Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

"With words," I said. "Like now."

"You are good with words."

"Very good," I said. "I am a sickness, a word-sickness. I was taught it by professionals."

"I have no words," Barefoot said.

"Okay," I said. "Then I will listen."

"Now you begin to know."

I nodded.

"Do you have any pets at home?" Barefoot said. "Any dogs or cats? An animal?"

"Two cats," I said.

"Do you groom them and feed them and care for them? Are you responsible for them? Do you take them to the vet when they're ill?"

"Sure," I said.

"Who does all that for you?"

"For me?" I said. "No one."

"Can you do it for yourself?"

"Yes, I can," I said.

"Then, Angel Archer, you are alive."

"Not intentionally," I said.

"But you are. You don't think so but you are. Under the words, the disease of words, you are alive. I am trying to tell you this without using words but it is impossible. All we have is words. Sit down again and listen. Everything I say from now on, today, is directed at you; I am speaking to you but not with words. Does that make any sense to you?"

"No," I said.

"Then just sit down," Barefoot said. I reseated myself.

"Angel Archer," Barefoot said, "You are wrong about yourself. You are not sick; you are starved. What is killing you is hunger. Words have nothing to do with it. You have been starved all your life. Spiritual things will not help. You don't need them. There are too many spiritual things in the world, far too many. You are a fool, Angel Archer, but not a good kind of fool."

I said nothing.

"You need real meat," Barefoot said, "and real drink, not spiritual meat and drink. I offer you real food, for your body, so it will grow. You are a starving person who has come here to be fed, but without knowing it. You have no idea why you came here today. it is my job to tell you. When people come here to listen to me speak, I offer them a sandwich. The foolish ones listen to my words; the wise ones eat the sandwich. This is not an absurdity that I tell you; it is the truth. This is something none of you has imagined, but I give you real food and that food is a sandwich; the words, the talking, is only wind-is nothing. I charge you one hundred dollars but you learn something priceless. When your dog or cat is hungry, do you talk to him? No; you give him food. I give you food, but you do not know it. You have everything backward because the university has taught you that; it has taught you wrong. It has lied to you. And now you tell yourselves lies; you have learned how to do it and you do it very well. Take the sandwich and eat; forget about the words. The only purpose in the words was to lure you here."

Strange, I thought. He means it. Some of my unhappiness began, then, to ebb away. I felt a peacefulness come over me, a loss of suffering.

Someone from behind me leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder. "Hi, Angel."

I turned around to see who it was. A pudgy-faced youth, blond-haired, smiling at me, his eyes guileless. Bill Lundborg, wearing a turtleneck sweater and gray slacks and, I saw to my surprise, Hush Puppies.

"Remember me?" he said softly. "I'm sorry I didn't answer any of your letters. I've been wondering how you've been doing."

"Fine," I said. "Just fine."

"I guess we better be quiet." He leaned back and folded his arms, intent on what Edgar Barefoot was saying.

At the end of his lecture, Barefoot walked over to me; I still sat, unmoving. Bending, Barefoot said, "Are you related to Bishop Archer?"

"Yes," I said. "I was his daughter-in-law."

We knew each other," Barefoot said. "Tim and I. For years. It was such a shock, his death. We used to discuss theology."

Coming up beside us, Bill Lundborg stood listening, saying nothing; he still smiled the same old smile I remembered.

"And then John Lennon's death today," Barefoot said. "I hope I didn't embarrass you, bringing you up front like that. But I could see something was wrong. You look better now."

I said, "I feel better."

"Do you want a sandwich?" Barefoot indicated the people gathered around the table at the rear of the room. "No," I said.

Barefoot said, "Then you weren't listening. To what I told you. I wasn't joking. Angel, you can't live on words; words do not feed. Jesus said, 'Man does not live by bread alone'; I say, 'Man does not live by words at all.' Have a sandwich."

"Have something to eat, Angel," Bill Lundborg said.

"I don't feel like eating," I said. "I'm sorry." I thought, I'd rather be left alone.

Bending down, Bill said, "You look so thin."

"My work," I said remotely.

"Angel," Edgar Barefoot said, "this is Bill Lundborg."

"We know each other," Bill said. "We're old friends."

"Then you know," Barefoot said to me, "that Bill is a bodhisattva. "

"I didn't know that," I said.

Barefoot said, "Do you know what a bodhisattva is, Angel?"

"It has something to do with the Buddha," I said.

"The bodhisattva is one who has turned down his chance to attain Nirvana in order to turn back to help others," Barefoot said. "For the bodhisattva compassion is as important a goal as wisdom. That is the essential realization of the bodhisattva. "

"That's fine," I said.

"I get a lot out of what Edgar teaches," Bill said to me. "Come on." He took me by the hand. "I'm going to see that you eat something."

"Do you consider yourself a bodhisattva?" I said to him.

"No," Bill said.

"Sometimes the bodhisattva does not know," Barefoot said. "It is possible to be enlightened without knowing it. Also, it is possible to think you are enlightened and yet not be. The Buddha is called 'the Awakened One,' because 'awakened' means the same as 'enlightened.' We all sleep but do not know it. We live in a dream; we walk and move and have our lives in a dream; most of all we speak in a dream; our speech is the speech of dreamers, and unreal."

Like now, I thought. What I'm hearing.

Bill disappeared; I looked around for him.

"He's getting you something to eat," Barefoot said.

"This is all very strange," I said. "This whole day has been unreal. It is like a dream; you're right. They're playing all the old Beatles songs on every station."

"Let me tell you something that happened to me once," Barefoot said; he seated himself in the chair beside me, bent over, his hands clasped together. "I was very young, still in school. I attended classes at Stanford, but I did not graduate. I took a lot of philosophy classes."

"So did I," I said.

"One day I left my apartment to mail a letter. I had been working on a paper-not a paper to turn in but a paper of my own: profound philosophical ideas, ideas very important to me. There was one particular problem I couldn't figure out; it had to do with Kant and his ontological categories by which the human mind structures experience-"

"Time, space and causation," I said. "I know. I studied that."

"What I realized as I walked along," Barefoot said, "was that, in a very real sense, I myself create the world that I experience; I both make that world and perceive it. As I walked, the correct formulation of this came to me, suddenly, out of the blue. One minute I didn't have it; the next minute I did. It was a solution I'd been striving for over a period of years. .. I had read Hume, and then I had found the response to Hume's criticism of causation in Kant's writing- now, suddenly, I had a response, and a correctly worked-out response to Kant. I started hurrying."

Bill Lundborg reappeared; he held a sandwich and a cup of fruit punch of some sort; these he held out to me. I accepted them reflexively.

Continuing, Barefoot said, "I hurried back up the street toward my apartment as fast as I could go. I had to get the satori down on paper before I forgot it. What I had acquired, there on that walk, out of my apartment where I had no access to pen and paper, was a comprehension of a world conceptually arranged, a world not arranged in time and space and by causation, but a world as idea conceived in a great mind, the way our own minds store memories. I had caught a glimpse of world not as my own arrangement-by time, space and causation-but as it is in itself arranged; Kant's 'thing-in-itself.' "