Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this--realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, self-renewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.

Joe Fernwright is a "pot-healer": an expert in repairing ancient ceramics. In the polystyrene world of a Philip K. Dick novel, it's a rare skill, and one not much in need. He scrimps and saves, hoping to save enough dimes for a few minutes phone-call to a kind of robot advisor named Mr. Job. If that sounds pathetic, it is: the world described by Dick in Galactic Pot-Healer is one of his dreariest, and the most familiar. Knowledge has been partitioned off into artificial intelligences like Mr. Job and Mr. Encyclopedia, who parcel it out stingily; the robotic systems that organize human life seem almost intentionally withholding and hostile. In this atomized existence, Joe and many others retreat to trivial distractions like "The Game," a silly pastime in which players are made to guess the titles of classic movies and books that have been translated into and out of English, like "The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed" for The Sun Also Rises. (Remember doing this with, like, Alta Vista?) It's a meaningless pastime for a meaningless life, one whose diminishment of spirit becomes close to death:

The energy and capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game. Contact with others, he thought; through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Suddenly, Joe is contacted by a mysterious presence: an alien life form calling itself Glimmung. Glimmung is something of a divine figure, a shapeshifter who can appear in any form to Joe, but he needs Joe's help, and the help of hundreds of others. On his home world, called Plowman's Planet, Glimmung plans to raise an ancient cathedral called the Heldscalla from where it lay under the planet's great ocean. Joe's pot-healing services are crucial to the cathedral's restoration, and in return for his help, Glimmung promises to bestow upon him a literally inconceivable amount of money. But more improtantly, Joe realizes, he has been given an opportunity to do something non-trivial--to take part, even in a small way, in a great undertaking that might give meaning and purpose to his life.

Any attempt at raising Heldscalla is fraught with risk. Plowman's Planet is peopled by giant rat-like figures who carry around a tome called The Book of Kalends, which is continuously being filled with the dictums of fate, including that of Joe and his new colleagues (like his new bronze-colored alien girlfriend, Mali). The Book of Kalends says that the attempt at raising the cathedral will fail, and Joe and everyone else will be destroyed in the process. But this only means that the raising of Heldscalla takes on a greater metaphorical importance; not only will it mean bringing purpose to the lives of those who raise it, but raising it will mean a victory over the mechanical and deterministic forces of fate and entropy. A sassy robot butler assigned to Joe and Mali explains that all things, even robots, are victims to entropy and fight against it, but there are forces in the world, too, of restoration and recovery, like Joe's pot-healing. The raising of Heldscalla lies at the nexus of the metaphysical and the political: is it more like Christ's victory over Death, or more like the collective seizing the means of production and the path of history?

Galactic Pot-Healer is--well, I guess you can't say it's one of Dick's strangest books, since every book that man wrote seems impossibly strange in its own way. You might say it's his most symbolic. When Joe and Mali descend into the ocean of Plowman's Planet to see the cathedral for themselves--against the wishes of the Glimmung--they discover that there's actually two cathedrals, a black cathedral and a white cathedral. They discover, too, there is a kind of anti-Glimmung who is locked in battle with the Glimmung, and who wishes to raise the black cathedral instead of the white one; this is the image of the eternal agon or something like that. You know, the Manichaean struggle between good and evil, or perhaps, knowing Dick's predilection for Eastern philosophy, something of the yin and yang. The image that will stay with me from this scene, though, is Joe discovering his own dead body, flapping up like a strange fish to advise him on what to do. A lesser writer might feel the need to explain this as a kind of time travel trick, but Dick is content to let the image be just the powerful image it is, a man confronted by the inevitability of his own destruction.

The climax of Galactic Pot-Healer offers Joe the ultimate choice: will he, like the other workers on the project, allow himself to be absorbed into the Glimmung and raise the cathedral with the combination of their skills and consciousnesses? Or will he cling to his individuality and be sent back to his former life, playing stupid word games? How far are we willing to take our dreams of partaking in greatness? I won't say what Joe chooses, but I will say that the novel's final line is possibly Dick's blackest, bleakest joke.