“The bells I heard in 3-74: space (the void). Beethoven's music encloses that space (as I've noted before). He converts space into time and time into space as one thing: space-time, and makes it as a unitary "thing" perceptible to us. It is motion (i.e., time) in space; audible space. Space with a mysterious nonverbal identity/presence filling it, moving in it. Movement as structure: being in nonbeing. The byss and the abyss.”
“I am a very dangerous person. Again, my very efforts to produce a solution are alarming because they so blatantly fail. My failure is the failure of all mankind (to find a solution or explanation). The fault is not mine.
I can say no more. What I have done may be good, it may be bad. But the reality that I discern is the true reality; thus I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis. I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak.
I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irra-tional, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to these people.”
“I am currently of the opinion that (1) there is a connection between original authentic Christianity through Gnosticism to Heidegger; and (2) that 2-3-74 was this particular experience; viz: the inauthentic state that Heidegger describes is the "thrown-ness" into the "fremd" that Gnosticism describes; there follows, then, a series of dire transformations by the
"thrown into the alien world" person trying to cope; I comprehend this as flight and evasion from fate (heimarmene), which is a sense that this alien state/world into which one has been thrown torments now and eventually kills (causes nonbeing, das nicht).
The unconscious apperception of this creates angst (dread). This running to evade nonbeing manifesting itself as fate generates a pressure time, in which - by which — the person is driven more than driving; that is, he both runs and is made to run; he is caused to flee more than volitionally fleeing. Thus there is caused an endless process of becoming that never turns into being itself; there is no true now — he is projected always into a dreaded next; he is not really here and now for him; he must run into the future and yet paradoxically away from the future; both runs toward and away from. Thus he is split. Part of him reaches inauthentically into the future to monitor it for peril — he cannot afford ever to ignore the future since it contains his fate which will kill him — and part of him looks away from the future for the same reason; this split may be the basis of schizophrenia. He must both notify himself of what he sees in the future and obscure what he sees from himself. This is another version of the split. But worst of all is — not that he must involve himself continually in the future out of apprehension, while also avoiding it, fearing to move into it, trying in fact to halt time (since time contains his fate) but he fails to be in the now, which is where reality is, and this is what most inhibits Sein; he has to be eternally becoming because he must extend himself eternally into the not yet. What I see in all this is that his sense that this alien world he has been thrown into will eventually ineluctably annihilate him is correct and he knows it is correct; this is not a delusion, this sense of impending destruction that will take away what little being he has. That time might increase or even complete his being does not occur to him because (and here the Gnostic perception is vital) this is an alien world into which he has been thrown against his will; i.e., he is helpless: he did not decide to be here, and the more he reaches frantically into the future (while simultaneously running from the future) the faster time "flows" (or the faster he moves through it). Thus the moment, the now, escapes him perpetually and he has no life he can call his own. But he must never reveal to himself this fact - about his inevitable future doom — lest he disintegrate utterly; again he is split. So he has no idea what he is doing or why, and he is enigmatic to himself; so he is too and for himself as alien as world is to him; he is as if thrown into an alien self on top of everything else!
As I say, the only solution to this is the Christian solution of what I call total capitulation to this fate and an acknowledgment that it cannot be avoided; it will come and it will destroy him. Thus he ceases running, and lives now not future; but at the moment he does this he knows that this anticipated doom exists — so in the normal course of life this sense of the future becoming the now only occurs — if it occurs at all — when the impending doom ceases to be future and is perceived as now: at which point anticipatory dread becomes logically total fear. However (as Heidegger points out) this apotheosis of dread, this being in-death, carries with it the possibility of Sein.”
Philip K Dick, Early 1981
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