Blinded by the Light by J. D. Daniels Cover artist: Bob Pepper (Doubleday, 1977) Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 1977. Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly, 2006. I don�t know how much acid you took. I don�t know how much I took, either. You wouldn�t believe me if I told you. I loved growing up in Kentucky, but after a certain point there was nothing to do but take drugs. Two years after an obsidian statuette in my stomach had begun talking to me, in a rare moment of clarity, I wondered if I might not have gone at least partly and temporarily, if not completely and irremediably, insane. I spent some time in a hospital. The sign on the door said Level Four: Risk of AWOL and the door stayed shut. The people who worked at the hospital didn�t want to hear what I had to say about Finnegans Wake. They told me I was going to have to stop taking the mind-altering drugs I enjoyed and learn to prefer the mind-altering drugs they prescribed. All right, I said. Add whiskey and stir. Back then my friends read William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. They read G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky and H. P. Lovecraft and H. P. Blavatsky, anybody with initials. They read the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and they, too, went cuckoo. Sometimes the cuckoo went back into its clock, and sometimes the cuckoo flew far away, never to return. It�s easy to see why. Dick�s novel Martian Time-Slip centers on the R. D. Laing-ian conceit that schizophrenia is not a crippling mental illness but a privileged insight into the true nature of reality. Try that one on after you�ve been shrooming for the better part of 1991. ~ Philip K. Dick said of A Scanner Darkly, �I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.� He was wrong, thank God. The novel that was Philip K. Dick was pretty bad. I would like to quote from Dick�s own recounting, eight years after the fact, of what has come to be called his �2-3-74� conversion experience, and to suggest that any informed opinion of his work�s extraliterary�i.e., theological, cosmological, or sociological�significance ought to be governed by an opinion of the following: 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 showed me what�s called the Golden Section ... 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 ... 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. ...

It was like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light hit him ... I remembered, I remembered. Back all the way to the time of Acts. I remembered events that took place in the book of Acts. ... And other things like that. And I remembered sitting with the Eleven, with the Twelve, it was after Jesus� death. ...

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. ... �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. ...

Isn�t it incredible? I found it in the encyclopedia.

�from a 1982 interview in What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick, ed. Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter, 2000.

If you are over 30 and cannot admit that this is pathetic, you have misspent your life.

~

The novel that is A Scanner Darkly is better than that. It was published in 1977. Here�s how it begins:

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house. He read about many different kinds and finally noticed bugs outdoors, so he concluded they were aphids. ...

[T]he endless biting of the bugs kept him in torment. At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard. First he sprayed the house, then himself. Yard Guard seemed to work best.

The appeal is immediate: charismatic paranoid vigor, pitch-perfect flat-affect ventriloquism, and headlong-rushing trashiness from the kind of writer who, as his novel proceeds, will not seem to care that his pet phrase �progressively more and more� is tin-eared; he has bigger aphids to fry.

It�s a Cheech and Chong story�Nice Dreams, say, if that�s the one where Stacy Keach turns into an iguana and Paul Reubens plays the coke dealer who keeps screaming �Hamburger!��except that, by the end of A Scanner Darkly, almost everybody is lost in wetbrain, or burnout, or whatever it is the kids call a drug casualty these days. But it would be dishonest to pretend A Scanner Darkly isn�t very funny. I found myself reading long sections out loud to progressively less and less interested auditors. The set pieces�the eighteen-speed bike, the home silencer kit, the break-in, Freck�s botched suicide, the microdot factory (absent from the movie)�are the best parts of the book. Here�s undercover narcotics agent �Fred,� reviewing the surveillance holos of himself, as �Arctor,� stoned and jiving with Luckman and Barris:

�She said, �Okay, if it�s a hysterical pregnancy I�ll get a hysterical abortion and pay for it with hysterical money.��

Arctor said, �I wonder whose face is on the hysterical five-dollar bill.�

�Well, who was our most hysterical President?�

�Bill Falkes. He only thought he was President.� ...

With great fury Fred slammed the holos ahead two and a half hours. How long does this garbage go on? he asked himself. All day? Forever?

If only we were so lucky. What�s the matter with garbage? I would rather re-read The Essential Captain America Vols. 1 & 2 than the collected works of haut-garbage comic-fanboys Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, for the simple reason that I prefer to drink my toilet water straight from the toilet.

Likewise, where Philip K. Dick is concerned, when garbage stop, very very bad�when drums stop, bass solo begin.

�Through a mirror,� Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner. And St. Paul meant, by a mirror, not a glass mirror�they didn�t have those then�but a reflection of himself when he looked at the polished bottom of a metal pan. Luckman, in his theological readings, had told him that. Not through a telescope or lens system, which does not reverse, not through anything but seeing his own face reflected back up at him, reversed�pulled through infinity. ...

I have in a sense begun to see the entire universe backward. With the other side of my brain!

There�s figurative garbage and there�s literal garbage�there is grade-F beef from Taco Bell, and then there�s fecal matter or refuse: that to which one says No. When cows are forced to eat nothing but themselves, they contract a lethal prion disease called bovine spongiform encephalitis. What do you call a man who sees his own face everywhere?

�Maybe it�s you fuckers,� Fred said, �who�re seeing the universe backward, like in a mirror. Maybe I see it right.� ...

Maybe, he thought, since I see both ways at once, correctly and reversed, I�m the first person in human history to have it flipped and not-flipped simultaneously, and so get a glimpse of what it�ll be when it�s right.

Outside of a scanner, drugs are a man�s best friend; inside a scanner, it�s too dark to see. How long does this garbage go on? All day. Forever.

~

Linklater has been faithful, in his fashion. He has made a brisk feature-length film out of a lazy novel. He deals with the boring parts by literally fast-forwarding through them, just as Arctor/Fred fast-forwards through hours of surveillance tape. Linklater conflates Jerry Fabin and Charles Freck; he gives Fabin�s job at Handy Brake and Tire to Arctor, who works at the Blue Chip Redemption Center in the novel; he takes the bullhorn by the horns and hands it, in a brief new scene as subtle as a chainsaw, to a ranter in a parking lot who is soon tasered and carted off. Linklater�s movie is never as funny as Dick�s book, although Robert Downey Jr. does his best; but it�s never as self-serving and graceless, either.

�and so on. What should I say next? that Linklater slipped an image of Dick into the scramble-suit, and that, despite my prissy condescension, I�m enough of a Dickhead to get the in-joke?

I�ve read 14 of Dick�s 36 novels. That doesn�t make me an expert. Lots of people know more about his work than I do, and they won�t be shy about saying so: Neuronal warping in their prefrontal cortices as a result of jammed-dopaminergic reuptake channels will, in many cases, have made them quite chatty.

~

Analyzing garbage culture is an excuse to prove that you can dance on any surface and in any shoes: a sign of talent, perhaps, but not taste. What does it mean to survive on garbage, to exult in coprophagy? What kind of art is it that doesn�t repay close attention: garbage or gossamer? What do you want�a novel you can read over and over again, a puncture-proof tire, a rock on which you might build a church? Or do you prefer the kind of built-in obsolescence that drives contemporary economies: a one-night stand? a cheapo narrative of transcendence exhausted? a drug?

This used to be a little novel about how amusing and sad it can be when your friends go crazy. Now it is an expensive, semi-animated movie with a lot of star power: not about how sad it is to have friends who go crazy, but about how cool it is that it�s sad that your friends went crazy�in rotoscope. Weren�t they funny while it lasted, those sweet, crazy friends of yours? Cue the sound and roll the credits. And let that boy in. It�s cold outside. Besides, he might be holding.

Arctor/Fred is the kind of protagonist your overlords would love you to be. Grandmother�s recipe for totalitarianism was systematic de-education, paranoid psychotic involution, Oxycontin and Chips Ahoy. What more cranial-rectal exchange could your masters desire than that you should squander your meager resources demolishing your mind, cognizant that you are doing so and miscalling it heroism?

Allen Ginsberg opined that he�d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, burning for the ancient heavenly connection. I guess it helps if you can tell yourself you�ve got something extra-special on your hands. I, too, saw some minds destroyed: the minds of everyday punks on everyday drugs, every day. They liked Rimbaud, but they weren�t the best minds of any generation, not by a long shot. They were just my best friends.

~

Show me the light by which you have seen this darkness�you can�t have a post-apocalyptic futurescape without an old-fashioned Apocalypse. The title of A Scanner Darkly, for you lucky heathens who didn�t endure priapic adolescences at church camp, is from the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ... Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

If there�s going to be an apocalypse, I wish it would hurry up and get here. I�d love to know what God really thinks about this dump.

~

Philip K. Dick was born in 1928. Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States. It was the year of the discovery of penicillin and Vitamin C, the year of the invention of the iron lung, the year of the publication of Woolf�s Orlando, the year �Steamboat Willie� introduced Mickey Mouse. Dick died in 1982: two years after Alien, Flash Gordon, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, one year after The Empire Strikes Back and one year before Reagan�s �Star Wars� Strategic Defense Initiative.

The present seems to change; the future stays the same. The future is not about vinyl pants, nipple-rings, e-mail and kung-fu. It is about loss of innocence, blood and suffering, power and pleasure, love and death. It is more or less indistinguishable from the past.

J. D. Daniels lives in Massachusetts. His essays have appeared in n+1 and Agni.

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