Looking out over Detroit and feeling Dickian

PKD has been on my mind a great deal since I returned from India. Maybe it has to do with his ability to see one culture superimposed upon another, I'm not sure. Dick is about as close to pay dirt in the saint department as we get in the West. Sure there are a few others, but when I read a paragraph, a few pages or even look into his eyes as presented by an online image, I find myself falling towards the infinite. There is a heat and a cold projected through his work. These resemble the sensations you get when you find some semblance of yourself sitting at the infinite campfire with the rest of yourselves. Yeah, I put my vote in that Dick was the real deal.

This from PKD's site: In February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of visions and auditions including an information-rich "pink light" beam that transmitted directly into his consciousness. A year after the events, in March 1975, Dick summarized the 2-3-74 experiences that would pervade his writing for the final eight years of his life:

"I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken."

"March 16, 1974: It appeared - in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns - and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.

"March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I - and it - had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist; it cannot exist.'

"March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."

Yeah, prolly old news to most of you, but I want to make sure that we've got our bearings before we go full throttle.

I was talking with PKD this morning and he said: "So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that *do* fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe--and I am dead serious when I say this-- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things."

Good tidings to be sure. Old hat as well for the chaos crowd. Anyway, I'm getting down to the wire on this post. Richard Linklater's film version of Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" is due out in June. You'll remember Linklater from his brilliant "Waking Life" which mused on PKD a bit as well if I remember properly. "A Scanner Darkly" is done in a similar animation style as "Waking Life" and from the promo shots looks pretty scrumptious. Plus, I think it's the first re-emergence of Timothy Leary's God child since she got busted for ganking couture. Regardless, "they" say this is the first accurate film representation of a Dick novel. I'm so looking forward to it that I've broke out a few PDK novels to get warmed up.

Oh, you'll laugh to read that a robot of PKD has gone missing.