This surd (something irrational that can’t be explained after everything that is rational has been) may stick with me. So I may wind up with something like quantum mechanics facts. In fact it may be an event in quantum mechanics, like something related to the Tao. I don’t know.
And this is what I wanted the most to explain. And this tug is right here and now, in the very trash stratum of reality. I have set out in pursuit of ontology, rising from level to level, only to go full circle and come back where I started: pop tunes on the radio, weeds in the alley . . . and the faint flurry of a kind of breath, as if some invisible spirit, perhaps the ruah, is breathing creation into existence ex nihilo. Yes, I am on the rim of reality; level after level each one more ontologically real than the previous, and then—nothingness. The void. Only a faint wind stirring reality, tugging at it. And maybe a glint of color, briefly. And a word or two as set to ground. 6½ years of work: a glint, a rustle in the weeds of the alley; I am confronted by unfathomable mystery, as if I saw cosmogenesis reversed: cosmic resorption, until at last creation ceased to be, and only the spirit moved across the face of the void. And, equally real and equally enigmatic, a small murmuring voice speaking in the night, as if from immeasurable distances away.
I have found the ultimate source: a rustle of wind in the weeds and faint, distant words by a lovely voice that is neither male nor female. Both bordering on the rim of not being there but being, I am convinced, the truly real; in contrast to the great substantial world order, the galaxies and nebulae, suns and planets, civilizations and deeds.
I cannot say that I have found moksa, enlightenment. I do not understand what I saw and what happened in 2-3-74. Something helped me. Who? Oddly, although I don’t know who I do know why (since the AI voice told me that). I chased after reality, and how far did I actually get? “Ti to on?” the pre-Socratics asked. Perhaps it is the wrong question.
An odd thought came to me. I end my exegesis with something—what I call a surd because that is what it is—that can’t be fitted into an otherwise satisfactory system. This one thing is simple. No elaboration of it seems possible, no implications extracted and elaborated. It makes me think of Dante’s semplice lume. And my exploded morphological structure reminds me of Dante’s description of God as the book of the universe whose pages are scattered throughout the universe.
I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze into one volume bound by love, the same
that the universe holds scattered through its maze.
Substance and accidents and their modes became
as if together fused, all in such wise
that what I speak of is one simple flame.
November 2, 1980
About all I can see clearly is that 3-74 was a heroic act that consisted of the overcoming of fate. “We can be heroes for just one day,” to quote Bowie. It all has to do with waking up long enough to perform one action, to make one change, before you sink back down into sleep, before you again forget. [ . . . ]
What strikes me about this is that it is cosmogenesis in miniature, in the microcosm, because something has come into being ex nihilo. What the person did—the heroic act—he could not do given who he is, given his history, his karma. It is an impossibility. Thus in a real and literal sense a new self has been born in him, since this fact, this deed, could not issue out of field self, the self is splintered throughout time and space. This is as much a miracle as the original cosmogenesis; in a sense it is the original cosmogenesis, and perhaps the ruah is present at it as it was in the beginning.
So I felt as if another self had taken me over; my actions were “disassociated,” without ideation; and then Thomas came into being in me. Maybe he was new, not a lost part rejoining me but new ex nihilo, the permanent offspring of the heroic deed that broke the power of the world rule existentially. What world lost, self acquired. There is a quantum transfer of essence from world itself, so that the balance between the two shifts critically. Self is acting on world, rather than world on self; it is as if up until then the self was only a product of world, its thing; it was a thing among things, controlled and directed and shaped, as a potter shapes a clay vessel. And all its deeds and all its thoughts have only been world acting and speaking through it, within a closed system of which that self was only a component.
For one thing, if you view it in science fiction terms, in terms of ideas, S-F has developed vis-à-vis time travel and changing the past: has not this one new deed changed the entire future, the entire future history of the universe? Because the universe is one great field, and to introduce a truly new thing or event into it is to alter it in its entirety. Permanently.
Since world is now no longer a closed system it is no longer in effect a prison.
[1:121] Is the secret connected with time and the reversal of time? Cosmic resorption? I am right in my writing: reality is a series of Chinese boxes, a box within a box within a box, etc.: but a final point comes when you have Valis, but what or who Valis is I have no idea. The Tao, YHWH, cosmic Christ, Brahman, Shiva, Krishna, or a quantum mechanics phenomenon. Or ruah, the spirit of God breathing creation into existence out of nothing—ex nihilo—you finally wind up with: non-being—that is, not-is-real, and the “is” is only seeming, is not real. You open box after box and ascend the levels of being (esse, substantia, einai) and then you open the last one and it contains—nothing! And yet you’re faced with the mystery or paradox that Ho On (for want of a better term) is actually right here and now, in the very trash at hand, not far away at all—the ultimate paradox in terms of your long search through level after level of being—he is at the initial least real (sic) level. You wind up back where you started, paradoxically. But now you know that this utterly worthless trash level—mere appearance—is somehow also Ho On, whom you seek. “The Buddha is a piece of toilet paper.”74 “The Savior is a crushed beer can in the alley.” Could this be the final great enantiodromia?
So if you push essence far enough in terms of ascending levels, you find you have gone a full circle, and you wind up encountering ultimate deity cooking and writing pop tunes on the radio and popular novels, and a breath of wind in the weeds in the alley.
It’s as if the ultimate mystery is that there is no mystery—it’s like what Robert Anton Wilson says in the Cosmic Trigger about being outside the Castle when you think you’re in, and inside when you think you’re out.
And in a way what is most paradoxical is that I said it all in Ubik years ago! So in a way my exegesis of 2-3-74 says only, “Ubik is true.” All I know today that I didn’t know when I wrote Ubik is that Ubik isn’t fiction. In all of history no system of thought applies as well to 2-3-74 as Ubik, my own earlier novel. When all the metaphysical and theological systems have come and gone there remains this inexplicable surd: a flurry of breath in the weeds in the back alley—a hint of motion and of color. Nameless, defying analysis or systemizing: it is here and now, lowly, at the rim of perception and of being. Who is it? What is it? I don’t know.