In February 1974, a dentist administered to Philip K. Dick, the writer, the author of the then-not-yet-so-famous Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
—the novel that gave rise to Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner—
, and the Hugo winner,
A Man in the High Castle
, a seemingly conventional dose of sodium pentothal.
A seemingly conventional dose that was too much for the expansive, electric brain of the kind who saw God in a pink laser beam, the same kind that suffered interference that placed him in the distant past—ancient Rome—when he approached the counter. a store, or almost anywhere.
What happened?
That, that same afternoon, when the pharmacy delivery girl brought home a painkiller, he had his first vision of it.
More than a vision it was some kind of opening towards a vast and total knowledge of the universe.
From then on, Dick dedicated himself to explaining what that sudden vision had consisted of - everything was precipitated by the gold necklace that the delivery girl was wearing, a necklace that represented a fish, a sign used by the first Christians, according to her - a vision to which which followed a small infinity of more visions.
One of them had her eight hours contemplating works of art — “hundreds of thousands of absolutely incredible images of modern art” — that simply appeared before her eyes, without knowing where they had come from and without anyone else being able to see them.
Another led him to baptize her son Christopher at home, and another, to receive a visit from a “red and gold plasma entity,” and to listen to the radio whether she was plugged in or not.
The corpus of hers, from then on, a work in progress, reached more than 8,000 pages.
Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem immersed themselves in them, at the request of the family—Dick's children, led by agent Andrew Wylie—to try to order and make sense of the chaos.
A chaos formed by, above all, solitary writing—in notebooks, graphically sprinkled with completely incomprehensible drawings, small units of diagrams that represent the way in which the idea, or the world, enters and leaves a brain in permanent and totemic expansion—but also letters—letters in which he included dozens of pages of ideas about what was happening to him, and what was happening to him was that he had become an entity that decrypted the world—, theories—which are called themselves things like “a crazy Soviet theory,” or that they talk about the “other universe” as “an intelligent, thinking mind”—and religion.
Because it's true, Philip K. Dick could have become the leader of a cosmic sect if he wanted to with such a written bible.
And he would have nothing to envy, his own religion, to that of the other science fiction writer who started one—Ron L. Hubbard, yes, the creator of Scientology.
It would be, the Dickian religion, in reality, the implosively introspective and, in a certain sense, intellectual, beat and demiurgic version of it.
Divided into folders, the chapters of this monumental—and above all, impossibly well selected and translated—work are read with the desperation with which they were written, in an attempt to reconstruct the holistic meaning of an entire life.
Dick returns, one by one, to all of his novels, in search of clues to what his brain had already captured about universal chaos, and tries to piece together a self traversed by the cosmos.
The book has exceptional documentary value.
Not only because of the way in which it returns, almost like a work that was being built before the eyes of the reader, about the moment of connection with the absolute - something that happened in the months of February and March of 1974, known, in a Dickian key, as 3-2-74, months 2 and 3 of 1974—and therefore, as a substrate of the author's own visionary work, but also for what it can reveal on a neurological level.
The plasticity with which he exposes the flow of his thought, a thought typical of victims of what has been called temporal lobe epilepsy - associated with hypergraphia and hyperreligiosity - is also an unprecedented behavioral milestone.
In short, a major work, to which we must give ourselves as Dick gave himself to the unknown, without prejudice.
Look for it in your bookstore
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