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a theology of trash Earlier this summer, I eBayed a copy of In Pursuit of Valis, an out-of-print collection of writings from the Exegesis, a 35,000-page heap of notes and journalings that Philip K. Dick worked on from 1974 to the time of his death in 1982. As one might expect, it's an extremely interesting piece of reading. I've always admired Dick as a spiritual thinker, in part because of the way he tempers his deep faith with a skeptic's suspicion of totalizing systems: "Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth—like the Self—is splintered up over thousands of miles and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be re-collected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, in Plato, Parmenides, in Heraclitus, Neo-Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Mani, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Orphism, the other mystery religions. Each religion or philosophy or philosopher conains one or more bits, but the total system interweaves it into falsity, so each as a total system must be rejected, and none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others (e.g., 'I am a Christian' or 'I follow Mani')." As a conspiracy-eater, I'm also attracted to his esoteric interpretation of Scripture: "Mark 4:11 says that the parables were intended to confuse and not inform everyone except the disciples, the latter understanding the esoteric meaning, the outsiders getting only the exoteric meaning which would fail to save them: this was especially true regarding parables about the approaching Kingdom of God." not to mention the topsy-turvy worldview that comes from believing in a hidden (yet immanent) salvific Christ: "Our whole reality is a hologram-like fake, and into and onto it in the guise of fakery, [Christ] substitutes the (truly) real. So the nonsense phenomena are real, the substantial & normal & expected & sensible are not. Our criteria for distinguishing the real from the irreal are totally reversed: to us, the real is the solid, the heavy, the serious and the irreal is St. Elmo's fire, will-o-the-wisps." Perhaps as a result of this kind of thinking, PKD begins to develop a theology of the cast-off, wherein God is found in "trash": "A random assortment of trash blown by the wind & there is God. Bits and pieces swept together to form a unity." The Exegesis notes are a less polished and more fragmented "behind-the-scenes" version of the ideas found in PKD's great novel Valis, but anyone who's enjoyed that novel would also get a lot out of reading this book. I know I've enjoyed it. Labels: spirituality

Monday, August 22, 2005 3:14 PM   Comments: Post a Comment