Master Hallucinator: Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Manuel Marrero
March 17, 2025
Where was the woman who said she’d call. She said she would call. This is the third time now. I don’t even initiate. She simply materializes, arranges for a call with me at a specific time, and then, as though preordained, doesn’t call. This describes more than one woman in my life. One gave me her number unsolicited. Another said she’d be delighted to meet me. I’m not evasive or avoidant. I have self-respect and I’m direct. But I’m sensitive with a propensity for paranoia and I think women are conspiring against me in group chats. Probably they’re just busy. Everyone in America is busy. Ambitious and aspirational. Self-fulfilling and self-owning. One thing women do a lot is hang out with other women.
As I sit down to write this, I have an idea in my head to put down in word processor. The idea is based on a prediction that was easy to make. The woman had not called. The woman would not call. Had she called I wouldn’t be writing this. But, as easily predicted, she didn’t call. She won’t.
There was another woman to whom I confessed my love. To this day I regret not making the case.
One day I woke to find that all my appliances were coin-operated. To shut off my alarm, I dropped a quarter in a slot. Getting out of bed was free. A pot of coffee was fifty cents. I slipped another quarter into the doorknob and the world opened for me.
Call it apophenia. Philip K. Dick’s high school classmate Ursula K. Le Guin put it best. Most writers have one to three maybe five ideas they write novels about. They tend to write the same things over and over. Like a bingo card filled with tics, there are ways to identify them. PKD had a million ideas each of which could form a novel. Most of them throwaways. What little we know about his process amounts to the speed at which he wrote novels and stories for cash hopped up on amphetamines. Drafts were rejected and filed, never to be published nor read by north of two people, their existence nonetheless documented. Philip Kindred Dick was divinely guided, Holy Spirited. How else to explain what translates to the page. Impossibly intricate narratives unspool as if prophesied. Nothing feels contrived or contrarian. Nothing ever happens (shibboleth/incantation of inertial malaise): dead giveaway your reality’s been altered and now, doubt-infected, never the same. A dead world theory. No tamper proof lids. A premonition becomes sacred.
His love life was tumultuous. Married five times. Fathered three children. Domestic violence. Involuntary commitment to institution, remand to psychiatric care. Visits from spooks due to a spouse’s leftist activities. He conflated abortion with Malthusianism and received death threats from feminists. He attempted suicide while driving, his lover in the passenger seat.
Any novel of his is difficult to review given my aims of emulously capturing the essence, centering the serious readerly experience while occluding more than one-third of the plot. Dick is a storyteller of the loftiest order. Some will tell you his prose belongs to the gutter but they’re unbelievably wrong. Never has the high and low resonated with such harmony. Also, I like to bring joy, but reading Philip K. Dick leaves me with fear and trembling, in the way serious reading is a sensuous activity akin to living another life. His work is disarmingly sad, its subtlety only enhancing the sadness.
And yet a moral optimist. Maybe not Christ-like, but with a moral foundation. Christological. A religious anarchist. It’s worth it for the stories. A collection of rosaries. You need to have conversations to write with an ear for dialogue. That’s the only reason to socialize when you’re actively writing. If you refuse to see the good in life and the power of goodness you’re lazy or a satanist. The human condition is worthwhile. Keep calm, you can write into deep darkness and there’s somewhere a way out, even if you can’t see it.
His writing is medieval. Greek. It cleaves to truth and pain. Infanticide and rebellion are not good. There is mood, affect, and intimations—castles in the sky—that aren’t burned off in translation, justifying his vast, cross-cultural and international appeal, if only posthumously. This new wave of science fiction writer didn’t care about science like hard sci fi, was paroxysmal and schizogenic, literary without being theoretical or formal, outclassing world builders and allegorists with phantasmagoria of unforgiving visions and relentless prophecy.
The book is in a sense about violent, intrusive thoughts. It’s his spiritual crisis novel. Like the world is ruled by a fallen angel, such as in Ephesians 2:2, “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.” How could you know you live in your reality once you’ve seen the stigmata of fallenness? NPCs in a simulacrum of your senses can gaslight you into distrust. How do you know you’re not being tortured by a psychopathic demiurge? It notices you noticing.
Not that I’m an obscurantist but clarity has run its course and inscrutability is the next frontier. Absolutely first rate at everything he tried to do, which is a lot. A true genius who touched the godhead. An artist who flew off the rails and performed miracles, his methodology a black box. Completely wackadoo. Read this before you’re “dead from excessive solar radiation.”