Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Read Free Page B

planet that gradually becomes our world) would be SF if Phil had written it.
Another Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," offers a way out of the categorical maze. Menard, in the twentieth century, is writing an original work entitled Don Quixote in the exact same Spanish that Cervantes employed. Since Menard's is a different (modern) consciousness from Cervantes's, the effect of Menard's duplicate Quixote text upon the reader must be entirely other. Borges explains:

Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid. [...] This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis-Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?
All very well and good. But whom, in light of Borges's "deliberate anachronism" method, shall we posit as the author of the works of Philip K. Dick, in order to obtain for them the respect they deserve?
Phil would have enjoyed that question. Hell, he asked something very much like it often enough in the eight-thousand-page Exegesis (subtitled by him Apologia Pro Mia Vita to emphasize its central importance) he wrote night after night for nearly eight years in an attempt to explain to his own satisfaction (he never succeeded) a series of visions and auditions that seized his soul in February-March 1974 and held it to the end of his life. This biography incorporates the results of the first study ever made of the Exegesis in its entirety.
The 2-3-74° _link_ experiences posed, one might say, the ultimate startling "What If?"-or rather, a new and infinite range of them. On March 21, 1975, one year later, Phil wrote as concise and radiant a summary of the visions as he ever achieved:
    I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken
March 16, 1974: It appeared-in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns-and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.
March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I-and it-had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, "This cannot exist; it cannot exist."
March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing. ~. . J

The 2-3-74 experiences, which so influenced Phil's final novels, are a rare and remarkable event in American literary history; how often has an American writer of any stature confessed to, and been obsessed by, such a subject? The title of this biography-Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick-pays homage to Phil's 1981 novel The Divine Invasion and, further, underscores the signal importance to his life and work of the above events. I do not wish to imply that any particular term (such as God) exclusively describes what Phil encountered in 2-3-74, nor that a Saint Phil emerged at last; Phil himself would have rejected both these notions.
But the core of the difficult truths that Phil held dear in his last years lay in 2-3-74. No one can pass upon the unanswerable question: Were those events real? Phil himself had no doubt that something had happened, though he always retained as a possibility-as his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Deter observes-the "minimum hypothesis" that they were self-delusion. But for readers who would, in this skeptical age, readily leap to that conclusion, the