Nomad Codes

people staring unblinkingly into the black hole, McKenna has opened up a great deal in the months since his diagnosis. “No thing lasts,” he notes. “That’s one thing I think you learn from life, psychedelics, or just paying attention. These Buddhists aren’t kidding: you are here for a very brief moment, and you can sit on your thumbs and do whatever you want, but in fact the clock is ticking. What are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna blow it off, or be a hedonist? What are you gonna do with that? If most people took this situation seriously, a hell of a lot more would be done with more attention to quality and intent. Now I’m much more in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion,” he says.“The real dilemma is how to build a compassionate human civilization. If we betray our humanness in the pursuit of civilization, then the dialog has become mad.”
    In his heart, McKenna remains an optimist. “When I think about dying, the thing that surprises me is how much of the future I regard as history, but I don’t want to miss it. I want to know how it all comes out. I would like to know how the universe came to be, if extraterrestrials exist, where biotech is going, where the Internet is going. Because this is it. We are on the brink of a posthuman existence. So what’s it gonna look like? What’s it gonna feel like?”
    Facing his end, McKenna admits that he doesn’t “have a lot riding on my vision of things.” But his visions are precisely what make him such an inspiration to so many people. Every day we see another talking head clawing his way toward the role of visionary, trying to convince us that his speculations about the future are true. But real visionaries are more than just futurists. Their power lies less in prophecy than in giving us new perspectives on a constantly mutating world, perspectives that manage to be simultaneously timeless and new. Real visionaries are always dodgy characters, because they embrace strange, heretical, even dangerous ideas. Terence McKenna is a real visionary.

    Note: Terence McKenna died in Marin County on April 3, 2000. His library and personal papers were destroyed in a fire on February 7, 2007. He is still missed.
    2000

MAD SCIENCE

SAINT PHIL

    When Philip K. Dick died after a stroke in 1982, he left behind almost forty science fiction novels, over a hundred short stories, a few remarkable essays, and the “Exegesis,” a crazed document that attempted to interpret the divine intelligence that he claimed invaded his mind in 1974. Though Dick remains partially buried in the mildewed heap of yesterday’s pop trash (best known as “the guy who wrote the book they based Blade Runner on”), his dedicated following has grown since his death. Some of his best books are out of print in the States, but a steady trickle of unpublished (and mostly non-sci-fi) work has been released in the last few years. Whether or not Dick hacked out the most brilliant American science fiction ever is debatable; that his work remains the most brilliantly fucked-up sci-fi is beyond doubt.
    Though he uses generic devices like androids, spaceships, Martians, and moon colonies, Dick’s worlds are usually bummers just around the corner, near-futures characterized by rampant overpopulation, surveillance, urban decay, repressive state apparatuses, ubiquitous ads, and invasive technology. As far back as the ’50s, Dick saw the dark, paranoid side of McLuhan’s global village. The animism that primitive humankind projected onto Nature was for him reborn in our technological environment, where ominous spiritual forces merged with the instruments of late capitalism. Dick’s machines are black jokes rather than believable imaginings: the portable computerized psychiatrist, Dr. Smile, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ; the empathy machine in “The Little Black Box,” which fuses the user’s consciousness with a televised savior; The Divine Invasion ’s holographic multicolored Bible.
    Driven by what he called “divine discontent,” Dick howled in his dystopic wilderness against the powers that be. His characters are ordinary schlemiels, bumbling Joes and Janes struggling with small moral dilemmas, poverty, politics, and psychic breakdowns in worlds where entropy reigns and communication breakdowns are inevitable. Unlike Pynchon—whose obsessions resemble his in many ways—Dick maintained little ironic distance from his characters, and his empathy for them and