gong. I can’t figure out what the hell it means, what that stuff is.

LEE:
Some of the Chinese music seems real strange.

DICK:
And that’s right here on the same planet. Now imagine these people—

OK, but if they can patch into a human brain, in a symbiotic relationship, then they can use the human brain to conceptualize the music. You can see the music.

LEE:
These biochips, are they a technological development of earth, or of these—

DICK:
Oh, of the—everybody’s—everybody will have them, I mean, they’re—they’re—we’ve got them now, here in the United States, so any civilization that can build a rocket ship that’ll fly to earth, can—they’ve got biochips.

LEE:
That’s going to be a—

DICK:
That’s another technical device, you casually have one character say to the other, “Where did you put the biochips?” “I put them back in the cupboard where they belong.” That’s all you need to say.

LEE:
Oh, I see. OK.

DICK:
That’s how it’s done. See, it’s amazing how easy it is to write if you know how—if you know what you’re doing. I mean, it’s only hard if you don’t know what you’re—

LEE:
How have you managed to assimilate all this information? I mean, you seem, you seem to be so up on everything. You just—do you spend a whole lot of time reading up on things?

DICK:
Oh, somebody loaned me an article. (laughs) A friend of mine who is a physicist.

LEE:
Over talking to you, you know, the last two tapes, and things and in the past—I mean, you seem to accumulate an incredible amount of information and you restore it well, you recall it very well. I’m just curious about how anybody does that.

DICK:
Well, I have developed a hell of a memory. I really have—I’ve developed a hell of a memory. I mean, from doing all the research I’ve done. My memory’s real good. And, uh, I’m drawing on a vast reservoir of—of memory. I mean, it isn’t that I know a lot, it’s that I remember so much. I’ve learned pretty much, uh, to retain, you know, a large amount of what I take in.

LEE:
I see. So, but, how many, like, would you say you donate so many hours a day to research and reading? Keeping up on things, or is it more, is it a random sort of thing? Do you subscribe to certain periodicals and things in order to keep up on things?

DICK:
My reading consists almost entirely of reference books—of nonfiction—I read very little fiction. In fact, I think you can say at this point I read no fiction. I just read references. Articles, magazines, books, stuff like that.

LEE:
I see. You’re constantly adding to your—

DICK:
Yeah, and what I’m interested in is information theory. This is—in fact, this is why the guy gave me the article on biochips, because he knows I was interested in information theory. And—and he himself finds it fascinating. And, see, the biochip is the greatest breakthrough in information storage that has ever happened in the history of this planet. And maybe—

LEE:
And they have implanted them already?

DICK:
No, no, no, no. They haven’t implanted it. They got—they can do it.

LEE:
Oh, I see, your article’s—yeah, OK.

DICK:
Yeah, they can do it, but they haven’t done it. There’s no reason. The—the biochip is alive; when it is implanted in the brain it will grow into the nervous system of the brain. It will grow into the neural tissue. Now the biochip processes information at the speed of light. Our neurons go very slowly, in comparison, I forget how slowly—real slowly, like 240 miles an hour, something incredible like that.

LEE:
You’re right about the androids, they’re just going to be better than us all the way around.

DICK:
Well, the biochip thinks—it can actually—it is— what the article said was that all the information of all the computers in the world could be stored in a biochip one centimeter by one centimeter square. Every extant computer we have—one centimeter by one centimeter. And I said—I saw him last night, and I said—I said, it was in a store, too, you know. I said, “Phil, I hope that wasn’t a joke article you gave me.” I said, “I hope there wasn’t a thing at the beginning that you didn’t Xerox which said, you know, this is the—want to see something really unbelievable, that might happen, you know, a million years from now— hope you didn’t just, you know, cut that off—” And he said, “No, that article is genuine,” he said, “I guarantee it.” In fact, I gave him a very valuable album back as a present for him giving me that. I gave him one of the most valuable albums I have as a present because I consider that article very important.

And we have, we have a one molecule deep layer of protein on this biochip. That’s all. There’s only one molecule deep. That’s—that’s as thin as you can spread it. And, it’s alive. And its—its speed will increase human intelligence to ten to the twentieth power. And, only the guy I was with last night said, “Well, that won’t help me any.” But—

LEE:
Oh, OK. No, I read the article but it’s been a few days—As I remember—it’s like a combination of—of a biological life form plus electronic—

DICK:
Yes. It’s got a coating over it, it’s got a conductive coating over it, yeah, which, I forget the name of it, but it’s a coating that’s conductive. See, they’ve got it down to bubbles, they were down already to the molecular level of information storage and retrieval. They were down to a bubble—what they call a bubble—so miniaturization, they had really made all the breakthroughs they probably ever had to go to in miniaturization, ’cause they were down to a molecular level. But the thing about this is, it’s alive, and it can reproduce. And we told a joke, we told jokes all night: like, uh, we were telling “Goodbye, Mr. Biochips” jokes and stuff like that, you know, and serving biochips and dip, and stuff like that.

This thing can reproduce, and it can divide and it can produce another biochip, it can produce a replication of itself. It can also grow into the human nervous system. They’ll probably attach it to some poor animal first. Which—it could be kind of interesting. ’Cause they—they could—the animal would think then to the twentieth power. And the first thing it’ll do is say, “God, everything looks quite different to me than it did a little while ago. Could—could you guys fix me some coffee? Can I watch the TV? (laughs) Is there anything around to read?” (laughs) Find, find, you know, uh, a, a chipmunk reading the Britannica very rapidly with one of these biochips in it.

LEE:
It does present a whole, a whole different—

DICK:
And the lovely thing is when, when the host dies you pull the biochip out, and it’s now got the host’s memories. Which you could then insert in another host.

LEE:
Well, this is really—

DICK:
And assuming this is not a joke article, I just hope to God this guy’s not over there laughing and thinking about me writing a book based on a nonexistent thing.

LEE:
Now with recombinant DNA, that seems like a plus too.

DICK:
I know, I know. We’re just, we’re just in a new world.

LEE:
It’s moving so rapidly, it’s really exciting.

DICK:
But for the purposes of my book the—the alien decides to biochip himself and insert himself as a symbiote into the human host brain. In the right hemisphere, which processes music. And there the human brain, the human neural tissue will, uh, conceive the music correctly.

This whole thing of conception is terribly important. We do not directly deal with the sense data. I— I’ve studied this for years. I mean this, this to me, this is where I live, this is—I am [unintelligible] when it comes to epistemology. We never get sense data directly. It goes through some kind of enormous methodological organizational system in our minds and brains that we have no understanding—there’s no real explanation of how this occurs. The first one to study this was Descartes, the one who studied probably the most profoundly was Immanuel Kant, who posited some kind of transcendental, transcendent self in each of us that we are not aware of, who organizes all our sense data in terms of time, space, and causation. See, you see, the alien creature would not have this structuring mechanism. He would hear just the raw sense data. And even if we heard the raw sense data, we would not be able to make any sense out of it.

We have some kind of tremendous structuring mechanism. This is why, for instance, when—when people who’ve never heard, like, rock and roll, you know, they were appalled at what they were hearing, you see, because they—they were not structuring, you see. And this is why, you know, like, uh, high school kids who listen to nothing, you know, but Johnny Mathis, for example—who I’m not puttin’ down—but I’m saying if they listen to Johnny Mathis and stuff like that—you know, the Everly Brothers— cannot understand what a symphony, what’s going on in a symphony. You see, there’s a, there’s a structuring that’s required by the—by the recipient himself, by his own mind, by his own brain—it’s probably on a brain level—to organize this material. Which is an interesting thing. Like, when, on—on certain kinds of drugs, the music gets real weird to you, because your brain now is organizing it differently.

I remember one time, I—the first time I took LSD, uh, I had my friend play only music that I was very familiar with […]—I had him play, I tried to think of music that was very innocuous. I mean, I didn’t want no sudden surprises. You know, no surprising stuff. I didn’t want any surprises. I didn’t want any loud noises, I didn’t want anything to scare me while I was on LSD, so had him play Beethoven quartets. So he just played Beethoven quartets. Well, I was sittin’ there and all of a sudden the music got real strange, and it got even stranger and it started to slow down, and the notes began to separate and the music stopped and just continued the last notes and played forever and finally turned into a spiny cactus that I could see and there’s a name for that and it begins with “s” and I can’t say it. I, I looked it up, it’s a word called like “syntheses” or something—you can look it up—it’s where you convert one sense to another, a sound into a, sound into video and video into sound, or something like that. Because of, I got that. So I saw the Beethoven quartet as a cactus. And with each, with each progression into the next measure, the cactus would grow more complex, so it was accretional. It didn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, uh, successive any longer, it was accretional. And it grew larger and larger and more complex.

Well see, now, this is the thing that would confront the alien. He, he would never be able to organize a Beethoven symphony, no matter how long he tried. Simply because these people have never had that sense. Though they, they would hear it, they, they could hear it but they would not understand it, so he’s gonna use a human brain as his interface. And then when he receives it, he will, it will be organized for him by the human brain.

Now, the problem here is, does a human being want an alien in his brain as a symbiote? And I intend to make that a major question. Because now we switch viewpoints in the novel. See? I mean, you’re catching me when I’m actually organizing a novel. This is the most essential part of writing a book is what I am doing right now. We switch viewpoints to the human being who is a composer. Now, that host for a symbiote from this alien planet would be a person who is involved with music all the time and, and has enormously sophisticated mental faculties for processing musical information. In other words, the alien ship has landed way out in the boonies, or it’s in Oregon or something like that, so now they’re picking up, you know. Well, here’s the answer to one of your earlier questions. They’ve picked up our radio transmissions. We’re using radio transmissions already, so that’s sound.

LEE:
How do they have the technology to pick up audio—

DICK:
Well, they pick up the radio signals, they just don’t utilize sound. They use an oscilloscope.

LEE:
Oh, I see.

DICK:
So here’s this guy and he’s a composer. And I’m almost tempted to insert a certain amount of humor in this book. He’s something like a Woody Allen character, he’s kind of a loser composer. Now, he’s real avant-garde but he’s not making any money, you know. Or he’s very commonplace, or something like that. What shall we do? Let’s do it right now—let’s work the book out. We’ll have him be a very routine composer, but financially successful, because how are they going to find him, otherwise? I mean, how are they going to find some avant-garde composer whose music doesn’t sell? They would probably pick somebody, uh, like Mancini. The equivalent of Henry Mancini.

LEE:
(laughs) OK.

DICK:
Some guy who’s writing schmaltzy stuff.

LEE:
He’s gotten a lot of, you know, some popular things.

DICK:
Well, OK, name some guy who writes the most ordinary music but who makes a lot of money doing it. Can you think of—

LEE:
Burt Bacharach.

DICK:
Burt Bacharach! You got it. OK. This is the equivalent of Burt Bacharach but it is only a coincidental resemblance and any resemblance is merely in the mind of the attorneys who are litigating against this.

LEE:
(laughs) OK, maybe we can think of another couple of ’em, make a composite sort of thing, you know?

DICK:
OK, here’s a guy. His name is Ed Firmley. Ed Firmley writes screenplays for cheapo—no, he writes the music for cheapo science fiction movies. You know, these clones of Star Wars. And he makes a lot of money. But he has no original ideas. None whatsoever. And they have this really rotten science fiction film about this detective who’s tracking down these androids. And this guy is writing this schmaltzy score to go with this movie. And he’s well known, he makes a lot of money, but he has no original ideas in the entire world. OK? Now, it’s easy to track him down because he’s well known. They stick the biochip of the alien life form into his brain. OK, now, the bioform is alive and it is essentially the mind of the alien—he’s on that biochip.

LEE:
He’s alive?

DICK:
Yes, he’s on the biochip.

LEE:
So he would become a part of this composer.

DICK:
Yes. But he’s, he’s there in a passive way. He’s just— what they do is—the composer is on his way home from a bar where he spends half his time. So he’s on his way home and they just bop him on the head, you know, and they insert the biochip and he comes to an hour later and doesn’t know what happened, just thinks he got rolled by, you know, a couple of street people, and he goes on home. They make sure they take his wallet, you know, and so on. That’s another thing. Surgically they insert this biochip through their extremely sophisticated technology. You’re in on the ground—I hope—I hope this is recording because I may not remember this, man. No, don’t touch it, no, we don’t even want to go near it. We don’t—it’s turning, the light’s on and it’s recording. Oh, God, if it isn’t recording we’re doomed, man, ’cause I’m assuming—

LEE:
It’ll only take but a second, OK? (checks machine) OK.

DICK:
OK. Now. This guy has a passive biochip in his brain, which is simply there for the purpose of the alien to enjoy the music, using the man’s right hemisphere—

LEE:
How did he get in there? Oh, all right—

DICK:
How did it get in where?

LEE:
How did the biochip get in the musician?

DICK:
They bopped him on the head and performed surgery in the alley.

LEE:
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought they just took his wallet. I—

DICK:
No, I just said he thinks he’s been rolled by some street people. He comes home and he says, “God, I got a splitting headache. I’ve been rolled by some street people. I wonder if I should call the cops.” He doesn’t know they did microsurgery on him: use laser surgery to open up his skull, stick in the biochip, close it up, you know, pat the hair back in place, use a little, you know, Krazy Glue, and send him on his way. But now he’s got this biochip inside him which is alive. And is growing into his neural tissue, see. And it’s there—it’s not there for a harmful purpose. It’s there so it can enjoy music. You got to realize this is a transcendental religious experience that is only known to mystics on their planet. They are now in position to act as a symbiote with the human brain.

So now, this guy goes back to writing this dipshit music, you know, for these cornball science fiction films, you know, makes a lot of money, has a big house in Beverly Hills, you know, and all that kind of stuff. That’s gonna be a lot of fun to write about: just some young nudnick nitwit, you know, guy who makes a lot of money but has no real ideas, you know—he’s completely at the mercy of the studios. They tell him exactly what to do and he does it, you know. They tell him to write, you know, 400 notes, you know, 400 dotted eighth notes in a row, he’ll do it—he does whatever he’s told.

Now, here’s what happens. The biochip lives there passively for a while, and that is the psyche of the alien, it’s—but this guy does nothing but listen to the dullest music available on the planet. That is, he has constantly got his FM turned to KJOY. Got it? So pretty soon the biochip wearies of this, see, ’cause the biochip wants to hear everything that’s going on, you know, everything from the wildest experimental music of people like Brian Eno—shit, I could set this in the present, I don’t have to set it in the future.

LEE:
It’s true.

DICK:
Everything, from Brian Eno, you know, to, uh, Palestrina. Palestrina was the earliest, you know, Josquin Desprez, you know, Josquin Desprez to Eddie and the Hot Rods. You know, everything. Most everything. And the guy is just listening to KJOY every day, you know, writing the same kind of stuff. So, what is the biochip gonna do? Now, it’s grown into his neural tissue, right? So it’s hearing everything he hears but it takes it only about a week to figure out that it’s going to be listening to KJOY for the rest of its life.

LEE:
And it’s aware of other forms of music, you know—it knows there’s something else out there.

DICK:
Yeah, because it also has access to his memories and his knowledge and everything else. But it’s only intended to occupy a passive role, using him as an interface.

LEE:
Wow.

DICK:
Pretty soon it becomes aware that the guy is never going to twist a dial; like when he gets these—see, what happens is when the guy goes to parties and stuff and he—there’s other kinds of music; OK, it’s very easy for the biochip to pick up a couple of seconds of some other kind of music, you know what I mean? Like, for instance, suppose they go to a party and somebody has some old Bessie Smith records. The biochip gets to hear about one and a half minutes of Bessie Smith. How long is that biochip going to sit still for this kind of crap that this guy is listening to? KJOY, right? You hear what I’m saying?

The guy gets into his car, and he’s tuning the car radio, and for a moment he picks up, you know, a Mozart opera. And the biochip hears this. And this is a serious matter. Remember for the biochip this is a mystical experience. It’s like the top level of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He gets a glimpse—not a glimpse, see, it’s the audio equivalent of a glimpse. He gets an audio glimpse of God for a second and this guy turns past some really great music; whether—however you want to define great music. Let’s just say “important” music without saying, like, classical or experimental or avant-garde. But as the guy turns to KJOY, for some reason he goes through the intervening stations and the biochip is just furious at this, because it’s being cheated out of what it wants. Well, it has a remedy. There’s a remedy for the biochip and that’s to take control of the guy’s—

LEE:
Take control.

DICK:
Becomes active, and starts controlling his actions. Anyway, so what finally happens is that the biochip develops a system where it begins to feed the guy mathematical ideas which the guy then converts into music, so now his music that he composes—Well, by this time it’s got him playing every kind of music in the world for it. But it’s not content to do that because the guy’s still writing the same kind of schmaltzy stuff. So it begins to feed him—and here we come back to this thing where mathematics is the basis of music, and mathematics is the basis of the color equivalent on their planet. It begins to feed him complex mathematical concepts which he then converts into music which then pass back to the biochip, which the biochip then remembers. So it is now taking an active role in the creating of musical compositions. And we have all the plot things where this wrecks the guy’s career, you know. But on the other hand, he is now one of the most—if not the most—creative and original composers on earth. I mean, he is now writing music based on the mind of a creature from another civilization, on another planet, in another star system. And the common denominator is mathematics.

This idea came one time I was putting on a, uh, some chamber music one time, and suddenly I realized, “My God, this is essentially audible mathematics.” Because I had been reading a great deal of logic; I had been reading a lot of philosophy. I had been studying logic and realized I was hearing a form of reasoning. I suddenly grasped, I suddenly realized as the composer wrote the music in a linear way, that music is annotated in a linear way, like writing is, even goes from left to right. And all of a sudden I realized the composer was doing with music what I did with writing, and I had never realized it before, only it’s mathematical. And all of a sudden I realized like in Schmenkna, a particular quartet by Schmenkna—who’s not a very good composer but he wrote one quartet that’s incredible and I play it over and over again because I can’t figure out how he did it—I was listening to it one time and I realized it has something to do with mathematics, with ratios, relationships, you know, and values, so on, numerical values and so on.

But this guy is basing his music on a life form from another star system. But it has a common denominator, and that’s math, ’cause math is ubiquitous, number is number. Everyone in the universe—as Carl Sagan is forever saying, math would be, number would be, the lingua franca of the universe. That would be how one civilization would communicate with another. So, he as a human composer can handle its mathematical concepts. But the music that comes out is quite different from anything anyone had ever written. So very rapidly he becomes the equivalent of Beethoven, he becomes the greatest creative genius—I mean, like my Britannica says Beethoven was the greatest creative genius in any field in the human race that we know of. So, pretty soon this guy is no longer writing the schmaltzy stuff for the Hollywood films. He’s beginning to create great music and it’s extremely unusual music. Now, he doesn’t know why. He has no idea where these ideas are coming from. He has no idea he has a biochip inside of him. OK.

LEE:
Right. The only one that knows is the aliens.

DICK:
They know it, yeah, and, of course, being telepathic they are transmitting all that stuff back to the mother ship which is in orbit—they are getting it all down forever. Now, here is where the plot really gets heavy, ’cause the original idea I had was for a Beethoven/Faust character. This thing, this biochip has got the guy writing night and day on these really difficult compositions. He can’t just bat out the same thing over and over again. It is evolving through, uh, hierarchical layers, evolutionary layers of music where greater complexity, greater originality, greater artistic merit, whatever axis you want to describe— it’s evolving like Beethoven’s music did from period to period to period. It becomes evident very soon that this is going to kill the host brain. The host brain will die as a result of the stress imposed on it by having to do this. It is now writing music so complex that the stress on—(pause)

OK, now, the problem arises, now we get into what for me in a way is the most, the profound part of this projected novel. The fact that the pressure being exherted on the host brain by the biochip is beginning to kill the brain, literally.

LEE:
The human brain does not have the capacity to—

DICK:
Right, because you figure this thing is operating—I mean the figure in that article I read is ten to the twentieth power. And the guy is writing great music. And the music is evolving. Now you got to remember, this guy still does not understand why. Now one of the great plot developments of course is when he discovers he’s got a biochip in him. And the next part is when he discovers that there’s an alien life form on the biochip. Now the way he would discover he has a biochip in him is simply he would go to a doctor when he begins to get sick. And the doctor discovers the biochip. Because the biochip is an object and would show up on a—on a CAT scan. Or whatever they use. They don’t use CAT scans—they use brain scans. Well, let’s just say it would show up. And that they—the biochip is detected, it’s discovered. So maybe I’d have to set it in the future. OK, let’s set it in the future.

And then he learns the situation, that he has a biochip in him. That’s why all of a sudden one day he began to have volume. See, for him what he—you know—he’s sitting there one day and all of a sudden he gets an idea for a composition which is radical and different from anything he’s done before. And that’s the beginning. And then they just get better and more radical. But he doesn’t know why. Well, you know, this is almost like Flowers for Algernon. Have you read that? Where the guy who’s mentally retarded, they give him that science—you know— Charlie—it’s a little like that. And that’s OK because I regard that as one of the greatest stories. I saw the movie and bought—I read the story a lot, it’s one of the most tragic and touching things I ever read or seen. This is that story again, but it’s a little different. Because—here’s what I plan to do. At this point the biochip knows that its host—the symbiote, I should really say it’s a symbiote—knows that its host is aware of the situation and now communicates with him. And—

LEE:
It’s on a conscious level.

DICK:
On a conscious level. It, now, the moment Ed Firmley, the composer, discovers the biochip, the biochip then speaks to him. And says, “You are right. You do have a biochip in you.” And it comes out that it’s from another civilization. And the biochip says, “Have them remove me surgically. And you will live on.” And Ed Firmley says, “Yeah, but I won’t be writing any more great music.” And the biochip says, “That’s right, you’ll be back to writing those schmaltzy cornball nothings.” Now, and see what we have here, we don’t have an antagonist situation. We don’t have an adversary situation. This guy benefited from this music. He loved writing this music.

LEE:
And he was receiving some critical acclaim?

DICK:
Yeah. In other words, the act of creating the music was terribly rewarding to him. And the response from the world was terribly important to him. But it’s killing him. There is an easy answer. He went to the doctor knowing something was wrong and now this is the answer to the question of what is wrong. He’s got this biochip in him. The biochip simply says, “Have me removed, and, you know, arrange to have me transported back up to the mother ship.” Or, we can do that. I mean, they can do that, the aliens can do it. The guy says no. “I don’t want to give up the biochip,” he says, “I don’t want to go back to writing that stuff.” He says, “I would rather go on writing this great stuff till I die.” And the biochip says, “Well, your doctor is right. You have like about a month more that you will go and then you will die.” So it’s a very serious problem. And I can see a very great and tragic theme, in this book at this point for this man. Which is different from the Flowers for Algernon. Because there are no choices involved. Charlie Gordon when he became the high IQ—did not have a choice about whether to go back to being an imbecile.

LEE:
Right.

DICK:
This man has a choice. However, it means death. Now, there’s more ways to skin a cat than most readers realize. Because if the alien can be turned into a biochip, the human mind can be turned into a biochip. And the solution that we have is as follows: that Ed Firmley will be made into a biochip. And inserted into the brain of one of the aliens. And what you will get back in exchange is for what is essentially the death of his body—that is, his body will die but he will be made into a biochip—is he will be inserted into the brain of an alien and he will be able to do something that was denied any human before. He will be able to experience their world of vision and color. Their visual world and their color language.

LEE:
A happy ending!

DICK:
More than happy. It’s—it’s ’cause the theme of the book is Faustian. This man has by now in the novel risen like Faust. To levels of tremendous knowledge. Levels of tremendous creativity. But, like Faust, there is a price. The price is death. However, if he could be made—and he can be—into a biochip—he will go into an alien brain when his brain dies. As a biochip. And he will then experience their world just as the alien in his brain was able to experience his world of music.

LEE:
So it’s like a heavenly exchange.

DICK:
Yes it is. It’s on a transcendental level in both cases. For him, this would be heaven for him, you see. He’s— the visual light world—the world of light and color and everything is to the humans what the world of sound is to the aliens. So he says, “OK—wait until we reach the last moment, you know, before there is —arterial sclerosis sets in. Whatever, we’ll just posit something else; arterial sclerosis might very well be what would happen, it might be something like that. But transfer me to a biochip and, he says, if you will then agree to insert me into an alien, one of your species, I will agree to go on another month. ’Cause see, now, by this point—see, this is why it’s not an adversary situation, this is a true symbiosis. True symbiosis is not the same as parasitism. A symbiote is half of a partnership. You have two symbiotes form symbiosis. That’s the difference between parasitism. So they’re both writing this music. The alien is giving the mathematical basis and he’s converting it into music. So that they’re joint composers.

LEE:
Uh-huh. I have a question. Now does his biochip being inserted into the alien pose this same problem?

DICK:
Yes. It will kill the alien.

LEE:
Oh, sad ending.

DICK:
That’s the ending. You guessed it—you guessed it— One of the aliens will have to sacrifice himself and die.

LEE:
To do this.

DICK:
Yes, and one of the aliens on the ship to whom we’ve been introduced is a character who already will agree to give up his life so that this guy, this human being who’s a member of another species can live on and that’s how the book ends. And—what do you think? And so we finally wind up with, we now see from Ed Firmley’s viewpoint what their world of color looks like. We’ve already seen our world of sound from the standpoint of the alien. At the very end we see their world through a human mind.

LEE:
I like it a lot. It really brings out the whole thing where you can’t have happiness without the pain.

DICK:
Oh, yeah.

LEE:
So that it does bring out all the, you know, the human experience into—

DICK:
Right. In my Angel Archer book she, her perception of reality, she says is—the two basic components of reality are pain and beauty. Pain and beauty are the two irreducible components of reality. Pain and beauty. In fact, I’m gonna get that—I have it here somewhere.

You see—this guy who is writing just this cornball music has now become not only a great composer, he is now conscious of real art, he is no longer a hack. I mean, that’s what he’s been really, he’s been a hack. I mean, let’s face it, the guy’s been just a hack. He’s been in it for money. He has this mediocre talent. He’s not experienced great art in terms of music. A human thing. But at the end he gets to experience their color, their color language, their color reality, their reality of light and color. Which would be equivalent to dying and going to heaven. Well, we can’t speculate on what would happen when you do die ’cause no one knows, so I mean that’s problematical. But this is for sure. By being inserted into this alien’s brain he will then see through its eyes and see what no human has really seen except maybe in a few moments when in an ecstatic, you know, trance.

And, yeah, “He who learns must suffer.” This is a quote from Aeschylus that she [Angel] remembers. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our own despair against our will comes wisdom to us, the awful grace of God.” But she’s thinking about this. She’d had this terrible, uh— infected tooth, I mean, where, you know, they have to do root canal therapy on her. Root canal irrigation and she just, and it broke out on a weekend. And what she did was she sat there all night drinking Jim Beam bourbon and reading Dante’s Divine Comedy.

LEE:
Oh, no!

DICK:
And she says, uh, “I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing. I read and I remembered. I did not read Howard the Duck or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comics that night. I read Dante’s Commedia, from Inferno to Purgatorio, until at last I arrived at the three colored rings of light, which is the Trinity. And the time was 9 A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson’s office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast not even coffee and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist’s receptionist. God save me from another night like that, but God damn it, had I not lived out that night, drinking and crying and reading and hurting, I would never have been born, truly born. That was the time of my birth into the real world. And the real world for me is a mixture of pain and beauty, and this is the correct view of it because these are the components that make up reality. And I had them all there that night, including a packet of pain pills to carry home with me from the dentist after my ordeal had ended. I arrived home, took a pill, drank some coffee, and went to bed.” See? And there’s quotations from—from—Dante here: three from when he sees the Trinity. “Three colors from its substance now appeared—” Excuse me—”Three circles from its substance now appeared, of three colors and each an equal whole”—that was Dante’s vision of God as the Trinity. And she says, “Most people, when they try to read the Commedia get bogged down in Inferno and suppose his vision to be that of a chamber of horrors. People head up in shit, people head down in shit, in a lake of ice.” And she goes on.

It’s really a—this is the high point of the book. OK now, see, this theme carries on into this next book now, that we’re talking about. Is that this guy has risen, this human, Ed Firmley, has risen to this— this ecstatic artistic vision. In terms of his own culture, his own civilization. Music. But has killed himself doing it. Now this is the—this is the paradigm of Faust. Faust reaches into a Godlike realm, grasps this thing and brings it back. But dies at the very moment that his hand closes on it. He both simultaneously gets what he’s looking for and dies. Death and victory become one event for the Faustian man. It’s incredible. This is the Faustian victory. If either occurs without the other it wouldn’t be Faustian. It would be something else. I don’t know what it would—you just die—I guess that’s just life, and you know that’s what—that’s the breaks, you know? If you get what you’re looking for it’s Promethean, I guess but, you know, the Faustian man grabs it and dies in the action of grabbing it. Now, he’s offered something else, he offered a kind of a quantum leap into the Faustian thing. He can transcend the entire human civilization, its species, and reach up into another species’ artistic vision. Which is color.

LEE:
But with his biochips then I suppose it would be possible for the alien that he was transplanted into—this is like the third person. I mean the first feeling that the biochip comes up with is the musician. If he goes—he’s still existing, I take it.

DICK:
Well, you know, I don’t know what to do with it. Now, I can work it either way. Now I’ve thought of the business of the direct reciprocal transfer, where he gets—where Firmley has his biochip that goes into the brain of the very alien who became a biochip in his brain, but that way we would have two of everybody. We have the person as the brain going on and we have the biochip version, so what we’re doing is cloning people. And I don’t like that because that gets awful. But once we start doing that it’s another clone novel. You know, where guys are cloning themselves. So what I’m going to posit is that when the biochip is actually an intact personality, the original brain is gone—’cause otherwise you could biochip yourself forever. You could create thousands of yourselves, you know. So this is kind of a mental cloning and I just cannot go that route because it’s too easy. It’s just too goddamn easy. You know—

LEE:
You’d have to have a series—

DICK:
There would never be any problem. No problem would ever arise for anybody once you could do that. I’ve got to set some kind of limits, you see.

LEE:
Right.

DICK:
So I’m going to say that when the alien biochipped himself, he died as an organic brain and lived on only in the biochip form. In order that—

LEE:
So he gave up his life to experience this, to transmit it back—

DICK:
Yeah, yeah, yeah—

LEE:
So he’s like the Christ figure because he gave his life for his cause—

DICK:
No! No. He gave it for his own delectation.

LEE:
Oh—

DICK:
He gave it for his own experience of human music. He did transmit it back but he’s the one who experienced it. So he was Faustian. The alien was the first Faustian one. Ed Firmley is now transformed into a Faustian figure. And now we have a second alien, and the second alien who really gives up his life. Of course now, we can add another ending, we can add—there’s still one thing left. If Firmley goes in as a biochip into this alien, then the alien is now the host for this biochip and they are in symbiosis: we’re back to the original situation where the alien goes in as a biochip and the [unintelligible] is reversed. The human is a biochip, the alien is the host. OK. Ed Firmley is in there, see, as a biochip and he sees colors and everything, and he sees language and all that. And after about a week he discovers that all this alien does is sit in front of a computer. He says, “This is not all that interesting. Let’s get back to the home planet.” And then he does to that alien what the original alien in the biochip did to him. He—

LEE:
He pushes the symbiote out—

DICK:
He pushes him, yeah, he pushes him out. Yeah. And so we really get to that ending anyway where he kills the alien. Where the alien dies, eventually, because Firmley is now putting such tremendous pressure on the aliens that the aliens, like—and they know it, they know it, when they do it. They know that when it gets into that brain and he grows out of the biochip into the neural tissue that he will begin to exert the same tremendous pressure because what you have is sensory hunger. You have hunger for stimuli. Which, by the way the brain does—the human brain does have an actual hunger for stimuli. Well, can you imagine Firmley in this alien brain? I mean, he would want to experience everything—it’s like people coming out and saying, “I want to go to Disneyland,” you know, they want to go to Knott’s Berry Farm, they want to go to the Huntington Library, you know; when we went to France, for instance, we want to go to the Louvre—I mean, we can’t go there and not go to the Louvre. So he’s going to want to do all that stuff. You know. When he’s exactly—everything is now turned around, but the difference is that now they know—the alien knows when he receives, when he actually hosts the biochip, that this is gonna happen. Whereas, Ed Firmley of course did not know because he was not consulted when they stuck the biochip in him. But this—the entity—the alien is the true Christ figure, the second entity, not the first one. The second one.

LEE:
But he, the, OK, but he was just going to be—have you decided yet? Is he going to be a random selection or is he going to be a guru with disciples, or is he just going be a computer technician?

DICK:
I—I’m going to, uh, leave that open ’cause I don’t want to write the end before I get right to it. It’ll be—this is—I guess it’s OK—this is something I better check, you know, to develop. This is something I’m pretty sure about, you know, we’re [unintelligible] . Yeah.

LEE:
Well, that’s what I mean, because you’re in different phases.

DICK:
Yeah, I’m gonna leave it, I’m gonna wait till I get to the end and decide how they’re gonna handle it. You know. But I—I—

LEE:
It poses some real interesting options you could use.

DICK:
I’m going to leave those options open till I actually get to it.

LEE:
Oh, I see.

DICK:
But, I swear to God, you know, I was lying there when I—you know, Snoopy in his doghouse—(phone rings)—Oh, shit, it’s Tessa, I’ll get it. […]

LEE:
Let’s hear more about you. OK. Your experiences of writing. We’ve heard about this new one—have you got a tentative title for it?

DICK:
It’s got a title all right—it’s called The Owl in Daylight, you see.

LEE:
The Owl in Daylight.

DICK:
Yeah, it’s a folk expression from the South where the guys meet and he says that’s the—it means he’s—his judgment is clouded. An owl being blind in daylight. Owls cannot see in daylight. They become confused and they fly into things and get killed—it simply means a person whose judgment is clouded over. And I heard it on a TV program just as a line spoken by a character and it made a tremendous impression on me. “The owl in daylight.” And I wanted to write about a guy who pushes his brain to its limit. He’s aware that he has reached his limit but voluntarily decides to go on and pay the consequences. And then I realized that this is simply a restatement of the whole Faustian thing—is that this, in point of fact, is what the whole Faustian thing is about, that the consequences are ignored in the pursuit of what for a creative person is some kind of artistic vision. But it could be the same with money. I mean it could be, you know, the acquisition of property, it could be, could be.

I mean, it’s really the striving where the person becomes aware of whatever it is he’s striving for is the cost. You know, the ratio, like, you know on a graph where the cost rises in proportion to the output, is that the cost line is rising higher and closing the gap all the time, you know. So that you could look on the graph, you can see that those two lines are going to meet and finally the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line—the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line, you know. And this is something I’m beginning to realize about myself that, uh, although I think my writing is getting better all the time, my, my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be. I mean, and also I’m doing so much more research that the wear on me in doing a book is just—well, you hear people say, like, they can no longer drink as much as they used to drink, you know, and it’s—there’s not really that much difference. I mean, uh, for some people it’s very different, for some people it’s drugs, for me it’s writing books, and now—now it’s—I can still write well but the cost—I mean I can just see this graph in my mind, you know, where this cost line is going to finally meet the yield line and the the cost line is going to go above [the] yield line, you see, and it’s inevitable. And then you have—

LEE:
Do you feel it’s imminent?

DICK:
No. I don’t. I really don’t. I think that that’s one reason I—I haven’t done any writing for some time. I mean, I wrote the Bishop Archer novel last May.

LEE:
Last May, OK. I was going to say ’cause you have quite a—several months—well obviously, since you’re just starting this new one, so it’s been quite a few months before you can—but you said that that almost killed you, you did have physical repercussions to that novel.

DICK:
Yeah, I was bleeding internally. When I got finished I was living on aspirin, scotch, and potassium tablets. And, uh, we—I sent the book off. They had put me under a very strict deadline. They wanted it right away, they said right away if you’re really gonna do it, I mean, uh, we can’t get it put through if it takes a while. And I just sat down—and it’s a literary novel and I have not ever sold a literary novel. I’ve only sold science fiction novels and I started writing and on page three I realized I couldn’t do it. I mean, there was just no doubt that I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t a mental thing where I got a block, it wasn’t a psychological thing where I got panicked out; I just suddenly realized that I—I mean it just—there’s just some things you can do and some things you can’t do. And I showed the three pages to a friend of mine who’s an editor and a writer and we worked for hours trying to figure out how to do a fourth page, just get one more page, and he could see just no way to go on. And I then decided that I had to do it whether I could do it or not. Which is, you know, kind of odd, because if you can’t do it you can’t do it, but I just wouldn’t admit I couldn’t do it, and I did go on and I did write it and they did accept it.

I sent it off and […] was waiting to hear from my agent. He took it with him on his vacation, his summer vacation, and he was going to call from home—from his cabin or wherever the hell he went. And we were sitting here and I was drinking scotch, and all of a sudden I started bleeding and I knew it was from everything. I mean, I knew that I had written a book but I really wondered, you know, at that point if I was going to survive physically. And I never even told the doctor about it because I figured it was, you know, it’s like your headaches, when they start— it’s a coefficient of all the stresses, the fear of failure.

The fact was I turned down a very lucrative, uh, offer to do another novel, which would have been a strictly commercial novel, for a very large amount of money, and that having turned that down and did the literary novel, Bishop Timothy Archer novel, I all of a sudden was confronted with the possibility that I couldn’t write the Bishop Timothy Archer novel. So I had turned down a lot of money to do—and then gone on to do a literary novel for a very small sum and then found out I couldn’t do it. And I had come so close to failure, and at that point we didn’t know— my agent had called to say, you know, that he had started but was unable to read it. He read the first twenty pages and just had to put it down. He said that he’d never had that happen to him before. With a novel, ever, that he literally couldn’t read it, he found it unreadable. It was just too shocking—

LEE:
Was this a literary novel or a science fiction novel?

DICK:
Well, it’s literary. It’s set the day John Lennon died. It’s—the girl is driving, she lives in Berkeley and she’s driving to Sausalito to sit in on a, uh, a lecture on Sufism, which is Arab—Arabic mysticism. And she hears about John Lennon’s death and it makes her think about the death of her husband, and her best friend, and her father-in-law, and then the rest of the book is really her memories of those three people.

LEE:
John Lennon’s death shook a lot of people.

DICK:
Yeah, well, it starts out—it’s interesting, because this is something that I thought would resonate with a lot of people. It’s—the book starts out—it’s all told from her viewpoint. I mean, it’s almost as if it’s a diary by her. This book is—there’s a name for this kind of thing—epistolary or something. It’s almost like a letter.

LEE:
Oh, I see, yeah.

DICK:
It starts out: “Barefoot”—that’s the guy’s name— “Barefoot,” she says, “conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs 100 dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed, and I think I know why we are on this earth. It’s to find out that what you loved the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places, rather than by design.” And that’s how the book opens. And she’s just all messed up. And you don’t understand what’s the matter. Her thoughts are jagged and they—they’re chaotic and they’re bitter. They’re terribly bitter. She says, uh, “That was how I first heard Edgar Barefoot, who impressed me initially as a jerk-off with a little voice. . . ,” And so she’s this very, very bitter person and then, uh, the chapter ends where she thinks she says—I am in the last paragraph of the first chapter— she says, “I am the last living person who knew Bishop Timothy Archer in the Diocese of California. His mistress, his son, my husband, the home owner and wage earner pro forma. Somebody should, well it’d be nice, if no one went the way they collectively went, volunteering to die, each of them went Parsifal, a perfect fool.” And then it goes back to those days when those people were alive. And it goes through the events that led up to their deaths, and their deaths. Back to the moment the book opens, it recirculates back to that very moment that the book opened, so it comes back to the present.

Chapter fourteen is the next moment after the end of the first chapter. “Facing a smiling, a moon-white smile, Edgar Barefoot said—” So you’re back all of a sudden in the present. Then the rest of the book is now this teacher, this Edgar Barefoot, this Sufi guru—and then “guru” is not actually the correct word—it should be “fakir”—but anyway, he brings back her humanity. He brings her out of this state of, uh—she’s literally destroyed as a person by the death of these people, ’cause she never really cares about anybody or anything again. And so it is a literary novel. It is a novel about the crushing effect of death on a very intelligent, sensitive young woman who really loved her friends very deeply. And in writing it I’m really exploring the subject of the effect of the death of someone that one loves very much. The loss of a loved one. And it changes you and you’re dehumanized by it. That suffering does not ennoble. I’ve never really bought the idea that we are somehow better off for suffering. I show that all this happened, and it did damage her. She did not benefit from it, they did not benefit from it, so the real question then toward the end of the book is, “Did anything happen that adds up to anything?” and, uh, so the resolution of the book is tremendously important and it’s a very serious novel, although there’s some funny parts in it.

LEE:
Do you feel you’d want to do a literary novel again? Since this next one is science fiction, do you feel more comfortable with this?

DICK:
I really would—I have to admit that I don’t think that I would do another literary novel. I mean, I wanted to explore that topic ’cause I had a number of friends die that I was very close to. And that—it wasn’t so much that I wanted to write a literary novel, it was I wanted to write that particular novel. I did want to write about the effect of death of a loved one on you.

LEE:
So the fact that it was, uh, literary just was a byproduct—

DICK:
Essentially it didn’t—uh, yeah. But I mean, I just— you know I’m interested in intellectual ideas, in science fiction ideas, like the biochip is fascinating. I just—I can’t stop thinking about biochips and all—

LEE:
Well, science fiction does not limit the imagination.

DICK:
No, I mean that’s the great thing about it. Right. I mean—

LEE:
It’s marvelous—that’s the whole thing—

DICK:
Yeah, science fiction is a lot more fun. This was not fun to write. This book was not fun. I worked very hard and I did a good job; I think the book is OK. But I must say that it was the most arduous thing I have ever done. I have never worked so hard and produced so little in my life. I mean I could not in any way—

LEE:
No, how do you mean by so little?

DICK:
Well I mean I don’t have very much to show for it. I mean, I could have written five science fiction novels.

(tape ends)

2-3-74

January 15, 1982

LEE:
(Laughs)

DICK:
Are we on the air?

LEE:
Yeah, we’re on the air now.

DICK:
OK, far out! Shall I talk ’60s talk? Far out, I can dig it. Outta sight.

LEE:
I can dig it, I can dig it—

DICK:
Far out. Cool. That’s the least cool. I can dig it, I can dig it. OK, first question.

LEE:
Well, I guess the first—

DICK:
Do you want to get a little personality onto the tape? Or what?

LEE:
That’s what I was looking for, a little bit of personality. Just the little casualness. That’s a good topic to bring up, the ’60s. Did you do a lot of writing in the ’60s?

DICK:
Oh, yeah. In fact, in five years I published eighteen novels. (laughs) In five years, what a lot of stories!

LEE:
Yeah. I mean you were saying earlier that you had to make a decision on your life at that time, whether you wanted to seek a new generation or take a little redirection.

DICK:
Right.

LEE:
This is when you went to, uh, Canada?

DICK:
This was not—no, this was in 1964, when I left Anne. Uh, I was beginning to notice that, uh, I began to notice—I had begun to notice that there was serious differences in the ideology of those chronologically my peers, and the ideology of those considerably younger than myself. Perceiving this fact, I had to ask myself which ideology was most syntonic to my own temperament. With great reluctance I abandoned the burned-out old freaks that didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground and went with the kids. And I have never regretted it.

LEE:
So what group, what age group of people do you identify with most?

DICK:
Now or then? ’Cause it’s changed now.

LEE:
Well, I suppose—well, are they the same?

DICK:
No, I—I—

LEE:
The same group of people, or are you still staying— you know, like, people that were then fifteen—

DICK:
Oh, I see, have grown older. I see what you mean. No, uh—

LEE:
I guess the Timothy Leary generation we’d call it—or the Dr. Spock generation.

DICK:
Right. No, I don’t see much of that because they really are into property and professions and stuff like that. But, what I am into—profession stuff, you know, too, but—

LEE:
You’re dealing more with a young group?

DICK:
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, yeah—

LEE:
I mean, like the eighteen to twenty-five—

DICK:
Right, yeah. I was thinking especially in terms of my writing. You know, it’s—I seem to be able to communicate with them better than I can with the older people.

LEE:
My God, you’re putting me over the hill—

DICK:
Oh, I don’t—

LEE:
(Laughs) Oh, don’t take it personally. No, I’m just telling you—I’m in the over-twenty-five group.

DICK:
Well—

LEE:
What [unintelligible]

DICK:
(picks up plastic Yoda doll) “Gee,” it says.

LEE:
It’s a real blow to find out I’m too old for Phil Dick. (laughs)

DICK:
Hey, this—honey, would you tell me what that says? That can’t say what it says. That’s—that’s just dopey. (laughs) I can’t make hide nor hair out about that.

LEE:
(laughs) He’s Yoda—it said—”Ready”—I lost it—it said: “Ready you are not.”

DICK:
Who talks like that? (laughs) Who says “ready you are not”?

LEE:
Yoda does.

DICK:
Is that Jewish or something?

LEE:
It’s Yoda. Yoda talks that way.

DICK:
Nobody talks that way.

LEE:
Well, Yoda does. Yoda talks that way.

DICK:
I guess so. Does he say, “Ready you are not?”

LEE:
“Ready you are not,” and then, comma, “No.”

DICK:
He’s correct, now that I—

LEE:
So when you’re writing you usually really go for the young group that you think is more open to your ideas?

DICK:
Yeah, right.

LEE:
Of course they are. They’ve got less biases, less thinking alike.

DICK:
Yeah. And also I think younger people want more information shot at them. I mean—

LEE:
Well, they have the time and the ability to assimilate it without so many other responsibilities tugging at them.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
As you said, people of the 60’s generation with all the property and so forth, and like, myself, yeah, I don’t have the time I had to read before.

DICK:
Right. I mean I don’t hardly read. I very rarely read a novel.

LEE:
You know, your time is taken up with other things; you’re worrying about mortgages, am I going to be able to afford a house?

DICK:
Exactly.

LEE:
Will I ever even have one?

DICK:
And if you have kids—

LEE:
God, well then that just compounds it.

DICK:
Yeah, yeah.

LEE:
Yeah, it is, it’s real difficult for the older generation. They have to make an effort where it’s not so rough for the younger people. Which is great, which is the way it should be.

DICK:
The only thing is like, I—I’m writing—what I’m writing now it tends to have a religious element in it. And now, I’m not really sure if that appeals to many people, but it’s something that’s become very important to me, this religious element in a number of books now. Based on an actual experience I had in 1974. I wasn’t really interested in it before then, and, uh—a very extraordinary experience. And, uh, I have been trying for eight years to figure out what happened and every line of reasoning and research that I take leads me back to a religious explanation. I mean, in other words it’s not something I just accept on faith; I studied and talked to people, I’ve written about it, I mean I’ve thought about it, you know, and I can’t break it down into anything but a genuine religious experience. And, uh, and it’s really funny because like I feel it saved my life but it saved the life of my little boy, too, Christopher. He had—

LEE:
Was that the experience?

DICK:
Well, yeah, he had an undiagnosed birth defect that would have killed him, and the doctor had didn’t know. He was just a baby, my little boy was then, see. And, OK, I’ll tell you. OK—I know it’s dopey, right? But this presence appeared and told me about my little boy’s defect—birth defect. Exactly down to anatomical details. And I ran in and I told Tess. No, first there was this flash of light, hit me right in the face and blinded me. It did. And it came out and all I could see was this pink and I was listening to this Beatles tune on the stereo and all of a sudden the words rearranged themselves. And there was something outside me. But what I heard was the Beatles’ words rearranged. It told me that my little boy had this, you know, undiagnosed birth defect, and it told me what the birth defect was. And when I told Tess and I said, you must take him to the doctor immediately, it’s urgent, she went right to the hospital to the doctor, and it was true. He did have that defect and he scheduled surgery for as soon as possible. And, uh, this went on for years. This went on for a whole year. This presence would talk to me. And, it used scientific terms. And it used Greek terms, and it used Hebrew terms. And I mean, you know—

LEE:
And it happened for how long?

DICK:
For one year. From February 1974 to February 1975.

LEE:
And then it just stopped.

DICK:
It went in a beautiful, beautiful way. It showed me what’s called the Golden Section, which is a rectangle of certain proportions with a short end and a long end, 8 x 13. It showed me that and signed off, and that’s the great Golden Rectangle that forms the basis of the universe, that’s the base of the Fibonacci numbers. I didn’t know that then, I’ve researched it—that ratio is found throughout the entire universe, from snail shells and tiny things and the growth of human hair to extragalactic nebulae—and it signed off with that. And they, I read it in the Britannica, they said that the properties of those Fibonacci numbers are unknown. They seem to be the basis of the universe.

LEE:
Huh!

DICK:
And that’s how it signed off. And I saw it here and I saw it there and it was incredible. And I saw things, Gwen, that I’ve never been able to tell anybody except Tessa, and it was like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light hit him and he never could tell people everything and I—

It just, it all started when I was on Pentothal and a girl came to the door with some medication from the pharmacy. Some pain medication. And she was wearing a Christian fish sign. And I was dazed from the Pentothal and dazed from the pain and I saw the fish sign and a strange funk came over me and I said—now, I was in terrible pain you know and I’m reaching for the bag and I said, “What is that?” and it shone when the sun struck it and it blinded me. And she put a finger against it and she said this is a sign used by the early Christians and when she said that, I remembered, I remembered. Back all the way to the time of Acts. I remembered events that took place in the book of Acts. I remembered it all and just for a fraction of a second and then it was gone and then during the next month it began to break through. It broke through this world of the early Christians, and I saw it here and now. Saw it here and now. It was here. Some of us who are Christians and some of us who are not. And this terrible iron empire. And I found out that it is the name of the particular age that this is associated with, the age of iron. The Romans had designated it the age of iron. And I saw this—it was called The Empire—and I kept saying to Tess, I said, “Earlay, Earlay”—and it’s Sanskrit, and it means “angry soldiers.” I said, the Roman soldiers will kill us. Because we are Christians. The Roman soldiers would kill us. And I taught her—here, I’ll show you what I taught her, come here, give me your hand. OK, when you shake hands, go like that and describe two arcs, intersecting arcs, that’s the fish sign, that’s the fish sign. And there were other things that I knew, so that I could identify another Christian, without anybody else knowing. And other things like that. And I remembered sitting with the Eleven, with the Twelve, it was after Jesus’ death. There were only eleven of us. The Lord was gone, and he was about to return. And they were real happy, they were terribly happy. But he wasn’t with us, but we remembered—we could literally remember—we could remember the Lord. We were joyful. We were just incredibly joyful. And this lasted for a year, and that’s—and, uh, the presence that appeared to me identified itself as “Hagia Sophia,” Saint Sophia, and I didn’t know what that meant. And I looked it up and you know what it said it is? It’s a code name that the Roman emperor Justinian coined for Christ. It’s a name of a church, uh, in Turkey that the emperor Justinian built and he called it “Saint Sophia,” which means “the creative Logos” or “Jesus Christ.” And I had never heard that before. I didn’t know anything about that. And it identified itself as Saint Sophia.

LEE:
Well, that’s real obscure. I’d never—

DICK:
Right. Isn’t it incredible? I found it in the encyclopedia. He wanted to call it after Christ, but there was a custom that they named the churches after saints, and he discovered that if you took the Greek from the Sixth Psalm, “Hagia Sophia,” and translated it it became “Saint Sophia,” uh, that’s “holy wisdom,” is what that is. So it sounded like the name of a saint. But it really means “Holy Wisdom,” Hagia Sophia. And it refers to Christ and it’s from the Sixth—or no, I’m sorry, it’s from the Eighth Proverb. Yeah, the Eighth Proverb. Incredible. It’s just incredible. OK, it’s part of the cipher in the Old Testament, it refers to the coming of the savior of the New Testament. And after Jesus does come, then we can look back and see the ciphers in the Old Testament, like in Isaiah. But until Jesus comes, you can’t see them. They’re not visible. And this is the one that is visible to the people around the time of the Emperor Justinian when he said “Hagia Sophia”; in Proverbs it was referring to Christ.

LEE:
How strange!

DICK:
Yeah, so he called the church that—St. Sophia. And I had never heard of this. I only found this in one source that referred to it. Will Durant says that in his history books about the Middle Ages. And, and the voice said, “Saint Sophia was not acceptable before”— no, no, “Saint Sophia is going to be born again. She was not acceptable before.” That’s what it said.

LEE:
“She”?

DICK:
“Saint Sophia is going to be born again, she was not acceptable before,” and I didn’t know who Saint Sophia was; I was going, “Who cares about sainthood?” I’m looking it up and it says “the creative Logos or Jesus Christ, a code by the Emperor Justinian used to name a great church in Asia Minor, now a mosque in Turkey, one of the wonders of the ancient world.”

LEE:
That’s real strange—

DICK:
Yes, it is real strange.

LEE:
Well, uh, so what does that mean?

DICK:
Well, literally it means Jesus Christ is going to be reborn again, and soon.

LEE:
Born again?

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
I understand that this time with a bunch of angels coming out of the sky.

DICK:
Yeah, exactly. A multitude of the heavenly host.

LEE:
I didn’t think he was going to stick around. I understood that all Christians are going to go right up.

DICK:
You know, I can’t find that anywhere in the Bible. Do you know where that is? That citation and stuff, about the rapture? I—that rapture thing? I can’t figure out—

LEE:
Acts, I think, chapter four. Do you have a Bible?

DICK:
Oh sure, I got Bibles all around here.

LEE:
I’m not positive about it, here, but I can take a good look at it—

DICK:
Oh, I’d be real interested in it, especially if it’s in Acts. It’d be really, really great if it were in Acts.

LEE:
Do you like Paul?

DICK:
Yeah, but of course you know Luke wrote Acts, but, I mean, the second part, you know, of the Gospel according to Luke. But I love Paul’s letters. Especially the captivity letters.

LEE:
I always thought he was a misogynist.

DICK:
I know.

LEE:
Which always put me off, I never cared for him much. How the heck do you read this thing? Oh, here it is. (reads)

DICK:
Oh.

LEE:
I’m still reading here.

DICK:
Well, we’re checking outside notation here. I love Acts and Luke. I love where it’s so fluent, and so beautiful. And I always feel very close to him.

DICK:
So in other words, it was as if I were—as I were in the book of Luke—it was if I were there. Like I was in that world. And, like, remember one part where I, uh, oh, King Herod said, “What is that noise out there?” And somebody says, “It’s the followers of John the Baptist.” And Herod says, “John? I beheaded him!” OK, I come to that part and I stopped and I said, wait a minute, they didn’t know how to write dialogue at that time in these books and I said, wait a minute, could it be the translation? OK, so I checked several other translations. And they—it was all that way and I thought, “Wait a minute. I’m a professional writer.” Now, I’m not arguing that the Bible’s a fake. I’m arguing something else. What I’m saying is that nobody who wrote in those days had the literary techniques which show up in the Gospels. As literary craftsmanship they did not evolve until centuries later. That is, if I were to read the book of, you know, Acts or the Gospel according to Saint Luke, and never read it before, and you asked me to date it, I would date it recently. I wouldn’t date it as an ancient book. I’ll give you another example, is where it says, “And Mary treasured all and Mary remembered all these things that Jesus had said and treasured them in her heart.” They didn’t know how to write like that. I mean, structurally, it’s like— it’s hard to explain. It’s where the observer is in relationship to the people that are being observed. And they only wrote from outside in those days, they didn’t know how to get into things and say, “And she treasured them in her heart.” They didn’t know how to write that kind of thing where they describe their thoughts, the inner world of characters. It did not exist in writing.

LEE:
There seems to be that each translator over the years would find it real hard not to elaborate.

DICK:
Well, everything we read from those times is technically translation, of course.

LEE:
Right. That’s what I mean. So each translator maybe added a little bit here and there. A little more polish. Make it a little more interesting.

DICK:
No, I am learning Greek. See, I’m going to go back to the original Greek. It’s—it’s real slow but I’m learning Greek to read the Bible. And I remember one day I was sitting here and I says, I remember in John, chapter three, it says, “God is love.” And the Britannica mentions that, you know. It says in definitions of God that in later Judaism and in Christianity the nature of God is said to be love, not power or wisdom but love. So I thought, I can read that in the original Greek. And, I’ll see if it’s eros or agape or what, which, and I read it and it said agape. And I thought, I’m reading in the original Greek, I’m not reading a translation. I am reading what that man wrote in his language, the three words—”God is love”—although it was not in that sentence order. I know which is theos, you know, for God, and agape is love, so I know how to get to “is” and I thought, almost 2,000 years is eradicated. And that’s what it says, too. And it doesn’t say “God is loving,” you know, so that it is an attribute of God, it says he is love. That’s different.

LEE:
I’ve often been intrigued by the people who promote the idea that God is in you, therefore you are God, uh, I know it’s kind of dumb but it’s never been real clear—(phone rings)

(tape ends)

BLADE RUNNER

Part 2

January 15, 1982

LEE:
Are we back on?

DICK:
She’s got a tremendous collection of books.

LEE:
But he’s just a little kid. You know, it just amazes me.

DICK:
Yeah. My therapist says a whole new generation, you know, is now growing up on The Doors.

LEE:
It is? That’s neat.

DICK:
He laughed, you know, when I mentioned that I liked The Doors so much, he wanted me to explain to him—well, of course, what amazes me in a way is Mick Jagger. I mean, he was so great at that concert at Paramount.

LEE:
Did you go? I didn’t—

DICK:
We didn’t go—we’d just see it on TV.

LEE:
Oh, I see.

DICK:
Yeah, and uh, it cost so much to go down there.

LEE:
He looks a lot better than he ever did before.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
Got off the junk and stuff—

DICK:
Yeah, isn’t it remarkable?

LEE:
Been working out—

DICK:
Yeah, jogs and stuff—

LEE:
Yeah.

DICK:
He’s forty years old. I mean, God, that was a great concert. And the next night I turned on Meat Loaf, who I really like. I think he’s so good—

LEE:
Oh! (laughs)

DICK:
I really like him.

LEE:
No, he’s grody—he’s disgusting.

DICK:
I know he is, man. Poor old Meat Loaf—you know when he’s not singing he looks like some jive turkey sittin’ on the back step, you know, at Bohunk Corners, Macon—

LEE:
And he plays those dippy little—you know, the nighttime stuff, you know, uh, oh, what do they call—well, we have on our cable, Night Flight and stuff, and I’ve caught him on there but he plays those dippy little half-hour programs on the top forty country songs and the top forty pop songs—

DICK:
I know. I like the guy, I think—

LEE:
Everybody needs somebody, you know. Meat Loaf needs you.

DICK:
I remember one time I had the uh—

LEE:
He got—he’s got this certain thing, this stage presence—he, um, intrigued me and almost as equally repulsed me.

DICK:
Well—

LEE:
Which is a strange combination.

DICK:
OK, I watched the guy first with the sound off. And I thought, if he’s as bad audibly as he is visually— he is so bad that nothing like this has ever existed. OK.

LEE:
(laughs) That’s pretty bad. But he does have a strange—

DICK:
I turned it on, you know, I turned the sound on, and I thought it was pretty good. Because I started out from looking at it, you know. But—

LEE:
You were intrigued enough to turn on the sound— I mean, you know, he grabbed you just like that.

DICK:
I mean it’s—

LEE:
Basically, TVs are better if they’re off.

DICK:
This is good wine. What year did you say it is? It looks like a cabernet—

LEE:
It’s 1982 here, you know. We can’t afford the vintage stuff.

DICK:
OK, well, see, that’s the trouble. I’m so rich that I think everybody gets the—

LEE:
We don’t have a wine cellar. I haven’t done that yet.

DICK:
What’s that?

LEE:
I said I haven’t learned to be a wine snob. I’m working on it.

DICK:
Hey, it’s not worth it, there’s always somebody better than you that’s worked longer at it.

LEE:
Yeah, but I always wondered if they are really sincere or if they just, you know—

DICK:
Well, a friend of mine got me for Christmas a 1974 Louis Martini reserved stock zinfandel. And I took it over to Juan and Sue’s as a—oh, it was so good. OK. We just sipped it. Little tiny, tiny sips until the whole bottle was gone. And it was just like we had drunk, you know, like cough syrup or something. I go in to buy some more. They don’t have the ’74, they have the ’78. Buy it, and bring it home, it’s no good at all. Turned out the ’74 had cost a lot more money—that was a very good year, they said, for the zinfandel. ’78 was not. So everything was the same label, same grapes, and one was real good and one was not. So maybe there is something to that, you know?

LEE:
Probably so, but I just wonder if the person who is affecting the wine taste—

DICK:
Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, I pulled something like that on a guy one time. I had bought a bottle of Rémy-Martin cognac. I called this friend and mentioned that I had it and he said, “I’m going to come over and have some, I really love it.” So he’s on the way over, and I had this bottle of $3.95 joke Armagnac—it wasn’t even a cognac, it was Armagnac. Just the worst Armagnac in the world. So I switched bottles. So he comes over and he pours this joke Armagnac, which isn’t a cognac, into the brandy snifter and says, yes, I can always tell the taste of Remy-Martin. So he got to drink all that he wanted because my bottle of Rémy-Martin was back in the pantry. With the, you know, and he, you know, it wasn’t even a cognac, it was, uh, Armagnac, which is—

LEE:
And he actually—

DICK:
Oh, he not only thought it was a cognac but he thought it was Rémy-Martin. And he said, “I can always tell the taste of Rémy-Martin.”

LEE:
How adorable! Well, that’s what I thought.

DICK:
Hey, do you know that all the time I had a friend who was music critic for the New York Times. And one time he came by and he had this album of a Haydn quartet played by the Hungarian Quartet. It had just come out. And he said, “Hungarian Quartet is the best quartet group in the world.” So he puts the record on and he has to go to the bathroom so he takes off. Now, I had this recording called “Great Performances” and it was anonymous, orchestras and chamber groups. You know them, their arrangement—they were literally anonymous, you know. So I take off the one with the Hungarian Quartet and put on this one and this one is a real cheap label and the side’s real noisy, you can hardly hear the players and he listens and he says, “Yes, the Hungarian Quartet definitely is the finest string quartet playing in the world today.” And I showed him what he was listening to. It’s another group entirely. They’re not even identified. And it’s an old recording, and the fidelity is terrible, this—the only thing that is the same is that when he went out of the room that particular quartet was playing and when he came back in the same piece of music was playing, but outside of that, in other words, there was nothing in common.

Another time, a guy was saying to me, and he says, when we had 78 [rpm] records, he says, “I really like Mahler a lot. Mahler is my favorite composer.” And I had a stack of Mahler symphonies, 78s, a whole stack of them. So he goes out of the room and I whip the stack off and put a Sibelius side on and it’s a Sibelius symphony, so it drops next. You know, so it goes from a Mahler symphony to a Sibelius symphony. He says, “Yes, this is indeed one of my favorite parts of Mahler—” (laughs) It’s not even Mahler.

LEE:
You’re mean. You’ve got a real ornery streak, don’t you!

DICK:
Well I, yeah, I guess you’re right. But I—I mean, it’s so funny, ’cause—

LEE:
I know, they set themselves up for it, too—

DICK:
They do, ’cause I’ll say, you know, frankly, you know, I understand everything there is to know about this stuff.

LEE:
Yeah, what I don’t know I usually try to just keep my mouth shut. ’Cause I figure, well, you know, if don’t say anything I won’t appear that fucked. That’s why I won’t comment on something, you know, and try to bluff my way—that’s too, I know there’s too good of a chance that you can blow it.

DICK:
I’ve caught myself agreeing that I’ve read a certain book that I hadn’t and I realized that sooner or later, you know, I’m going to make some ghastly mistake, that somebody’s gonna make up a book title or something like that.

LEE:
I usually say, “It sounds familiar.”

DICK:
Yeah, well, you can’t fault that.

LEE:
I like to be real vague on those sorts of things.

DICK:
(regarding plastic Yoda) This is so cute, isn’t it?

LEE:
You know, I like the way he talks on the bottom too. I didn’t realize that it was the old-fashioned eight-ball stuck in there.

DICK:
That’s what it is, yeah.

LEE:
What does it say now? “Reckless are you, no.”

DICK:
He sure talks funny.

LEE:
(laughs) He sure does. What the hell does he mean? I’ll have to ask the kids—they’d know.

DICK:
God, this Blade Runner thing is so—

LEE:
Are you going to have toys and stuff?

DICK:
Yeah, they’re going to send me action figures. Oh, we’re going to have sleepwear, we’re going to have coloring books, we’re going to have comic books. We’re going to have everything. I mean, I forget. I heard the list.

LEE:
Can I get some for Willie’s little brother and sister?

DICK:
Sure.

LEE:
They’re at that age where, you know, especially his little brother—he’s got for Christmas, he got, oh, the shield and oh, everything from Clash of the Titans. Plus, you know, a bunch of stuff from Star Wars, too. He’s just crazy for that kind of, you know, his mom buys him the pajamas and everything.

DICK:
That’s the thing that I have, that’s a big part of the movie, that kind. And that’s the thing that kind of gets me. Well I have—OK, one time my agent called up and said, you know, are you interested in 10 percent of the rights of the returns of the comic book version of your novel? And I said, “Comic book version of my novel?” I says, “Yes, I’ll give you 100 percent of the suppository rights!” I mean, “comic book version of my novel?” It’s like telling Tolstoy about War and Peace. “Mr. Tolstoy? Would you like me to tell you about the comic book version of your—”

LEE:
I know that hurts. That hurts.

DICK:
Yeah, I’m afraid it does. It’s kinda fun. I mean, my agent said he doesn’t know when he gets these lists of things like that if he should send it to me or not. You know, he said, “I got a poster for the novel; it’s three by five feet, you want to see it?” I said, “Yeah. OK, send me the poster,” you know, and he said, “I can’t find anything to put it—we don’t have an envelope that’s three by five feet—but it’s gonna be funny.” He says, you’re gonna be up in L.A., he says, and a bus is gonna go by, and on the back of the bus it’s gonna advertise the movie and your book—it’ll say “And read the Ballantine novel” and you’re gonna turn to the person next to you and say, “That’s my book,” and they won’t believe you.

Mary [Wilson, an acquaintance of Phil’s] and I’ll be out of town for a […]. She’s so wonderful. You know, we went out to the studio and,—I’ve talked to you about it, haven’t I? Going up to Doug Trumball’s studio? Oh—It was really great. We were like little kids. They showed us how they did some of the special effects, you know, and we talked to different technicians. It was really beautiful, I mean, the paintings and the stuff. And they showed, they had—there was one painting of the opening. What they did, now, this contains—did I show you this? In another article—the opening shot of the movie is contained in this other article. It’s not mentioned in the article, but this is the opening of Blade Runner. Of course, now, without him standing behind— that’s Doug Trumball. But there you see it’s actually two-dimensional—one is horizontal and the back ones are two 400-story pyramid buildings sticking up. Well, he built the model and he also did the painting. And the painting crew was pitted against the model building crew to see who could do the best. So, when they had it all finished, they had their choice of doing it with that model or the choice of going with the painting and they chose to go with the model. But I looked at the painting and I swore to God it was three-dimensional. It was painted in such a way—

LEE:
Who did it?

DICK:
I don’t know, some guy on the staff. And I looked at it and even though I could see it was a painting, it looked like it was real. It was like perspectives that I had never seen before. And this is what I heard from a producer from another studio that had seen the opening. He said there are angles that have never been seen by a camera before. That’s what he actually said. Never been seen by a camera before. And then I saw the opening. I couldn’t believe—I’d never seen anything like it. They’re doing things that have never been done.

LEE:
And then when is it going to be [released]?

DICK:
June. June. Yeah.

LEE:
It’s going to be something to look forward to. Are they going to throw a sneak preview?

DICK:
Oh, well, sure—they are going to try it out in the theaters. I guess it’s OK for me to say this. It may not be OK for me to say this. I can’t say it. But it’s something I saw but it’s really exciting. They’re going to try it out on an audience I’m sure and see what the audience’s reaction to it. All they’ve done—they’ve done these incredible things, I mean they really have, they’ve really done incredible things. Uh, they’ve brought in art people who have skills that— each member is himself a craftsman in whichever subcompartment of the video—you know, visuals thing—he is. It’s just person after person after person. There was a fashion magazine named Preview mentioned in the article. Some of the different technicians that have been brought in. I mean, it’s just incredible. It’s like in the Middle Ages, making cathedrals. You know, having every different craft represented. And it was so funny. There was this one great big picture and all it showed was three or four very small neon signs they’d have in the background. Did I tell you about this?

LEE:
Yeah, those with the—

DICK:
Yeah, with the guy’s—with the crew’s name on them.

LEE:
Yes, you did.

DICK:
That was incredible. It’s, it’s just, just—it’s like they’re creating a world, they’re creating a world for that film. The actual—it was, uh, that you could hold in your hand and you’d look at that and you’d say that is so crude that that’s not a very good child’s toy. In other words, it’s too crude to be a good child’s toy, you see what I mean? And then you’d see on the screen where they filmed it, and it would fill the sky and it would glow. And it had this giant—I can’t explain it—this is what I’m not supposed to blab about—I’m sorry. I have to stop. But it was just incredible. I mean, you know—

LEE:
But this is just the special effects that are going to be really—

DICK:
Well, they’re not even using special effects as they’ve ever been used before. They’re creating an actual world. It’s a world that people actually live in. Uh, there’ll be dents on the cars, they’ll be scraped paint here and there on the cars. A guy walks by a newsstand. Every newspaper has a complete article, a title, the names of the staff writer quoted—

LEE:
They’re made up? Special?

DICK:
Yeah, but they’re full articles written out on pages even though the viewer will never see it. He’ll never see it.

LEE:
Oh, yes, you were going into that. Yeah—something. The characters get right into the actual world that they will be participating in.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
Will you be able to be on any of the sets to watch it being filmed?

DICK:
Uh—

LEE:
I bet that it would be exciting.

DICK:
It’s all filmed.

LEE:
Oh, it is.

DICK:
I was invited up, but I didn’t have a chance to go because I was working on my Bishop Timothy Archer novel, and when I finished the Bishop Timothy Archer novel the next day I called and they had finished filming that Thursday. This is a couple of days before I called them Monday evening.

LEE:
It would have been really exciting to be able to see the actors actually participating in it.

DICK:
Well, they’ve done all that. And I lost a close friend because I was so dumb I wouldn’t go up. She tried to convince me to go up and I said, you know, “I’m busy and I’m working” and she said, “This is something that in your entire life,” she said, “few people ever see—”

LEE:
That’s true.

DICK:
“—do something like this.” And I just kept on working. And then, finally it was too late. But, uh, I saw— some footage on TV where they had made a film of one scene being filmed, so that you were actually seeing another camera filming. And then, after a couple of takes Harrison Ford came down and he talked to the audience. (pause; says the next lines in a funny voice) He said—wow—he said—well, I’ll tell you what Harrison Ford said. You wanna know what Harrison Ford said? I’ll tell you what Harrison Ford said. No. Harrison said (laughs)—he said—

That is good wine. I’ll tell you—I haven’t seen wine like that—listen. I’m real old, right, there’s never been wine like that in my lifetime, I’ll tell you that.

LEE:
It’s something new.

DICK:
It’s a new concept.

LEE:
You thought of it. You thought of old people’s years, in my age group, they didn’t know about these types of things.

DICK:
You still resent me. You’re so hostile about being thirty. Hey, I’m gonna hit you with a heavy one. You want to hear a real heavy one?

LEE:
OK.

DICK:
The first time I went into the doctor’s where he was reading my chart, and he said “middle-aged man”— the first time I ever heard the word “middle-aged.” And he looked at me and he said, “That’s the first time you’ve ever been told you’re middle-aged, now.” God, I had my wife with me, she was in her twenties you know, and I says, “What? I beg your pardon? What you say about me?” And he says, “Well, you are middle-aged,” he says. “You’re official—it’s on paper here.” My wife’s twenty-seven years old!

LEE:
What’s the official?

DICK:
I blocked it out.

LEE:
Oh, OK, good.

DICK:
Whatever it was I didn’t think it came for another ten years.

LEE:
I know, I’ve moved it up. When I was fifteen it was thirty was middle-aged. And forty was just elderly.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
And nobody wanted to live past forty but I’ve rearranged that, you know, now.

DICK:
One time, this kid I knew who was doing a lot of drugs, he said to me, what was it like to see the first automobile? Well, that’d make me what—1971— It’d make me seventy-one years old. And I said, “It scared hell out of my horse.”

LEE:
(laughs) Did he take you for real? Oh, my God! He really thought you rode horses, huh?

DICK:
Oh well, Christ, I have no idea what he thought.

LEE:
I remember being amazed that my mom, they actually had bicycles when she was a kid—it just astounded me. I think it’s—I have girlfriends who say their kids hit them for stuff, too—like they’re really shocked.

DICK:
There’s some—tune on those goddamn bubblegum rock stations. “Your momma don’t dance and your daddy won’t rock and roll.” And they call them “the old folks”—your parents. The old folks were the grandparents. And I’m surprised that the parents were the old folks.

LEE:
Yeah.

DICK:
Oh, excuse me—I’m having trouble, a little bit of cork here in my wine. The cork isn’t in the wine.

LEE:
Let’s hope not. Oh, I’m sorry I couldn’t bring the boa constrictor up like you asked. But you know—

DICK:
Good God, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. I heard it—I heard the sentence backward. That’s most interesting. That means we’re on tape. Somebody’s—

LEE:
We can rewind it and prove that I said that forward. You’re hearing the other side. You’re hearing it played back backwards.

(tape ends)

EXEGESIS

January 15, 1982

LEE:
No, you seem very sincere on the religious stuff. I wasn’t sure about what—if you were kidding about the Gospels were written recently, I didn’t know—

DICK:
Oh, yeah, I want to explain what I mean about that. I don’t mean that they were written recently, by any means. I don’t mean that I think they’re forgeries—

LEE:
Yeah.

DICK:
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I know they’re not forgeries. No. What’s incredible is from the internal evidence, that is, you know, from the text itself, it would appear as if they were written recently because they use modern devices, structural devices that didn’t exist then, to show, for instance, the internal side of the character. They didn’t have that device then. No, I’m not questioning that they were written a long time ago. What I am really arguing for is this divine authorship. I’m arguing for divine authorship. The authorship of the Holy Spirit.

LEE:
Oh, really.

DICK:
Yeah, yeah, I am. For internal evidence as a writer, see, this is my area of expertise. As a writer, it is my professional opinion, not as a person, a religious person, but as a writer, my professional opinion is that they show unmistakable influences of modern trends and developments and structural improvements that are basic in the English language.

LEE:
That’s fascinating about ancient people, then. You know that, to me, was always the reason why they had the story of the Garden of Eden and particularly Noah’s Ark—always fascinated me and I always rationalized it in my head because I found it real hard to believe he got all the animals on the one boat and everything, you know.

DICK:
Yeah, it suggests immediately, uh, you know, cartoons of either the largest boat in the world or the smallest animals in the world. (laughs) Or some combination thereof.

I just keep seeing things in the New Testament that struck me as so beautiful, and there was a Jewish philosopher at that time, uh—named Father Judeaus—Father Jew—that’s what it means. And, you know, we don’t hear much about him—we hear a lot about Aristotle and Plato and so on. And he was drawing up an analytical list of virtues, what are human virtues. And this list of virtues had existed throughout all Greek and all Roman times. It was— it was part of the entire world as they knew it, you see. And there was nothing on the list about rendering any assistance to anyone in difficulty. So he noticed that, although it was the prevailing opinion, the prevailing ethical opinion, that it was a sign of weakness to care if someone else was in distress, you know, and feel anything or do anything. He knew, from reading, from being a Jew, and the Torah, the law, that there was something in Hebrew called saducha and it meant “giving aid.” And he added that to the list. And it had never been there before in Greek and Roman times. And it’s called philanthropia and it means—it literally means love of man. And it means giving help—

LEE:
It was added to the Gospels?

DICK:
No, no. This is philosophy.

LEE:
OK, I’m sorry.

DICK:
This was a philosopher. This was a philosopher. He was taking the prevailing trend—

LEE:
I know that you think it was philosophy, but up until this time they hadn’t been included in the Gospels?

DICK:
No, this would be the philosophy of the whole ancient world.

LEE:
OK, I misunderstood you.

DICK:
The whole Greco-Roman world did not regard giving aid to those in distress as a virtue, they regarded it as a weakness. Because he had read the Torah, he knew better. And he added the Greek, philanthropia, which he defined as giving aid to those who were in need. And therefore, through him, it entered the Western world. And at the same time as Christianity. The Father knew nothing of Christ, yet he put that in at the same time Christ did. Which is really incredible. Because see, this had never been there before in the Western world. Philanthropia. And I learned Greek, and that was the first word I wrote in Greek was philanthropia. As the word that to me, that was the turning point in the world, in the entire Western world.

LEE:
Just reminded me of a Lee Layport that teaches at Santa Ana College. His very favorite, um, Greek word was sóphisma. Oh, my God, he must have said that at least twenty times during one class period. And—

DICK:
What’s the word?

LEE:
Sóphisma.

DICK:
What does it mean?

LEE:
Something to do about the Sophists, which were the modern, more sophisticate—

DICK:
Oh! Oh—yeah—I’m sorry, yeah, sure, Sophists.

LEE:
On, and on and on—

DICK:
That’s just from Sophia—that’s the “Saint Sophia” that’s the Sophia in—you know—[…]

LEE:
And, uh, and then the modern word “sophisticated” evolved from that.

DICK:
It did, but—

LEE:
But he was saying, actually, it was a term of ridicule. By the elders of the city. I don’t know. This is what— I’m quoting Lee Layport.

DICK:
No, he’s wrong.

LEE:
He’s wrong?

DICK:
Yup.

LEE:
I always thought so.

DICK:
“Sophist” meant those possessing wisdom. From “Sophia,” meaning wisdom. Word for wisdom. Something that goes from possessing wisdom. It essentially meant what, uh, not so much learning as a scholar. But, uh, being skillful at argument, actually, is what it meant. There is an element there that is not quite right, see, ’cause— […] Well, I don’t recognize the suffix but now I do recognize the word.

(Later that night, Dick is recalling a recent religious experience.)

DICK:
[…] extraordinary. I called my agent and told him. I mean, this is, this is something, you know, I don’t usually talk to people in general about my religious experiences. I mean, ’cause, you know, they don’t believe me. And I don’t like to talk to my agent too much about them, because after all, I don’t want him to think he’s got a crazy client. I mean, that’s being realistic, you know, that’s just not done. Convince him you’re doing too well. But I did this time. I called him. And I talked to him until he finally said he had to hang up. Uh, if this were true it would be incredible. It’s a little like a novel written by Arthur C. Clarke called Childhood’s End.

But for almost eight years I’ve been in touch with some kind of mind that has given every evidence of being God, including the words and everything. And I think now that it’s another species of life. That would seem to us like apes, subhuman. They have been preparing us all this time, for several thousand years through our religion to accept them because they are really different from us. I mean, they are not like anything on this earth. And it’s literally taken three thousand, four thousand years, to acclimatize mankind, now, for this meeting between us and them. Because they don’t want us to pull away from them. And they know from experience that when one civilization, when one planet meets another the shock is unbelievable. Like nothing anybody’s ever experienced. And now the time has come when we are going to see them as they are. They don’t look like Jesus. They’re ugly, they’re horrible but they are like Jesus spiritually. They think we will see that spiritual side. But they are something so awful-looking. They don’t have any ears. They can’t talk. Doesn’t have any hands. Looks like a praying mantis. Looks like a praying mantis. I mean, that’s—I know, I know, like, right, yeah, see? But that’s how they know they’re going to look to us. But now they think they can come out. And they—they think because of our music they think we’re great spiritual beings. They think we are the spiritual beings and we think they are the spiritual beings. It’s incredible.

LEE:
When did you decide this?

DICK:
Pardon me?

LEE:
When did you feel this?

DICK:
This happened this week. Just this week, just the other day. Two days ago. I saw myself going out to greet them and they were awful-looking. And they were like animals. And they weren’t even able to talk. So the only way you could greet them was to throw yourself on the ground and, like, paw on the ground like apes do. And, uh, I turned to my wife, who was with me, and I said in German, I said, “Frau, singt, fur unsere freunde,” I said, “Wife, sing for our friends.” Because that’s what they wanted, was our music. That’s what they wanted so much. And I woke up and I realized it was all true and I called my agent and he said, well, it would make a great book. Today I called him and said I’m making a book out of it. But I said yesterday it’s true, I said, because they showed me the color, they write in color. They showed me an example of their adaptation, how they write down first the thoughts themselves and then annotation to those thoughts. They show … at first they bombarded me with their thinking in color which I didn’t know was thinking and then they showed me the annotation. You know, like we have a printed page? It looked like a page from a medieval music score. But not like that at all. If you thought it was anything, you’d think it was music.

LEE:
Was this presence similar to the experience that you had in ’74?

DICK:
Uh—

LEE:
Or was it mostly just—

DICK:
I started out with the colors. Uh, after I saw the golden fish sign. I saw the golden fish sign. You know, OK. Then a month later I started seeing color. At night. For eight hours. Brilliant colors that blinded me and they were incredible complex patterns, I mean recognized them as surpassing anything that our greatest artist can do. Any artist that we have— none of them like Paul Klee—they were better Paul Klees than Paul Klee could paint. And better Chiricos than Chirico could paint. And said I don’t know what this is. I’ve never seen anything like it. There are millions and millions and millions of them and each is a work of art and I was straight. I give you my word of honor. I mean I’m not—I am not lying. I was totally straight, I’ve been straight for years. And what it was was a language, because this week, last week, last Saturday, yeah, OK, last Saturday, I was sitting there as you and I are sitting here now. Suddenly I was hit with a flash of light and I saw their annotation from those colors. The colors were the thoughts and the annotation was the writing of the thoughts. And I saw it and I said, “I see music and mathematics and color.” I said, “I know what the music is. I know what the mathematics is, but I don’t know what the color stuff is. The music and the mathematics is Pythagoras’s disclosure between mathematics and music as the basis of reality.” I said, “What would the color be? Would it be a language?” and I said, “Yes, it’s a language, they’re showing me that this is a language that they use involving mathematical symbols and musical interval annotations and color.”

LEE:
But in what way do you think they’re going to try to contact us?

DICK:
They are going to show themselves as what they are.

LEE:
What a shame. I mean, people don’t like repulsive things.

DICK:
They know that. They know that. They know it, and they’re ashamed. And that’s the tragedy. The tragedy is not that they’re ugly. The tragedy is their great shame. Because they look at us as these spiritual beings and they see our—our revulsion and they feel shame. They don’t feel anger. They don’t feel anger at it, they feel shame. OK, they feel the way we would feel if we approached God and God were to be repelled by us, you know, physically finding us repulsive, and that’s the way they feel. And yet they are our gods to us. Uh, we are gods to each other. They’re praying we won’t see that. It’s not like two different species.

LEE:
Is this like the beast that won’t die from the fatal wound in Revelation?

DICK:
Oh, no, no. That’s the empire. That’s the empire.

LEE:
OK.

DICK:
Oh, no, it’s the empire, it’s the empire.

LEE:
Are you picking these records at random or are you— you’ve got ’em—

DICK:
Essentially at random.

LEE:
Are you really?

DICK:
Yeah, just kind of, uh, you know, like somebody would light a cigarette for instance, I do that a lot when I get edgy. I mean, honey, I called my agent and I said, you know, I saw their annotation and the thing is it would take weeks to draw up—for instance, I later realized that in drawing it on paper you are only going to draw some of it. It had, for instance, the logarithmic spiral from the Fibonacci numbers in it. But that, even that—(pause) that’s water running in the wall (laughs). I know, it’s [next door neighbor] Pam’s bathtub. Yeah. It becomes impossible to tape in here because of the water running in the walls. People have noticed that. But anyway it would have taken weeks to draw that thing up, it had so many mathematical symbols in it. But you see—

LEE:
Is this where you got the first clue of this novel?

DICK:
Yes. Yes. It would—yeah, yeah. You came over that Sunday—this was Saturday night, you came on Sunday—we were up all night, she and I, and I would tell her, I would say, OK, now they’re firing linear sequence information at me. Uh, and I can give you the missing integers so that it forms a sequence of its own. And then I named off the sequence and she remembered it, but I didn’t. It was all happening terribly fast. It was happening at tremendous velocity. They only had a few seconds to fire it across. And they fired it quick. It was like seven different sequences with missing integers and I say, OK, Pythagoras, and I began to work it out later on.

LEE:
I know you were just getting kind of a glimmering of it on Sunday.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
But to have it crystallize this fast is pretty, pretty amazing. Of course, when something grabs you like that you just kind of can take it and go with it. That’s great.

DICK:
Well, then, since then I’ve had that thing where I saw them coming out of the woods as animals, but—

LEE:
Does it worry you?

DICK:
No, I mean I just want it to be OK for them. You know? It is going to be OK for them. I hope—I’m sure it is.

LEE:
Do you know what the basis of any communication would be?

DICK:
Math.

LEE:
Would they really be able to communicate with us mathematically so that we won’t go squish them all or scramble them with malathion or whatever.

DICK:
Uh. OK, they’re going to rely on math because they’ll do with that golden rectangle, that 8 x 13 thing, with me. They can—

LEE:
I mean, I’m talking about a real fear of—people see something like that—it’s frightening.

DICK:
Yeah, yeah.

LEE:
I mean, they might try a mass genocide on whatever it is.

DICK:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Jesus Christ! Literally true.

LEE:
I know it is.

DICK:
I mean, I was just thinking if it repels, like emotionally, but no, no, you’re talking about actual—

LEE:
Exactly. I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.

DICK:
God! You know, I never thought of the past—just kind of an emotional response—you know—but you’re right. They could turn, for instance, you know, helicopter gunships at them.

LEE:
I wasn’t being facetious when I said that about the malathion.

DICK:
I realize that, yeah. I realize that, yeah. How does it— you know you are still being able to grasp what they were trying to communicate to me.

LEE:
What I was saying is, you know, you said they think they’re ready. I don’t think so if they’re that repulsive. They better find a way to communicate before they appear.

DICK:
I saw them and they look like little white insects— bugs. They’re awful. They look cold, and they’re not. They’re not cold. But they look to us life forms that the analogic life forms on our planet are degenerate, machine repetitious, arc—reflex arc—machines— ants, and stuff like that (sic). On their planet those are the viable evolutionary trend—not the fossilites trend, you see.

LEE:
See, they’re so repulsive to humans, you know, we don’t like insects, period.

DICK:
Yeah, and they’re deaf, they have no language; they don’t speak.

LEE:
I know. They’re just nasty things that everybody wants to kill and eradicate.

DICK:
So, all they can do is fire the mathematical constants, which of course is the thing you know, but that doesn’t necessarily save them. That doesn’t necessarily save them from being killed. Just to fire, you know, a series of numbers and that’s all they’ve got at this point is a series of numbers. They have to fire those numbers.

LEE:
I don’t mean to upset you but this is just what occurred to me.

DICK:
I never, I know, it’s a natural—I’ve been blocking that thought. They’re not worried that we won’t like them, they’re worried that we have the capacity to kill them by the millions. To kill them all.

LEE:
I’d send out a scout.

DICK:
Gee, that’s one thing I didn’t tell my agent, you know. And I said, uh, you know, I don’t know what to do, you know, about this kind of thing. I wrote a book about it, The Divine Invasion, on the basis of what I saw and everything and it is YAHWEH himself coming back to earth, and—(pause) Jesus Christ! They tried to kill him, they consider him a monster and tried to kill him. They literally in the book—they do. He comes—

LEE:
In your book?

DICK:
My book. It’s already in print. Just what you said. And I’m saying, “I never thought of that.” But I said, he comes, OK, he’s YAHWEH and he’s not recognized as YAHWEH and they try to kill him as a monster.

LEE:
Try to kill him? Did they succeed?

DICK:
No.

LEE:
Then maybe he is the beast from Revelation that withstands the fatal wound.

DICK:
Oh! Can you find it for me? Let me see that […] I know this all sounds really nuts, and I told my agent, you know, I said that I’m convinced that that’s what’s been going with me all these years now, you know? And it isn’t God—

LEE:
Oh, here we are.

DICK:
OK, fine.

LEE:
It’s the fifteenth [thirteenth] chapter of Revelation: “And then I saw a second beast that emerged from the ground. It had two horns like a lamb but made a noise like a dragon. The second beast was servant to the first beast and extended its authority everywhere, making the world and all its people worship the first beast.”

DICK:
Well, now, that’s the empire.

LEE:
“Which had had the fatal wound and had been healed. It worked great miracles, even calling down fire from heaven on earth while the people watched; through the miracle which it was allowed to do on behalf of the first beast, it was able to win over the people of the world and persuade them to put up a statue in honor of the beast that had been wounded by the sword and still lived. It was allowed to breathe life into the statue so that the statue of the beast was able to speak, and had anyone who refused to worship the statue of the beast be put to death.” And then it goes on to the stamping of the 666—it’s the Antichrist. That’s what I was taught in Sunday school. I had a real strong Bible upbringing.

DICK:
I, you know, I’m overwhelmed by that. I mean, maybe I’m just spooked out. That is an awfully powerful section of the Bible there which I am not very familiar with.

LEE:
I was very much attracted to it as a child. I used to get bored in church during the sermon so I read. I found the Bible much more interesting than his babbling, and I’m still that way. I have no use for churches whatsoever. I don’t even want to be in one.

DICK:
I don’t go but I read the Bible a lot.

LEE:
I enjoy the Bible and I do like Christ’s teachings. Interesting. So that’s about the best. Revelation fifteen is, Revelation twenty is. That was the part we talked about earlier. Where the angel came down— OK. Um . . .this was after the other. Uh. . . “Then I saw the angel come down from heaven with the key of the abyss in his hand and an enormous chain. He overpowered the dragon, that primeval serpent which is the devil, Satan.” OK, at that point you go back to fifteen, and they said, um, oh—I should—I’m sorry, that’s thirteen not fifteen—OK. “Then I saw the second beast. He had two horns like the lamb and made a noise like a dragon.” OK, over here in twenty it says, “There was a primeval serpent, which was the devil, and Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years. He threw him into the abyss and shut the entrance and sealed it over him, to make sure he would not deceive the nations again, until a thousand years had passed. At the end of this time he must release him for a short while.” And then it went on into the thrones and the people given power.

DICK:
Let me read you the part I like the best in Revelation. The part that I just love, here. I’m not as good at finding stuff as I … uh, “Then in my vision I saw the door open in heaven and heard the same voice like a trumpet, saying, ‘Come up here, I will show you what is to come in the future.’ With that the spirit possessed me and I saw a throne standing in heaven and the one who was sitting on the throne. And the person sitting there looked like a diamond and a ruby. There was a rainbow encircling his throne and this looked like an emerald. And on his throne a circle with twenty-four thrones, and on them I saw twenty-four elders sitting, dressed in white robes with golden crowns on their heads. Flashes of lightning were coming from the throne, and the sound of peals of thunder. In front of the throne there were seven flaming lamps burning, the seven spirits of God. Between the throne and myself was a sea that seemed to be made of glass, like crystal. In this standard grouped round the throne itself were four animals with many eyes, in front and behind. The first animal was like a lion, the second like a bull, the third had a human face and the forth animal was like a flying eagle. Each of the four animals had six wings and had eyes all the way around as well as inside. And day and night they never stopped singing, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty. He was, He is and He is to come.’ Every time the animals glorified and honored and gave thanks to the one sitting on the throne, who lives forever and ever, twenty-four elders prostrated themselves before and threw down their crowns in front of the throne, saying, ‘You are our Lord and our God. You are worthy of glory and honor and power. Because you made all the universe and it was only by your will that everything was made that exists.’” Beautiful language, yeah.

LEE:
That’s pretty.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
So, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to call your friends the Antichrist, but it just made—you know, it was too coincidental. I just flashed on that and I thought I’d bring it up. Um—

DICK:
It’s a strange feeling, the feeling you’re living in the apocalypse. It’s a very strange feeling. That the—

LEE:
It’s strange that you’ve written a book.

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
And now that it’s taken on a different meaning.

DICK:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I had that happen once before with a book I wrote. After it came out. I am—my mind is really—yeah, looking back now at Divine Invasion, that is essentially my current novel. It’s really God, they don’t recognize it, they think it’s a monster, and they try to kill it and they are evil. They are evil. They’re a fusion of the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Yeah. They form one government and it’s worldwide.

LEE:
Gospel, I suppose.

DICK:
And they—A computer told them that a monster baby is being smuggled into earth in this woman’s womb—this fetus—that it’s not human. And they decide it’s a monster from outer space and they should kill it. Uh, and they open the Bible and read from it and the Bible seems to verify that it is a monster from—that it’s a monster. They come to the part where it says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And they decide it’s something that they should kill.

LEE:
Yeah, right.

DICK:
And they try to destroy the ship and the baby—the mother is killed. The baby is taken out by paramedics at the scene—and that’s in the future so they have, you know, real good equipment. And they put him in what’s called a “syntho-womb” till it becomes full term, you know. And then it can be born. He’s born but he has brain damage and he doesn’t remember he’s YAHWEH. He thinks he’s just an ordinary baby. He’s taken to school—public school, including schooling and everything.

LEE:
This is The Divine Invasion?

DICK:
Yeah.

LEE:
OK.

DICK:
And he’s really YAHWEH and he doesn’t remember it. And, it’s really—so in a way it was all in vain. He’s not dead, it’s just that he doesn’t remember it at all. He thinks he’s just a little kid. But they thought they’d killed him, and they would kill him if they could find him. It’s like the killing of the infants at the time of the, uh—the time of Herod, you know, where all the infants … were killed. And when I wrote the book, I wrote it on the basis of hearing the following words: “The time he waited for has come, and the work is complete, the final world is here. He has been transplanted and is alive.” The next night I heard the same words again: “And he has been transplanted and is alive.” And at the word “is alive” I saw the Tetragrammaton. Very extraordinary […]

LEE:
How fascinating!

DICK:
So this book—

LEE:
Do you know what time it is?

DICK:
It’s, uh, 10:40.

LEE:
God, I got to get going, Phil. I should have left a long time ago. Let me turn this off.

(tape ends)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books by Philip K. Dick

Novels

Solar Lottery. New York: Ace, 1955.

The World Jones Made. New York: Ace, 1956.

The Man Who Japed. New York: Ace, 1956.

Eye in the Sky. New York: Ace, 1957.

The Cosmic Puppets. New York: Ace, 1957.

Time Out Of Joint. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959.

Eye In The Sky. New York: Ace, 1957.

The Man in The High Castle. New York: Putnam, 1962.

The Game Players of Titan. New York: Ace, 1963.

Clans of the Alphane Moon. New York: Ace, 1964.

Martian Time Slip.. New York: Ballantine, 1964.

The Penultimate Truth. New York: Belmont, 1964.

The Simulacra. New York: Ace, 1964.

Dr. Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace, 1965.

The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldrich. New York: Doubleday, 1965.

The Crack in Space. New York: Ace, 1966.

Now Wait for Last Year. New York: Doubleday, 1966.

The Unteleported Man. New York: Ace, 1966.

Counter-Clock World. New York: Berkeley, 1967.

Ganymede Takeover. New York: Ace, 1967.

The Zap Gun. New York: Pyramid, 1967.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968.

Galactic Pot Healer. New York: Berkley, 1969.

Ubik. New York: Doubleday, 1969.

A Maze of Death. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Our Friends from Frolix 8. New York: Ace, 1970.

We Can Build You. DAW, 1972.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

Confessions of A Crap Artist. New York: Entwistle Books, 1975.

Deus Irae, with Roger Zelazney New York: Doubleday, 1976.

A Scanner Darkly. New York: Doubleday, 1977.

Valis. New York: Bantam, 1981.

The Divine Invasion. New York: Simon And Schuster, 1981.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. New York: Simon And Schuster, 1982.

The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Zeising, 1984)

Puttering About In a Small Land. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985.

Radio Free Albemuth. New York: Arbor House, 1985.

Mary and the Giant. New York: Arbor House, 1987.

Short Stories and Other Works

A Handful Of Darkness. Cowan, 1955.

The Variable Man And Other Stories. New York: Ace, 1957.

The Preserving Machine And Other Stories. New York: Ace, 1969.

The Best of Philip K. Dick. New York: Ballantine, 1977.

The Golden Man. New York: Berkley, 1980.

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon. New York: St. Martins Press, 1985.

In Pursuit Of Valis, Selections From The Exegesis, (ed. By Lawrence Sutin). San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1991.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick: 5 Volumes. San Francisco: Underwood Miller, 1987.

The Dark-Haired Girl. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Zeising, 1988.

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Selected Literary And Philosophical Writings, (ed. By Lawrence Sutin). New York: Pantheon, 1995.

Filmography

Blade Runner. Warner Brothers, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford. Based on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, 1982.

Total Recall. Carolco, directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Based on “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, 1989.

Screamers. Triumph Films, directed by Christian Duguay, starring Peter Weller. Based on “Second Variety”. 1996

Minority Report. Dreamworks, 20th Century Fox, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. Based on the short story of the same name, 2000.

Impostor. Miramax Films, directed by Gary Fleder, starring Gary Sinise. Based on the short story of the same name, 2002.

Paycheck. Davis Entertainment and Lion Rock Entertainment directed by John Woo, starring Ben Affleck. Based on the short story of the same name, 2003.

A Scanner Darkly. Section Eight Productions, directed by Richard Linklater, starring Keanu Reeves. Based on the novel of the same name, 2006.

Next. Revolution Studios, directed by Lee Tamahori, starring Nicolas Cage. Based on “The Golden Man”. 2007

Radio Free Albemuth. Open Studios, directed by John Alan Simon, starring Alanis Morrisette. Based on the novel of the same name, 2010

The Adjustment Bureau. Media Rights, directed by George Nolfi, starring Matt Damon. Based on “Adustment Men”, 2011.

Total Recall. Original Film, directed by Len Wiseman, starring Colin Farrell. Based on “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, 2012.

King of the Elves. Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Chris Williams. Based on the short story of the same name, in production to release in 2013.

Books About Philip K. Dick

Levak, Daniel J.H., A Philip K. Dick Bibliography. San Francisco: Underwood Miller, 1981.

Pierce, Hazel, Philip K. Dick. Starmont House, 1982.

Rickman, Gregg, Philip K. Dick, In His Own Words. Long Beach, CA: Valentine Press, 1984; new edition 1989, Fragments West.

Rickman, Gregg, Philip K. Dick, The Last Testament. Long Beach, CA: Valentine Press, 1985.

Williams, Paul, Only Apparently Real: The World Of Philip K. Dick. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

Rickman, Gregg, To The High Castle, Philip K. Dick, A Life, 1928-1962. Long Beach, CA: Valentine Press, 1989.

Sutin, Lawrence, Divine Invasions, A Life Of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony Books, 1989.

Dick, Anne R., The Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 A Memoir and Biography. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

INDEX

Acts, Book of, 150, 153-54, 155

Aeschylus, 127

agape, use of term, 156

age differences, 144-47

Alien (film), 37

Allen, Woody, 112

androids:

and biochips implanted in brains, 106-9, 111-25

compassion lacking in, 64

intelligence of, 63-64

as metaphor for dehumanized people, 63

as replicants, 26, 33-34, 36, 63

who don’t know they’re androids, 36-38, 64

anonche, use of word, 63

Anselm, Saint, 80

Archer, Angel (character), 54-60, 61, 62, 96

Archer, Timothy (character), 55-56, 62

Aristotle, 77, 78

armagnac, 162-63

authors, see writers

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 97

Bacharach, Burt, 113

Ballantine Publishing Group, 35-36, 167

beauty and pain, 126, 127-28

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 67-68, 77, 97, 98, 120

Beethoven quartets, 110-11

Bible:

authors and translators of, 154-55, 177-78

Book of Acts in, 150, 153-54, 155

Greek language and, 155-56

Revelations in, 190-94

biochips, 103, 104, 106-9, 111-25

“Blade Runner,” as trademark, 20-21

Blade Runner (film), 3, 10, 12, 20-47

book compared with, 32-36

endings shot for, 31

filming of, 170

killing replicants in, 33-34, 36

merchandising tie-ins with, 165-66

ninety-second teaser of, 21-22

opening scenes of, 23-24, 167

original book for, 31

PG rating for, 31, 42

photo book of, 38-39

preview of, 168

screenplay of, 30, 31-32, 38, 39

set designs of, 23-24

sex and, 42

sound track of, 22-23

special effects of, 23-24, 26, 29-30, 167-70

street scenes in, 26-28

world created for, 169

books vs. films, 33

brain:

biochips implanted in, 106-9, 111-25

material structured by, 110-11

music processed by, 99

right hemisphere of, 100, 109

stimulation craved by, 30

Carson, Johnny, 96

chance and determinism, 63

characters:

based on real people, 52-53, 57-60

building of, 68-69

changing, 63-64

female, 45-47, 51-52, 54-63, 66-67, 75

as idealized self, 62

loss of, 60

love-hate relationship with, 61

mental pictures of, 72

writer’s familiarity with, 96

Chariots of Fire (film), 22

Childhood’s End (Clark), 182

Chirico, Giorgio de, 184

Clark, Arthur C., 182

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 22, 24-25

color:

frequencies of, 93-95

language of, 89, 93, 100, 102, 126, 185

in religious experience, 184-85

as vibration, 72-74

cost-benefit ratio, 134-35

ciphers, 80-82

Dante Alighieri, 88, 117, 127-28

death, as going into the light, 92, 102, 127-28

Death in Venice (film), 33

deductive reasoning, 74-75

Democritus, 78

Descartes, 80, 96-97, 109

Desprez, Josquin, 116

detectives of the forties, 43-44

determinism and chance, 63

Dick, Christopher, 148-49

Dick, Philip Kindred:

aging of, 172-73

analyst of, 46-47

death of, 7

internal bleeding of, 60, 135, 136-37

memory of, 105

religion and, see religion research activity of, 105-6, 134-35

and younger generation, 144-47

diminishing returns, law of, 134-35

direct reciprocal transfer, 129

Divine Comedy (Dante), 88, 117, 127-28

Divine Invasion, The (Dick), 11, 190, 194-96

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), 10, 12, 17-20

Blade Runner and, 20, 32-36, 53

comic book of, 39, 166

editions of, 20

out of print, 38

rerelease of, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41-42, 167

Doors, The, 159

Durant, Will, 152

Eddy and the Hot Rods, 116

epistemology, 109, 119

Everly Brothers, 110

Exegesis (Dick), 11

eye, phosphine activity in, 90-91

failure, fear of, 136

Faust story:

in Owl, 120, 124, 128-30, 133-34

universality of, 67

female characters, 45-47, 51-52, 54-63, 66-67, 75

Fibonacci numbers, 149, 186

films vs. books, 33

Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 67

Flowers for Algernon (film), 122, 123

Fonda, Jane, 21

Ford, Harrison, in Blade Runner, 21-22, 28, 30, 39-42, 43, 44-44, 171

forties, detectives of the era, 43-44

Fronholfer Line, 93

gas, perturbations in, 92, 95

Gilbert and Sullivan, 99

God, existence of, 80

Golden Section, 149, 188

Greek language, Bible and, 155-56

Haggia Sophia, 151-52

Hauer, Rutger, 26

Hungarian Quartet, 163-64

“Impostor” (Dick), 37

information decade, 30

information theory, 83, 106

iron, age of, 150

Jagger, Mick, 159-60

Jesus Christ, 152-53, 191

“Johnny Are You Queer?,” 40

Joyce, James, 67

Justinian, Emperor, 152-53

Kant, Immanuel, 109

KJOY, 116, 117

Klee, Paul, 184

KROQ, 40

Kubrick, Stanley, 29

Layport, Lee, 180

lazers, 73

Leary, Timothy, 145

Lee, Gwen, 5, 8, 10-12, 142

Lennon, John, 137-38

Leucippus, 78

light:

going into, 92, 102, 127-28

religion and, 88-89, 102-3

logic, study of, 119

LSD experience, 110-11

Luke, Saint, 153-54, 155

Mahler, Gustav, 164

Mancini, Henry, 113

Marlowe, Philip, 43-44

mathematics:

communication via, 187-88

music and, 69-72, 73-74, 118-19, 125, 185

universality of, 95, 119

Mathis, Johnny, 110

Meatloaf, 160-61

Meed, Sid, 23, 29, 41

music:

abstraction of, 98-100

as conceptual, 98, 103, 104

emotion and, 100

LSD and, 110-11

mathematics and, 69-72, 73-74, 118-19, 125, 185

as mystical vision, 100-102

oriental, 103-4

Owl in Daylight and, 97-104

religion and, 102-3

score of, 97, 100

transduction of, 97-98, 100

as vibration, 72-74

“Music by a Long Thin Wire” (recording), 70-71

Nightwing (film), 41

No drama, 104

novels:

analyst having read, 46-47

development of, 111, 121

female characters in, 45-47, 51-52, 54-63, 66-67, 75

first sentence written for, 65

literary, 139-40

plots based on experience, 147-55

see also specific titles

optic neurons, 90-91

oscilloscopes, 95, 112

Owl in Daylight, The (Dick), 3, 11, 12, 74-83, 87-140

basic concept of, 74

biochips in, 103, 104, 106-9

development of, 111-25, 186-87

Faustian theme in, 120, 124, 128-30, 133-34

meaning of title, 74, 133

musical experience in, 97-104

supernatural experiences in, 89-92

oxymorons, 77-79

pain and beauty, 126, 127-28

pain medication, effects of, 149-50

Palestrina, 116

parasitism vs. symbiosis, 125

Parmenides, 75-78

Paul, Saint, 149, 153-54

“Paycheck, The” (Dick), 12

Peoples, David W., 32

philanthropia, use of term, 179-80

philosophy, father of, 76

phosphines, 90-91

Plato, 75, 76

plots, based on actual experience, 147-55

precognition, 52, 59

Prometheus, 129

Pythagoras, 69, 95, 185, 187

quantum mechanics, 78

Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 30, 43, 44

religion:

Bible and, 154-56, 177-79

experiences of, 147-55, 181-86

light and, 88-89, 102-3

music and, 102-3

rebirth and, 153

signs and symbols of, 149-51, 184

Remy-Martin cognac, 162-63

replicants, 26, 63

killing of, in Blade Runner, 33-34, 36

see also androids

Revelation, 187, 190-94

Rosen, Rachel (character), 36, 42, 45, 60-61

saducha, use of term, 179-80

Sagan, Carl, 119

Sauter, Doris Elaine, 3, 5, 7-12

Scanner Darkly, A (Dick), 12

Schmenkna, 119

Schoepenhauer, Arthur, 98-99

science, quantitative basis of, 70

science fiction:

film special effects in, 25-26

imagination and, 140

original ideas in, 37

sales of, 20, 135

supernatural experiences in, 89-92

Scott, Ridley, 23, 31, 32

Shannon, Claude E., 83

Sibelius, Jean, 164

Smith, Bessie, 117

Soldier of Orange (film), 41

Sophia, Saint, 151-52, 180, 181

sóphisma, use of term, 180

sophistication, 180-81

sound:

ears and, 96

frequencies of, 93-95

lack of, 92, 100-102

raw sense data in, 110-11

species bias toward, 91

as visible, 95

Spade, Sam, 43-44

special effects:

in Blade Runner, 23-24, 29-30, 167-70

in Close Encounters, 24-25

in science fiction, 25-26

Star Trek (film), 22

statements, self-authenticating, 79-80

symbiosis vs. parasitism, 125

Thales, 76

totality, use of word, 79

Total Recall (film), 12

Transmigration of Timothy Archer, The (Dick), 4-6, 11, 53-60, 61-64, 135, 136-39, 170

Angel character in, 54-60, 61, 62, 96

chance and determinism in, 63

religious theme in, 53, 88

Trumball, Douglas, 22, 23, 29, 167 2001 (film), 22, 29

Valis, 4, 5

Vangelis, 22

virtues, list of, 178

visual spectrum, 93

wave form moving through a gas, 92

Wilson, Mary, 167

writers:

of the Bible, 154-55, 177-78

characters built by, see characters characters lost by, 60

deadlines for, 66, 135

Faust stories by, 67

male and female viewpoints of, 62

productivity of, 64-65

rebirth of, 127-28

research activity of, 134

writer’s block, 64-66, 135-37

“Yoda” figure, 146, 165

Young, Sean, 36, 41-42, 45