Dan the other day spotted a really cool collection of audio files from Philip K Dick. Some are interviews, and some are I guess just him talking into a microphone. Some of the formatting is pretty weird, but that lends it a certain charm. This one in particular seems to have been made from the tapes some guy (not sure who) used to interview him in his home. You can hear his son Christopher as a baby, his wife Tessa coming home from the store, a neighbor yelling something. It’s pretty wild.

For posterity I wanted to grab hold of a couple things he said in the interviews (although I didn’t listen to them all yet) that I really liked. First off is a quote:

Destiny comes like a firecracker dropped in the back of our pants by an invisible person.

I think that’s verbatim. There’s a little more after it, but that’s the best part. The other things I really liked, although some of these were more just mentioned than specifically spelled out. So I might be interpreting into them a bit. But oh well.

1. He says something about how one time he was hypnotized, and convinced to do something. When he came out of hypnosis and accomplished whatever the task was, he says his mind had developed a perfectly rational reason that made him perform his task. It was only afterwards that he realized that this was completely and utterly an invention of his mind to explain to itself why he was doing something which only his subconscious knew about from the hypnotic suggestion.
2. This makes me wonder like crazy just how much (if not all) of our actions are actually like this. We have all these reasons we say for what we did, but really it was all just something similar to hypnotic suggestion from earlier events. I guess this ties into what he was saying about Mussolini’s fascism as well: how Mussolini believed in acting first, and then making up an explanation afterwards (his explanation being fascism, I guess).
3. This one’s a little less clear… but he is talking about the I Ching, and how the I Ching was an early instance of the Logos breaking into our world. But instead of the Logos, they called it “The Spirit of the Ancestors.” Either way, it became a written vehicle for the Logos principle (since it seems to like using “The Word”). Anyway, he says something that I didn’t quite completely get about like two sets of codes. One was the written word as expressed in the I Ching. The I Ching basically consists of a set of answers. Individualized units. Just by reading the I Ching, you couldn’t guess what the question was. So the question comprised the second half of the code. The he goes into sort of an elaborate analogy about his novels (or a character of his’ novels) as being like the I Ching in that regard: they only contain half the code. There’s something about this that blows my mind but I’m not sure how to express it yet.
4. He also talks at one point about how the “spirit always works through natural law.” The example he gives is that like he’s in a car accident, and then meets somebody in the hospital who he was “destined to meet.” And the “spirit” determined that getting him into this car accident and the chain of events which would follow was the simplest most economical way to bring the two bodies together in time-space. That is, the spirit doesn’t generally just lift people up, teleport them and put them together. So it follows through the causal chains of “ordinary” experience and manipulates those by looking further down the time stream, trying to weave them together.

As far as I can tell, he’s describing the novel Radio Free Albemuth at the end section of that monologue. But I could be wrong. If it is, it’s in a pretty different form. It may also have elements of the Man in the High Castle described, but I’ve never read that, so I’m not sure. Either way, RFA is awesome because it’s basically a complete re-telling of VALIS but from a totally different perspective. Taken together, the two illuminate each other really really well.