How is it that people can walk on a bed of hot coals without injury? How do people bend objects only with their minds? I don't know, but occurrences such as these open the door to questioning reality, and the corporeal world. Philip K. Dick raises such questions in his essay, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In that essay Dick says that his primary curiosities are, "'What is reality' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'" and later, "My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point." It seems to me that they do indeed unite, and it is because any reality is the construction of humans. Even in our own history we have had numerous realities that the mainstream population embraced, and right up to this day there are several different realities being played out in our world. Religions form many of these realities. Science forms many of them. Theologians, politicians, teachers, parents, friends, priests, dictators, philanthropists, ourselves, etc. Realities are being created constantly.
No one will agree on what reality is, therefore, there are either too many to enumerate, or THE reality is illusive to us and we are simply ignorant of it and can only resort to making up silly representations of false realities. Who knows? In response to a woman's request that Dick define reality for her, he answered, "'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.' That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972 [8 years earlier]. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly." Dick goes on to question that notion of reality in the essay, and many others, but perhaps Dick is most helpful on this difficult metaphysical question in his novels, The Game Players of Titan being one example.
In the playing out of Bluff, the game in which properties, and eventually worlds, are won and lost, the players are hoping to find fruitful partners, ones which can successfully concieve children. The human race has been afflicted with sterility, but not entirely; certain combinations of couples can successfully concieve. The reality of this world is different from our own. The continuity of humanity all depends on the luck of the roll of dice. No one can know which new coupling will result in success among the new partners. Survival takes on a new definition where fate and chance combine in a complex web of events.
When Pete Garden begins to see humans as vugs, the reader knows that the whole foundation of reality is beginning to slip away as we read each consecutive word.. The reality of the McClains being humans had appeared absolutely irrefutable to Pete, not even a matter of question, until he saw Mary Anne as a vug. What is even more ambiguous than this "unreality" is that Pete is on drugs and cannot tell for sure if he has hallucinated the vision of Mary Anne as a vug, or if it was "reality." Then he begins to wonder who else might be a vug? Perhaps everyone is a vug except for him? Perhaps even he is a vug and doesn't even know it. Hence, the wonderful ambiguity that leads to schizophrenia, the state in which you realize that you know something that no one else knows. Of course, the one eternal source of truth for the reader, and Pete, is the Rushmore effect. When he asks the Rushmore unit if Mary Anne is a vug it replies that she is not. From this we might have conclusive evidence, but Mary Anne claims that she can manipulate the Rushmore unit, so we really have no certain information, no idea what is real and what is unreal. This ambiguity within the narrative is far richer than anything that Dick can tell us about reality in his essay because the narrative really makes us question what is "really" going on in this novel, and by doing so it informs us of how tenuous our ideals of reality are. We realize that what we consider to be real is simply a construction made by ourselves, or our society, and may well be an illusion.
However, Dick's essay is rich in ambiguity in its own right. Just as he questions the nature of reality(s), he also proposes a rather conventional model of reality, "My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real...I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts." Now, Dick, just prior to propounding this theory has explained a marvelous set of events that befell him. He had written a book, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and in it had unknowingly retold the basic narrative from a Biblical story in the Book of Acts. He had been unaware of the phemonenal parallels until one day he had been describing a scene of the book to his priest when the priest told him of the similarities, "I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts...and I have never read acts, I must admit." Very odd, indeed! So what are we to understand from Dick's essay? That reality is unkowable, or possibly multiple, or are we to believe that we are living in a continuous, revolutionary unfolding of the Christian myth? I love ambiguity!
Dick offers us yet another theory to bridge the gap between these two polemical notions of reality, although it is necessary to note that it draws upon a still eternal ideal: "It is the theory that the Evil One -- Satan -- is the 'Ape of God.' That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are decieved, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50...and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?" Once again, who knows? But this particular ideal of reality, or the appropriation of reality by Satan, would certainly go a long way in explaining how Mary Anne could be an ambiguous character, one who might be one thing, but could just as easily be another. She could be part of that plan of Satan's, to render all of the world and illusion, clothing reality with a false materiality, and most importantly, a false sense of Time. If one cannot differentiate between the vugs and the humans, between what exists in its "real" state, and what is wearing a mask, then how can we ever realize if we really exist?
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