Any lying language creates at once in a single stroke a pseudo-reality, contaminating reality, until the Lie is undone. As soon as one lies one becomes separated from reality. One has introduced the falsification oneself. There is one thing no one can force you to do: to lie. One only lies for one’s advantage. It is based on an inner decision invisible to the world. No one ever says to you, “Lie to me.” The enemy says, You will do and believe certain things. It is your own decision to falsify, in the face of his coercion. I am not sure this is what the enemy wants, or anyway the usual enemy. Only a Greater Enemy, so to speak, would want that, one with greater objectives, and a clearer idea of what the ultimate purpose of all motion is.
Sometime in the past, about three months ago, I must have become aware for the first time in my life that the cause of my misery was the Lie and that the enemy, the real enemy, was a liar. I remember somewhere along the line saying loudly, “He is a liar; he is a liar,” and feeling it to be very important, that discovery. I forget—or rather I guess it does not matter—what specific lie by which person made it all change. There was a person, there was a lie. A week after I realized that with no possibility of evading it everything altered radically for me, and the world began to talk, in a true language of signs: silently. The Lie had slipped away. The Lie deals with talk, written or spoken. Now it’s gone. Something else shines forth at last. I see the cat watching at night, for hours. He has seen it all his life; it is the only language he knows.
I think a lot about my early childhood and remember events in it vividly, which I guess is a sure sign of senility. Also events that took place within the past ten years seem dim and not really a part of me. Their sadness is gone: used up. I encounter new fresh sadnesses in my remote past, like stars that burst into life when I notice them. When I pass on, they again are forgotten. Usually, however, senility is a gradual process; mine came on abruptly when I noticed the cat trying to discern what was causing me pain (I had stomach flu) and then what he could do to help me. He finally got up on my abdomen transversally and purred. It helped, but then when he jumped down the pain returned, whereupon the cat got up again. He lay on me for hours, purring, and finally the disturbed rhythm of my stomach began to match the pace of his purrs, which made me feel much better. Also, the sight of his jowly face gazing down at me with concern, his keen interest in me his friend—that changed me, to suddenly open my eyes (I had been lying for an hour on the couch) and see his concerned large furry face, his attention silently fixed on me. It was not an illusion. Or, put another way, his field of energy, his strength, was at that moment greater than mine, small as he was, since mine had dimmed from the flu and his was as always. Perhaps his soul was at that unusual moment, that critical moment, stronger than mine. It is not usual for a small animal’s soul to be larger than a man’s. He warmed me and I recovered, and he went his way. But I changed. It is an odd senility, to be comforted and healed by a small animal who then goes on as always, leaving you different. I think of senility as a loss of contact, a drop in perception, of the actual reality around one. But this was true and in the present. Not a memory.
The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It’s best not to talk about this. I’ve tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can’t find any. I’m trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can’t discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.
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.
[4:41] The best psychiatrist I ever saw, Dr. Harry Bryan attached to the Hoover Pavilion Hospital, once told me that I could not be diagnosed, due to the unusual life I had led. Since I saw him I have led an even more unusual life and therefore I suppose diagnosis is even more difficult now. Something strange, however, exists in my life and seems to have for a long time; whether it comes from my odd lifestyle or causes the lifestyle I don’t know. But there it is.
For years I’ve felt I didn’t know what I was doing; I had to watch my activities and deduce, like an outsider, what I was up to. My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognizable world. Where is that world? In my head? Is it what I see in my own life and inadvertently transfer into my novels and to the reader? At least I’m consistent, since it is all one novel. I have my own special world. I guess they are in my head, in which case they are a good clue to my identity and to what is happening inside me: they are brain prints. This brings me to my frightening premise. I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can’t figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism?
It’s too much for me. Like an astrophysicist who by studying a Black Hole causes it to change, I seem to alter my environment by thinking about it. Maybe by writing about it and getting other people to read my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my books. Someone suggested that.
I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.
My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them; it’s a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they—my books—are already there. Whatever that means.
The most ominous element from my books which I am encountering in my actual life is this. In one of my novels, Ubik, certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment. In my novel what broke through was the presence of a man who had died. He speaks to them through several intermediary systems and hence must still be alive; it is they, evidently, who are dead. What has been happening to me for over three months is that a man I knew who died has been breaking through in ways so similar to that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead and he is alive, or—well, as in the novel, I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense.