The Philip K Dicksquisition
Philip Kindred Dick always knows the way in. His stories begin with characters in the middle of a thought, or halfway through a conversation for which we have no context, or as everything is already falling apart. A PKD story doesn’t prepare you for itself with prologue and introduction and preambulatory situational nonsense. (There isn’t any of…this, in other words.) He isn’t going to dim the house lights down and back up a couple of times before gently going dark and raising the curtain—instead, you are shaken awake, not welcomed so much as revived into these worlds from an unconsciousness you don’t remember falling into, blinking and slightly disoriented and not quite sure how much to trust what you’re being shown. The initial unbalance, the sense of instability, is trying to tell you something, that the seam you can feel under your fingertips in the wall you’ve palmed for balance could be a soft spot between dimensions, an awful and irresistible scab—but which side is the wound? Is it healing something, or furtively papering it over? Are his stories metaphors for our faulty perception of reality, or is all of perception itself just a metaphor machine, restlessly working to make sense of a fundamentally incomprehensible world—or, as PKD might have it, not a single world but overlapping worlds in intermittent and often incoherent conversation with each other. And what are we to do with these inputs, these untrue things, or truth adjacencies, besides spin them into the fictions necessary for understanding? Is the extent to which we accept the truth of these stories, the stories we’ve built from an erratic experience of a volatile world, in direct relation to how well, or how poorly, we see our surroundings? Could it be that none of this is metaphor, that what we take for metaphors are the forgotten memories of previous lives? A misremembered and perhaps hidden-from-us past, that every layer of perception—from our dreams to our hallucinations and deja-vus to our experience of this very moment—is not just intuitively real, but objectively true? And if you suddenly believe yourself awakened to some new, apparently more real reality, the scales having fallen from your eyes, free from the constraints of rules you hadn’t until just now realized were entirely breakable—how certain can you be that that’s you that just woke up? The same human you—whatever precisely that is supposed to mean—from last year, from yesterday, from five minutes ago? PKD makes no promises that as the edges of this world shimmer and give way that what is revealed will be anything more real, or that our senses are ever reliable indicators of anything at all—just that it would be dishonest, somehow, to turn away from it. That the sensory inputs are compelling reason enough, for him and for you, to press on, to expound upon some unlikely-if-not-impossible theory about previously unthinkable whys and what ifs, to peel at that seam/scab in the wall to see what might be on the other side. That the you, here and now, whoever or whatever that is, has latched on to something, has found themself in the interrogative mode. That this world—unreliable, erratic, falling out of joint, disappearing around the next corner—must be interrogated. That the interrogation is the point. And while you cannot be certain that deeper necessarily means truer, nor sure that there will be a reliable way through, or back out—you can trust that PKD, at least, always knows the way in.
Philip K Dick wrote something like 120 short stories and 40 novels in his too-short life—and the plan is to talk about every single one of them. This is the Philip K Dicksquisition, a podcast brought to you by the Brain Iron dot com multinational media empire. Coming soon to this feed will be the first episode in an almost certainly overly-ambitious project of indeterminate length in which we hope to eventually read and talk about PKD’s entire body of work.
Each P.K.Dicksquisition episode can be understood as a companion piece to a short story or novel written by Philip K Dick. I will not pretend that all the questions raised above are answerable, nor that every episode will approach them directly, nor that every dashed-off story he wrote for a check from the old pulp magazines is directly engaged with what he seemed to see as his larger project—to wit, an interrogation of what is real and what is human, and, later in his life, an obsessive, compulsive focus on the events of February and March of 1974, when PKD experienced what he would describe as visions of and interactions with various incarnations of the divine. But wherever he aims to take us, we will follow, with an open and inquisitive but still skeptical mind.
Many of his works have been adapted into movies and television shows—when possible, we will discuss the adaptations, as well.
This show, as an ongoing endeavor, will prove impossible without the support of an audience—an audience that we hope to cultivate through a shared interest in and love for the stories and novels and journals that were PKD’s life’s work. If you would like to support the show, you can head over to our substack at Brain Iron dot Substack dot com, and look for The Philip K Dicksquisition button at the top of the page. There is a link to the website in the description of this episode in your podcast player. Subscribers will have commenting privileges on the Substack posts for each episode, along with other perks to be determined later, as we figure out what, exactly, it is that we’re doing here.
As to what it is that we’re doing here for now, I invite you to read one of PKD’s earliest known works, the short story STABILITY, written sometime around 1947, though not published until forty years later, in 1987. The story is available in The Collected Stories of Philip K Dick, Volume One, and fairly easily found for free on the internet, if you just hunt around a bit. Read the story, subscribe to our feed on this and any other podcast delivery service, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks!
The Philip K Dicksquisition is a production of the Brain Iron Multinational Media Empire. For more, head over to Brain Iron dot Substack dot com, or Brain Iron dot com.