The Rhipidon Society: A conversation with Tessa B. Dick
Late author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) believed information had been fired into his brain by a beam of pink light, in time coming to the conclusion that the (Roman) Empire Never Ended, and seeing himself as a member of a team of early Christians he termed "the rhipidon society" after the fish first used to signify Christ. After this preternatural occurrence, Dick began a trilogy of books known as the VALIS trilogy. VALIS was Dick's acronym for the Vast Active Living Intelligent System commonly referred to as "God." Says his last wife Tessa, his roommate at the time, "Phil and I both experienced something very real in February and March of 1974. Phil might have been paranoid, but somebody was persecuting him. We just don't know
who it was. Perhaps some day I will discuss it in more depth, but for now I will focus on Phil's experience and keep my own private." The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, usually considered the third volume of the trilogy, is really just a stand-in for a novel called The Owl In Daylight, which Dick died before beginning. Tessa was kind enough to grant us her permission for use of the photos accompanying this article, and her recently-published version of this unpublished masterpiece manifests a satisfying semblance of the unwritten masterpiece Phil may have had in mind.
Like VALIS and other books written by Dick himself after his outlook on life was reshaped by the events of 2-3-74 (his shorthand for February and March of 1974, when his neuro-semantic breakdown, or theophany, as the case may be, occurred), parts of the plot in his wife Tessa's book mirror elements of Dick's own life played out in the guise of multiple characters. Tessa's nonfictional memoir of her late husband, Philip K. Dick : Remembering Firebright, described on its homepage as a "personal look at Phil's ‘pink light' experience and the work that it spawned, covering the final ten years of his life, with some background from his earlier years." Her behind the scenes account of a defining chain of events in postmodern culture via speculative fiction deserves the attention of Philip K. Dick fans and writers everywhere seeking to understand the world and themselves through writing, as he did. Her 2012 and Beyond: Ancient Secrets and Mysteries points out the recorded existence of nuclear reactors and anti-gravity craft in Indian lore predating the Western historical record, and shows how the major Judeo-Christian religions have adopted various pagan beliefs and practices, and how ancient catastrophes and visitations by sentient beings shaped the history of civilization and continue to influence human culture today. And her The Man without a Past is a murder mystery starring a reluctant lady sleuth embarked on a paranoiac odyssey into environmental pollution, mysterious men in black suits and murder.
Despite infrequent accusations of religious heresy, Philip K. Dick is recognized to have successfully predicted or prophesied much of modern social experience. The seemingly pointless virtual application Yoville on popular social networking site facebook is spine-chillingly similar enough to the Perky Pat layouts from Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose players lose themselves in an idealized illusion of life, as to have been directly inspired by that book. Tessa B. Dick's well-written, impressively-crafted The Owl In Daylight pays tribute to the implications of 2-3/74 by modernizing them for new generations of seekers.
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