First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science
fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from
Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live
just a few miles from it—and, as if that were not enough, I once had the
honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.
For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I
think it was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the
producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant
teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad... an old
friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed
Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Little
children wearing Mickey Mouse hats—those black hats with the ears—kept
running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth
asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing
little children about, said some extraordinarly stupid things that day. Today,
however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of
you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the
impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We
can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and
unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college
or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were
mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days,
friends would say me, "But are you writing anything serious?" meaning "Are you
writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to be accepted. We
yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were
invited to give speeches and appear on panels—and immediately we made
idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction
writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?
It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just
before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN
BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think:
Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or
cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants,
and pass as humans.
Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't
claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain
matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The
two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What
constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I
have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated
topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we?
What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or
phenomenal world?
In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental
issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them
unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the
garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the
family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members
of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the
metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full,
these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.
Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen
will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course,
the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people.
But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his
disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to
get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided,
that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or
any humans do. And
then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a
private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all
other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to
person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking
about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true
(more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's
as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality
and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours
that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The
problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently,
there occurs a breakdown of communication... and
there is the real illness.
I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When
they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a
human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost
at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched
tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in
some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A
flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape.
Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it
also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no
sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his
punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question
"What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my
readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred
stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl
college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she
was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I
thought about it and finally said,
"Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was
back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more
lucidly.
But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we
live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media,
by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and
the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds
right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I
watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught.
The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is
viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is
probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's
all misunderstood. And the
thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child
correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV
situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually
swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always
good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win.
What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you
will lose. The message here is,
Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer
Baretta asks you for information, give it to him,
because Officer Beratta is
a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded
with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very
sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I
distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power:
that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do
the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel
after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall
apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I
will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which
do fall apart.
I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the
novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be
more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not
assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a
universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the
birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish.
This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually
part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of
the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we
ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs,
habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can
live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable,
elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Of course,
I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are
always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving
organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was
only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is
true of each of us, like it or not.
The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that
are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek
philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose
their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating
next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed
because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own
philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right—let's not
forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and
therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right,
since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus
judged things real.
I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is
ultimately real, you right away begin talk nonsense. Zeno proved that motion
was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he
lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the
greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics
met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members
of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see
Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking
what they said seriously.
But I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious
topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the
definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities
begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake
as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one
topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or,
fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans,
turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with
fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake
humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate
Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride—you can have
all
of them, but none is true.
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the
concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked
by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose
some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted
them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials
would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps
someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly
transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance,
suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if
the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a
moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have
to close down.
In Plato's
Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian
God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to
work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have
adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out
as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God,
out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly
and
secretly, into something real?
We would not be aware of this tranformation, since we were not aware that our
world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea.
Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for
several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do.
At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One
time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across
mention of a Gnostic codex called
The Unreal God and the Aspects of His
Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What
kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and
how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that
I'd been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there
is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does
not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called
Snakes of Hawaii. A
number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in
Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.
Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described
are real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not
to believe what he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland
understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are
animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic
circuits. So no deception is taking place.
And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears
under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I
suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star
system, as depicted in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of
that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?
And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true?
That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but—Is it
true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science
fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and
only later on realize it.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.
If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must
use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel
1984. But another
way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can
get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension
follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all,
it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures.
This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast.
Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the
viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of
sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an
hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal
twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye
motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes
into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the
left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate
that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis.
We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the
messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we
do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of
dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have
participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we
have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers,
scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know
how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their
own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my
writing is true, or
which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially
lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking
fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability
it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot
legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of
pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to
declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.
It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is
pure fiction, and to learn later on—perhaps years later—that it is true.
I would like to give you an example. It is something that I do not understand.
Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't.
In 1970 I wrote a novel called
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the
characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is
Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we
read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the
police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character
is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.
Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I
had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her
boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent
months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again
and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a
restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in
the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the
truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."
Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the
mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It
has for four years.
In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to
my priest—I am an Episcopalian—and I happened to mention to him an
important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman
meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As
I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively
more agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from
the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black man on the road is named
Philip—your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he
could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me.
"And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."
I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene
in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts... and I had never
read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high
Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix—the
same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking
police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the
Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which
very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and Paul.
Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my
novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone
named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a
man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of
Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is
fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts
the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house—an exact
inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit
responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.
Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete
stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes
away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger
for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is
falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and
althought Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped
falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and
had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter
between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them—both
in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at
work: the name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when
I wrote the novel.
A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin
to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a
particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain
this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years I
have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.
But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was
walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to
enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment
building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as
if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I
returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up
to him and asked, "Is anything the mattter?"
"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."
Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took
all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with
me and asked where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I
returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no
good, since there was no gas station within walking distance. So I returned,
in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and, together,
we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there,
two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. Suddenly I
realized that this was the scene in my novel—the novel written eight years
before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my
inner eye when I wrote the scene—the glaring white light, the pump jockey—and
now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was
helping was black.
We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I
returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me
back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what
my name was. I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally
lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say,
I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters
the black man on the road.
What could explain all this?
The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I
have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important
sense,
time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it
to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still
have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape
underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is
that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the
death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of
the Book of Acts.
Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world
and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the
absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D.
50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman
Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?
During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to
you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One—Satan—is
the "Ape of God." That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's
authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation.
Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are
occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50... and Satan
has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?
I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist
says, "What year is it?" And I reply, "A.D. 50." The psychiatrist blinks and
then asks, "And where are you?" I reply, "In Judaea." "Where the heck is
that?" the psychiatrist asks. "It's part of the Roman Empire," I would have to
answer. "Do you know who is President?" the psychiatrist would ask, and I
would answer, "The Procurator Felix." "You're pretty sure about this?" the
psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large
psych techs. "Yep," I'd replay. "Unless Felix has stepped down and had been
replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for—"
"Who told you all this?" the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I
would reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that I'd be in the rubber room,
inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there.
Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably
not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that
Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the
United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact
I can't seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of
Saint Paul.
So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other
good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I
know is
real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint
Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as
Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens—that just can't be. Saint Paul
would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet
high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.
But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my
novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene which I
described back in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence
in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly
as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of
change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through
to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it
wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of
years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the
ancient world, the world of the Bible,
is concealed beneath it, still there
and still real. Eternally so.
Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so,
having gone this far already. My novel
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was
released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I
had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day
I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned
a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery
person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and
sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I
opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman—who wore a shining
gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason
I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the
medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish
sign.
"What does that mean?" I asked her.
The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a
sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.
In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I
suddenly experienced what I later learned is called
anamnesis—a Greek
word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and
where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to
me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret
Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to
communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was
true.
For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into
view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more
importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had
gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy.
We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the
Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our
great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going
to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.
Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occured
only a week after
Flow My Tears was released? And it is
Flow My Tears
which contains the replication of people and events from the Book of Acts,
which is set at the precise moment in time—just after Jesus' death and
resurrection—that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having
just taken place?
If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to
leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over
four years now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time,
frozen time, timeless time, what is called "sacred" as contrasted to "mundane"
time... I can't count the theories I've tried out. One constant has prevailed,
though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit
which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human
minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans,
even without their awareness.
In the writing of
Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event
which I realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular
writing process. I had a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when
I awoke I found myself under the compulsion—the absolute necessity—of
getting the dream into the text of the novel precisely as I had dreamed it. In
getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part
of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.
I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form.
See if this dream reminds you of anything.
The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child.
He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing
slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color;
each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn
knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an
ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white
beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so
serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said
nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he
had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason
Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from
now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman
continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind
him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them
enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended
to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.
Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But
in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that
could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in
robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner
was dead.
This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a
law posse exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It
is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely
believed to have committed some crime. I had the impression that he was
guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had to be killed, a terribly sad
tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to begin to cry, and
therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station.
Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to
which this dream refers. It is
Daniel, 7:9:
Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe
was white as snow and the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of
fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing river of fire
streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads
upon myriads attended his presence. The court sat, and the book were
opened.
The white-haired old man appears again in
Revelation, 1:13:
I saw... one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden
girdle round his breast. The hair of his head was white as snow-white
wool, and his eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass
refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.
And then
1:17:
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right
hand upon me and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and
I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive for evermore, and I
hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you
have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter."
And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put in my
novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by
this description:
...he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old
man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What
noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men.
Evidently he was a king.
Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And
this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in
darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force
of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and
condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the
verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking
back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.
So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the
sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from
the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply
this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge
rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The core
message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You
will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to?
Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain
knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep
my thoghts to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took
place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who
was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace.
The most powerful man in the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did
when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to my wife, with
tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to
himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For God's sake, let us
forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—"all the
President's men," as it's put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should
be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up
in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.
Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to
be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant
in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school—where he
grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and
of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune
cookie, I got the following fortune:
DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.
I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese
restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I
think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he
have mine?" The White House did not answer.
Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work supposed fiction might write the
truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a
man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not
know it; all things are wrapped in
appearances" (
Fragment 34). And
Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing
itself" (
Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert,
of
Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things
are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all
that is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori
reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from
birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear
to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no
reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are use
to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain
the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain
amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.
Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure,
but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious
structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true
landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it
seemed, because in
Fragment 52 he said:
"Time is a child at play, playing
draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said,
in
Fragment 18: "If one does not expect
it, one will not find out the
unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward
Hussey, in his scholarly book
The Pre-Socratics, says:
If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by
most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further
instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing
suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is
necessary... The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with
God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like,
or a part of, God.
This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an
analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at
the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early
philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The
first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born
in the mid-sixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority
except that of his own mind, says:
One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or
in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him
thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same
place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.
This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent
among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all
reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a
mind." Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is
difficult to tell how far the designs in God's mind are distinguished from the
execution in the world, or indeed how far God's mind is distinguished from the
world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras
had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter which made it, to
some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that
everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, nor
primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with
deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got
reduced to what we can neatly—but wrongly—classify as crude. The
summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as
follows: The
kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at
its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest
level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks,
and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us
through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which
thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The
universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as
humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.
Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The
universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is
not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the
universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza—two
thousand years before him—Xenophanes had said, "Effortlessly, he wields all
things by the thought of his mind" (
Fragment 25).
If any of you have read my novel
Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity
or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar
commercials and winds up saying:
I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the
worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here,
I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word
and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik
but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is
the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one
of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come
across; God help us if the man who translated my novel
Ubik into German were
to do a translation from the
koine Greek into German of the New Testament.
He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled
him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously
never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of
translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made
the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says
of itself:
I am the brand name.
Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have
come out as:
When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt
with God, and what God was, the brand name was.
It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from
Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological
themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning,
and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without
him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.
Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.
As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is
reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that
I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition
that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape,
never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That
is all I can come up with—a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and
faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human,
though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should
not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it,
even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves.
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say
no
to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their
deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their
names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to
be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their
willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In
essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately
manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch
the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being
taught, and then I realize, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch,
they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they
reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to
withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand.
The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small
people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge
quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell
endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart
beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie
quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is
true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.
One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and
his mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic
Gospels. Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a
fisherman. I fish for fish." He was playing with a metal lantern which someone
had given me, which I had nevel used... and suddenly I realized that the
lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in my
little boy's soul at that moment—and not placed there by cereal merchants
or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four,
had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.
Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand
years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion
that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today.
Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to
end.
And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again.
Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland
will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.
Thank you.