PKD Deconstructed and Reconstructed

I—“Could you, would you, with a goat?”

“Logic!” cried the frog. “There is no logic in this!”
Mr. Arkadin

This is not a normal world.
Batman

Long ago, when my youth burned green and wild with oats (as Dylan Thomas, or a bad parodist of Dylan Thomas, might write) I picked up a sci-fi magazine and read a very short story called “Roog.” The story described a dog’s “paranoid suspicion” against garbage collectors, told from the dog’s point of view,1 and it absolutely juiced my neurons. I felt as if I had just smoked my first pipe of Alamout Black hasheesh (“We taking you higher”) all over again. I felt wigged. I felt as if “illuminated from above.” I felt, in short, that the dog hat talked to me.

Well, that Trip occurred a long time ago—almost forty years ago, I suspect—but I never forgot the name of the author of “Roog” and I never stopped looking for anything else by him in print. In 1978 or ’79 I finally met him—Philip K. Dick in all his beamish and batty beatitude. We both had reached our mid-forties by then, and I think we shared the subterranean tremors that shift male tectonic plates at that age. Specifically, as writers concerned with the “abnormal,” we each wondered sometimes if we had absent-mindedly graduated, somewhere along the line, from whimsy to lunacy. Phil had the persistent notion that, in February 1974, he had made contact with some sort of Higher Intelligence. Of course, as a card-carrying Postmodernist, he never really believed that totally. I had the suspicion that I had also contacted a Higher Intelligence, in July 1973.2 Of course, as an initiated Deconstructionist, I also never believed that totally.

I think most of my first conversation with Phil revolved, like some huge model of a clock or the Newtonian universe, around one blazing center: his attempt, within the rules of courtesy, to test me and determine how crazy he should consider me. If he could pronounce me sane, I felt, he would feel more secure in accepting the same verdict on his own condition.

I think Phil classified me as relatively sane (like most writers) and that helped him, for that day, to accept himself also as no wackier than the rest of our profession. Of course, if I know anything about Phil Dick, by the next day he probably got around to wondering if the Empire had manufactured a Robot Allegory Wizard and passed it off on him as a writer with the same initials, just to confuse him further about the problems of “reality” and “normalcy.”

Phil always felt very perplexed about “reality” and “normalcy,” because he couldn’t seem to get a hold of either of them.

Phil reveals in this book (in a letter to John Van der Does, an old friend of mine) that Alfred Jarry’s system of ‘Pataphysics played a larger role in his thinking and writing than most commentators have noticed. (One who, finishing the last page of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, turns at once to the first page of Phil’s UBIK and reads on, will see the connection at once.) Perhaps Phil’s major perplexities and existential agonies resulted from his failure to read Jarry’s great Irish disciple, Finnegan, whose system of ‘Patapsychology3 rests on the First Noble Truth (also called Murphy’s First Fundamental Finding), “Nobody has ever seen a bloody ‚average‘ man or woman; nobody has ever experienced a fucking ’normal‘ day.” (Professor Finnegan actually heard this-in a minor epiphany-from one Sean Murphy of whom nothing else remains on record except for a remark Finnegan attributes to one Nora Dolan: “The only hard work the Murphy lad ever did happened twice a night when he picked himself up from the floor after falling off a bar-stool.”)

The Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON),4 of which I have the honor to serve as President and CEO, has conducted numerous scientific experiments upon this matter and we have found thus far no exceptions to Murphy’s First Fundamental Finding.5 The average and the normal “exist” theoretically (i.e. in a ghostly way) as mathematical abstractions, but nobody ever encounters them in human life. As Finnegan wrote the day his second great Enlightenment first burst upon him while visiting his friend Dr. Hoffman in Basel (April 19, 1943): “The very act of speaking or writing the Saxon verb ‚is‘ strengthens the British Monarchy.”

We have titled that the Second Noble Truth, of course.

The Sage of Dalkey6 (as we in CSICON always call Finnegan) would have loved Phil Dick. Both agreed that “the Empire never ended,” although Phil found evidence of it chiefly in American politics and Finnegan found it in the structure of the neurolinguistic and logical structures the British have imposed on the planet. (See, for instance, Finnegan’s Semiotic Analysis of Various Translations of the Necronomicon, Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Neuropolitical Institute, 1944, in which de Selby argues that, just as anybody who uses the words “revealed truth” thereby perpetuates what he called “Papist gossip,”7 anybody who uses the words “objective truth” perpetuates “the Empire’s lordly lie of divine impartiality.” This passage, p 69-93, includes the famous bon mot, “Logical Consistency and British Imperialism must have had the same mother, because they look like twins to me.” The O’Brien pronounced this “perhaps the most Gaelic sentence ever written in the English language, and therefore the most subversive sentence also.”)

But perhaps I proceed too quickly into the Celtic Twilight. Let us, as the more earthy Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and look more closely at what we have said. Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, begins with the dispassionate study of non-repeating state-specific events—precisely those “eccentricities” that orthodox science, and even Chaos Theory, seem unable to contemplate-and arrives at a predicament of “baffled suspiciousness” characteristic also of Lacan, Foucault, Fort, Derrida and modern philosophy in general; the same baffled suspiciousness, I might add, that we recognize in the “method” acting of Brando, the stories of Borges, the films of Bunuel and, of course, Philip K. Dick’s ouevre. One should never confuse this Zen-like wariness with paranoia, the quite different state of unbaffled (indeed, dogmatic) suspiciousness. Finnegan’s ‚Patapsychology, similarly, begins from the investigation of “preposterous memories”—things we think once happened to us, but still can’t believe—and arrives at a position of astonished agnosticism about all workings of the primate and hominid nervous systems, including the human. (From this foundation Finnegan built his notorious rejection of English grammar, the 24-“hour” day, the 60-“minute” hour, the system of “inches, pounds, shillings, yen, dollars, volts, ergs, light-years, nations, ‚laws,‘ ‚commandments‘ and other tribal gossip,” etc.)

Perhaps I can suggest the basic difference (in flavor if not in substance) between Finnegan’s view (and mine) and that of Phil Dick by recounting and revising Phil’s tale (later in this book) about Zebra and the alphabet soup. In the early drafts of VALIS, Phil considered having Zebra-the hypothetical Higher Intelligence that disguises itself from us, like certain insects, by perfectly matching and thereby blending itself into the environment (the whole bloody environment, grok?)—almost tip its hand to one mildly paranoid investigator by spelling out in his alphabet soup:

THERE IS NO ZE

This message, although (or because) incomplete, creates an Empedoclean Loop. If the investigator believes the implicit message, “There is no Zebra,” he must simultaneously and immediately doubt it, because only Zebra or God-any difference between the two has now vanished-could send precisely that message by precisely that medium. Such self-canceling prophecies fascinated Phil as much as they have also captivated Zeno, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Lacan,8 Korzybski, Garfinkle and Hofstadter (to name a few …)

A Finneganoid equivalent (or non-equivalent) occurs if one imagines the alphabet soup spontaneously spelling out

COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY

Foucault op. cit. has had some interesting observations on this “sentence” (in his labyrinthine and truly formidable discussion of the impossibility of separating sentences from non-sentences, or books from non-books) and Chomsky’s whole refutation of Behaviorism rests upon the implications of these five “simple” words. I have also commented upon them elsewhere (e.g. The New Inquisition, Falcon Press, 1988.) Finnegan’s discussion (Golden Hours, Vol. V, 34-229) points out that if we regard COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY as utterly “meaningless,”, then we should not feel surprised “if a monkey banging at random at a word processor produced them, or if they appeared in the formation of clouds.”

Obviously, we should also not feel surprised if they appeared in the random movements of our alphabet soup, either.

The fact remains that, contrary to scientific criteria of meaninglessness, most of us certainly would feel considerable astonishment if our alphabet soup suddenly communicated with us concerning the sleeping habits of ideas that belong simultaneously to (a) the set of all green things and (b) the non-included set of all colorless things, and if the said soup further described such habits in a word both violent and curiously vague. (How does anyone, or anything, even an idea, sleep furiously?).

Thus, the officially “meaningless” can carry considerable (and sometimes sinister) meaning—at least to those who, like Blake and modem linguistic theorists, can see infinity in a grain of sand.

We leave it to the student’s own ingenium (as Old Uncle Al Crowley would write) to apply similar analysis to the more alarming case of a ouija board that suddenly spells out COULD YOU WOULD YOU WITH A GOAT? Suffice it to say that many would fearfully attribute such an event to Satanic influence, while others would more whimsically suggest that if Zebra did it then we know that Zebra has a “Phildickian” sense of humor. Only the most creative or over-the-edge personalities would suggest that such a message might telepathically emanate from Madonna, trying out lyrics for a new video.9
 

II—“The Sub-Genius Must Have SLACK”

A magician is just an actor pretending to be a magician.
F For Fake

No ordinary tomato could do this, but-
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

I will italicize a certain verb-form throughout the next few paragraphs—the verb-form that Finnegan considered “the heart and guts of the slavering Imperialist monster.”

Most of the critical commentary of the later works of Phil Dick returns monotonously to the question, “Was Phil in communication with a Higher Intelligence in 1974, or was he just hallucinating?” With the slight background in ‘Patapsychology sketched above, we can see that the very phrasing of this question perpetuates British Imperialist “reality” (or, more accurately, British reality-tunnels10: habits of perception and conception.) As Finnegan would say, to ask that question-to accept the grammatical game based on “isness”—proves that “The Empire never ended.” (And I find Sheissinhosen’s overly-ingenious attempts to link Finnegan to Sinn Fein and the I.R.A bombers both absurd and contemptible.)

Phil, alas, wasted a lot of energy asking such questions. “Was it Zebra? Was it God? An extraterrestrial from Sirius? A hallucination? A flow of raw information from the right brain to the left?” (We all benefit from that “wasted” energy, of course: it fueled some of Phil’s most blindingly brilliant writing.) Finnegan would say, like Korzybski, that any word or phrase following the fantasy-word “is” simply represents primate babble (“the instinct to gossip”). Whatever you say a thing “is,” it simply “isn’t,” because no word, or group of words, or abstract “concepts” made of wordclusters actually equals the non-verbal experiences of our actual existential living.

In other words, we now recognize language as metaphor, and every word as a “buried poem” (Emerson’s phrase)—and some scientists, recognizing the dangers of metaphor-hypnosis have simply stopped writing sentences containing the words “is,” “to be,” “being,” or their cognates, all of which imply stasis, reification and medieval “essentialism,” and now write instead in E-prime, or English without these Imperialist fallacies: a new kind of English that closely approximates the classic Gaelic linguistic sensibility exemplified by The O’Neill and Blind Raftery and the O’Lachlann of Meath.11

For instance, “Beethoven is better than Mozart,” rewritten in anti-Imperialist E-prime emerges as “Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me, in my present mixed state of musical education and ignorance.”

“There is only one possible explanation” translates as “At present, I can only offer one model that may fit the data.”

And “You are a male chauvinist pig and Politically Incorrect, too!” comes forth in E-prime as a simple “Fuck you, buster!” or simply “Buzz off!”

(Even before Finnegan, the Irish way of dealing with “is” consisted chiefly of reducing it to self-negation. E.g. in one Dublin legend, two old codgers meet on a bitter October day. “Isn’t it filthy weather for this time of year, Paddy?” one of them ventures, “Ah, sure,” says Paddy, “it isn’t this time of year at all.” The same principle of contradiction, or Celtic irony, appears in Wilde’s “The truth of metaphysics is the truth of masks,” Joyce’s ouevre, etc. Wherever the British see a certitude, the Gaels see a muddle or a gamble.)

So: some people may prefer the metaphor that Phil Dick’s later works emanated in part from God, and some may prefer the metaphor of Zebra, or VALIS, or the right brain model (which no longer has the popularity among neurologists that it enjoyed when Phil wrote all his wonderful letters about it), or the psychosis model, or “the Head Apollo,” or the Russian satellite, or the Buddha in the park, or the model that simply says Philip Kindred Dick did a little too much Speed with his Acid and Weed and got chemically discombobulated. The metaphors, always, express the commentators‘ own maps of the world, and several of them can have relative truth values on different scales of magnification or within different arts, sciences or other games—just as a weather map has truth value for a few hours, a political map for a few years, a geological map for a few aeons etc. and none of them refutes Salvador Dali’s surrealist map in which Europe consists of Spain, Paris, Dublin and nothing else but vast wastelands.

In discussing my own Contact experience, I personally prefer to speak in terms of the over-simplified but scientific-sounding holistic-right-brain-talking-to-linear-left-brain model—when the audience looks dumb and WASPish. In addressing other, more exotic audiences I say frankly that the pookah did it.

You see, like Phil, I had a long odyssey seeking “explanations” before I learned the basics of Deconstrutionsism, ‘Patapsychology and Ethnomethodology. One psychic I consulted told me I “was” channeling an ancient Chinese Taoist-alchemist. Another psychic told me I “was” channeling a medieval Irish bard. Finally, in County Kerry, I learned about the pookah—a six-foot-tall white rabbit who likes to play jokes on Englishmen, psychiatrists and others who think they know what everything “is.” Having read Finnegan by then, I realized that the pookah model works as well as any other metaphor (and belongs to the same genus as the animal “allies” or “familiars” in shamanic and wiccan traditions world-wide.)12

In fact, writers have had such experiences since the dawn of literature, and have given us many more metaphors to supplement those of Phil and myself. Besides VALIS, Zebra and the pookah, for instance, we have the “Muse” of Homer, the White Goddess of Robert Graves, the ghost of Virgil guiding Dante, Faulkner’s “daemon,” Mailer’s “navigator in the unconscious,” etc. etc. Blake even ascribed his Poetic Visions to breakfast visits by the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. Robert E. Howard, the greatest of all crude pulp writers (because he really believed in a crude pulp world) said he felt Conan the Barbarian standing behind him and dictating his stories.

The metaphors, I repeat, do not matter, and the identification of map with territory implicit in the word “is” perpetuates the Empire’s Black Iron Prison that Phil saw so vividly-and the Dark Satanic Mills vision’d by Blake and the Nova Ovens of William S. Burroughs, too.

Or, as J.R. “Bob” Dobbs said recently—I had dropped by to visit him at Dobb’s Freehold in West Corkscrew (between South Fork and North Tablespoon, real close on Dallas)—“Only an eejit would ask the exact size of King Kong’s dong or, like that poet feller said, that Mr. Cummings, a good old boy, I know him, he said, what did he say?, oh, yeah, I got it, he said some crazy son of a bitch might invent an instrument to measure Spring with.” He inhaled deeply, unlike our new President, and then exhaled dragonic fumes that made my head swim. “Hellfire, by, all great literature gives us Slack, and to receive it, we gotta let it have some Slack of its own,” he concluded profoundly.13

„How does one let literature have Slack, O Epopt of the Illuminati?” I asked humbly. (You have to put on that kind of act when “Bob” gets in one of his know-it-all moods.)

„Shite and shinola, boy,” he said, laughing, “The Sub-Genius always has enough Slack to give it away.”

I sometimes wish I knew the exact blend “Bob” smokes in that pipe. Makes me think of Old King Cole, the way “Bob” more and more becomes “a merry old soul,” right before our eyes.

But we have heard the chimes at midnight. Listen, fearful wedding guest …
 

III— It Walks By Night

Stand back—we’re on a mission from God!
The Blues Brothers

And don’t call me Shirley.
Airplane

Many things have come to pass since Phil Dick saw Zebra and heard the voice of the Head Apollo; and, sure, many strange moons have crossed eldritch skies, by Christ, since he published his VALIS trilogy and died so tragically young.

Having lost Phil, the world seems on the edge of going mad with grief and Denial (in the Twelve Step sense of “Denial”).

Our previous Vice President got into a heated argument with the fictitious heroine of a fictitious TV show, and she won the debate, even though she does not “exist” at all, at all, in the sense that scientists or non-Celtic philosophers understand the concept of “existence.” Not since Swift refuted Partridge’s claim that he (Partridge) had not yet died, have we seen debate so Hibernian and fey: a grown man, and he a Vice President no less, caught debating with a Virtual Woman as if he had wandered into the Holo-Deck on Star Trek.

Almost every day now we hear of Satanic sexual abuse of children, and—even more subtly terrifying when you think about it—even of non-Satanic sexual child abuse, by “ordinary” people, which also has allegedly reached epidemic proportions.14

Tipper Gore—the wife of our current Vice President, the man who will become President immediately if Bill Clinton has an accident—allegedly once played Rock records backwards listening for messages to (or from?) dyslexic Satanists. Will you believe it, faith? Jesus and Mary and Joseph, will you believe it?

Hundreds have come forth, at UFO conventions, to testify that they, like Whitley Streiber, suffered rectal molestation by interplanetary Xists or Sexists or some other dirty buggers from Out There.

Prof. Joe Bob Meeker of Four Square Creation Science Tabernacle and University (East Butcher Knife, TX.) has produced enlarged photos of the “face on Mars” demonstrating an uncanny resemblance to Moe Howard, of the Three Stooges. It would turn your blood to ice, that it would.

Clearly, we live in egregious times. The visions of Phil Dick may soon seem only an overture to the “shift in the constellation of the Archetypes” that Carl Jung predicted would occur before the end of the century.15 I have made many notes toward a long essay (or perhaps a monograph) on similarities of detail, in both the allegedly “objective” “facts” and the Freudian or Jungian symbolism, in cases of(a) “normal” child sex abuse cases (b) “Satanic” child sex abuse cases (c) poltergeist disturbances and (d) UFO abductions and sexual molestations. While I do not have the material in a complete or ready-for-publication state as yet, I can point out that the similarities appear staggering and strongly indicate that one common phenomenon lies behind all these seemingly “different” (and always jumbled) memories (memories of the Black Iron Prison and the fiendish post-Mengeler experiments the Dark Satanic Empire conducts on us, Phil the Fluter might say and Tim Finnegan would say the same …)

In particular, all victims of these (human or “inhuman”) attacks suffer partial or (even more commonly) total amnesia about the events, often for decades after-usually until they meet a hypnotist with a keen scientific interest in kiddie porn or UFOs or both. (The significance of this for the Philip K. Dick mystery becomes evident when you remember that one of Phil’s psychotherapists thought Phil’s problems derived from sexual abuse by his grandfather as a small child.16)

In this connection, I should mention an informal study I myself performed, selecting 150 residents of San Jose, California at random. Ninety-eight per cent of these subjects had absolutely no memory about molestation by grandparents, Satanists or UFOnauts! When ninety-eight per cent of the population of one average city shows the same total amnesia or mental/emotional fugue, the government, I think, should stop its monstrous cover-up and allow us to know what hideous Things out there might sneak in to have go at us in the middle of the night, when we lie asleep and undefended.

Think about it. By Christ, it would scare Blue Jesus out of you, so it would.

Meanwhile, I find myself contemplating the case in which the alphabet soup suddenly spells out,“Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.” I’d like to think that could only happen in a Phil Dick novel, but I, too, share the “baffled suspiciousness” that haunts the arts and philosophies of our time. Too many weird things have happened to me already. Perhaps I will have to avoid alphabet soup entirely. A chara, my nerves sometimes give me fierce trouble these days and, as Professor Finnegan said in his last interview with de Selby, „Most sods who live to my age are bloody dead already.” The uncharacteristic use of the dreaded Sassanach verb shows that the audacious, witty and frequently sober17 Professor Timothy F.X. Finnegan, like Phil Dick, sometimes got lost in the labyrinth of possibility that opens before the astonished eyes of the ontological explorers of our time.
 

Robert Anton Wilson
Capitola, California
January 1993

 

 

1) Philip K. Dick said in an interview once that he conceived “Roog” while watching a dog and trying to figure out how the dog perceived/conceived/constructed his world. I also spend lots of time watching dogs, and other animals, trying to intuit or deduce or guess what sort of feeling and/or thinking they do. Like Finnegan (vide infra, dig?) I have come to the conclusion that humans differ from other animals only in worrying about whether their opinions and behavior can pass a Political Correctness test. E.g. I remember once looking at a Komodo Dragon, on a TV nature documentary, while he ate a crab. The narrator identified this particular Komodo Dragon as “a male around 50.” As a male around 50 who also liked crab for lunch, I felt an immediate empathy or “oneness” with this weathered veteran of the reptile social order. I thought for a while about how much all males around 50 have in common, besides irony. Then, when I wondered about the differences between Mr. K. Dragon and myself, I realized that, most obviously, he had never wasted a minute in his whole life wondering if other reptiles would think his behavior Politically Correct or Politically Incorrect. I regard that Komodo Dragon as one of my most blessed Teachers and I hope that, like me, he has reached 61 and still occasionally eats crab for lunch.

2) Phil’s Contact experiences and mine differed in all respects but two (1) both of us had traditional mystic/pantheistic Visions in part of the Trip, and (2) both of us, oddly, had the impression, at some point, that the communicating “entity” resided in the system of the double star, Sirius. Both of us also subsequently regarded the whole matter with a mixture of excitement at the possibilities opened to us and a high degree of cautious agnosticism about accepting any one explanation of the phenomenon. As Finnegan wrote (Golden Hours, IV, 73), “One must read David Hume extensively, ingest the ‘magick herb’ of which Abdul Alhazred hints, or speak Gaelic fluently, to escape the Imperialist and dogmatic constraints of English grammar.” I meet two out of three of those requirements.

3) Usually mis-“corrected” into Parapsychology by well-meaning but ill-educated copy editors. This has resulted in endless polemic against Finnegan by people who haven’t even read his major works. See e.g. Sheissinhosen, Finneganismus und Dummheit, University of Heidelberg, 1982, Werke, Vol. 2, p 230-270, Vol. 3 passim and Vol. 7 p 3-989 (1987). A semiotic similar to Finnegan’s appears in Michael Foucault’s L’Archeologie de Savoir, Editions Gallmard, Paris, 1969.

4) Which you really must not confuse with CSICOP, an Imperialist cult devoted to vicious and virulent anti-Finnegan propaganda, evidently provoked by die ubiquitous ‘Patapsychology/Parapsychology misprint which haunts all editions of Finnegan’s Golden Hours (Vols I-XXIII) until the epic-making corrected edition of Gobbler (Golden Hours, Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Non-Phenomena Institute, Dalkey, 1993.)

5) All data remains in MS. as yet, but the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Theochemical Institute, Poolbeg, promises to bring forth a collected edition of the best 666 papers by researchers who, seeking everywhere on this planet for “normalcy” or “averageness,” have found no empirical evidence of either. See, in this connection, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkle, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1968.

6) Dalkey: a small town on the south of Dublin Bay, so eccentric that, as Sir Myles na gCopaleen said, even the streets seem to meet by accident. Finnegan lived there during the years of his greatest philosophical and scientific investigations, having left Paris in 1937 after the heartbreak he experienced when Sophie Deneuve, his one great amour, left him to engage in stealthy combat with Gertrude Stein for the hot jungle love of Alice B. Toklas and the secret formula of her wonderful Brownies. Sir Myles never left Dalkey in his life, and boasted of the fact. He founded his various Institutes, originally, not to publish Finnegan but to promote his favorite (pre-Finnegan) philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, who had proven that the universe doesn’t exist but God thinks it does. Sir Myles regarded Berkeley, Finnegan, Jonathan Swift and William Rowan Hamilton as Ireland’s four greatest heroes, because they had undermined the entire logical Universe upon which British Imperialism rests. (Swift proved, in his dispute with the astrologer, Partridge, that just because a man repeatedly denies that he has recently died, we do not necessarily have to believe him. Hamilton invented quarternions, the mathematics in which, contrary to what they tell us in school, x times y does not equal y times x.) Sir Myles’s four heroes—like Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett (among others)—all illustrate the typical Irish response to a Logician or an Englishman: which consists of “You claim that’s a proof? Sure, you haven’t considered….” and then Logic becomes as full of pot-holes as the streets of Belfast.

7) In ‘Patapsychology “gossip” signifies any verbal communication with a hidden agenda, and “the instinct to gossip” explains most of what other, pre-Deconstructionst thinkers would variously call “the search for truth” or “the impulse to play” or “the creative spirit.” Thus, to Finnegan, the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the theory of Natural Selection, Joyce’s Ulysses, the paintings of Picasso, the Collected Speeches of George Bush, Phil Dick’s Exegesis and even Finnegan’s own writings, all represent “state-specific gossip systems.” Compare Garfinkle and Foucault, op. cit. and Korzybski, Science and Sanity, Institute of General Semantics, 1948.

8) According to the World Health Organization, approximately 100,000,000 acts of sexual intercourse occur every day on this planet. That averages out to 4,166,667 per “hour,” or 69,450 every “minute.” I originally decided to mention this as a bonus to those scholarly types who actually read the footnotes, but now that we’ve raised the topic, do you ever worry that somebody else has gotten a lot of your fair share?

9) At least, when “Could you, would you, with a goat?” appeared to me in a dream last night, I suspected the Madonna explanation. (She lives only a few hundred miles south of me and telepathic waves, like the magnetic, flow toward the North Pole.) However, my wife insists that I got the whole phrase out of a book by Dr. Seuss which I don’t even remember reading. The entire passage, which she quoted from memory, goes as follows: “Could you, would you, with a goat? I could not, would not, with a goat. I will not eat green eggs and ham. I will not, will not, Sam-I-am.” ‘Patapsychology, of course would look warily upon both her “memory” and my “non-memory.” I will only remark further that if the passage does come from Dr. Seuss and not Madonna, the trained clinician recognizes in it obvious symptoms of substance abuse, and the truly redblooded Christian patriot will demand that the police seize this “kiddie porn” and burn it at once.

10) I owe the term “reality-tunnel” to Dr. Timothy Leary. See his Neuropolitics, And/Or Press, 1978 and/or his Info-Psychology, Falcon Press, 1988, and compare Garfinkle’s concept of the “gloss” in Studies in Ethnomethodology, op. cit.

11) See To Be Or Not, edited by Paul Dennisthorne Johnston, International Society for General Semantics, San Francisco, 1992.

12) For a contemporary “Americanized” pookah legend, see the play and/or film Harvey, by Irish-American Mary Chase. Sheissehosen’s diatribes against Finnegans’s use of the pookah model went far beyond the bounds of decent adult debate or academic decorum, and the pipe-bomb sent to Dalkey from a non-address in Heidelberg suggests that more than a pedantic feud motivates some of the anti-Finneganites. See Jesus Magdalena La Puta, La Estupidez de Sheissinhosen, University of Madrid, 1977, and Heinz Gobbler, “The Vatican Bank, the CIA and Sheissinhosen Linked: Notes on the Strange Death of Roberto Calvi,” Journal of Teratological Evolution, Royal Sir Myles na gCopallen Theochemical Institute, Fall 1992.

13) J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the living Slackmaster, alleges that he made Contact with the Xists from Planet X even before Phil Dick or Whitley Streiber had their Contact experiences. “Bob” further alleges that everybody who tithes one-tenth of their yearly earnings to his Church of the Sub-Genius in Dallas will get rescued by the Pleasure Ships of the Love Goddess when the Xists return to destroy Earth at 7:30 in the morning on July 5, 1998. Sheissinhosen’s attempt to find sinister implications in the appearance of “Bob” standing on the Grassy Knoll holding a Confederate Flag in Frame 235 of the Zapruder Film (Werke, V, 23-69) seems unconvincing and frankly vicious. I must admit, however, that La Puta (“P2, the Priory of Sion and the CIA: Strange Background of J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs,” Journal of Teratological Ontology, XXIII, 17, Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Marching and Chowder Society and Committee for Serious Investigation of Claims of the Preposterous) raises serious concerns with his computer enhancements of this controversial frame, which seems to show Roberto Calvi, Jimmy Hoffa and Archbishop Marcinkus standing beside “Bob” with smoking guns.

14) According to the Los Angeles Times (April 23, 1991) the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit has become very skeptical of these Satanic tales, because every case they investigated proved fraudulent. The Times adds, however, that belief in Satanic kiddie-sex remains firmly entrenched in the minds of most Fundamentalists and Feminists, and it requires considerable chutzpah to challenge two such powerful and fanatic groups. Besides, as all UFO investigators and Kennedy Assassination buffs say, you can’t trust government agencies, which always seem involved in “cover ups.”

15) This prophecy appears in Jung’s book, Flying Saucers, but a nice lady came around and told me they had to close the library before I jotted down the publisher and date, and I had a bad cold that day anyway. Surely you can look it up for yourself. I can’t do all the work.

16) See Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin, Harmony Books, New York, 1989

17) Well, occasionally sober.


PKD Deconstructed and Reconstructed
by Robert Anton Wilson is the foreword to The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1977-1979 (1993, out of print).

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