Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 14

Chapter 14: TW for talk of misogyny and brief mention of drugs

Well, that’s one way to solve a cosmological battle of deities that’s taking place over a small Virginia town.

Turns out the last chapter ended with a fakeout. A happy one at least! The golem on Ted’s shoulder turns out to be the one which Mary had controlled, and is now fully inhabiting. The rest of the battle feels very grey goo-ish, with Ahriman taking a pretty passive role in the whole “consuming everything” business. Most of the work is done by the rats, golems, snakes and spiders. However, Mary has a plan, and begins guiding Ted along, fighting off rats with her tiny spear (made of a needle stuck to a twig). I love the image of guy just running through a horde of rats with a tiny person on his shoulder fighting off the horde with essentially a nail. It’s pretty comical.

Eventually, Ted figures out what he needs to do. Or rather, Mary tells him. He needs to wake up Ohrmazd. Making his way through the crowd, Ted realizes who it is. Doc Meade. Ted drags the doctor out of his car and reminds him who he is in a very Spirited Away manner.

Suddenly the book takes a turn that is really hard to describe. I have a bit of an issue with sci-fi writing generally, and PKD in particular that shows up here. The reality breaks, while certainly impressive, are usually handled in a fashion that’s a bit over-the-top. I know that might seem unintuitive, of course a reality break should be over the top. It’s a break in reality. However, I feel like Eye in the Sky did it well with the subtle implications that something was just “off”, and the much more delicate understanding of “reality” as a philosophical construct rather than a purely ontic experience. There are passages in here that describe like, the entire unmaking of a star cluster and the pulsing feeling of Ted’s body floating outside of the whole of the known universe and it’s all a bit too much.

My problem, I guess, is that it’s hard to visualize the gravity of the situation. I can imagine a star exploding in my head, as though it were on a film. However, it seems like in the imaging of that occurrence, the magnitude of the event is undone somewhat. Similarly, when I attempt to imagine the magnitude of such a fundamental shift in reality as the universe being potentially unmade, it’s impossible to visualize. Any image doesn’t seem to quite capture the sheer awesomeness of the event being described. Honestly, I think I’d need to be tripping to really get into the headspace where I could both visualize the happenings and imagine their impact.




Anyways, the long and short of this sequence is that Ohrmazd and Ahriman just kinda… leave. I realize how ridiculous it is, but that’s what happens! They just start fighting and go carry on their fight somewhere else, and thus Millgate returns to normal! I feel like we’re less in sci-fi and more in weird fiction at this point. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just kind of ludicrous how rather mundane the actual events that solve the conflict end up being.

Ted and the Wanderers quickly gain the upper hand in the fight and drive away the rest of Ahriman’s horde. The town and the people in it are slowly returning back to the way they were before The Change occurred.

Which just leaves Mary. Ted talks with her, and it’s… I don’t know. It hits a bit of a mixed feeling with me. So basically, what happens is Ted asks Mary who/what she really is. She replies that she is Armaiti, daughter of Ohrmazd. Mary was the form she took during the eighteen years since The Change. She was the one who engineered events so that Ted would leave town before Ahriman arrived, so that some years later she could bring him back and awaken her father to go fight Ahriman once more. Ted and Christopher then set about returning her to her original form, and it’s described as being this rather tall and inhumanly beautiful woman before she then dissolves back into the Earth. On the surface level, I’m fine with all of this. It’s a pretty satisfying conclusion to the chapter. However, Dick inserts this weird conversation between Ted and Armaiti in which he kind of objectifies her body while in golem form, talking about how “she sure doesn’t look thirteen anymore”. It’s a really strange juxtaposition and I’m a bit put off by it. I guess on the one hand I understand the urge to position and describe deities as being human-like but epitomes of human beauty in some ways. However, the beauty described here (apart from the final line “she was the essence of generation, the bursting power of woman, of all life.”) is rather cis-het male oriented in what it lingers on (hair, breasts, eyes, sleek body). I’m not sure exactly what would have made this better. Like I said, at one level I understand the tendency in writing to make gods “beautiful” but on the other it certainly seems rather normative. Ahriman is a grey-goo blob, Ohrmazd is a giant radiating glow of night sky with stars in place of a head, Armaiti is a really pretty woman?

All this said, the chapter ends with a nice sentiment by Armaiti to Ted. Ted kind of feels like I do about the absurdity and randomness of Millgate being selected as the site for this battle to take place, and how ultimately the decision was fairly arbitrary and that Millgate didn’t really have any sort of significance. I think the solace she gives Ted is pretty helpful with regard to this:

“It was small compared to the greater picture. But it’s a part of the greater picture. The struggle is vast; much bigger than anything you can experience. I’ve never seen the real extent, myself, the final regions it’s entered. Only the two of them see it as it’s really waged. But Millgate is important. It was never forgotten.”

[since writing this review, and finishing the book, I’ve found a comparison online that likens the whole sequence with Ohrmazd awakening to the intro of Katamari Damacy, and I think the comparison is actually pretty spot on to my problems with the way it’s written. It’s kind of campy in its execution of this great mystical event].