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120 Glimmung Subsequent masterpieces—notably The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik—would refine and reflect the combinations first tried out in Martian Time-Slip. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? falls by the wayside only to the extent that it focuses on Dick’s other big question— What is human?—which more or less pushes the reality question out of the running of the novel’s world. A Scanner Darkly, which in some of its trappings may be Dick’s most deluded work, places recovery against/ alongside delusion or dissociation. As Emmanuel Carrère argues, A Scanner Darkly reflects the author’s hard-won acquisition of the owner’s manual to his mental illness. To maintain his psychosis as encapsulated he henceforth observed a three-phase distinction between, or gradation of degrees of madness: Like certain other very sick people, Phil had a lucid understanding of his disease, and henceforth he drew a clear distinction between (a) writing that organizations like X-Kalay were actually secret drug laboratories or that Nixon was a Communist, (b) believing it, and (c) believing that it was true. He thought that it was possible to write such nonsense, inasmuch as he was a science fiction writer and writing science fiction was all about coming up with hypotheses of precisely this kind, but that it was reprehensible to believe it. Above all, he understood that he could believe something without its being true, because he wasn’t only a science fiction writer but also a con- firmed paranoiac who tended to confuse the real world with the worlds he created in his books. (218) While A Scanner Darkly borrows its skewer of dissociation from doubling in and as Faust I, quotations from which crowd the introduction of the splitting theme or condition, Dick’s other bookend of Faust reference, Glimmung 121 his novel Galactic Pot-Healer, sets its agon off with quilting plot points summoned from Faust II. At one point in his Exegesis, the monumental corpus of reflections on his mystical experience of healing pink light in 1974, he admits and identifies his second Faust novel as a psychotic work. Galactic Pot-Healer shows the very real possibility of encroaching madness. The archetypes are out of control. Water—the ocean itself—which is to say the unconscious , is hostile & rises to engulf. The book is desperate & frightened, & coming apart, dream-like, cut off more & more from reality. Flight, disorganization: the way has almost run out. Those elements dealt with in earlier novels—ominous elements— now escape my control & take over. (In Pursuit of Valis, 195) Scanner then, shows that human reason returned sometime after Galactic Pot-Healer. But in 2-3-74 divine reason (noesis), the Logos, Christ himself, entered me or occurred as if in response to the last savage attack . . . of the years of problems I had gotten myself into by my madness, folly, drug-use, etc. (197) Thinking back to when I wrote Pot: I felt so strongly—& correctly—at the time that when it came time, in writing the book to have the theophany occur (i.e., for Glimmung to show himself) I had nothing to say, nothing to offer because I knew nothing. Oh, & how I sensed this lack of knowledge! & now this is precisely what I do know because now I have experienced it (2-3-74). . . . I had no ideas about the theophany at all, . . . that which would not & could not come with Pot; that in writing Pot that exactly was where I reached the end—wore out & died as a writer; scraped the bottom of the barrel & died creatively & spiritually. What misery that was! Paisley shawl, hoop of water, hoop of fire; how wretched it was; how futile. (198–99) But the last-mentioned manifestation of the Glimmung does represent a last understanding of the aetherial world, complete with veil or shawl, which Dick could have dropped in reference to Helen of Troy’s veil, left behind in Faust II when the grieving mother follows her self-destroyed son back down into Hades. (Eventually the veil metamorphoses into clouds.) That Glimmung’s manifestation also shows the face of a teenage girl (on another occasion partially covered by the shawl [127]), “an ordinary face, easily forgotten but always encountered,” moves down the chorus lines of the Eternal Feminine, where the small-world charms of Margaret mingle with Helen’s great world appeal: “It was, he thought, a composite mask” (41). The artisans summoned from all over the universe by...

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