Profane Exegesis: Reality and Simulacrum.

I managed to get along to the Cameo the other day to see A Scanner
Darkly, an animation film, based on the novel by Philip K Dick.
Always satisfying to see Dick coming into his own over the years, I
found it mind-blowing in itself to be sitting there watching it at this
particular point in time and space, my mind kept wandering making the
usual free-associative connections. But the gist of the story is the main
character Bob Archer is under surveillance by a cop who also happens
to be himself. Dick and his playing around with simultaneously
Gnostic and deeply psychological themes.

I think most of the audience and his readers see his ideas as little
more than the imaginative fantasies of an imaginatively gifted writer.
But for some, myself included, Dick has come closer to blowing apart
or unravelling some of the truth behind appearances. That the world is
not at all what it pretends to be, True, he seems to have altered his
viewpoint every other day, but the probing was done.
I felt this long before the movie The Matrix ever made its
appearance, but it was a year or two before it did that I was sitting in an
upmarket bar by Bristo Street for a last drink with an esoterically
inclined friend and UFO buff before he went off to Vancouver, that I’d
brought the conversation around to the subject of how our notions of
reality, our most basic assumptions are, if you like, under an onslaught
from the entertainment industry as well as in the arts and literature; that
movies like 12.01, re-made later as Groundhog Day - with great comic
actor Bill Murray, are touching on aspects of the deepest metaphysics,
our most cherished presuppositions of the basis of time, space and
causality, and I expected to see an increase in such themes. (Even if
Murray does use the situation – the time anomaly – to cheat his way
into the heart mind of the woman he loves).
Questions of identity, the nature of the self, the apparent solidity of
the world and ourselves as we experienced and believed them to be.
The whole phenomenal universe. It was all coming under the
microscope, often in very brilliantly inventive and entertaining fashion,
but far removed from a meaningless diversion.
In its way, The Matrix came to personify this for me. I found
12.01 as profound in its own way with its theme of a time loop
repeating itself, a staple in many dramas since. I’d come to see history,
individually and collectively, as being only a sequence of events and
lives being repeated over and over again in different forms.
The Matrix, appearing shortly after our conversation, had its
moments of epiphany for me, notably in one lower-key scene, when
our heroes, Neo, Morbius, and the rest, are being pursued by agents
and a cat walks past Keanu Reaves as Neo, just as he’s about to follow
the them up the flight of stairs, then another cat crosses his path in
exactly the same manner, which catches his attention. This alerts the
others who describe this as a glitch in the Matrix; a fabricated reality.
The basis of the film.
I had long known this to be true. It had been taking form over the
years through a sequence of unlikely associations and startling
synchronicities. Some of them I’d have to be blind not to pick up on.
Apropos of this, it’s worth recounting if briefly how I came to meet V.
and how these associations come to shape themselves. I state it in the
present tense as it’s still an ongoing sequence, a semi-mystifying
phenomenon, though to all intents and purposes V. fell swiftly out of
my life for the time being, having shown no inclination to keep in
touch in any way. But this was just his reserved style.
The person who had introduced me to him was no more or less
important. This was at the Traverse Theatre where Uri Geller was
doing his thing. I would describe myself as being less of a sceptic than
V. As for R who introduced us, her whole orientation seemed to
revolve around people rather than ideas. Gifted with the ability to
compartmentalise disparate and conflicting ideas a in workable form of
dissociation par excellence, challenging or unusual ideas were shifted
to the back of her awareness in a kind of haze of irrelevance compared
to the 'real world' of people. And I think she felt she was doing us both
a good turn, and could congratulate herself on any psychological
chemical reaction that might take place, any new perspectives we
might stimulate in one another. Undoubtedly esoterically inclined,
with a deep interest in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, his overt
interest was in UFOs. This was the basis of our common interest after
all, the reason she had felt we should be introduced to one another.