“How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” by Philip K. Dick

 

 

[With a big hearty hat tip to Ken Baumann, who fwded me a link to this essay, apropos absolutely zilch, just because he thought I might think it was interesting. He was right and a half.]

 

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

[After the jump, I write Ken a note about what I thought about the essay]

 I love how this essay is sort of broken into 2 halves. The first half is really a thoughtful essay about media domination of the public mind, and the 2nd is really and truly the ravings of a crazy person, albeit one who just might be right about everything. Have you read much PKD? Maybe we talked about this and I don’t remember…. Flow My Tears is a fascinating book. And that whole thing he describes about meeting the girl and then the fish necklace making him realize he’s in AD 50, that’s all actually part of a novel he was working on around that time– VALIS, the first book in his late major trilogy. No doubt VALIS is autobiographical, even “true” in the sense that PKD himself believed more of it than not, but he did take the care to publish it AS fiction. Maybe that’s just the avenue that was open to him. 

I think the truest thing he says is the self-deprecating paragraph at the beginning about being a terrible writer. God love him, but he IS a terrible writer. His prose stinks, he can’t characterize, and all the worlds where he sets novels are totally unbelievable ill-thought-out “worlds.” He’s a disaster, in short, and yet–and yet and yet and yet. I’ve read many of his books; I’ll read many more. He’s the best example I can think of of a writer whose work is valuable (and enjoyable) despite the fact that it fails by almost any conceivable standard of reading or writing. I guess that in itself is a kind of miracle. 

[And now how about one more quote from the essay, which you really should bother yourself to read]

 

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him,because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

Tags: Ken Baumann, Philip K. Dick

8 Comments

1. April 14th, 2009 / 4:13 pm jereme—

   PKD lived in Orange County back when it was lame and snorted meth like it was nutritious.

   he was definitely a little whacked from it like any long term use meth head.

2. April 14th, 2009 / 12:13 pm jereme—

   PKD lived in Orange County back when it was lame and snorted meth like it was nutritious.

   he was definitely a little whacked from it like any long term use meth head.

3. April 14th, 2009 / 5:42 pm alan rossi—

   glad to see PKD getting some words here. he can’t fucking write a sentence, but i love reading his stuff, especially the trilogy, because not many other writers can track that all-consuming need and obsession of a mind to ‘figure it all out’ like PKD. an example of intensity and blood being just as important as language.

4. April 14th, 2009 / 1:42 pm alan rossi—

   glad to see PKD getting some words here. he can’t fucking write a sentence, but i love reading his stuff, especially the trilogy, because not many other writers can track that all-consuming need and obsession of a mind to ‘figure it all out’ like PKD. an example of intensity and blood being just as important as language.

5. April 14th, 2009 / 7:33 pm Drew—

   That biography I Am Alive and Your Are Dead was really good. Really got into his craziness.

6. April 14th, 2009 / 3:33 pm Drew—

   That biography I Am Alive and Your Are Dead was really good. Really got into his craziness.

7. April 15th, 2009 / 2:22 am Cal Morgan—

   And for a fictional take on Dick and the omnivorous, deranged mania of the writing mind, check out Chris Miller’s hilarious new novel, The Cardboard Universe, just published today! (Shameless plug–at Harper Perennial he’s one of our own–but the book is seriously one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.) It’s one part Confederacy of Dunces, one part Pale Fire, and about 1000 shards of old Twilight Zone episodes, all jammed through the exquisite funhouse blender of Chris Miller’s mind. Open to any page and you’ll laugh out loud–something that can’t be said for any old novel . . .

8. April 14th, 2009 / 10:22 pm Cal Morgan—

   And for a fictional take on Dick and the omnivorous, deranged mania of the writing mind, check out Chris Miller’s hilarious new novel, The Cardboard Universe, just published today! (Shameless plug–at Harper Perennial he’s one of our own–but the book is seriously one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.) It’s one part Confederacy of Dunces, one part Pale Fire, and about 1000 shards of old Twilight Zone episodes, all jammed through the exquisite funhouse blender of Chris Miller’s mind. Open to any page and you’ll laugh out loud–something that can’t be said for any old novel . . .