Finished: A Scanner Darkly

I finished PKD's A Scanner Darkly this afternoon. The last 100 pages really sucked me in, hocked me up and spit me out hard. PKD scares me about as often as he awes me. Actually it is the manner in which he awes me which is frightening. I didn't expect Scanner to go where it went in the spiritual realm. Of course, PKD's spiritual realm is so thick with science that God creeps up through some flawed technology. In the case of Scanner, the technology is the human mind itself and the flaw is competitive hemispheres of the brain as brought on by drug "misuse" to quote PDK from the author's note that concludes the book.

"It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right and all that that implies. And we don't know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right hand glove pulled through infinity."

It's going to take me a while to process this one. I'm very interested to see what Richard Linklater's film version looks like. As mentioned here previously, it's due out this June.

Now I'm off to work on Alex Grey's Mission of Art and the new edition of Metzner's Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca. It's great to return to my reading habit.