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HOW MANY WORLDS DO WE EXIST IN SIMULTANEOUSLY? "THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT" AND THE LIFE OF PHILIP K. DICK

INT. -- LIVING ROOM -- 1974. The silhouette of Philip K. Dick completely in shadow dominates the screen. He appears to be passionately listening to the scherzo from the second movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony. Quick cuts of his dissheveled Santa Ana living room and writing desk in disarray, home to both a SF pulp writer and crash pad of numerous others, vacant now save for the crushed cigarette and empty glass detritus of their most recent romp. The doorbell rings. LIGHT falls on his figure and face. He is writhing in pain. The bell rings again and startles him. He gets up to answer it. CUT to INT.-- LIVING ROOM DOOR --CLOSED. The bell rings once more, and Dick's hand opens the door revealing the figure of a young woman in silhouette, light pouring from behind her. FOCUS on the woman. She is young and dark haired and is making a drug store delivery.

The nature of identity is one of the great themes of postmodern writing. Philip K. Dick's writing has been reconsidered of late as belonging to a more literary genre than the pop SF cult pulps he was thought to have cranked out during his lifetime. A prestigious Library of America edition of four Dick novels was published last spring and a second edition is scheduled for release later this year. His reviews are far more glowing now than they ever were in his lifetime. But critics unfamiliar with Dick's transformative mystical experiences and religious works, such as his "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura" and two million word Exegesis, often miss the point.

Dick's quest for identity is far more than clever artistic trickery begging for deconstruction. It belongs to a realm that transcends time and space, and though Dick found himself working with one of the great themes of his or any other day, pulling from his writer's toolbox point-of-view and perspectival techniques of the postmodern period, he was coming from and going to other directions entirely. His inspiration was more than literary. His was divine.

Today, Dick is most widely known as the original writer of the stories behind the films "Blade Runner", "Total Recall", "Minority Report", "A Scanner Darkly", and the recent "Next". Inventive and prolific, he left us with the beginning of an unfinished novel he called "The Owl in Daylight."

"The Owl in Daylight" is also part of the story of a Philip K. Dick film biography set for release in 2009. Toni Grisoni, whose credits include "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," is writing the screenplay for Electric Shepherd, the creative production arm of the Philip K. Dick Estate. Paul Giamotti (nominated for an academy award for best supporting actor in "Cinderella Man" and currently playing the title role in HBO's original series, "John Adams") has been picked to portray the revered author and mystic.

Grisoni is interweaving Dick's life and his mystical experiences with Dick's plot for "The Owl in Daylight". Giamotti told MTV Movie News, "The idea is to take one of his last stories and put him as a character in the story. A lot of his stories were about reality getting bent around, so we’re trying to do that."

Dick began writing science fiction short stories in 1951 for the many pulp SF magazines such as "If", "Galaxy", and "Amazing Stories" popular at the time. His ambitions though included mainstream realist novels. "I knew all kinds of people who were doing literary-type novels," as he is quoted in his chronology appended to the Library of America edition. "They all encouraged me to write, but there was no encouragement to sell anything. But I wanted to sell, and I also wanted to do science fiction. My ultimate dream was to be able to do both literary stuff and science fiction." He concentrated on science fiction for a few years, then turned his hand to realist novels, only a few of which were published. Though his realist novels were largely unnoticed, he applied the skills he honed writing them to science fiction, publishing in 1958 his first U.S. hardcover, Time Out of Joint. Time Out of Joint billed itself not as science fiction, but as "a novel of menace".

In 1961, after discovering the "I Ching", Dick began writing The Man in the Hight Castle, an alternate reality tale, published as a "thriller". He used the "I Ching" to help plot it out. "I thought I had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction," he said. The next year his agency returned fully ten realist manuscripts it considered unsaleable. Then in September, The Man in the Hight Castle won the most prestigious prize in scifidom, the Hugo Award. His reputation and income from his writing derived mainly from his short stories in the pulps, and with the Hugo, he was forever stereotyped as a writer of science fiction in the minds of the publishing world.

EXT. - FIRST CENTURY ROME - A CROWDED ROMAN MARKETPLACE - DAY. Philip K. Dick, attired as a poor Roman artisan, is frantically running from a pair of Roman soldiers. They almost apprehend him, but he pushes over a basket of fish and gets away. The Roman soldiers slip on the fish, and one of them falls in the street. He runs down an alley to a doorway and knocks weakly at the door as he slouches on it. He puts his hand to his side and sees that he is bleeding. He looks up and sees the Roman soldiers searching the street outside the alley. He knocks again, louder. A shadowy figure opens the door and pulls him in as the camera pans up to an Icythus symbol carved in stone above the door.

What did Dick see in the pink beam of light that radiated from the Icythus dangling from the delivery woman's necklace? Much more than his perception of having been a persecuted Christian two thousand years before. Throughout the remainder of his life, he would work almost daily on his "Exegesis" in which he explored that and similiar experiences after the bell rang in 1974. For the rest of his life, he would undertake to understand both mentally and spiritually the pink beam and following visions of February and March 1974, which he named "2-3-74", never fully comprehending its meaning. Dick chased the secrets of 2-3-74 through ten thousand pages of rough draft.

"'Salvation' through gnosis--more properly amamnesis (the loss of amnesia)--although it has individual significance for each of us--a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world--and self-experience, including immortality--it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning," Dick wrote. The world that is taken to be real, read by the senses and written by the mind is "a cardboard, a fake." Gnosis is in recognizing the false, ignoring the illusions, and above all, seeing/remembering the system of divinity that connects us all.

Even his fans were sometimes dumbfounded by some of Dick's statements. In France in 1977, delivering the keynote address at a scifi convention called "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others", Dick said that two of his novels, The Man in the Hight Castle and the critically well received Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said were based on his jagged memories of a slave state world. Stunned, the audience left with eyes like saucers and mouths agape.

"Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make," he said in "The Android and the Human". The truth behind reality is "what you do with the bits and pieces of meaningless, puzzling, disappointing, even cruel and crushing fragments all around us that seem to be pieces left over, discarded, from another world entirely that did, maybe, make sense."

Another, far more concise, theophilosophical work is appended to VALIS, a SF novel in which he fictionalizes 2-3-74 (fictionalization in Dick's case usually being more like bringing the reality of his life into a blurry focus). Dick summarized his "Exegesis" in "Tractates Cryptica Scriptura". Reality is an illusion, a prison in which we are trapped. Not a prison of our own making, but one from which, to break free, we must awaken to our true natures.

FLASH FORWARD TO 1982. "Its a folk expression from the South -- an owl being blind in the daylight," Dick said in an interview with Gwen Lee in one of the last interviews of his life. It simply means a person whose judgement is clouded over. The book is about the inability to understand. I can't even put it into words."

Inspired while listening to soul lifting strains of Beethoven, Dick conceived for "The Owl in Daylight" a world of humanoids in the far reaches of space with no ability to hear or detect sound and whose only sensory information about the universe comes from their hyperdeveloped sense of sight. They can see how things appear in most all of the light spectrum--x-rays and gamma rays, for example-- unlike terrestial humans who can only see a tiny sliver of the light spectrum with the eye. Having no auditory capacity, the insightful but mute aliens communicate through colour frequencies rather than sound frequencies such as those generated by our vocal chords.

Dick's interview with Lee is transcribed in What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Last Conversations of Philip K. Dick published by OverLook Press. Lee was a close friend of Doris Sauter, with whom Dick had a relationship, as well as with Dick's then fifteen year old daughter, Isa, and an aspiring journalist and writer. Lee recorded a series of interviews with Dick, the last of which was held just two weeks before the stroke that ended Dick's life a few weeks later in 1982--only four months before the release of "Blade Runner", the first film based on a Dick story, to put it in perspective. Among Lee's interview notes is an outline in miniature of the whole story of "The Owl in Daylight" along with Dick's development of the story.

"It would begin on another star system on a planet with a civilization quite different from ours -- a civilization where there's no atmosphere such as we have and as a result, speech is never developed; they're mute and deaf. And because of the failure to utilize sound, they have no art predicated on sound," Dick told Lee.

Their inability to know sound, however, makes the effects of sound seem mystical and awe inspiring to them. "And what I want to do is, you know," Dick explained, "the way we have in our world mystical visions of heaven, like at the end of Dante's Divine Comedy, and these visions are generally that heaven is light -- the concept of light is almost always associated with the next world to us." Despite their hyperfamiliarity with all things revealed by any natural light, or maybe because of it, their glances (so to speak) of the mystery of sound in the universe fascinate them to the point of reverence. "Their normal world would be the way we envision the next world to be," said Dick.

Some of the deaf humanoids have visions of Earth and our experience with sound. A few of them travel to Earth from their far off world. The occular aliens waylay a successful B movie music composer, one Ed Firmley, and implant a biochip in his head through which they plan to broadcast Ed Firmley's flourishing experiences of sound back to the home planet. Dick continues in his interview with Lee extensively on "Owl". But the novel was never finished, and the story was never told.

Until now. Not as a novel, but as a screenplay. And not as Dick's last story. At least not as such. Grisoni is bending the story of Dick's life around the character of Ed Firmley, if Giamotti's statement about "bending reality" is any clue. Readers of VALIS remember some point-of-view shape shifting between the main character, Horselover Fat, and the actual writer, Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick the writer bent himself around Horselover Fat the narrator in VALIS, not by a shift in narrational points of view, but by the real Philip K. Dick finding himself in the fictional body of his character Horselover Fat, narrating in the character's stead. The artistic effect of this technique is that of reality entering a world that doesn't really exist.

Narrating as Dick-as-Horselover Fat in VALIS, Dick wrote, "If it wasn't for Horselover Fat and his encounter with God or Zebra or the Logos, and this other person living in Fat's head but in another century and place, I would dismiss my dreams as nothing...Dreams of another life? But where?..Are we all like Horselover Fat, but don't know it? How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?" The unreal fictional world becomes more real and the real world of Philip K. Dick and ourselves less so.

Electric Shepherd is owned by the Philip K. Dick Estate, which is to say by his children. In addition to Isa, there is Laura (Dick) Leslie and Dick's son, Chris. After Dick's death, Isa and Lee Gwen remained friends and Lee became closer with the younger Laura as well. The production company was set up by the Dick children in 2005 after their disappointment with the films "Screamers" and "Paycheck" based on Dick stories so that the daughters could take "a stronger hand in future projects" according to a September story in the LA Times. In October, Electric Shepherd announced that they had negotiated with The Halcyon Company, a start-up production company, to allow them to have the first crack at any PKD related Electric Shepherd project.

"Our Father's library and legacy are deeply important to us and we will strive to bring the highest level of integrity to each project we produce," said Isa and Laura in a press release announcing the arrangement.

Electric Shepherd received a letter from OverLook Press in which OverLook asserts some rights to "The Owl in Daylight", or to Gwen Lee's notes from her interviews with Dick based on their publication of "What If Our World Is Their Heaven?" Whether OverLook has any claim to movie rights is the sort of question that causes Hollywood producers and their lawyers to generate radioactive Blackberry waves, given that the story was Dick's and Lee was essentially taking notes. Yet hers is one of the few, and certainly the most comprehensive, sources of information about the unfinished novel. And though this dispute is being acted out through the companies, Lee and the Dick daughters, who have remained friends, have been advised not to talk to each other on the matter directly.

Flicks? Yes there are two of them. As always with anything Philip K. Dick, the story takes yet another bizarre turn. An unrelated project depicting Dick's life is now in production, this one called "Your Name Here" and is using the same technique of interposing scenes from Dick's life and his stories. "Your Name Here" stars Bill Pullman (he was the president in "Independence Day") as a writer based on Philip K. Dick but, to avoid hassles over who owns the rights to Dick's life, not (wink, nudge) based on Philip K. Dick. Directed by Matthew Wilder, the musician, "Your Name Here" is his first directorial attempt. The production goes out of its way to detach itself from any legal reference to Philip K. Dick or "The Owl in Daylight", though not very far out given the obvious references in "Your Name Here" to Dick. For one thing, the Dick-but-not-Dick character is named Frick--a hybrid of Dick and Frimley.

Taryn Manning costars with Pullman as a Victoria Principal based character with whom Dick was, she says to MTV Movie News, obsessed. "All around his office you see pictures of me. One day, he does a huge line, and the next thing you know he's in the back of a limo, and there I am!" Manning said.

Pullman's character in "Your Name Here" is driven by schizophrenia, speed, and obsession over the actress based on Principal. It is true that Dick's prolificacy was aided by amphetamines and that he exhibited paranoia off the DSM-IV chart. "Your Name Here" can be expected to highlight that aspect of Dick's life. Manning's comments make that much plain.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) confirms Manning's version: "'Your Name Here" tells the tale of the Sci-fi author William J. Frick during the last few days of his life. Penniless and living in squalor, Bill Frick is on a mission to finish his latest literary masterpiece. His inspiration is the actress Nikki Principal: the object of his obsession. After evading a lengthy visit from an IRS agent, Bill has a sudden stroke and wakes up in a limo with none other than Nikki Principal herself, who informs him that his current literary endeavor is going to change the world. He looks out his window and soon realizes that he has become a God amongst mortals, as murals and statues of him permeate the entire city. The vast majority of people worship him, but some like the nefarious Maurice Kroger want Bill's knowledge and power for their own malicious agenda. Over time Bill realizes that he is now living in a world in which he created, he is living one of his novels."

Both "The Owl in Daylight" and "Your Name Here" are so similiar in premise, studio argumentation over infringement might seem likely. Legally speaking, Dick is dead and no one owns the right to tell his biography. The use of Dick's stories by way of the contrapuntal real life/fictional life technique is another matter. With Dick's life so much a part of his writing, possessing it like a spirit beyond exorcism, it is hard to imagine it being told any other way and still getting it right. "Your Name Here" is in postproduction, and of the two, is on track to be released first.

Which of the two films will capture Philip K. Dick? Dick is hard to pin down by anyone, whether moviemaker, literary critic, or avid reader. The lit crits sometimes accuse Dick of a cardinal sin in the fictional world, that of using the forbidden deux ex machina technique in the wormholes of his narrative action. Again, they miss the point. Dick's deux ex machina is a merciless mechanistic universe that eats up and spits out humans back into the worlds in which they find themselves trapped. Rather, the technique he most effectively employed is the mise en abyme, an infinite iteration, as though Dick and his protagonists are mirrors forever reflecting each other, each new iteration contained within itself smaller and smaller until Dick turns to another protagonist and the process repeats ad infinitum.

To Dick, the universe is a machine and there is a god in it--though not the God he matched wits with in the "Exegesis". He tried mightily to reconcile his own identity with what happened to him in 2-3-74 with the real God in the universal machine. God answered all the permutations of data Dick served up in this game of cosmic I/O and when God crunched Dick's numbers, His answer was always the same:

The reality that Dick tried so hard and through so much pain to understand and explain always eluded him, as it always eludes us. Ultimately Dick despaired that, despite his mighty effort, he was unable to understand, intellectually, his powerful encounters with a true reality. Commenting on his 1976 short story, "Second Variety", he stated his "grand theme" as "Who is human and who only appears (masquerades) as human?" And though Dick himself may never have understood the mystical reality he experienced, through his very many words, he did explain a transcendent reality to his knowing and careful readers--the real truth of human existence: To be a real human is to be many humans at once, often in surprising and baffling ways, day after day after day.

Everyone connected with the "The Owl in Daylight" may benefit in a year or two. Having more than one movie out on the same subject has happened before, and studios are savvy when it comes to juggling release dates. Dick's daughters, through Electric Shepherd in their deal with Halcyon, aim to see their father's work receive worthy screen treatments, and also keep his written word alive in print. Gwen Lee and her publisher will at least see increased orders of "What If Our World is Their Heaven?" among Dick's fanatic SF legions and can count on interviews and exposure when "Owl" is released. Among the women, the tone and intent of talks likely weigh heavier than the outcome of financial squabbling among the publishers and production companies when it comes to preserving long-time friendships. Everyone gets something along the glistening tinseled avenues of Hollywood.

Unless, of course, you're Philip K. Dick. One minute, you're sitting at your typewriter listening to Ludwig and banging out a potboiler for which you've already been paid and your agent has already asked you will it work, and the next minute the director yells, "Sound!" and you're melting in the blinding glare of Kleig lights in makeup and costume and you're a fictional character named Frick or Frimley or Dick or something like that when in reality you're not an actor or a character in a movie or in a book, or even a cult SF writer, for God's sake.

Brother Tom' Miracle Book, A Gnostic Folk Reading of the Gospel of Thomas from the Palm Tree Garden is lavishly illustrated and contains an encrypted message.

New to Gnosticism? Wondering what Gnostics think of The Da Vinci Code or Sylvia Browne? Check out the Palm Tree Garden's new Gnosticism F.A.Q.: Some Frequently Asked Questions for Gnostic Gnewbies!

The Gnostics believed in two temporal ages: the first or present evil; the second or future benign. The first age was the Age of Iron. It is represented by a Black Iron Prison. It ended in August 1974 and was replaced by the Age of Gold, which is represented by a Palm Tree Garden.

For this reason, error grew angry at him, persecuted him, was distressed at him, (and) was brought to naught. He was nailed to a tree (and) he became fruit of the knowledge of the Father. It did not, however, cause destruction because it was eaten, but to those who ate it, it gave (cause) to become glad in the discovery, and he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves.

After you tear down the walls and escape the vast, all-consuming edifice of the Black Iron Prison, slipping your bonds and stepping over the rubble of the walls, the detritus of empty signs and the dust of a crumbled ‘civilization’ and emerge in a beautiful Garden of stately Palm Trees, cool and refreshing breezes filling the air and ridding it of the ashy dust. From a clear, clean pool at the center of the garden, a young girl with jet-black hair gathers water in a vase decorated with the vesica pisces, the interlocking fish symbol. The girl offers you a draught, and you know not only that you have come home, but also that you are no longer alone.