be weathered.… Kabir, the sixteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.
The conflations in this passage are so perfectly typical—SF writer and uneducated street girl, Dick's suffering and yours. His self-mocking humility at Herbert Gold's “charity” is balanced against that treasured, ink-fading file card: a certainty that value resides in the smallest gestures, in scraps of empathy. Dick was a writer doomed to be himself, and the themes of his most searching and personal writing of the 1970s and early 1980s surface helplessly in even the earliest stories: the fragility of connection, the allure and risk of illusion, the poignancy of artifacts, and the necessity of carrying on in the face of the demoralizing brokenness of the world. Dick famously posed two questions—“What is human?” and “What is real?”—and then sought to answer them in any framework he thought might suffice. By the time of his death he'd tried and discarded many dozen such frameworks. The questions remained. It is the absurd beauty of their asking that lasts.
On a personal note, I'm proud to make this introduction. Dick's is a voice that matters to me, a voice I love. He's one of my life's companions. As Bob Dylan sang of Lenny Bruce, he's gone, but his spirit lingers on and on. In that spirit, let Phil have the final word here. Again, from the Golden Man essay:
What helps for me—if help comes at all—is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I've been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted out in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article on Indian Philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy … the time was 4 A.M.; I was exhausted … and there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this: “The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient.… The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences ‘of’ them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects.…”
That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists. As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, who I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.” I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.
* * * *
Thanks to Pamela Jackson, whose 1999 dissertation “The World Philip K. Dick Made” helped clarify my thinking in writing this introduction.
BEYOND LIES THE WUB
They had almost finished with the loading. Outside stood the Optus, his arms folded, his face sunk in gloom. Captain Franco walked leisurely down the gangplank, grinning.
“What's the matter?” he said. “You're getting paid for all this.”
The Optus said nothing. He turned away, collecting his robes. The Captain put his boot on the hem of the robe.
“Just a minute. Don't go off. I'm not finished.”
“Oh?” The Optus turned with dignity. “I am going back to the village.” He looked toward the animals and birds being driven up the gangplank into the spaceship. “I must organize new hunts.”
Franco lit a cigarette. “Why not? You people can go out into the veldt and track it all down again. But when we run halfway between Mars and Earth—”
The Optus went off, wordless. Franco joined the first mate at the bottom of the gangplank.
“How's it coming?” he asked. He looked at his watch. “We got a good bargain here.”
The mate glanced at him sourly. “How do you explain that?”
“What's the matter with you? We need
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