It’s Saturday night and I’m drinking alone while contemplating drones and metadata; complacent celebrity culture staring its own collapse in the face with remarkable calm and indifference and the various potential proofs for a multiverse I’ve been reading up on lately; wars over natural resources and increasingly more extreme weather all the time and the civil unrest that goes along with it and the NSA just trying to plan ahead with its massive domestic surveillance program we’ve all been hearing about recently thanks to Mr. Edward Snowden. And in the back of my mind, there’s always Philip K Dick, like a critic in the corner. Specifically, how PKD is the New World Order?
But this isn’t the post I was going to write. I was going to write about the imagination. Which I’ve also been reading up on. PKD himself, and Henry Corbin’s brilliant essay, Mundus Imaginalis, in which he claims our imaginations are as real as the table where you sit to dinner. That just as our bodies extend out into physical space, our imaginations extend into imaginal space. This all sounded very seductive to a man who spends all his time concocting fantastical worlds like three-dimensional crossword puzzles. So, I thought, Well, what if…
This place he is describing is known as Na-koja-Abad in Persian literature, or literally, “the place that is nowhere”, and is specifically the place where visionaries go when they’re having their visions. Unlike Thomas More and his Utopia, which could mean either “good-place” or “no-place”, and where this “no-place” has been interpreted to mean “fantasy” or “unreal”, the “nowhere” of Na-koja-Abad is a place that cannot be visited by our physical selves, but is nonetheless real. Corbin describes this place as “above the world of the senses and below the pure intelligible world”. For intelligible world, read instead, “the world of Plato and his eternal Forms”. At least this is how I read it, and why Corbin’s essay was so inspiring to me. This in-between place is exactly the place I have always wanted to live, and why I have largely wasted my life writing my million dreamscapes.
But this has changed recently, because civilization as I know it is noticeably cracking at the seams, and I have become paralyzed by uncertainty. China’s economy is faltering and I am returning there in two months. My own country is embracing its role as the Evil Empire with greater and greater good cheer, and the weather of the world becomes more and more apocalyptic in appearance with each passing year. Is it not possible that the Mayans were right? Perhaps our world did end on December 21st, 2012. I want to believe that this is just my imagination running away again, but then I see the people of the world in open revolt, and the countries of the world in open opposition to their people, and the world itself seeming to spin out of control, and as much as I’d like to believe it’s all in my mind or some media mind trick, I cannot deny that this is really happening.
There’s a great anecdote from John C. Lilly, inventor of the sensory deprivation tank, who fed LSD to dolphins for the navy, who believed that when he took acid in the tank he was travelling through space. Richard Feynman once went for a dip in John C. Lilly’s tanks, and when he got home he sent Lilly a copy of his famous Caltech lectures with the inscription, “Thanks for the hallucination,” which got Lilly all riled up. He called Feynman and chewed him out for dismissing his experience rather than examining it objectively. As in, everything we experience is equally subjective and should be treated as similarly real or unreal as the rest.
Truth of it is, far from a luxury we can’t afford, our freedom to imagine and to explore the imaginal is the essential thing we need to protect. In his as-of-yet unpublished masterpiece, The Indifference Engine, a selection from which was published on this web site earlier this month, Clarke Cooper makes the claim that the free market works as a kind of neo-totalitarian state, wherein we understand totalitarianism to mean a state that wants to change its populace into “ideal citizens”, and new because it completes this end through desire rather than fear. Every aspect of our lives are defined by commerce, and we become nothing more than consumers. All aspects of our existence that cannot be quantified are ignored as if they do not exist. This would certainly include the mundus imaginalis.
So it’s not just our NSA taskmasters and their meta data harvests that we have to worry about, but the whole of the technological grid. The whole whirlwind of interface and oblivion, of the XBox squeezebox of the soul, and all these other prosthetic imaginative tools that teach you not only how to think, but how to think in a very small and constrictive way, while all the while, the imaginal becomes an ever more distant place where people played back in the days before our visions were circumscribed by our fears. Or were they ever not circumscribed by our fears.
It is worth noting that the well-known countercultural icon Hakim Bey (née Peter Lamborn Wilson) cites Henry Corbin as an influence. Hakim Bey is himself most famous for writing T.A.Z. or Temporary Autonomous Zones. Arguably the most influential utopia of recent years and like another utopian, Karl Marx, a step beyond the fantasies of past utopian thought to instead be a more practical view of the ideal society, the premise of T.A.Z. being that these ideal societies cannot last, but just that they ever were is all we can ask, like a spring afternoon with the most beautiful woman in the world.
For, unlike Marx’s economic practicalism when it came to the Ideal, Bey practices a poetic internalization of the Ideal. He speaks of “ontological anarchy”, that we should all create our own day, even in the face of “that pustulant giant who sleeps, and whose dreams of Order metastatize as spasms of spectacular violence”. This is what makes Bey so brilliant and so important for all those who believe in freedom. He rightly places freedom not as a potential future political actuality, but as an internal reality that is now. Could argue that this viewpoint derives directly from Corbin, but I’m not in an argumentative mood.
Not only is the imaginal world real, but it can directly affect our own world for better or worse. The powerful vision of Bey and Corbin and others fuels underground movements around the world, from CrimethInc to Green Anarchy to Greece, but what is more, the relationship between freedom is placed in an ambiguous relationship to power in Bey’s work. The sense is that part of what makes these temporary zones so free is their temporariness, and ontological anarchy can only exist in the face of oppression. Or, as Aeschylus says, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” But does it always work this way? I imagine it works something like it did in the latest Green Lantern movie, in which embracing the green force [will] creates change for good and embracing the yellow force [fear] just makes everything so much more f-d up for everyone.
That’s to say, if we face our suffering and work to change it, this is good, if we turn away in fear, this is bad. Not exactly an esoteric message. But still. Your insides are infinite. The answers do come from there. And film is our means to collectively dream, to imagine together.
Of course there are those who would say that films are as much of a prosthetic imaginative tool as any multiplayer gaming system, but what do you think? Do films work to fence in the possible, or do they open us up to greater possibilities? I say it depends on the film and how you approach the film. A good film is full of potential messages and doorways to new thoughts. An example of a bad film? Transformers. It’s only message is hate and it’s only purpose is to distract through MTV-style edits. All the same, you can learn from even the most blatant propaganda films if you watch these films like there are two of you, the one watching, and the one watching the one watching. In this way you can pick up the little twitches of recognition when something noteworthy happens in the semantics department. And pick up propaganda for what it is.
The mirrors within mirrors in Welles’ The Lady of Shanghai, the pretty colorwork of Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession and its oedipal realism, the eyeless sockets in Hitchcock’s The Birds, those long empty hallways in Kubrick’s The Shining, the icon-like shots of James and Donna and Maddie singing in Lynch’s Twin Peaks. These are moments when what I see is not just an image in a film, but a time when the unconscious of the creator and the unconscious of the viewer meet, or a case in which a filmmaker is showing a person a fear or desire that’s so primal, it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge and examine a part of ourselves that otherwise goes unseen. This is how watching myself watching a film would work. Perhaps all of this is obvious to you, my culturally savvy friends. I bring it up as just one of the ways in which we enter and explore the imaginal world.
Film is occult, because it can work at this primal and visceral level. In the same way as sex can be a mystical experience, a film can reveal to us a piece of our mind in an almost physical way. Perhaps because these pieces of our mind exist in a very real imaginal realm? Jury’s still out on that one, but I do experience it as a very physical and sudden shudder of recognition. Like the little death of another little white lie. Two recent examples of a film that elicited this sort of reaction from me are, The Thirteenth Floor and The Quiet Earth.
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The Thirteenth Floor is a murder mystery set in an alternate reality in which a team of scientists in the nineties have created the ultimate virtual gaming experience. In this case, the 1930’s. The player’s consciousness inhabits their avatar in a 1930’s environment while their own unconsciousness body is kept in a holding pattern. The mystery is compelling, and the plot twists are certainly Dick-ian, although never taken to the extremes that Mr. PKD was known for. Let’s just say that reality is not what it seems. It’s a well-done film.
A recurring theme within this film is the distinction between what a person does in the virtual world versus their real world. Is mass murder okay in a purely imaginal realm? And by displacing your avatar’s consciousness, is it possible you could cause this avatar to go mad? The film opens with Descartes’ famous quote, “I think, therefore I am,” and throughout it, the idea that these virtual creations are actually conscious and therefore living entities is reinforced through a variety of means. Dropped comments. Plot twists and so on, which… I am about to divulge a major spoiler, so if you don’t want your experience of this film tainted, then stop reading now.
The people in the nineties who created the nineteen-thirties virtual reality are themselves a virtual world created by persons in another more distant time. And this revelation specifically creates the “house of mirrors” effect, in which we begin to get a very real sense of people not only playing God but the whole question of an artificer God and the layers of reality leading us towards Him and away from Him, and also that each layer is equally real and valid, for the avatar is as real as the avatar’s avatar, and an avatar may be more “human” than the human who created him, which suggests the revolutionary possibility that a person could be more “God-like” than God, by which I do not mean more omniscient or omnipotent but behaving in a more Godly fashion, just as our avatar is more “humane” than his human creator. In this world within a world within a world within a world, all of them are equal, as in, unless I had prior knowledge that I was in a simulation, I would never know.
And just as the world of the 90’s programmers is a manufactured one, the real world at the end of the film (and the happy ending that goes along with it) feels equally if not more contrived. And after the film has ended, the aftertaste of artifice continues. Which brings us back to Philip K. Dick and the multiverse theory.
In one of his last essays, PKD talked of what he called “orthogonal time”. Which is something like time moving sideways—or like a time that peels off perpendicular to the arrow of cause and effect. PKD deals with gnosis at various points in his work, often of a character coming to know a world outside their own fictitious worlds, and the ultimate revelation of his own experience when he opened his front door to find a “girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense” with a gold Christian fish necklace around her neck, and in that moment, he claimed a laser fired off of it and in that moment he became aware of himself as actually living in the world of the early Christians. In his efforts to make sense of this experience he describes as an anamnesis or a “sudden loss of forgetfulness”, and his earlier understanding of the universe, and the solution he comes up with is to state that time as we see it is an illusion and that it is actually an invisible prison, that time can move in different directions, and that we can actually “fix” or literally change the past through present actions, that current actions can alter past events. If this sounds nutty to you, it’s just going to get nuttier.
He speaks of this orthogonal time as like a spiral. It is going around and around itself, in the same year but also continuing along with time as we know it. In this way, he can say it is 70 A.D. and also 1978. In this way, he can continue to hold his vision true and also continue to function in the world of others.
There is, however, another version of multiversity in the news these days.
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In a very memorable quote, especially from a scientist, Nima Arkani-Hamed, after witnessing the most recent experimental results of the Large Hadron Collidor in Europe, stated, “The universe is inevitable. The universe is impossible.” What he was referring to is the fact that new evidence seems to suggest that “naturalness,” Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained, may not apply to our world, and furthermore that our universe is just one among many, and that among those others most are very possibly dead universes. All this clutter is disconcerting to say the least.
For some reason, I think of PKD’s notion of “kibble”, which could be loosely defined as useless objects which multiply over time. Another way to perceive multiversity.
The difference between Dick’s and Arkani-Hamed’s multiversity is that in Dick’s case we are dealing with an imaginal multiversity, as opposed to an actual multiversity in the case of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues. But, as Lilly points out, why is it that one excludes the other? Could there not be imaginary universes? Could we not be imagining all of this?
In talking about persons in relation to the universe, PKD says we are a “bit of the hologram”, as in, we are a part that contains the whole, that is the whole that is imminent to the whole. Looking in is looking out.
I used to think of my dreams as a place that I went, a place that just so happened to be quite a bit better than the world I was occupying while awake. I took my dreams as of a greater reality than the slog of the day to day. In my dreaming, I hooked onto a bit of the Logos it seemed to me at the time, as in, the motivating force of the universe, while all the while living in the nooks and crannies of NYC, with its drugs and in one of my many homes, a trash bag full of high end two piece suits now clammy with sewage, and at this time, I wrote an entire book based on what I called at the time “free association narrative” entitled, The Manikin Textbook, that involved exploring a sort of reverse pornography. (That is, instead of being unable to look away from all the pretty images, it was more like, Not looking away from all the images is pretty.)
I wanted to explore deeper and deeper levels of depravity, to dig into the darkness behind my eyes until everything had turned so bright I would become completely blind. This is exactly what I succeeded in doing. I believed that my unconscious could teach me about the future and was honestly attempting to write a kind of future-realism. I wanted to write a realism from the end of time. This experiment now comes off as nothing more than sheer weirdness.
Lars Von Trier, when talking about his process in creating his innovative paranormal hospital drama, The Kingdom, spoke of how he’d made an effort to “write with his left hand” as he believed Lynch had done when creating his Twin Peaks. To write blind as it were. The difference here being that Von Trier and Lynch did not give themselves over completely to this unseen realm of the unconscious, which is like the shadow of the imaginal world—that’s to say, that if the objects of the imaginal realm are real, then the shadows these objects cast would all fall in the unconscious—but getting back to Lars Von Trier, David Lynch, and the left-handed approach to authorship, and how these two auteurs did not give in completely, but rather utilized their unconscious to some degree so as to create a certain effect. This is the difference.
To utilize the unconscious and the surreal to create an effect when writing for and to others. While those of us who have embraced the unconscious and the surreal with a fanatical zeal, we are in real danger of creating what appears to be imagistic nonsense. Each of us may have our own imaginal universes that are exclusively our own, but if so, the only place where our imaginal worlds meet are superficial connections concerning popular culture and the like.
(But—is it? Is that really the only place where our imaginations meet? Are we distinct entities floating in distinct imaginal universes that may even be each their own literal distinct universe? Is there no place where my thoughts touch yours? I’m not going to touch that, that’s for sure.)
Of course, there are those who would argue that all this imaginal clutter we fill ourselves with—from TikTok and Youtube to whatever daydreams you’re dreaming right now—are obscuring a more primal imaginal reality that is universal, what Jung called the “collective unconscious”. Some would argue this place is alive. But I am not a theologian. And PKD?
The essay of his I’ve been referring to throughout this is called “How to Build a Universe that doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later“, and was originally written in 1978, and in it he speaks extensively about the coincidences between his book Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, the Book of Revelation, and his own life. He extrapolates from this situation that all of these coincidences are related specifically because our understanding of causality is wrong. The past is the present. The imagined is real. The universe is impossible. The universe is inevitable.
Which brings us to our second film. How? You’ll see.
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The Quiet Earth involves a character walking around on an Earth devoid of other people, but the ending suggests that this world he’s been walking around in was never there in the first place. More spoilers below, I’m afraid.
Zac Hobson wakes up on July 5th at 6:12am in Hamilton, NZ, and slowly comes to the conclusion that he’s the only person left on Earth. What starts out as euphoria, grows into a madness. He starts going about in a woman’s slip and sets up cardboard cut-outs of all the most famous world leaders from the past century (Adolph Hitler, Elizabeth II, and John Paul II among others) and lectures them from the mansion he’s been holing up in. Everything changes when he meets another survivor, who he of course falls in love with.
Zac had been working at a corporation called Delenco that seems to be responsible for the disaster, as a result of a disastrous outcome to their Project Flashlight. And throughout the film, there are moments when the world suddenly becomes unstable, all of which comes to a climax when Zac and the other survivors ride down to the main satellite projecting this “effect” and Zac tricks the others into stepping aside so that he can be the one to sacrifice himself blowing up the satellite. Insert psychedelic graphics, and follow with a final shot of Zac on a moon of what appears to be Saturn and across the horizon, these explosions that look like weaker nuclear mushrooms, nuclear mushrooms a little light on the head. Then the credits roll.
Really all of this is about that final shot. Which also happens to be the poster for the film by the way. Was everything leading up to that in the main character’s imagination? Was he the catalyst for a cataclysmic event on an alien world as a result of his wonderings in an imaginal world was meant to simulate his Earth? For some reason, I am reminded of Ender’s Game, and how a small boy can accidentally perform genocide while playing what he thinks is nothing more than an elaborate video game. The final shot seems almost like a non sequitor. Which is why the film’s so brilliant. That last shot puts everything preceding it into question, and creates a dynamic of uncertainty.
The uncertainty is an essential element to any discussion concerning our perceptions of what is seen as the real world, and any contention for an objectively realized imaginal reality. The point being that we just don’t know. We walk around in our world and point at buildings and make small talk, but there are those among us who say they see something behind these things, or that these things were never there in the first place, or that what we see is like a thin skin and behind it is me myself.
I mentioned earlier that Corbin places his mundus imaginalis between the sensory world and Plato’s world of forms. More specifically, what differentiates Corbin from Plato, is that Plato’s library of perfect forms that are then realized in the multiplicity of actual objects and ideas. With Corbin, it’s more like, there’s another dimension we go to when we dream that is constantly being filled up with our many imaginings but also, according to Corbin, this mundus imaginalis is a gateway to Allah. (Allah… Ideal forms… Chabuduo (差不多), as the Chinese would say.)
Corbin’s vision is that any journey through the mundus imaginalis will lead us to God. Which doesn’t mean we can’t be distracted by our imaginations. There’s a difference between traversing the imaginal to see where it leads, and sitting yourself down and spinning colored threads because you can.
But what does ANY of this have to do with the New World Order?
Remember Philip K. Dick and his “time is a prison” idea. I would argue that by taking away our ability to dream, we are willingly imprisoning ourselves in the reality of the New World Order. It’s not escapism, it’s simply escape. And where we’re escaping to is not a better future, but a better today. As well as also creating the potential for other futures that do not result in the most amount of suffering for the most people possible. Collapse of the world as we know it may be inevitable, but that does not mean that oppression is inevitable. For are we not all Temporary Autonomous Zones? We can be if we choose. But we must choose.
—GBoyer
Chicago, 2013
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
