Snakes of Hawaii
I liked this selection from Philip K. Dick’s essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later:
In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?
We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn’t exist, and how can something that doesn’t exist have aspects? But then I realized that I’d been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to go ahead and ignore all the interesting metaphysical material that PKD deals with here and just say that I want that book.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 10:00 pm and is filed under books, old dead white guys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Snakes of Hawaii”
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philiptdotcom said on June 22, 2009 at 3:47 pm:
Your friend's book would've been funnier if it had been published before 1930, when the "blind snake" Ramphotyphlops braminus was first discovered to be introduced to Hawaii (and they still persist here). Also, Hawaii's waters are part of the native range of the yellow-bellied sea snake (Pelamis platurus). So, "Native Terrestrial Snakes of Hawaii"–while not quite as catchy a title–would've been funnier to folks who actually understand the current snake situation in Hawaii.
(For a reliable and recent more in-depth look at the current situation, see: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/ps/PS554p409.PDF)