Philip K. Dick response journal #3
In reply to previous journals, questions you have asked. The Phil Dick quote about his being revolutionized in the mind by Robert Anton Wilson is on the jackets to many of his non-fiction books. In particular Quantum Psychology. The fiction that I had given you last time bore much relevance and relatedness to Dick, I thought. Questioning reality itself, just from different perspectives. As a writer, I have my similarities but larger differences with Dick. He likes to focus on characters, and plot-driven action—he likes the everyman, as we’ve discussed in class. People with bad jobs. – My own personal universe consists of a world beyond this, where there is no such thing as an extraordinary man, or a subordinary man, or the idea of a man at all. People aren’t pushed into these shapes called characters, people are too unstable. Often I find when I’m reading Dick, that he oversimplifies a character every now and then, putting them into the place of “being something” – when nothing is. Nothing. And to reflect the world as actually being something, or a person as being something tangible, only perpetuates the lie and confusion. I feel like Dick’s own perceptions on what it is to be real, as he always is debating even in the earlier work, began to change after the Valis experience. The construction of characters in Valis is similar to my own… transient. Shifting. Split in the middle. One person does not equal necessarily one person. One person could be two people. Split. Different sides. Shifting.
I’m sorry if you don’t like abstraction. It’s the only language I know, can know, will ever know. I don’t trust reality enough to engage in concreteness on the level as it is known in the academic world. Sometimes I fit my self into the little role, but I realize often to concretize something is only to lie about it. If I bring something into being as a concrete thing, I always must qualify that I have no attachment to assessing something in this way. That my own interpretation of it as a non-abstract thing is temporary, fleeting.
And then I realize with the whole problem of me not being capable of being compatible with the way reality is described, makes me incompatible with reality itself. Communication itself. I am willing to delve into that, in pursuit of trying to live what I fluctuate to think of as “truth.”