PKD’s Love of the Disordered & Puzzling
MarmaladeI actually had to develop a love of the disordered & puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackled, not in fear but with tireless fascination. What has been most needed is reality testing, & a willingness to face the possibility of self-negating experiences: i.e., real contradicitons, with something being both true & not true.
The enigma is alive, aware of us, & changing. It is partly created by our own minds: we alter it by perceiving it, since we are not outside it. As our views shift, it shifts in a sense it is not there at all (acosmism). In another sense it is a vast intelligence; in another sense it is total harmonia and structure (how logically can it be all three? Well, it is).
Page 91 (1979)
In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis
by Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
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This deeply touches upon my experience. I also had to develop a love of the disorderd & puzzling… for I never felt capable of denying these or distracting myself from their effect upon me. If I didn’t learn to love the puzzles that thwarted my understanding, then seemingly the only other choice would be to fear them.
I was just thinking about the several years after my highschool graduation. For most people, this time of life is filled with a sense of bright opportunity and youthful fun. But, for me, it was the darkest time of my life. I felt utterly lost with no good choice available to me. I questioned deeply because my life was on the line… quite literally… because it was during these years that I attempted suicide.
I don’t remember exactly when I discovered PKD, but it was around that period of my life. PKD’s questioning mind resonated with my experience. The questions I asked only exacerbated my depression, but I did not know how to stop asking them. So, to read someone who had learned to love the unanswerable questions was refreshing. Plus, I was inspired by the infinite playfulness of his imagination.
Imagination was what I sorely needed during that time of feeling stuck in harsh reality. To imagine ‘what if’ was a way of surviving day by day, and the play of possibilities brought a kind of light into my personal darkness. I won’t say that PKD saved my life, but he did help me to see something good in it all.
Then, I became interested in other writers for quite a while. I had even given away most of my PKD books. I’d forgotten why I had liked him so much until A Scanner Darkly came out. I watched it twice in the theater and was very happy to be reacquainted with PKD. That movie really captured his writing like none other.
Those years spent away from PKD’s work, I had been seeking out various answers(such as those provided by the great Ken Wilber). But now I feel like I’m in a mood again to simply enjoy the questions.
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I’ve been taking notes on another book and came across some lines that resonate with my sense of what PKD was about:
“Mercury is the trickster, happiest when he is at play. Playing he is able to achieve the double consciousness of the comic mode: the world is serious and not serious at the same time, a meaningful pattern of etenrity and a filmy veil blocking the beyond.”
Page 77
The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines
Eric G. Wilson
Access: Public 
Marmalade 
Nicole said
i used to think when people talked about the teenage and university years as being the best part of our lives that i might as well kill myself then too. it wasn’t that i was as depressed as you, because my depression was only mild, but i was confused and searching. getting married and having kids was very challenging at times and i really only feel that i am beginning to enjoy my life as fully as i always wanted. i know what i want, i have some idea about how to be fulfilled and happy, i have a satisfying career and many friends, i am pursuing depth with God and meaning… everything is falling into place.
Marmalade said
I hear ya. I do enjoy my life now even though my depression probably isn’t any less than back then. I have perspective now and I know what I like. I focus on what I like and I do my best to ignore the rest. I can now enjoy the questions but without as much angsty desperation.
Nicole said
that’s really positive! though i do hope that somehow the depression can lift. That must be challenging always to come back to that. Reminds me of a book I enjoyed years ago called Father Melancholy’s Daughter
about a priest who couldn’t shake his tendency to deep depression no matter how hard he tried. very moving…
here is something else by the author about it
Marmalade said
Thanks for the mention of that book. I liked this last part from the first link:
One of the answers lies in the words of Margaret’s father to a fellow priest: “The Resurrection as it applies to each of us means coming up through what you were born into, then understanding objectively the people your parents were and how they influenced you. Then finding out who you yourself are, in terms of how you carry forward what they put in you, and how your circumstances have shaped you. And then … and then … now here’s the hard part! You have to go on to find out what you are in the human drama, or body of God. The what beyond the who, so to speak.”
“And then … and then … now here’s the hard part!” lol
There is a movie about depression that I watched back then: Ordinary People. I haven’t come across another movie that captures better my sense of my depression, but my situation was and is a bit different from the character.
The story is similar to the Stephen King story The Body(made into the movie Stand By Me). A younger son has to live with the memory of his dead older brother who had been the perfect son. The mother is entirely into image and the son tries his best to fit in.
The most insightful part of the film is where a depressed girl he had befriended in the psych ward had killed herself after convincing everyone(including herself) that everything was normal. It shakes the boy to the core because if even someone who deals with their depression so ‘positively’ falls prey to hopelessness, then what hope is there for him. However, the point is that he is less likely to try to kill himself again because he doesn’t repress his valid feelings.
The message of the movie is that we all are just ordinary people, no one is perfect. The movie presents the mother as less together than the son despte her trying to put up a positive front.
Nicole said
yes, Ben. Yes!
another book I have found important in terms of many of these themes – finding yourself, working out who you are in your family, understanding your mission in God, dealing with the death of a sibling – is mystical_paths_by_susan_howatch
Actually, it’s part of a long series about this psychic but though it speaks casually of paranormal abilities it is very real and goes deep into our day to day lives.
Marmalade said
I checked out your review of Mystical Paths and sounds like a strange story.
Have you read the whole series?
Nicole said
it’s a very strange story! i’ve only read a couple of the books, and while i’m mildly interested in the rest, you know the mantra! so many books… 🙂