Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:10
SEASON 1, EPISODE 10
THE GLITCHED RAINBOW HEAD OF PHILIP K. DICK from Torley
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes were made.
Okay we are going to step out of the narrative and into the reality you and me and we share, in all its awful and terrible love.
Actually, what I want to demonstrate is that this seams between the narrative and our reality is much more thin that we think it is.
That in writing about “the end of the world” or the “collapse of our civilization” by any creative combination of cosmic/human foibles, we might actually bring about what we desire. The question is: how do we bring about what we don’t desire in those liminal spaces where what we know dies and what we can’t know yet is being born.
This is the question which is at the heart of my work as a human being/scholar/artist. Hi I am the Doctor! I am the Doctor who is one of the lead characters at the heart of this story. I am an anticipator. This is my work of anticipation.
This is story about the creation of anticipatory community and the practice of anticipation. What do I mean by this? Here is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation (completed in the initial raging winds of the COVID pandemic in New York City at Union Theological Seminary in May 2020)
I draw primarily upon the definition of anticipatory community provided by the Lutheran theologian and ethicist Larry L. Rasmussen, who describes anticipatory community as those:
...home places where it is possible to reimagine worlds and reorder possibilities, places where new or renewed practices give focus to an ecological and post-industrial way of life. Such communities have the quality of a haven, a set-apart and safe place yet a place open to creative risk. Here basic moral formation happens by conscious choice and not by default (simply conforming to the ethos and unwritten ethic of the surrounding culture). Here eco-social virtues are consciously cultivated and embodied in community practices. Here the fault lines of modernity are exposed.
(Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227.)
Within anticipatory community the practice of anticipation is constantly cultivated by those who are the anticipators. The anticipators are those who create the prophetic edge against the threats of ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. In anticipatory community the very idea and practice of community is brought to the common tool-shed and repair-table to be fixed up again for the sake of each and everyone's Earthy and spiritual flourishing. The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
This is a story of anticipating not only (or not quite exactly) how I would like the horrible insanity which keeps us all trapped in its gilded cage to collapse. This story is an attempt, in concert with your own anticipatory desires, to make this actually happen in the spacetime we all share in our weird, beautiful, and mysterious quantum entanglements.
Recently I’ve returned to the work of one of my favorite writers, the omnidirectional/hybrid-genre hypermodern mystic Philip K. Dick. Besides enjoying perhaps his most famous work The Man in the High Castle, I’ve also been taking the exceptionally deep dive into the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, his blissfully and provocatively undefinable collections of writings based on an ongoing series of mystical experiences he had in the final few decades of his life. In entering the ocean of the Exegesis, one must accept, in its own kind of twisted faith, that not only is K. Dick not insane, but in fact he might be one of the most sane people the wreckage of the twentieth centuries has ever produced.
All committed (pun unintended) artists/creative types know that a work of art has its own vibrational energies which emerge from the fabric of reality and bounce back/into the fabric of reality, shaping our lives anew. As the art critic Jerry Saltz tells us:
Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?” Gustave Flaubert wondered. Most artists know this feeling—that we’re being led by something outside ourselves. We all choose our styles, our materials, modes, means, tools, and so on, but the work we create isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice. I never quite know what I’m going to write until I write it—and then I’m not sure where it came from. This is art’s otherness. It’s so powerful that you might sometimes wonder if art is using us to reproduce itself—if art might be a self-replicating cosmic force (or a fungus?) that has colonized us into symbiotic service. This can be thrilling. It can also be unsettling. “It’s like a ghost is writing,” Bob Dylan said, “except the ghost picked me to write the song.” Don’t let this creep you out. Instead, learn to trust it. How to Be an Artist (p. 8).
As K. Dick wrestles with new/old vistas of history/reality appearing in his dreams and everyday mindscapes, he began to wonder two primary things in his initial notes of the Exegesis. 1. Was he being guided by a future intelligence/version of his self trying to guide him towards some kind of self-realization? (more on this in a second) 2. Was he now beginning to inhabit the world of his own novels? The answer to that second question may not seem as strange as it sounds, for anyone with any familiarity with K. Dick’s works know that we do basically live in the world he was writing about. But, for K. Dick personally, it was much more uncanny. He writes in the Exegesis:
This brings to my mind my strange and eerie feeling that my novels are gradually coming true. At first I laughed about this, as if it was only a sort of small matter; but over the years—my God, I’ve been selling stories for 23 years—it seems to me that by subtle but real degrees the world has come to resemble a PKD novel; or, put another way, subjectively I sense my actual world as resembling the kind of typical universe which I used to merely create as fiction, and which I left, often happily, when I was done writing. Other people have mentioned this, too, the feeling that more and more they are living in a PKD novel. And several freaks have even accused me of bringing on the modern world by my novels. (40-41)
Several times I’ve had the uncanny experience of meeting people who resemble persons, characters, I’d previously made up for my novels. In Flow My Tears there’s a 19 year old girl named Kathy, as you recall, whom Jason meets; she is a girl of the gutter, so to speak, living a quasi-illegal existence. The next year, 1971, I in fact did meet a girl, the same age, living a life so similar to that of the girl in the novel as to frighten me—frighten me that if she reads the book ever she may sue. Her name—Kathy. (41)
So this brings me back to my initial point and the reason I (in a meta way? such a boring/commodified term nowadays) interrupted the narrative to bring the reality I am sitting in (a pub called Chequers in Barkingside in London, Guinness on the table, horse races on the tubes, dodgy-looking yet lovely locals enjoying a Friday afternoon) and the reality we live in (late-stage capitalist bureaucratic schizophrenic hell-scape which is being rapidly consumed by a defiant Earth).
This story is an attempt to bring about what I hope will be the least traumatic transition beyond this hell-scape as possible. The avoidance of trauma is impossible and undesirable, for one needs to be broken to truly understand the nature of the spiritual. In imagining the collapse of our infrastructure, wars between kids blowing up pipelines and those who want to protect the remaining fossil-fuel assets, and the strange event known as the Pralaya, which seems to me some event in which the consciousness of Earth permeates our own consciousness to awaken us to immanent dangers and possibilities, I am literally trying to wish this into existence. In some strange sense I believe even my own small creative contribution not only will, but must help to create the anticipatory communities I want to be part of.
Back to K. Dick’s first question: 1. Was he being guided by a future intelligence/version of his self trying to guide him towards some kind of self-realization?
He writes in the Exegesis:
But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us. Its sense of timing is perfect. But most important it knows everything. It can make no mistakes. It must be back for a reason. (53)
In the book Quantum Warrior: The Future of the Mind, the author John Kehoe suggests a practice of being receptive to communication from our future self. I can tell you from recent experience that every time I send out a conscious prayer/intention for some signal/sign from my future self, I get a serious scared-straight experience, especially to my own shortcomings in the deepest spiritual work of my life: choosing day in and day out to love, to the best of my ability and beyond, my vulnerable jewel of a life-partner. My future self does not sugarcoat things like some vapid white-girl New Age yoga fascist-adjacent “manifester.”
So do I believe that there is literally a future self who can guide us and bitchslap us if need be back onto the required path? Do you? All I can evince is a willingness to be receptive to the possibility, as K. Dick was. It’s a bit of Pascal’s Wager. I might as well accept and adjust myself to the possibility rather than ignoring the fact of their existence and the obvious messages they may be sending. I would rather write this and be perceived as an unhinged fool, as I’m sure K. Dick wrestled with, than be caught with my existential pants down when the various shites begin to really hit the various fans.
One last ingredient to throw into the bouillabaisse here: what I am trying to break and break through with this story is our captivity to what the philosopher/critic/educator/my new BFF Mark Fisher called our comprehending/uncomprehending addition to capitalist realism aka our being trapped, like a caged animal, within the dictates of the deranged consciousness of capital 24/7. In the posthumous collection of his lectures entitled Post-Capitalist Desire, Fisher shared these thoughts with his students:
Say you done your day of work and then you go home. Are you going to leave the house now? I’m tired! Then you’ve done a double day of work-you’ve done a full day of work and then you’ve done domestic work on top of that, which is still overwhelmingly done by women more than men. So, you’ve done that, then do you want to go out and raise your consciousness? Yeah, OK, but…I’m kind of tired…We can’t be hard on ourselves about it. Time-poverty is real. And that’s what they’ve done. That’s why they want it-scarcity of time…we could all be working much less now, but that’s the insanity of it-the full insanity of the capitalist system. They produce an artificial scarcity of time in order to produce a real scarcity of natural resources. (132-133)
THIS is what I want to destroy with this writing! The absolute insanity of capitalist space-time, which ruins our creativity, ruins our capacity to love effectively, and especially ruins our capacities to provide a healthy, regenerative ecology for the generations ahead.
(Deep breath) This is what you to help me with. Use this story to help me create the anticipatory communities we need to make the transition out of this insanity. Let my imagination be a catalyst for your imagination. Let us not lose hope even when hope has lost hope.
(Now back to the quantum drones kung-fu excitement)