"Dick,_Philip_K._The shifting realities of Philip K Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

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genius, and that genius shines through every page of this book." Further unpublished selections of the
Exegesis appear in this volume -- including a full-length essay, titled (in the parodic pulp style that
Dick employed with masterly effect in his fictional works) "The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The
Secret Meaning of the Great Systems of Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed for the First
Time."
As is exemplified by this flamboyant title, there is something in the nature of Dick's raptly pell-mell
style that may well put off those readers who think they know what "serious" writing must look and
sound like. Of course, it was just such fixed canons of "serious" discourse that Dick devoted himself
to dismantling -- or, in the more fashionable postmodern jargon that has come into prominence since
his death, "deconstructing" -- in many of the essays included in this book.
Dick is, as a matter both of style and of content, an uncategorizable thinker. One can dub him a
"philosopher," and indeed he warrants the title in its original Greek meaning as one who loved
wisdom and truly believed in the value of uninhibited questioning -- a rarity in this day and age, in
which the word "metaphysical" has become a synonym for "pointless." But Dick has none of the
systematic rigor and impersonality of tone that mark modern-day philosophical analysis for most
readers. He adheres to no single philosophical school, though he feels free enough to wander through
the hallways, so to speak, of each and every school of West and East down through the ages. He
defends no propositions; rather, he samples them, explores them to their heights and the depths, then
moves on. He proposes ultimate answers -- a goodly number of them, in fact -- and then confesses
that he himself cannot choose among them. Especially in the Exegesis, Dick is sometimes moved to
exclamations of unphilosophical joy; at other times the despair expressed on the page is a fearful
thing. Dick clearly does not fit the modern mold of the "philosopher"; his true affinity is with the pre-
Socratic thinkers, whose gnomic and evocative writings -- adamant, fragmented personal visions of
the universe, its nature and purpose -- have resisted definitive textual analysis for more than two
millennia.
If one attempts to label Dick as a "mystic," similar difficulties arise. First, the term "mystic" seems
to imply, by its standard usage in theological literature, that Dick definitely made contact with a divine
reality or "saw God," as modern parlance goes. This conclusion is, of course, unwarranted. Dick
himself never made up his mind as to whether it was God or "psychosis" or "something other" that he
contacted in 2-3-74. Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of the Exegesis. The sheer
strangeness of Dick's visions, coupled with his self-confessed "nervous breakdowns," have led some
readers and critics to conclude that 2-3-74 can be seen only as the product of mental illness; the
diagnoses offered are legion. To be sure, attempts at posthumous diagnosis of Dick are doomed to
be highly speculative, particularly when psychiatrists and psychologists who treated him at various
times of his life themselves disagreed widely over his mental state (most placed him as neurotic in
some form, and at least one found him quite normal). Quite aside from the difficulties of such
diagnosis, there is the further concern that diagnostics per se are useful when applied to a living
patient under treatment but are singularly reductive when employed as a simplistic categorizing label
for a substantial body of writings by a deceased author. There is, in truth, no psychiatric term yet
devised that does justice to the vividness and cornplexity of his writings -- and their impact on the
psyches of his readers. To read Dick with attention is to participate -- startlingly -- in his unique
vision, which frequently violates consensus assumptions about the nature of "reality," but retains
nonetheless a brilliant coherence and emotional depth that signal anything but the workings of a
madman, howsoever the facts of his life may be thrashed over and diagnosed by amateur analysts.
Critic Alexander Star has aptly delineated the boundary between the man and the impact of his
work: "Dick's sanity was open to question. But throughout his career he wrote with qualities that are
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rare in a science fiction writer, or in any writer at all. These included a sure feel for the detritus and
debris, the obsolescent object-world, of postwar suburbia; a sharp historical wit; and a searching