Missive Written in Haste to the Philip K. Dick Society by Herbert Street

(edited by Dave Hyde)

After two years of doubt and wonder and of a madness shot through with a terrible cold sanity, I, Herbert Street, hesitate still to set forth the details of the exposition I now lay before you. My fingers tremble on the keys... So easy to wipe the written word away, expunge it from existence - would that memory were such a convenient thing! But I'll press on.

It all started that summer of '89 with the pilgrimage to Colorado -but, no, I leap ahead. It started way before that. It started with that awful book, so familiar to me, read so many times - so familiar to you all, my friends - the one, the only VALIS written by that master of irreality and human pain, Philip K. Dick. Fortunately I need not here digress into a dilation on that much-mused-upon classic. The mere title itself conjures in our brains images of a complexity and wonderment that cannot be grasped by our common minds. A supreme effort will be required, I feel, to understand the revelations revealed on its every page. And who among us can even contemplate the effort involved, the research? Who has the time?

Unfortunately I did. Oh, there's some who say that work is its own reward, others that knowledge is a worthy goal, and more who point with pride to the accumulations of their lives. I've spent a lifetime pondering such matters. It's what got me into trouble. So, me, I say now that life is in the living, life itself is all there is. Be thankful we share a common reality, fuzzy at the edges - or do we indeed! VALIS, though familiar enough to us, is unknown to the hoi polloi asleep in their uncomfortable beds. We are already on the edge, my friends; how much further must we press before we fall off?

But I would end before I start! It's so difficult, getting this down. I feel I must write quickly but the dams have yet to burst; the floodgates of repressed memory are squeaking open. I fear the flood. Thank God - or He that passes for Him - that our society exists; without your knowledge and support I dare not relate my tale, else I be condemned a madman, shuttered away from the world, my ravings ineffectual and unheard.

So, then, as one madman to all others, I'll tell this tale. Because now I have it.

It all started, as I said, with VALIS in 1982. The year of the Master's death and the year reality first unpeeled for me as I read the book. You all know what I mean. I needn't explain it here. VALIS... so much has been said already. Too much, I say, for some things should be kept secret. I now wish I'd never read the book. Ignorance is knowledge, as Orwell said. But... too late for me. My hope is that by facing this here I may save a few others, force those who dither on the fence to climb down and follow more traditional paths. Is this, then, a plea? Yes, I guess it is. Though I must write this, you must not read it. Put it aside now. Burn it! Have no more truck with VALIS. Take up instead your daily paper and immerse yourselves in the ills of the world; they're not so bad after all.

What, still here? Well then, in 1982, my mind feverish with visions, I determined to contact VALIS itself. But I knew not how to do it. Naturally I had knowledge of many arcane sciences, had travelled many dusty byways of the human mind. I am not young. I'm old, old in life and old in useless, dangerous wisdom. I didn't know which way to go, but certain paths looked promising to me.

I'd misspent a youth in a deep study of Hermetic Magick, that ancient and modern art of ascertaining the Unknown and one's place in it, and had continued my dabbling into later years. It seemed a likely choice. I got out my books and many months passed - yes, even years! - as I followed ancient astronauts and the three-eyed descendants of Ikhnaton into the depths of racial memory. The Dogon people from bright Sirius; Summanus, the dark, shunned god of Rome; Zoroaster, St. Sophia, the works of Boehme, Apollonius, Dee and Crowley; all were grist for my mental mill. The Tractates Cryptica Scriptura were my bedside companion. It was not enough. What I sought still eluded me. More; I needed more! Many was the distant bookseller out in the world roused from his misbegotten sleep by my cryptic telephone calls! My files grew, filled with notes that now, even I who wrote them, cannot read them in their crabbed intensity. My wife of twenty-two years left me - I cannot dwell on how abstract it seemed at the time. I was immersed, submerged in knowledge. What else mattered? VALIS preyed on my mind. Still, it's better that she's gone; my degradation is enough. None should share it.

There came a time when I thought I had learned enough. I must put my knowledge to practice. God! Can I talk of the things I did! They shame me now. Vile necrosities! Read of them elsewhere if you wish; look to the foul pages of the Necronomicon to satiate your morbid curiosity. I'll mention them no more here! But I see now that I was duped by the Empire. As it is written, "The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one." (Tractates, 42). Yes, violence. Violence to the Mind and Spirit! But all was not for nought. These practices, sad and useless as they were for the most part, at last cleared the air. They taught me discipline, a discipline I sorely needed under the escalating spiritual trials I underwent; I undertook them willingly! Only so did I survive. Demons, hah! Monsters from the vast deeps, I met them all! They are nothing to me now. There is a larger evil in the world, beyond the reach of manic delusion. My third eye was opened, my ajna eye which seeks the truth. I blew all these phantoms away and was left with nothing. Skills and practices of a useless kind, memories of degradation!

With opened mind I looked inward upon myself, seeing there a slate that had been wiped clean of stain. I knew not which way to turn. Was this the work of VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System itself? I waited, many weeks, for the writing to appear. And squiggles of meaning did indeed form in the blankness of my mind but they were unstable, drifting off like moths caught in the periphery of one's nighttime vision. Ah, tantalization! The secrets of the universe just outside my reach, waiting for me only to grasp them physically with my mind! But they would not be taken.

In my mounting desperation - for, surely, I was far gone now - I turned to strange drugs to aid my concentration. Long familiarity with the modern pharmacopeia enabled me to select wisely - or what passes for wisdom when one is lost in obsession! The soporifics I set aside. Heroin and opium, though having their uses, were unsuited to my present needs. I spurned them and turned to the hallucinogens and amphetamines to propel my search. Cocaine and speed, hashish and LSD, XTC and DMT, all the marvels of the synthetic chemist I accumulated. Specialists in foreign tropical lands confusedly met my wild demands for yage vine and the dung of the Andean Desert Rat! Phosphorescent molds I collected from the filthy run-off of industrial emulsion plants, and many a day would see me under the guise of mycology scraping slivers of rock into tiny jars at the Rocky Mountain nuclear flats. But I was no connoisseur! No aristocrat I! I despise such snobbery. When my collection was completed to my satisfaction I fasted for three days, as it is prescribed, and then, seated in my circle in the Dragon asana, I reached out at random into my jars and boxes.

We've all been there to some extent, I know, or the madness of my visions would be impossible to relate. Who, unless one oneself has crossed that barrier between the koinos and idios kosmos, can even begin to comprehend the possibilities available to the unfettered, unhinged mind, twisted by the complex pull of modern pharmacology?

Reality in its mundane form ceased to exist for me. It disappeared, whipped into a terrible vortex in which I in my circle was the calm center. Night after night, week after week, I became All - all in all, all there was - until there was no I anymore, only the Experiencer, the pole around the center of which the carousel ride of reality turned. In the far reaches of my hallucinations - no, hallucinations they were not! - I discerned the breath of cosmic life as if it were a vacuum spun around me. I died. And entered an awful blackness where nothing could abide. For an eternity I rested with the Others in this darkness, this negativity I knew to be the City of the Pyramids of which the mystics rave in their farthest tortured fantasies. And here, in my endless night, in this Dark City, VALIS glanced upon me. How did I know, you ask, as well you might. Doubters! I know! VALIS spoke to me in a burst of light (the colour of which I shall not reveal; it is different to everyone). And what it said, though speech does not apply, was, "go away; you are unworthy."

Shattered, I lay for days in my dark circle while reality reformed kaleidoscopically around me. I slept the sleep of the dead - of the damned! I awakened cold and weak, drained of the drugs which now, on their shelves, mocked me in silence. Outside there filtered in the sounds of starlings and distant traffic. Two weeks had passed in earthly time. I spoke the Words and crawled from my circle. Although weak I found earthly sustenance in the form of a can of Heinz chicken soup. it fortified me, kept me alive, for I had only died in my mind. For a week I ate this basic nourishment. I slept and recovered my strength, though I was never again to regain my former solidity of being. Something had been permanently taken from me. But something had been added, something inside. A light! A fire which burned in me like a magnesium flare. I burned for VALIS.

VALIS beckoned; she had me in her sway, had filled my mind with ways and means and holy missions. Seduced me with her love. I loved VALIS as purely as the good priests and nuns of Mother Church love the good Lord Jesus. I was on a mission for God!

I will not relate all the sordid details. Suffice it to say that on a cool autumn night in the year of our Lord 1990 I found myself in Fort Morgan, Colorado, seeking directions to the cemetery. For eight years all my efforts had brought me here to this conjunction of space and time. Eight years of obsession! Madness! Loss! Anguish of the mind and spirit. Oh, I wish... Stay away! Stay away from VALIS! Seek it not else like me you find yourself in such a situation, talking to that fool at the all-night eatery, putting up with his questions and knowing smirks. God, I hate those bicyclists, those bubbleheads! Indeed, see yourself there, so far gone in debauchery to be leered at by bicyclists!

Yes, my friends, monomania is a sad thing to witness these days. I remember... philately, butterflies, a respectable collection of pornographica... That was enough.

But we cannot return. There is no going back. Graveyards are easy to find after all... and so are shovels... Ha! Got you there, eh? Forgive me my little joke, my sad attempt at ghoulish humor. You expected it of me, didn't you? Admit it! No, I didn't dig up the Master's grave. Even I in my sorry state didn't think of such a thing. But we can have a little chuckle amongst ourselves, eh, with no hard feelings?

Well, then, you say, what did I do?

I did nothing. I kept vigil sitting on the headstone of PKD's grave and as the coldness of the earth seeped up the stone and into my soul I watched the stars. Around me, again, whirled bright, noisy reality. But I had no circle, no protection, no knowledge or care. I had nothing, I did nothing. All my efforts, good and bad, were nothing to me. Cold and lonely as a stone I sat and wept.

The morning sun found me and blessed me there, warmed me to life. I arose from the stone and stepped into the sun. Suffused with light, filled with air, I passed into the Palm Tree Garden.

In the near distance, silhouetted on a ledge of rock, black against the sun, a young girl played a pipes of Pan. Transfixed by her melody and the golden light of the sun I did not advance. In my heart I felt the weight of evil. She looked up at me as the tune ended. "Welcome to real time," she said.

"Help," I said, "I'm sick." And I clutched at my stomach.

She stood and tossed her hair. My cramps disappeared. And with them all trace of evil.

"The Empire has ended!" I yelled, knowing it for certain. "And I've found you!" I leapt at her but she danced aside.

"No you haven't!" she laughed and was gone.

The memory washes over me now... I see her through a curtain of easy tears and the Lullaby of Phoebe rises unbidden to my ears... Oh Beauty! Cruel scourge of souls, if you yet care, burn up these memories; they draw me so. I cannot live with them - though I must!

I awoke from my vision with my face in the ground of the Master's penultimate resting place, eating dirt, vile and unloved. Around me the cemetery markers faded from pink to grey and the last wisps of haze melted into nothingness as the rising sun cleared the horizon. In a daze of loss I hugged the ground, cold reality too solid around me.

I looked up to the sun fat and golden, pitiless with its revealing heat. It burned, oh how it burned! Burned my soul to ashes with its vile light. A creature of darkness I was hithertofore, shunning the light of day - and now I was revealed! A sham. A shadow. A thing without substance. Only memory, damnable memory! Too much pain in memories, my friends, too much for a man to stand. Think back on the evil in your lives, if you dare, and be thankful for forgetting when your mind shies away. Yes, forget, you bastards, for I cannot! Ah, how I rue that day in my feckless youth when first the garish covers of cheap Ace doubles introduced me to the name of Philip K. Dick. Better I had turned to Louis L'Amour or Agatha Christie, anyone but Dick. Now I must live - hah, live! - only in memory.

Phoebe, fair mate of Pan; God, how I miss you! Why? You shouldn't have left me this way, locked in this Black Iron Prison, shut off from real life. Oh you trickster, it's not fair that I should be done this way. Memory! I should have no memory! The old tales tell of the vision of Pan, that none may live who see his face. Then why am I alive? Or am I mad? - the tales speak also of the madness of those who did not die in the searing beauty of your gaze. Of their delirious babble I am evidence here, now, alive - and mad! Hah, hah! I should have forgotten! Why? Why not? Why? Around and around I worry about that, here in this foul prison called life. I miss you so and I'm mad. Ah, Jesus, come out of your cave; I need you now. Only you can save me from this awful memory. I can stand it no longer. Every minute of every day. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Damn the clock! Damn it to Hell!

I can't go on. It's too much for me. Save yourselves, my friends; seek the Palm Tree Garden no more. Burn your VALISes and your Divine Invasions, put aside your mystical hopes and aspirations, settle for the dull life, the normal life. Settle for less than all there is to be known. Live in false reality and be thankful for it. But live!

As for me, I am only a memory. Farewell, friends!

[signed] Herbert Street.

[Editor's note: Appended to this rather unusual manuscript, in a rusty scrawl that I can only surmise is the author's own handwriting, is a short postscript that reads, as best I can fathom it, as follows:

"My time runs out of my hands. But lest there be doubters among you as to the truth of my tale - some who think, perhaps, that I lie, that this is all a work of fiction, a drug-addled rave from the mind of one far gone in mania, I have attached a photograph I took that morning at PKD's grave. In it you can see, in black silhouette, the shadow of the rising sun and the figure of Phoebe seated beneath a fan-shaped palm, playing her pipes of Pan!"