There’s a peculiar coincidence that seems to keep happening to me, and I’m curious if it happens to others. Often when I’m reading a book or watching a movie/TV show, there arises apt connections to current events, serendipitous little bridges, as if I were meant to be reading/viewing what I am at this moment. It could just be that the themes are fresh in the mind, who knows.
A current example is with PKD’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Gerwig’s Barbie blowing up the box office. I picked up Dick’s book about a week ago, just as Barbie opened in theaters. While I haven’t seen the film (I’m not a fan of packed theaters), the book’s premise, at least at the surface, contains some interesting similarities to the film.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—hereinafter referred to as Stigmata— is a breadcrumb of Dick’s later woes. It was published in 1964, one year after his critically acclaimed (and one of my personal favourites) The Man in the High Castle. Both novels share similar themes, particularly those of permeable realities, where worlds have worlds overlaid on top of them, echoes of each bleeding through the layers. These themes predicated his obsession with Synchronicity theory, a series of beliefs—further emboldened by drug-induced paranoia—that would eventually consume his work and degenerate his personal life.
I could go on ad nauseam about Dick’s life and work, but for the sake of everyone’s time and attention, I’ll try to focus on the theme of “talismans”.
Life is Plastic
Stigmata takes place in the technological future of 2016 (lol), where all the solar system’s planets have been colonized. The Earth—now referred to as “Terra”—has progressively grown warmer, its citizens rarely able to leave their dwellings after noon due to the heat. A planet-wide draft is in place, plucking unfortunate souls for the colonies, which essentially exist only as claims to sovereignty.
Life in the colonies is a dismal, monotonous existence. The colonists are supplied with antiquated machines and equipment, most broken down and left as metallic skeletons. They spend their lives tending to meager gardens, existing in little communities called “hovels” that have long since fallen into disrepair. Their only reprieve from the dire realities of colony life comes in the form of a drug known as Can-D.
Drugs are centrally thematic to much of Dick’s work (for obvious reasons), but they also always tend to serve a function in the narrative. Whether it’s Substance D in A Scanner Darkly, or Can-D in Stigmata, the altered state that follows their consumption tends to reveal some sort of truth about the world (or worlds). Dick was addicted to a variety of drugs, claiming that his hallucinations were akin to shamanistic glimpses at underlying Truth, like peeling back the layers of reality. Likewise, the characters in many of his novels experience these “glimpses”, brief moments of confounding penetration through the superimposition of Reality.
These “glimpses” tend to require some sort of talisman, like a honing rod, tuning the user to certain frequencies of reality—kind of like a resonance. In The Man in the High Castle, the talismans come in the shape of a trinket or the I-Ching; in Stigmata, it is the substance Can-D used in tandem with “Layouts”.
Layouts are essentially figurines provided by Can-D’s manufacturer, P.P Layouts Inc. They consist of physical props of “Perky Pat” and “Walt”, the former—as one character puts it—a “little brassy blonde-haired doll with all her damn clothes and her boyfriend and her car.” A pretty explicit allusion to Barbie and Ken if there ever was one.
I find the premise of this novel fascinatingly morbid. In 1964, Dick was so cynical about the state of climate change—something only beginning to burgeon within the collective conscious—and the realities of late capitalism that not even the drug of the future is enough to escape; it needs something even further: Perky Pat and Walt, objects of fetishization for one to project onto.
The use of Can-D and the experience of inhabiting Pat and Walt is spoken of explicitly in religious terms by the hovelists. When taken together, the minds of Can-D users cohabitate Perky Pat and Walt, the experience akin to a communion. But even the glamour of Perky Pat’s pristine, Californian dream isn’t enough. The hovelists grow tired of the sheen and superficiality of the Layout’s world, the once thrilling escapade now a monotonous and drab affair. The material reality of colonist life is inescapable; even in another world, it crawls in at the seams, dispelling the illusion.
The Hidden World
Superficiality—it’s a concept at the heart of many of Dick’s novels, the locus of his character’s dilemmas. The characters in Dick’s novels often share a confusion of reality, something that would eventually be labelled its own genre—paranoid fiction. The arcs of his characters tend to begin with discontentment with the nature of their world, and trend towards a skepticism about their base elements, catalyzed by a transcendent experience by way of the aforementioned talismans. This thematic recurrence isn’t mere coincidence; it finds parity in Dick’s own life.
In 1974, while recovering from a wisdom tooth extraction, Dick was briefly visited by a woman making a delivery to his home. He was stricken by her necklace, a gold Ichthys pendant which she explained was “a sign used by the early Christians”. The Ichthys was used by Christians to secretly identify themselves, fearing prosecution by the Romans.
In a letter to fellow science fiction writer Charles Platt, Dick explained that the sun’s reflection off the woman’s necklace produced a pink beam, which entranced him in a moment of transcendent clairvoyance.
“I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.” (Link)
Following this (and other hallucinations—some drug-induced, others not), Dick theorized that these strange experiences were glimpses into another of his lives superimposed over his current one. He believed this other version of himself was named “Thomas”, a “Christian persecuted by the Romans in the first century AD”.
He grew increasingly paranoid, increasingly devoted to this idea of malevolent gods, parallel lives, and prophetic visions. In one perplexing instance, while listening to “Strawberry Fields Forever”, the divine pink light informed him his son was dying. He rushed him to the hospital and was informed that his son had a “fatal inguinal hernia”.
While some of the above is tangential, I believe the genius of Dick’s writing is that instead of wholly surrendering to his “paranormal experiences”, he channeled them into his art. His novels, while certainly containing their fair share of fantastical elements, always sustain a human core. Though there are kernels of his grandiose, esoteric theories, the message of his novels pertain to the loss of collective empathy, to how much we’ve conceded to technology, to corporations, to materialism.
It was as if he were using his characters as his own Barbies and Kens, thrusting them headlong into his own psyche, seeing how they react and what they can discover about themselves and their world, using them as arbiters for truth. Perhaps he saw his work as talismans themselves.