Now that the blog is set up I’m going to go back to work from last year which I couldn’t elaborate on much because of the confines of instagram. The first is a painting I finished in September. It was inspired by Valis by Philip K Dick, particularly a line about Eros being "Thanatos wearing a mask" (I assume he is playing with the Freudian understanding of these concepts here) . The split figure refers to the split personas of Horselover Fat (the protagonist of the book) and Phil (the stand in for PKD). The otherworldly color of the pink light (which Horselover understands as “Zebra”) that PKD/Horselover Fat saw in his moment of revelation is a constant throughout the story, something he thinks he sees glimmers of even later when existing on another layer of reality.
If you've never read this book or are generally unfamiliar with some of PKD's spiritual beliefs, on February 20, 1974 he had an experience involving a beam of pink light which entered his mind allowing him to be consciously aware that he was experiencing two timelines simultaneously, that of his life in modern California and as a part of a persecuted Christian underground movement in the ancient Roman empire, which never fell. He went on to develop a complex often paranoid Gnostic spirituality around his perception of these two simultaneous realities, and his belief that we are experiencing life as a series of simulations, which at his most optimistic he thought were being run by a god figure to rescue us from our world, which he saw as "the Black Iron Prison".
In a lot of ways Valis is a personal conversational narrative, where the protagonist who is himself an aspect of PKD puzzles through the meaning of his revelation and comes to understand it through several different shifting narrative lenses and realities including a science fiction/ sociopolitical one, and interacts with another aspect of himself in doing so. There’s a lot of doubt, paranoia and confusion, and because he was so invested in the topic and was so well read, a lot of references to the various pre-existing systems he was testing his own evolving understanding against, and you can find a lot of ideas from what would posthumously be compiled into his Exegisis throughout the text .
If you're interested in learning more about the ways PKD's fiction and philosophy intersected, his later belief that his fiction was not actually fiction etc, you can watch an entire recording of his speech to a baffled group of French fans titled "If you Find this World Bad you Should See Some of the Others" on youtube or read a transcript here here's also an episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast titled "Visions of Philip K Dick" I recommend.
A couple of random intersections in the lattice of coincidence around the time I was designing this particular illustration:
While I was reading Valis in FDR park a man who was catching turtles in the lake approached me saying “oh you like reading? I wrote a book! I died three times and came back” and handing me his business card.
His website is no longer live but here is a description of his book from his publisher’s page:
“This information has been downloaded to my brain from God, the Angels, and my Spirit Guides. They want me to tell the world that everyone on the planet may be more worldly spiritual, together as one. They wish you to know the true meaning of God, our creator, his army of angels, and other spiritual beings in our galaxy and the universe!
No religion is better than another religion. There is one God, the creator for all of us on this planet. Your religion may visualize God, and what you think God looks like, but God is both male and female, and is an energy essence form of intelligence that can manifest to look like any creation. This is their message to mankind.
You must read this book over and over again until you actually get it. The majority of people will not understand it at first. You must eat and drink natural foods so the cells in your body will heal your DNA and, in turn, your universal spirituality will ignite through your pituitary gland, the master gland. You will see things that you have never seen before”
It felt in the moment like the book had leaked into the world around me; a genuinely 3D multi-sensory reading experience. If you read his bio on the publishers site you even find him slipping between first and third person like Horselover Fat/PKD does. I’ve seen him at the park a few times since, catching invasive red-eared sliders from the lake and giving them away to kids. It makes me happy to know that there’s a regular joe mystic in my neighborhood.
The second thing was a scene in the documentary Poly Styrene:I am a Cliche which I was fortunate to get to see in probably my last and only public gathering of the past 2 years, outside in the dog bowl at Clark Park. The movie is a really beautiful, thoughtful and unflinching portrayal of Poly Styrene (best known as the singer for the XRay Spex) who was probably one of my earliest artistic and intellectual influences and I highly recommend it. In it there’s a brief reference to an experience she had in the 70’s which left a deep impact on her (you can read a bit more context on it in this review) :
“WHILE TOURING the UK with X-Ray Spex in the late ’70s, vocalist Poly Styrene had a very close encounter with a UFO.
A luminous pink fireball of energy glided up to her hotel room window and gave Poly a message, which she dutifully reported the next morning to her band. “Everyone thought I’d lost the plot,” she told an interviewer. It was “the moment that changed me forever”, she said. Her life would follow an extraordinary, often deeply painful trajectory in the aftermath of that event.”
A Page from the Augsburg Book of Miracles. The translated caption reads “In the year A.D. 1300 a fearful comet appeared in the sky. And this year, on St. Andrew’s Day, the ground was shaken by an earthquake so that many buildings collapsed. “