08.13.04

Flow My Tears, Philip K Dick Said

Posted in Books at 5:32 pm by

If you ever think you’re having a particularly odd day, stop and consider a while the phenomenally (or perhaps phenomenogically) strange life of Philip K. Dick, professional questioner of reality.

This absolutely characteristic essay (titled ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’) gives you a sense of how endlessly weird it must have been to be the man who, as he indicated himself, had two basic questions: “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”

One of the most destabilising things about Dick was that, like Borges, he was an intellectual magpie: he read widely if not deeply. This allowed him to flutter down onto an idea, strip it out of context and reuse it in a way that had never been intended. The results were often logically unkempt, but always interesting. Watch him do it here:

In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

Much of this particular essay is devoted to a serious of coincidences Dick experiences after completing one of his later novels, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. He comes to wonder if he is actually living in AD 50, experiencing the events of the Book of Acts, and it is only the existence of Disneyland that reassures him that this is not the case.

The uncanny thing is, you quite believe him.

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