The Owl In Daylight was the projected title of an unwritten novel by late author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Since owls are gifted with keen night vision, but ill-equipped to navigate in sunlight, it’s a metaphor for blindness in unfamiliar territory. It’s also the title of a forthcoming film purporting to mix an account of Dick’s life with elements from his fiction, and the name of an “indie-rock/punk” band on facebook presumably inspired by one of the others.
Most recently, Phil’s X-wife Tessa Dick has woven her impressions of his life and her vision of his unwritten masterpiece into an excellent novel published this year called The Owl In Daylight: Things are Not As They Appear. As she explained on her blog, “I spent ten years with the man, and I participated in the writing of A Scanner Darkly and other works. I know how Owl should be told, and I am telling the story.”
Philip K. Dick was a writer who believed that human perception of reality is occluded to such a degree that the apparent is a hoax, and chose to make this heretical message palatable for readers by expressing it within the genre of speculative fiction. He recorded his neuro-sematic breakdown, or theophany, as the case may be, which occured in February and March of 1974 (involving his temporary possession by a para-human force, whether divine or extraterrestrial, and his reception of uncommon knowledge via a mysterious beam of pink light) in his VALIS trilogy. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, generally considered the third volume, is really just a stand-in for The Owl In Daylight, which he hadn’t begun at the time of his death. Dick felt he had seen through the veil to the bare bones of What Really Was, and spent most of the rest of his life attempting to understand, explain and communicate this vision to others. His was possibly the first and certainly one of the more remarkable recent attempts to unite the disparate fields of theology and creativity in modern American literature. A major inspiration for Timothy Archer was the story of his friend, Bishop Arthur Pike, whose embrace of spiritualism after the death of his son was the source of a minor scandal within the Episcopal church. Pike disappeared without a trace during a spiritual expedition to the Dead Sea in 1969.
Phil’s wife during the events of 2-3-74, Tessa carries the legacy of this ultimate experience, and succeeds brilliantly with her latest novel in equaling and possibly surpassing his own attempts to pay tribute to its implications by modernizing them for a new generation of seekers. The Owl in Daylight is self-published. Written in loving tribute to Tessa's late husband, it manifests a completed version of the unwritten masterpiece Phil had in mind. Like VALIS and other post 2-3-74 works, parts of the plot in this one mirror elements of Dick’s own life. Author of several other works of fiction and nonfiction, Tessa says, “I consider The Owl my best work so far.” Take heed.
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