Friday, October 22, 2010

Watch Philip K. Dick Going Crazy on YouTube

This morning I was surfing YouTube for interviews with f/sf authors. In so doing I ran across this bizarre 1977 footage of Philip K. Dick giving a speech at a science fiction convention in France. Actually, this is not as much a speech as it is PKD earnestly reading a written statement about how he recently discovered that reality is a computer program. All fans of PKD should be familiar with this authors' famously tenuous hold on reality, but to see this manifested on film is quite moving and also, for me at least, quite sad. This clip is painfully reminiscent of a close high school friend of mine who has been fighting problems with schizophrenia and paranoia for much of his adult life. Interestingly, this friend of mine (wisely) refused to read VALIS out of fear it would make matters worse.

In this video you can hear PKD saying things like "Some of my fictional works were, in a literal sense, true", "We are living in a computer programmed reality", and describing how books like Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears the Policeman Said were based on true realities he had seen in visions. "I claim to remember a very different present life," he says.

12 comments:

  1. Very interesting. I've read of this incident, and it was quite fascinating to see it on film.

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  2. I read a PKD biography website earlier today that said this speech was his last public appearance before his death in 1982. Between this speech and his death he wrote and published three more books: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I am not terribly fond of any of these books, but I suppose I should reconsider them as autobiographical works based on the statements in this clip...

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  3. Y'know, if the Wachowski brothers didn't know about this clip, then I'd be surprised, all the way down to the "something has changed in the matrix" bit of his speech.

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  4. Poor fella. Only Kafka played around with reality more intensely. It would be wrong to say he delved too deeply in his writing obsessions and slipped off the edge as he clearly is suffering here for his drug taking.

    He was one of only a dozen decent genre writers of the last century.

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  5. @Kent - So, you've like, read them all?

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  6. This clip sounds completely sane compared to the interview transcribed in "What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick" by Gwen Lee. In the interview, he talks about the plot of "The Owl in Daylight", his last unpublished book concerning an alien race of shamen/pilgrims who possess the mind of a musician. Later in the interview, he confesses that the book is in fact, autobiographical and only thinnly diguised as fiction. Reading that interview really hammered home for me the poor state of Dick's mental health.

    Despite all that, I really think "VALIS", "The Divine Invasion", and "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" are his best works and do contain some valid and profound questions about life. He could be a pretty powerful writer, but I don't envy the path he took to get there.

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  7. James. I don't need to glug the entire bottle of plonk to dismiss a vintage. Feel free though to continue reading indiscriminately into your old age.

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  8. As someone who knows his grip on what others call "reality" is sometimes somewhat unsure and slippery, Dick doesn't sound so crazy here (at least not to me). I note that several times during his speech he references the fact that his listeners may not believe him. Although his ideas might be considered outlandish, he knows that others don't share his perceptions and is able to say that. Truly delusional people are not self aware in that way.

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  9. How did that clip slip past the Matrix-minders?

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  10. If I did not know better, that is to say if I was not aware of PKD's history of drug use and mental illness, I would have thought it was a stunt. It feels rather like some media stunts pulled these days, efforts to promote movies and TV shows. For example, the hype surrounding the new Tron movie, with faked material for the fake companies of the movie. But I do know about PKD history... and so the clip is somewhat sad.

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  11. Impressive. PKD remains my favorite Sci Fi writer no matter. His themes about reality not being reality somehow strike a chord. Just like the Matrix does. Just figure, suppose the Wachowskis haven't seen this... then they and PKD would be tapping into a truth after all ;-))
    Nah. They must have seen it.

    But seriously. A question. Regardless of his drug (ab)use. Could PKD have seen something real, in a sense? Monroe and others tell about similar experiences. Ask for yourself - just open minded - could there actually be truth in it?

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  12. Thanks for posting. This seems ripe for sampling in some 90s-style techno/industrial track, ala:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjho-zVgDXo

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