I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD. I AM ALIVE.

334 ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD. I AM ALIVE. Around the square of vivid writing materializes the spray can a la Andy Warhol; the square of writing becomes its label, as in previous manifestations. . . . The two realities—the spray can versus the actual photographed events—merge into one ruin of particles, as if an entire planet had burst, and nothing remains of it but radioactive waste. It is as if the Warhol drawing of the spray can and the writing attempted somehow to stem the explosion and did so—but only for a moment; then it, too, was swept away. Even it was not enough. —philip k. dick, Ubik: The Screenplay In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, adolescent or group psychology organizes the communion-like experience of fusion or translation that human colonists on Mars share when downing the drug Can-D and projecting themselves into the couple of dolls Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt and into the doll layout, which represents life on Earth (or, more speci fically, on the Coast).1 Palmer Eldritch’s competing experience of other worlds via his drug Chew-Z represents the psychotically heightened version of Can-D fantasy. In Mercerism “fusion” was the highest attainment of empathic identification as group identification: clutching the empathy box one surrenders to the sending and receiving of one’s mood, which whether upbeat or swinging low is group-formatted, reflected back as contained within the group experience . At the same time one sees Mercer on his hopeful/hopeless climb out of the tomb world and one feels the injuries he endures during this climb at the hands of adversaries who first assembled against him, according to all of you are dead. i am alive. 335 the Mercer legend, to stop his interventions on behalf of animals. As Pris pointed out, however, conditions on Earth don’t really hold a handle to understanding life on Mars. Thus the main difference between the fusion of Mercerism and the fusion or translation obtained via Can-D is that the importance of the tomb world is on Earth not as in the heavens or outer space. Viewed from the stricken world of Mars, Earth is the “other world” of fantasy. Around the drug and the Barbie-doll-based small world after all of the Perky Pat layout colonists identify themselves as varieties of “believers.” “It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality , as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you believe as some do that it’s outside of time and space, that it’s eternal” (42). The sensualist position sees the drug as license to fantasize any and all illicit acts, which from the juridical standpoint are impotent wishes (42). Whereas this one wants to gain something, the other swears by the loss fundamental to fusion: “I admit . . . that I can’t prove you get anything better back. . . . But I do know this. What you and other sensualists among us don’t realize is that when we chew Can-D and leave our bodies we die” (42). Whereas fusion in Mercerism was fundamentally the Christian Mass dismantled through the modifications that the all-importance of animals introduced, Can-D fusion is fundamentally adolescent, while analogies with the double Mass of Christianity and of mass-media consumerism are openly admitted. In the tight spot of small differences, official Christians nevertheless militate against the “religious” drug cults of fusion beholden to Can-D. Anne Hawthorne travels to Mars to try to convert drug users to the Neo-American Church: “You know how the eating of Can-D translates —as they call it—the partaker to another world. It’s secular, however, in that it’s temporary and only a physical world” (126). Her fellow passenger , Barney Mayerson, concedes that he would try Can-D before he joined her church: “I can’t believe in that, the body and blood business. It’s too mystical for me.” But, Anne counters, tripping back to an Earth that you know isn’t the real one also takes faith. “It’s experienced as real; that’s all I know.” “So are dreams.” “But this is stronger,” he pointed out. “Clearer. And it’s done in—” He had started to say communion. “In company with others who really go along. So it can’t be entirely an illusion. Dreams are private; that’s the reason we...