Where We Are and What Might We Be: Engaging Philip K. Dick with Gary Panter
by J.T. Dockery
(This following interview originally appeared on March 30th, 2015, as a component among the moving parts of the online comics compendium, DARLING SLEEPER, as edited by Jesse Lucas.)
I have found myself recently thinking about artists, more consciously about the lives of artists, and, more pointedly: dialogue between artists. Whether, in my own life, working now on making comics based on my memories of the late Hasil Adkins, or, as a reader, engaging with Philip K. Dick’s work, and following: wishing, to some extent, that I could engage the author directly, beyond internal dialogue with the body of work.
There’s something about P.K. Dick and comics. Art Spiegelman met him and they discussed a collaboration which ultimately never came to fruition. Robert Crumb spun in comics form the story of The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Dick. A page from Rick Griffin’s Man From Utopia, in precognitive mode, drew what it appears to me a perfect illustration of Dick’s concept/vision of the “Black Iron Prison.” In the last novel published in his lifetime, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick has the central character list, “Howard the Duck or the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comix,” as items she could have been reading instead of “Dante’s Commedia, from Inferno through Purgatorio.”
Gary Panter connects many of these threads. I consider Panter an influence also on my own work, which is more beside the point than my estimation of him as one of the great contemporary artists, in comics and in painting: in general, etc.
While I will never have the opportunity to walk and talk with P.K. Dick directly, I do have the opportunity to communicate with Mr. Panter, rather he made the opportunity occur by his willingness to discuss the subject, for the privilege of which I thank him. This is why I sought to talk with Gary: to connect with the living memory of Dick, not just the figure of letters/posterity which Dick has become in the decades following his death.
J.T.’s suggested soundtrack for this interview:
Like Guernemanz said to Parsifal, “You see, my son, here time turns into space.”
Let us engage.
J.T. Dockery: If I’ve got my facts straight, Gary, you were born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, studied painting at East Texas University, and after that relocated to Los Angeles in ’77. In 1980 you went with your then wife, Nicole, representing the L.A. punk zine, SLASH, and interviewed Philip K. Dick.
I’m interested in the series of events that led to the interview. Was it your interest or someone else’s idea? How was the connection made to interview him?
Beyond that original interview, you have written eloquently, quoted in the introduction to the collection of Dick’s Exegesis writings, a “word portrait” of how he appeared to you at the time. But, to further that a bit, the second part to this question is to ask you more specifically not just the appearance of the man/personality, but the context: how did Phil Dick appear in that landscape, that specific space/time of California in the late seventies/first year of the eighties? What was that landscape like for you and how did Dick fit into, or not fit into, your experience of it? I imagine some weird, maybe weird in its mundanity, descent or even ascent for that matter from L.A. to Orange County at his door.
Gary Panter: Starting in late 1977 I was getting my comic, Jimbo, published in SLASH punk magazine in LA and doing interviews and record reviews a little. I had done stuff in WET and some record covers and for New West magazine and my stuff was becoming a little visible. I was putting self published comics in dress shops and the Soap Plant before Melrose really got going. I wrote a fan letter to Phil through his publisher asking if I could interview him for SLASH and forgot about it as an impossibility. I came home one day and listened to my answering machine and there was a message from Phil pretending to know about punk rock and saying “yes” that he was open to an interview. I took the tape out of the machine and have it somewhere.
It turns out, K.W. Jeter Phil’s friend and also a science fiction writer — Dr Adder — was a reader of SLASH and liked Jimbo and told Phil what to say when he called my machine. I think K.W. was at Phil’s place, his con-apt, every time we visited. The apartment was in Santa Ana not far from Disneyland. A gated upstairs two or three story 70s style apartment with a small plant court — motel-like. Spanish tile styling stucco, wrought iron bars, potted plants.
My image of Phil was from the Rolling Stone interview where he was sure that the FBI was on to him and blew up his safe for what reason he knew not, but liked to ponder and generate various scenarios which come up in his writing and Exegesis. And he turned out to be that kind of guy. A guy out of a Pynchon novel or P.K .Dick novel. Middle aged — a little over weight. A little worn thin. Jolly. Sociable. The Southern California landscape — artificial lushness in a desert built on a resonating alluvial plane, endless geometry of cheap shacks and little radio like house with plants at varying densities, a never changing dusty white day with artificial water sprinkler beautifying everything in the evening. No one walking — an empty Perky Pat layout.
Phil somewhere down there by Fantasyland and Goofy and Mickey and Abraham in the robotic hall of presidents, Hollywood house of wax and palm trees. He had a Furry Freak Brother poster on the wall and a bunch of snuff boxes and fancy earphones on the coffee table. He and K.W. tossed the conversational ball around as old friends. He had cats.
We visited him several times — maybe five times and he let us bring friends like Steve Samiof and Claude Bessy and Philomena Winstanley, Jay Cotton and the Texas composer friend who turned Jay and me on to Phil’s books in college, Nathan Vinson of Dallas. When Nate visited, Nate and Phil went into an intense discussion of Presocratic philosophy. Claude Bessy and Steve Samiof were co-editor publishers of SLASH. Claude was a little older and had been in the Paris Situationist movement in the 60s. Samiof is a beatnik style guy who did all kinds of writing and publishing projects. Claude and Phil went deeply into a conversation about the Gnostic experience. This was the period from the movie Blade Runner being made and to him getting to see a rough cut before he passed away. I talked to him a few months before he died. He was very patient with a nerd fan.
J.T. Dockery: I almost mentioned the Rolling Stone article by Paul Williams in my preamble, as that was kind of the connective tissue/press between “mid to late” hippie culture and then, punk culture with your SLASH article. He was older than the hippies and then a few years later when you met him, even older than the punks, but he seemed to genuinely enjoy the attention from younger folks, and even if his knowledge of the particulars of, say, punk rock were less “genuine,” the enthusiasm remained genuine.
I find it really charming that you wrote Phil a fan letter, and that got the ball rolling. I always knew that K.W. Jeter was one of the figures in Dick’s circle of younger sci fi writers/friends in Orange County in that period, but I never really knew why per se he was there for the interview so that’s great to know the details.
Gary, this is what I long for: that I could have been one of the characters discussing Presocratic philosophy, Gnosticism, and underground comix with Philip K. Dick. Following, again: this is why I wanted to interview you on this subject.
I was just reading Dick writing in a letter, discussing with the correspondent how his life started to resemble his own fiction, to his own mind, through the years. Also, one of the editor/annotators, David Gill, was remarking in the footnotes to the Exegesis collection that Dick’s vision of the “Black Iron Prison” as: “…ancient Rome transcends the petty concerns that addle the plastic–fantastic fakeness of Orange County in the 1970s, and in this way can be read as a kind of sacred urban fantasy that replaces a vapid reality.” Which all seems to echo true with the account of your experiences of Phil.
I find myself reflecting on Dick’s fictive worlds: the future as a landscape just a few, not hundreds of years, ahead in time in which a false, alternative reality has taken hold, and, for example, only a product in a spray-can, like Ubik, could tear away the veil of falsity, etc. His more personal vision, or visions, of Rome of the first couple of centuries superimposed over Orange County, which found expression in fiction in the novel, VALIS. Then I think of your own worlds in the visual medium of comics; I imagine Jimbo could meet Alice Cooper instead of Jesus of Nazareth or both on the road to Damascus or if not Damascus then the road to Dal Tokyo, and all of it could yet be occurring in the context of the world of Dante. While it doesn’t seem to me in your work you’re personally lost in your created worlds, as has been accused of Dick and for that matter leveled by Phil at himself, yet the whole flotsam and jetsam of past present and future, and in general a kind of “transcendent future past junk” reality principle that seems to me emblematic of Dick’s science fiction and your own narrative comics and figurative painting, and, furthermore, that you both, in your own ways, were ahead of and/or on the vanguard of time, or rather “the times,” predicting what in the clipped common lingo today might be called “meta” or even “mash up.”
Does what I say ring true for you? Regardless, could you put into your own words how Philip K. Dick’s writing influenced you at the time read him or met him and/or later, if at all? Or was it more like discovering, rather than an influence, a fellow traveler/fellow raconteur of strange but familiar worlds? I realize those kind of question can be hard to pinpoint in regarding one’s own work.
Gary Panter: The thing that immediately got me about Phil’s books, is that they were very near future and many of his ideas seemed very plausible or inevitable. Modern art painting in the 20th century was to me a kind of science fiction in that one as viewer isolated or uncovered a path that led somewhere into the future by getting into a dialogue with the work of the painters. I was always interested in predicting the near future. Phil was way ahead, of course.
What I brought to meeting was my own bad acid trips, one of which persisted in throwing things I had seen in acid into my path, giving me a terrible feeling of having seen my own future. To some extent that is still true. I had no problem believing that what Phil said was true for him, and that it might be connected to another somehow accessible reality — other paths, possible paths, inevitabilites. My deep immersion in fundamentalist primitive Christianity, with which I have always had problems, was a set up or trigger to my acid confusion and time rupture or mental illness, though I don’t feel ill.
Much of ideas of the Exegesis Phil would go over and over and over in conversation. It was a playful exploration — it obsessed him, and his mind that loved to model possibilities. Every visit he had a different take or possible explanation for what had happened to him. And he told us all the similar stories which became familiar — of his son’s hernia, of speaking in Koine Greek in his sleep, etc.
One thing that he didn’t mention in the Exegesis to my reading of it was once when I visited (and I have reported this before) is he said that he was leaving for the Middle East and that he had discovered that a certain species of palm heart granted memory of future and past lives and that this was what immortality was. He didn’t leave for the holy lands and was testing the idea and pulling my leg, but something in his reading had led him to that idea.
One thing he mentioned that Jonathan Lethem doubts, as I recall, was that Phil said that he read Finnegan’s Wake over and over and that the reading of that book needed to be a life’s work. I haven’t read him saying that anywhere else.
On the first visit when I was taping, he conducted one straight interview and at the end asked to turn off the tape and then plunged into his pink beam fish emblem experience. He was eager to try it out on others. He had a great sense of humor, self deprecating and a tease, but in earnest about the experience.
All the arguments J.W. would bring back to his nice cat and how God had allowed his perfectly nice cat to get run over, therefore: there was no justice and no God. Then Phil would begin to tease at the situation of God and the cat. And talk about his cats. One of which was slow as she had fallen off his balcony and gotten hurt.
Phil was a soft touch and loved to tell of dating girls at group therapy and having his pretty bank teller talk him out of thousands of dollars when he deposited his first Blade Runner advance check.
If you read the Exegesis you get a good idea of what it was like to be around him.
J.T. Dockery: Ultimately, I’m at ease with the notion of an author or artist’s work being a way to engage in conversation with the work as avatar for the author, which Dick, especially with the Exegesis writing, as you have pointed out, does more than most authors to preserve that sense of active conversation, or, the book like recordings and albums a way to preserve performance in time/out of time; it’s technology and development of technology I can get behind. I think of books as living “friends” in a sense, at least the ones I enjoy: the work of artists of the past to be work with which I can still, in essence, converse. That’s one of the advantages of symbolic language. There’s really not much difference between written language and visual symbolism, I mean language IS a visual art, too, only slightly, har har, less subjective than imagery. I think artists, in all the various creative forms which involve construction of some kind of artifact, seek to leave records, and are, following, naturals at seeking to break down barriers of space/time. Coming back to Dick again, rereading the VALIS books now after more than a decade or so since I last looked at them along with with the collection of Exegesis writings, etc. made me realize just how influential he has been to me and it’s been to some degree: a comforting realization to get back to his words.
I, too, have issues surrounding “primitive,” as you put it, Christianity. I come from right under the bible belt, with my rural eastern Kentucky upbringing, something I’ve struggled with most of my life. One of the comforts, whether it’s come from Dick or Carl Jung, etc. and then some of the more recent scholarly work on the Nag Hammadi texts is that, regardless of belief, there was once an early version of Christianity, which falls under the umbrella of “Gnosticism,” practiced in the first couple or three centuries before Constantine expedited it as a state religion and the Nicene Creed came into effect and all the proto-orthodoxy of the “free thought” of early Christianity as anarchic to the state in turn becoming the orthodoxy of the late Roman Empire and the foundation of “The Church,” and some of the concepts of that “lost” Christianity/Christianities which are not dogmatic make sense to me and make me feel like I do fit into a lineage. Either way, I’ve been engaging with a lot of this in my more recent comics, and sometimes my comics, in an unconscious fashion, seem to predict some of the things I’m discovering after the fact on a conscious level, or, in another direction, some of my own dreams/visions have had impact on where my art has been going. From either direction, the form of the process appears to me as a kind of internal feedback loop. Seemingly.
My recent comic series of an intended three volumes, which I just finished, began with a dream of myself eating a mutant fish and then the fish starts to eat me back, although it was a character in the comic, in the dream it was “me.” Jung saw the fish symbol as emblematic of the Age of Pisces, of which Christ became the most prominent avatar, just as Hammurabi was the most emblematic figure from two thousand years previous to the time of Jesus/Pisces, and I think Jung would say that the fish symbol coming back into a kind of mythopoeic, archetypal sea change as we move into the Age of Aquarius, was natural, and, among many theories, Dick said more or less the same at one juncture in the Exegesis. Something in our collective unconscious. I had no way to predict when I had that dream that my comic book series was to end with me encountering a Christ figure, and it being unclear whether I was ingesting him or he was ingesting me, ha.
Not that you would remember, but I recall Jung’s the Red Book/Liber Novus, came up briefly on Facebook in one of T. Edward Bak’s threads, and you piped up. I’m not sure how familiar you are with that work other than to know it exists, but digging myself into that more recently, the revelation of the specifics of Carl Jung’s own visionary experiences on the cusp of WWI, and even down to the female conduit, in Jung’s case in the primary guise of Salome, appearing to him with information, reminds me of Dick’s recounting of the female AI voice. Just like Dick, Jung went searching for other accounts in history that might compare with his own. Yet Jung remained steadfast in staying in the role of “the doctor,” and used his experiences to develop what we regard as psychiatry now. I wish Dick could have seen/read the Red Book. I know he was fluent in the writings and ideas of Jung, and I think he would have certainly felt some peace to see just what Jung had gone through in its unvarnished, to Jung, experiential state, only published in full recently after a century of whispers and hints. That said, Dick didn’t become a religious figure, either. Like Jung remained “the doctor,” Dick seemed to remain “the novelist.” Either way, for myself, I’ve been looking to them and elsewhere and trying to remain, “the artist.”
That whole bit you mention with travelling to the Middle East reminded me of his late friend, the Episcopal bishop Jim Pike, who had died in the Middle East seeking, whatever he was seeking, from the region of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the aforementioned novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, seems to warn of the dangers, via bishop Pike, of all that kind of thinking and sometimes ill advised seeking. Speaking of K.W., who was always the man with the dead cat counterpoint for Dick, he says in the documentary The Penultimate Truth, in regard to Transmigration as the last published work by Dick in his lifetime: “Thank god, he didn’t die crazy.”
In closing and trying to connect all these dots, I’m thinking of comics as lowbrow trash art and sci fi as lowbrow trash literature and Dick’s awareness that if God speaks to modern man it’ll be through some bit of trash on the ground in Orange County, that we all more directly find high art, if not the voice of God, in the trash of modern culture, in the future we are now in of discovering that Carl Jung himself made an underground comic, that in the marginal, there is truth or rather truth/s can be discerned. Seemingly. Keep looking. Maybe Dick, in his life and his work, provides for any of both some permission and some warnings.
So I’ll just pass the microphone back over to you, brother Gary, ha, and see if you have any closing words for us here, at the time of this walk and talk’s conclusion, on a Sunday morning.
Gary Panter: To me an artist is anyone trying to be an artist, secretly, publicly or accidentally in any medium.
Phil would have written another 50,ooo pages had he seen the Red Book, which I have looked at what is easy to find online but not entered into it.
Phil was certain that the Catholic church had killed Pike and he was trying to encode that message into the book or books. He was nervous about talking about it but did talk about Pike often. These days it would seem Pike might have happened into many flavors of religious murderous gangsters out there. Phil had a paranoid streak, no doubt, but it also seemed to delight him as well as frighten him as Dali’s utility of his paranoiac-critical method.
More and more religion itself seems to be foe and preserver and shredder of remnants of divine invasions. Remaining the artist instead of clergy is essential.
Dick knew Hubbard as I recall him saying, I think (memory tricks), and he was fascinated and repelled by Hubbard’s determination to make a lot more than the two or three cents a word of writing science fiction by starting a religion.
The sincerity, stubbornness, purity and pollution of art seems to be useful and essential and some kind of mediated divine invasion.
Whereas religion’s relation to epiphany seems like the machinations of art sales and commerce and puffery, but even worse, contrasted with the art world, since religion pretends to guarantee truth and veracity approved by GOD herself.
There is ugliness on the artistic epiphany side but more the pathetic destinies of gophers.
Griffin was invaded and fun to talk to.
Ballard predicted Reagan’s presidency long before that seemed a glimmer in the possible.
Philip K. Dick wasn’t crazy, he was ENGAGED in the struggle to understand where we are and what might we be.
A note of gratitude and acknowledgement here to my friend, cartoonist/collector/librarian Bill Widener, who in Lexington, KY, on the heels of me having first read of Panter’s SLASH interview in Lawrence Sutin’s biography of P.K. Dick, Divine Invasions, years ago, and discussing it with Bill sitting in his backyard and saying how much I wished I could read the interview in its entirety, gave me a funny look as if considering something important but inscrutable to me, wordlessly removing himself inside to then return with his copy of it, which I did not know he owned, entrusting me to borrow the fragile newsprint of the SLASH original, long before it was available online.– –JTD
