HOW TO BUILD A WORLD THAT DOESN'T FALL APART TWO DAYS LATER
(...)
So I ask, in my writing, What is real?
Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities 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 which
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. Before the new things can be born the old must perish.
This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually
part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. What I am saying is
that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the
authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters
most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with
the new.
Of course, I would say this, because I live
near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones.
Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum,
like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take
and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.
Philip K. Dick, 1978 in The
Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
Selected Literary and
Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin, Nova Iorque: Vintage Books,
1995, 180-195.
No comments:
Post a Comment