Hello readers,
Few Philip K. Dick books take place in as real-life of a setting as “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer”.
This is a religious and metaphysical science fiction story which skews to the philosophical, told from the point of view of Angel Archer between the time it took her to enter the seminar of an Edgar Barefoot; she was married to Tim’s son Jeff before the deaths of the two along with Angel’s friend, and Tim’s wife, Kirsten Lundborg, who was the mother of Bill Lundborg.
This is another book from the VALIS series, which is really good in my opinion, and which deals with topics that are personal to the author.
The story of Timothy Archer feels real, first and foremost, because of its fictionalization of real events; it is a story about death and grief and coping with the suicides of loved ones, or rather their individual intentions to die, coping via religion or spirituality as a metaphor for how to survive, as stories we tell ourselves in order to do what will avoid death.
The day of John Lennon’s murder, after she had found out she was now all alone, Angel felt guilty over having arranged Tim and Kirsten’s meeting, which, in a roundabout way, was the catalyst that led to everyone’s deaths.
When Jeff committed suicide, his father, a Bishop, was sent on a spiritual journey to prove to himself that he had experienced his son’s return from “the other world”, knowing he was unable to prove it to others due to the necessity of belief.
Angel had made that blatant and clear to be tragic, as Tim’s search had ended in his death in the Dead Sea; what hooked me was how the narrative of the book was framed around her restlessness, how her expositioning was a distraction from her suffering, where the line between narrator and author bled often enough that one is left unsure whether they are reading real-life fact or fiction.
Quote: ” ...there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk. ”
Timothy Archer sought to locate the genuine source of Christianity, which he said was hidden from the world for twenty-two hundred years. However, the Bishop was on trial for heresy, as his views differed from that of the Church; Tim’s troubles centred on translators coming across the sayings of Jesus predating Jesus by almost two hundred years, which shook the foundations of Tim’s faith, the revelation meaning that Jesus was using means that were available to the people of his time; however, the Church had failed to charge Tim and had “left him as a result even stronger than ever.”
Tim had become obsessed with locating the Original Source and with figuring out what it was, he had grown uncontent with faith alone and needed to experience the food and drink that turned one into God Himself, like a title or a role; Tim thought God was real while Angel thought he was “not really real” in the sense that he was intangible unlike a tangible wall or stone, thus Tim’s search for proof was futile and had in fact ended in futility according to the narrator.
Angel decided to visit Edgar Barefoot’s seminar, but she reflected on the bulk of the book’s narrative to herself before entering.
Quote: “... We are all just a moment in time in forward motion.”
The heartbreaking part was how Angel had gone along with Tim and Kirsten’s madness about Jeff because she wanted to believe that her dead husband was back, she loved him and, worse, she wanted to keep in contact with the Bishop and with her friend; however, she would still feel guilty after the fact.
Quote: “This is the famous nature of hindsight: to it everything is inevitable, since everything has already happened.”
She lost touch with Tim after Kirsten’s death, but he got back in contact to ask Angel to join him in going to the Dead Sea, which she declined because she did not want to die in the Desert. Tim was still chasing a drug for the insight he desired; he believed the anokhi mushroom was Christ, the wisdom of God, which was the only thing that--he thought--had the power to change his own fate, failing to understand that the transcendental form was the story of the anokhi.
After her first seminar, Edgar reintroduced Bill to Angel. Barefoot believed Bill was a Bodhisattva and had turned down nirvana to help others achieve it, which symbolized how Angel, unlike Tim, had accepted that transcendence, becoming comfortable in and unhindered by the world. Regardless of what really happened, Angel and Bill had the ability to summon the people they loved through their pooled memories of Tim, Kirsten and Jeff.
A haunting prophecy from 1982; quote: “It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.”
The ending featured a classic Philip K. Dick reality-twist, despite its otherwise real-life inspired setting, over Kirsten’s son and Tim’s transmigration, which was still grounded in doubtful reality because of Bill’s psychosis.
I saw the conflict of proof versus belief as a test for Angel Archer from God, where becoming rooted in the physical was the punishment for failure; Tim had tried to explain to Bill that it was impossible to explain Jeff’s return because belief is based on faith in one’s experience--this was proven to great effect through Bill being more pious about cars than Tim was about Christ, as Bill never needed more proof to assess any issue with his system, he had faith, the same as Angel.
Quote: “Believing something because it’s impossible... Not ‘despite the fact that it was impossible’...”
Insanity or unintelligibility equals being out-of-touch with reality, but reality operates despite the faults of irreality; Angel viewing death as a negative was rational and sane, even if she were incorrect and Tim were right, as chasing death would get one locked up in an institution or in another cycle of rebirth. Forming an idea bound by the future would root the idea in the future, thus determining fate--but it only did so if people believed it; Timothy Archer was punished for chasing and knowing God, needing and finding proof instead of believing.
Tim’s sin was missing the mark; the phrase “God is the Book of the Universe” was used as metaphor for Tim’s futility in finding God as an object at a single place in time and space.
Thank you for reading, please share your thoughts.
Allen W. McLean
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