mark monday's Reviews > The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

"...the Old Testament gives us many instances of Yahweh addressing his people through the prophets. This fountain of revelation dried up, finally. God no longer speaks to man. It is called 'the long silence.' It has lasted two thousand years."



"Jung speaks... of a person, a normal person, into whose mind one day a certain idea comes, and that idea never goes away. Moreover, Jung says, upon the entering of that idea into the person's mind, nothing new ever happens to that mind or in that mind; time stops for that mind and it is dead. The mind, as a living, growing entity has died. And yet the person, in a sense, continues on.

If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need."

Once upon a time there was a Bishop of California, a good man and a flawed one, a man who made mistakes but tried to do the right thing, a man whose son killed himself, a man who went on a spiritual journey after that death, a man who then also died tragically. This was a real bishop and his name was James Pike. One upon a time there was a book about the Bishop of California, a good man and a flawed one, and all the rest of it, the sadness and the tragedy and the death and the seeking and the death, the death. This is Philip K. Dick's bishop and his name was Timothy Archer.

Once upon a time there was a character named Angel, the protagonist in a book about a bishop and a death, and another death, and finally, another death. She was a good protagonist and a flawed one, she tried to do the right thing, she tried and she failed. But is it even failure if you are living in a flawed world, a vastly imperfect creation, one where the Creator has walked away, or flown away or floated away or transubstantiated away or or or, who cares, they left, He left, bored and uninterested in providing even the smallest sign of His caring, let alone His love. You can't blame an angel for failing in a world that sees both success and failure as equally meaningless. At least Angel tried.



Once upon a time there was an Angel who tried, who tried to not let the idea get in her head, that there was something more, some meaning to it all, a God who created order and meaning, that life and death both had meaning, she tried not to believe in all of that. She failed. Once upon a time she decided she could at least save one person, she wasn't able to save the others but surely she could at least save this Bishop, the most helpless and yet the strongest of them all. She failed. Once upon a time she decided she could at least help herself, she could try to achieve some sort of understanding, or at least a kind of equanimity with what had happened in her life, she could at least try to make sure she was more than a hollow where a person once was, a life that once had people in it, all of them gone now. She--

"I turned to my own menu, and saw there what I wanted. What I wanted was immediate, fixed, real, tangible; it lay in this world and it could be touched and grasped; it had to do with my house and my job, and it had to do with banishing ideas finally from my mind, ideas about other ideas, an infinite regress of them, spiraling off forever."

Once upon a time there was Angel, and she succeeded, in that one small thing, in that decision to keep trying, she'd leave the world of ideas behind and focus on the material world, hope wasn't lost yet, she would save this fourth person and so would be saving herself, and she--

Once upon a time there was a Bishop who transmigrated, he had left the world and then he came back into it, into the body of another, yet another person who needed saving. The Bishop had searched and he had failed and he had died and he had came back and he--

Once upon a time there was an author named Philip K. Dick who tried, who really tried, to understand God and the world and all of the ideas in his head, so many of them, he tried to organize his thoughts and create a kind of narrative out of them, he tried to understand death and reality and his place in it all, he succeeded and he failed and he--