Author: myrmidon
Date: 07-11-04 21:38
I found this forum today. What an eye-opener. Here we have a bunch of threads, each dealing with various aspects of the projections of the mind of Philip Dick. The project here is to say something significant about those worlds created by Mr. Dick, and thereby contribute something to the "community of minds" who come here to investigate those Dickian universes.
But Dick, perhaps more than anyone, dealt with worlds that were distorted, bizarre, sick, schizophrenic, psychotic, breaking down, falling apart, unraveling, and going wrong. And yet, perhaps everyone here, or maybe just me, somehow has the feeling that Dick was able to accomplish some sort of superhuman feat in his writing: he was able to extract something redeeming, something beautiful and something essentially noble out of the the swirling shards of shattered dreams and realities. But what exactly was it? What was he doing in his writing?
It is my guess that we want to know the answer to this question because we find ourselves, to greater or lesser degrees, dealing with the same "chaos", and we wonder whether Dick might have found the key of redemption.
So my question to you folks here is whether a forum like this can help find the answer.
I would have thought so, but reading the exchanges in several of these threads, I suspect I might have been overly optimistic. I seems that while some are looking for the answers that I'm seeking, others are drawn to Dick by some sort of affinity or identification with the chaos, and see Dick's project as perhaps an active promotion or flowering of a psychotic melodrama for its own sake, as if the distorted shapes and grotesque pattern of the funhouse mirror are the point.... the real "illumination". (And I suppose, if you've been experiencing such bizarreness all your life, Dick's visions might seem to be a powerful affirmation of one's own righteousness.)
Of course, this doesn't just apply to Dick, he just happens to be the greatest master of the technique. But once people discovered that such powerful rending of the psychic fabric could effect people like an addictive drug, and cause them to reach deep into their pockets to pay for the experience, well, there inevitably came those ready to cash in (e.g., Lynch, etc.).
And so out come the guns and the psychopaths who own them, ready to jump into melodrama and play their parts to the hilt. For me, _A Scanner Darkly_ is probably the scariest of Dick's psychopathic visions.... I get the creeps just thinking about the shower scene at the beginning. But Dick had the ability to tap into his own psychopathic visions and channel them into the literature he created. He could conjure the disease into works of art... which his readers could safely approach and contemplate....
But can the same be said of the interactions of a community of souls inspired... driven... seduced ... even coerced by his stylized madness?
A community of people all-too-ready to jump into the insanity with all guns blazing... a true celebration of the madness?
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