Tiny Cracks (Part one)
Visions of Paranoia

In March and April 1974, Philip K. Dick began receiving strange messages and streams of data as if they were being downloaded to his brain. Though he allowed for the possibility that they were the product of his prodigious use of speed and/or a symptom of mental illness, he began to believe that they were from an entity called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). Wherever they came from, they had a profound effect on his work and life; it completely altered how he looked at the world and his perception of what reality was.

Even a cursory glance at ‘The exegesis of Philip K. Dick’ reveals a world that is so different from that with which we are familiar. A deeper reading of the book, though it can be difficult to plough your way through it, is definitely worth it. You don’t have to believe in the existence of Valis or a similar entity to appreciate Dick’s examination of our perceptions of what we call ‘reality’. The same themes present in the exegesis are covered in his novels, especially his later ones.

Robert Anton Wilson had similar experiences with what he saw as a form of magical entity and concluded that though they were real ‘enough’, they weren’t as ‘real as the IRS’, but ‘easier to get rid of’. Again this experience affected the rest of his life and work, though of course, he had already broken with what could be called a ‘consensus view’ of reality. In particular, his ‘Çosmic Trigger’ trilogy gives the standard complacent view of reality a severe savaging in a very entertaining way, as well supplying one of my favourite quotes, ‘belief is the death of intelligence’.

Wilson’s concept of ‘Maybe logic’, best summed up as never completely believing or denying any particular group or religion’s version of reality, is a useful approach to the world around us. As is his linked irritation against the ‘either-or’ Aristotelian logic which has been the mainstay of western thought for a few thousand years or so. When you think along the lines he suggests, it makes sense; for example, day slowly becomes night and vice versa. Day doesn’t just stop and become night. Likewise, the seasons change in the same way; there is no neat division between them.

When I was a teenager at school, I remember getting quite annoyed by the black and white manner in which everything was taught and by the way in which each subject was isolated from another as if there was no connection. So when I came across both Dick and Wilson (The only thing I didn’t quite get about Wilson was his interest in Timothy Leary who I have always seen as a complete charlatan), and a third writer, William S. Burroughs, it was a revelation that there were people out there who looked at the world in a similar way to me but even more strangely.

It was Burroughs who was the most shocking writer of all; Naked Lunch was even more weird and unreadable than Joyce’s Ulysses at first AND it was also the most depraved thing I had ever read. If there is one, over-arching theme that covers all three writers, it is a loosely based anti-authoritarianism against elements of control but there’s also the acceptance that the consensus view of reality doesn’t reflect the world we live in. To a certain extent, they could all be said to have had an occult view of reality, Dick lesser so.

 

In my view, this helps to cut through some of the nonsense and pre-conceived ideas that is offered to as reality. Whilst I probably won’t be writing much about the Illuminati, pink laser beams of light or giant centipedes, some of my way of looking at the world is definitely influenced by the above writers. All of which is a highly convoluted way of introducing the blog, in which I want to look through the tiny cracks in the surface of the world at what lies below.

To be continued…