PKD's Divine Interference - by Erik Davis - Burning Shore

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PKD's Divine Interference<br>One from the Archive

Erik Davis<br>Feb 20, 2024

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Today, February 20, is the (possible) fiftieth anniversary of that strange day when Philip K. Dick glimpsed a delivery woman’s Christian fish necklace and launched into the extraordinary series of bizarre experiences and events that the author referred to as “2/3/74.” Lawrence Sutin gives us this date in his bio, but I don’t know where it comes from. Today is also the last gathering of my Alembic lecture series on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The date lies heavy, it seems.<br>So for this “One from the Archive” (new slug) I decided to repost some excerpts from a Dick essay I first ran on the nettime listserv on September 25, 1996. (For the full version, plus citations, see Techgnosis.com.) In the 1990s and 2000s, nettime was a wonderful and spiky gathering place for media artists, tech critics, theory heads, and avant-garde hackers. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the collective insights, grumpy comaradery, and social and critical possibilities catalyzed on that important listserv, whose sharp and radical European voices countered the dominant voices of American and especially West Coast tech speculators (in both senses of the term) in those years.<br>When this essay ran, few Dick critics were really engaging the man’s religious experiences, something I wrote about for my Yale thesis in 1988 and would discuss in Techgnosis two years later and, two decades later, in High Weirdness. Attentive readers will recognize some language and arguments from those texts, but there is enough unique stuff in here — particularly the discussion of Three Stigmata and Jean Baudrillard, whose revival is seriously overdue in these AI daze — to beam it to you on this uncanny anniversary.

It was February of 1974, and the American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was in pain. The man whose darkly comic novels of androids, weird drugs, and false realities stand as some of the most brilliant and visionary in the genre had just had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and the sodium pentathol was wearing off. A delivery woman arrived with a package of Darvon, and when the burly, bearded man opened the door, he was struck by the beauty of this dark-haired girl. He was especially drawn to her golden necklace, and he asked her about its curious fish-shaped design. “This is a sign used by the early Christians,” she said, and then departed.<br>Most of us who hit the freeways in the U.S. know this fish well, as its Christian and Darwinian mutations wage a war of competing faiths from the rear ends of BMWs and Hondas. As a Christian logo, the fish predates the cross, and its Piscean connotations of baptism and magical bounty (the miracle of loaves and fishes) reaches back to the time when the harshly persecuted cult secretly gathered in the catacombs of Alexandria. Ichthus, the Greek word for fish often inscribed within the symbol, is also a code, an acrostic of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” One apocryphal story claims that Christians would secretly test the spiritual allegiance of new acquaintances by casually drawing one curve of the fish on the ground. If their companion was “in the know,” he or she would complete the fish shape.<br>For Dick, the ichthus was a secret sign of an altogether different order: it was a trigger for gnosis. As he wrote later in a personal journal,<br>The (golden) fish sign causes you to remember. Remember what?…Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA…You remember your real nature…The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.

Following this event, Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a “spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex…tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information.” Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely than today’s online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine “AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice” speaking to him from outer space. Other times, Dick felt he was in telepathic communication with a first-century Christian named Thomas, and once “the landscape of California, U.S.A. 1974 ebbed out and the landscape of Rome of the first century C.E. ebbed in.”

From R. Crumb’s immortal “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick”<br>Like many an acid casualty (Dick himself preferred amphetamines), Dick also picked up strange signals from electronic devices, and for a time he received “die messages” from the radio. This should be no surprise; radios, stereos...