Una biografía que por momentos parece un relato del propio Phillip K. Dick.
Es muy interesante como Carrere hace mención a sus relatos y su proceso creativo y como estos se entremezclan inseparablemente con la vida de Dick. Me ha dado muchas ganas de volver a leer sus novelas con este punto de vista.
Muy recomendable. 317 Rapita.
Dalla scrittura.
Dalla vita di Dick: dal mondo che c'era nella sua testa, con o senza acidi; dalle sue idiosincrasie psicotiche, paranoiche e mistiche.
Semplicemente perfetto.
Anche per qualche attimo di vertigine, pensando che non è un romanzo, ma un tentativo di bio-grafia (se mai la vita, qualsiasi vita, possa essere trasformata in un segno grafico).
317 Dentro il cervello di Philip Dick
Come restituire la follia, la creazione, la vita, i processi mentali di un autore completamente fuori dagli schemi, Philipp K.Dick?
Carrère ci riesce, eccome.
E' lui, parla per lui, parla con lui, parla con noi, intreccia biografia, finzione autobiografica e l'opera stessa di Dick con effetti tridimensionali. Entriamo nel cervello di quell'uomo e troviamo tante droghe, medicine, paranoia, donne che lo hanno amato contro ogni buon senso - e una lucidità che solo a lui appartiene.
Creare androidi capaci di ingannare, innamorarsi, uccidere, voler morire - come nell' eccellente film che ha ispirato, Blade Runner - e dubitare, lui stesso, di essere un androide che non sa di esserlo.
A tali paradossi arriva Dick, e Carrère li sa ricostruire, con passo medico, umano, psicologico, biografico, storico per arrivare al dubbio atroce, alla certezza finale: io sono vivo mentre voi siete morti. Lui ora è morto, ma per questo noi forse siamo vivi? 317 Ho sempre amato Philip K. Dick.
Da quando lessi la prima volta La svastica sul sole e Cacciatore di androidi (ora, giustamente, pubblicato col vero titolo Ma gli androidi sognano pecore elettriche?) il suo interrogarsi costantemente sulla natura della realtà è stato per me motivo di domande importanti e ragionamenti mai scontati con risposte non solo imprevedibili, ma spesso introvabili o inesistenti.
Ho sempre saputo, come informazione di base, dei problemi di droga avuti da Dick, ma li ho sempre considerati come una nota di colore o poco più.
Mea culpa, indubbiamente.
Tutto questo per spiegare il modo in cui mi sono avvicinato a Io sono vivo, voi siete morti, biografia, in parte romanzata, di Dick scritta da Emmanuel Carrère.
Posso anticipare che, finito il libro, la prima sensazione è stata quella di liberazione da un peso.
Carrère porta il lettore nella mente di Dick, romanzando volutamente il racconto dei suoi pensieri senza, per certi versi, preparare il lettore a ciò che si troverà ad affrontare.
Perché Dick non era solo un uomo che ha vissuto per anni con forti dipendenze da qualunque tipo di droga orale: Dick era, fondamentalmente, un paranoico schizoide che per tutta la sua vita ha cercato di affrontare il mondo affidandosi ciecamente, o quasi, al suo strumento più formidabile e, al contempo, più inaffidabile; la sua mente.
Pagina dopo pagina incontriamo una persona egocentrica, bisognosa di amore ma incapace di andare oltre quel tipo di relazione in cui una parte e pienamente dipendente dall'altra.
Dick voleva che le sue donne dipendessero da lui, non voleva lavorassero, non voleva studiassero, voleva pendessero dalle sue labbra: era l'unico modo che concepiva per sentirsi amato e, al contempo, l'unico modo esistente per farle allontanare tutte, prima o poi. L'unica che non si piegò a dipendere da lui fu anche quella con la quale gli scontri furono più violenti e devastanti.
Ma purtroppo il problema di Dick non era solo nelle relazioni con le donne, era col mondo: dotato di enorme intelligenza, non si abbassò mai realmente a farsi aiutare e finì per diventare una presenza sempre più ingombrante tra i pochi amici, i conoscenti, anche gli sconosciuti.
La sua spirale finì, nel tempo, per convincerlo di essere spiato dall'FBI, di essere oggetto di interesse tra i comunisti, di essere in realtà un cristiano che viveva nel 70d.c. e di essere, di fatto, nel 70d.c. fino all'autoconvincersi di essere una sorta di nuovo profeta il cui scopo sarebbe stato quello di scrivere il terzo libro della Bibbia.
I suoi romanzi non nacquero, in molti casi, come tali, ma come il suo modo di riportare ciò che riteneva essere la realtà in quel momento. Ubik, Pamler Eldrich, Valis sono tutte sfaccettature di questo suo tentativo di capire una realtà a cui non riuscì mai ad accettare di fare parte.
Difficile accostarsi a un uomo così complesso e, lo ammetto, in molti punti della lettura ho avuto la tentazione di fermarmi e di allontanarmi dall'uomo-Dick troppo simile e al contempo troppo lontano dallo scrittore-Dick da me tanto amato.
L'amarezza più grande, alla fine, nasce dal rendersi conto che una mente tanto sopraffina non sia mai stata supportata a sufficienza per trovare un equilibrio e una propria felicità o, quanto meno, serenità: Dick, per quasi tutti, era l'eccentrico con cui era divertente parlare, il tizio sopra le righe che avrebbe sempre trovato un nuovo modo di mettere in difficoltà l'interlocutore, il marpione che ci provava costantemente con qualunque essere umano di sesso femminile. Nessuno o quasi vide il Dick dilaniato che aveva bisogno di una propria strada e lui, di certo, non aiutò mai a mostrarlo.
Il sapore che d'ora in poi darò ai suoi romanzi sarà per forza di cose ben diverso, più amaro, sicuramente più inquietante.
Alcune parole, invece, sul modo in cui il libro è scritto.
Carrère ha creato una biografia atipica, in cui l'elenco dei fatti è mischiato a viaggi nella mente di Dick con interpretazioni che, onestamente, non so quanto siano da prendere alla lettera: molte sono le fonti citate, ma un tale dettaglio sui pensiero porta a domandarsi dove, realmente, siano state pescate alcune informazioni; il dubbio che si sia cercato l'abbellimento o forzata un'interpretazione è forte e fastidioso.
Così come estremamente irritante è la scelta dell'autore di raccontare per filo e per segno alcuni dei romanzi più importanti di Dick per mostrarne i parallelismi con la sua vita: se una tale scelta può essere legittima (anche se discutibile) trovo assolutamente scorretto che non venga segnalata la cosa prima di intraprendere la lettura; se qualcuno non dovesse aver letto quelle opere (e, nel mio caso, questo vale per un paio), il piacere della lettura futura ne viene pesantemente inficiato.
Si tratta di una caratteristica molto grave, per quanto mi riguarda.
Un libro che quindi mi ha lasciato con parecchio fastidio addosso, del quale non nego l'approfondimento (fin eccessivo) o l'interesse, ma che per un po', invece di avvicinarmi al protagonista, otterrà l'effetto opposto: quello di non farmi leggere, per un po', nulla di Dick.
E, di sicuro, di non avvicinarmi mai alla sua Esegesi, quell'opera finale su cui lavorò fino alla morte e che include praticamente ognuna delle sue convinzioni profetiche e religiose: sarebbe troppo, almeno per me. 317 Un viaje alucinante a la mente de uno de los escritores de ciencia ficción más importante e influyente de la historia.
No sólo asistimos a los hechos de la vida de Philip K. Dick, como la muerte al nacer de su hermana melliza, lo cual afectaría su vida y su mente por el resto de sus días; sino que Emmanuel Carrère hace deliciosos malabarismos literarios para irnos contando las obsesiones subjetivas de Dick en un crescendo de delirio y locura.
Múltiples veces durante la lectura, los hechos reales y delirantes de los mecanismos mentales de Dick contados por Carrère me hicieron soltar unas buenas carcajadas.
Ha sido una gozada que me ha hecho sentir más cerca y apreciar mucho más a Philip K. Dick como persona y como autor. Sintiendo empatía por la obsesión, angustia y dolor que siempre acompañó al autor de UBIK.
Una lectura súper recomendada para cualquiera que alguna vez se haya leído alguna de sus novelas y se haya interesado por la vida de locura de su autor.
317
FREE DOWNLOAD I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K. Dick
This is an unforgettable biography of the visionary grand master of science fiction, Philip K. Dick. Emmanuel Carrère follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink light, three-eyed invaders and messages from the Roman Empire.
Drawing on interviews and both published and unpublished sources, Carrère traces Dick's multiple marriages, paranoid fantasies and and dizzying encounters with the drug culture of California. As disturbing and engrossing as any novel by Philip K. Dick himself, Carrère's unconventional study interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw - from cloning to reality TV - a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions. I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K. Dick
Une biographie romancée que je trouve à la hauteur du citoyen qui l'a inspirée ! :)
Podcast de La compagnie des œuvres
'Regards sur Philip K. Dick', émission de France Culture des 14, 15, 16, 17 décembre 2020 :
https://www.franceculture.fr/emission...
Bande-son possible :
Bike - Pink Floyd
317 Alienante, coinvolgente come pochi. È lo stile di Carrère, certo, ma è proprio Dick, le visioni che si riflettono nella scrittura e la scrittura che diventa profezia. Dick era schizofrenico, tendenzialmente paranoico, più o meno dipendente, a fasi alterne, da psicofarmaci e anfetamine, e con queste premesse non troppo incoraggianti ha riflettuto per tutta la vita sulla differenza tra realtà oggettiva e soggettiva, tanto da farne un’ossessione.
In uno dei suoi libri aveva coniato una parola, kipple, per designare lo stato di decomposizione, di sporcizia e di caos a cui tende ogni cosa sotto l’effetto dell’entropia. La sua vita scivolava a tutta velocità verso il kipple. La sua vita: ma che cosa voleva dire, dal momento che non era più sicuro che fosse la sua, né di essere ancora vivo?
Ne parlo anche qua: Viaggio tra i libri (e nella mente) di Philip K. Dick
317 Un Impero che non è mai cessato, la continua lotta tra finzione e realtà (ma sopratutto tra il koinos e l'idios kosmos, battaglia infinità ancor più terrificante perché propria dell'uomo, interna e feroce, ma anche della macchina-simulacro) per conquistare l'egemonia.
La storia di Dick è certo riflessa nei suoi romanzi, tra il ghigno di Palmer Eldritch e l'eterna inconsapevolezza di Hawthorne Abendsen, ma è sopratutto la figura continuamente sospesa di Dick stesso, sempre al confine e che coglie sempre l'occasione, fortunatamente, di dire la sua, cercando di varcare lo specchio, o almeno cercando di decifrare le scritte che vi compaiono. 317 Prophecies of the Non-Organization Man
On an early Spring camping trip to Seeley Lake in Montana about twenty years ago, I took my canoe out before the morning mist had cleared. The sun was bright above me but visibility was only about ten yards at water level. Out of the still-calm water just ahead of the boat, a fish leaped. Before the fish had hit the water again, a bald eagle swept in and attacked it with both talons. But as the eagle struggled to rise with the fish, in through the fog dived a much larger golden eagle. Clearly panicked the bald eagle released his catch to the golden eagle and both flew straight up out of sight
My response was one of uncomprehending immobility. Had the last three of four seconds actually happened the way I perceived them? If so, what did the event mean? The second question came hard on the first. In fact the second question is what gave significance to the first. If the event had no import then it didn’t matter whether the fish and the eagles, and the mist and the watery sun were elements of a dream or reality. But if it were real, it was so unexpected, so improbable, so utterly personal that it seemed to demand an explanation beyond the biological imperatives of hunger and predation.
So the event became for me not a sign from the Great Sprit or an omen but a permanent, if not continuous, object of meditation. As such it is a focus of interpretation and re-interpretation. Most of these interpretations are fanciful but occasionally one will hit on an aspect of my personality with surprising sharpness and even harshness. I don’t think it is rash to call this sort of interpretation a revelation. And I don’t think it’s projective hubris to suggest that this is congruent with much of religious revelation which relies on natural symbols to communicate spiritual truths.
The difference between my revelation and that of religion is that I know that my interpretation applies to me. Others may find my revelation about myself to be useful in their own self-interpretation. But neither I nor they can make any credible claim to its universality, its stability, or therefore its truth, other than as a comforting, or disturbing, or simply surprising personal surmise. The steps from personal insight to communal recognition to general truth to religious doctrine are ones of pure and increasing power; they involve coercion at the most fundamental human level, that of language.
The enforcement of revelatory interpretation does not merely mean the promulgation of a definitive interpretation but also the fixation of every word and verbalized idea in such an interpretation. Doctrine demands the control over language and the authoritative designation of who are entitled to define its components. Since language is circular - words are defined only by other words - religious power is necessarily exercised through language, all of it, not just that used to formulate ‘sacred’ revelation. The Religions of the Book - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - therefore are not mainly concerned with things spiritual but with things linguistic. Doctrine pretends to specify what to believe; but it really controls how to speak.
Philip K Dick was in permanent rebellion from his childhood against the high-jacking of language by religion -secular as well as spiritual. He knew from his own experience not only how entirely subjective the interpretations of events are, but more importantly how it was possible to manipulate others through manipulation of language. His favourite way to demonstrate how manipulation works was solipsism: the establishment of the questionability of the existence of minds other than one’s own. Solipsism. of course, is refuted by the very use of language itself since language presumes and is dependent upon more than one isolated mind.
But this solipsistic contradiction isn’t something that bothered Dick. His object wasn’t to deny other minds but to undermine the power that controlled other minds through religious language. He came to maturity at the time of the Red Scare and the McCarthy Committee on Unamerican Activities, the civil religion of the USA at the time. He was a member of a burgeoning consumer society in which the collectivist ethic of the corporate Organization Man of William Whyte was dominant and demanded a certain kind of public liturgy. He was a talented writer who, he felt with good reason, was denied entry into ‘mainstream’ literature because of arbitrary boundaries of genre, a sort of literary religious sectarianism. For Dick, solipsism was a therapeutic technique not a philosophical position. He knew it’s power because he experienced its effects constantly.
So Dick was a powerful writer; he was also neurotic, often obnoxious, an obsessive devotee of I Ching and a member of the 1950’s avant garde of California hippiedom. But he knew the difference between being powerful and wanting power. Unlike an L. Ron Hubbard, or a Jim Jones, or even a Richard Nixon (all his contemporaries), Dick never succumbed to the temptation of turning personal insight into a movement like Scientology, or a cult like the People’s Temple, or a political ideology like gun-toting, race-baiting, Orange County Republicanism. He plugged on resolutely with his strategy of literary solipsism. He applied it to the emerging drug culture of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary; and he even applied it to himself in his flirtation with Christianity. By keeping himself uncertain, through his writing, of the existence of other minds, he avoided the trap of power-seeking.
Carrère correctly identifies Dick’s central theme. It’s there in the title of his biography, although he never mentions the word. Essentially Dick has one consistent message in two parts: ‘You can’t know me and I can’t know you; so how about we stop projecting thoughts, motivations and intentions because they’re almost always wrong. And by the way, you’re not as autonomous as you think you are.’ This is prophecy in the best sense of the Old Testament - not prediction but assessment of the contemporary condition. It occurs in one way or another in almost all Dick’s work. In fact one way to look at his work is as a progressive articulation of this fundamental revelation. The genre of science fiction is ideal for Dick’s purpose because it can effectively undermine religious symbols which sit on the edge of consciousness while remaining definitively outside religious controversy, an especially important camouflage in a country as self-consciously religious as America.
But despite Carrere’s accuracy in identifying the essence of Dick’s technique, I think he does Dick an injustice in portraying Dick’s ‘mission’ as a product of his neuroses and somewhat unconventional family life. No doubt Dick appears driven to certain modes of expression that originally appeared in his childhood. But one can more fittingly describe this as consistency of vocation than working out of childhood trauma. Dick used the most intimate scraps of his relationships in the service of his main theme - something that understandably annoyed spouses and friends to the point of hatred. But what else could such a modern mystic - a functional misfit in any society - use as his raw material except his own relationships? And could he ever even approach that elusive horizon called reality without making them bigger, more serious, more dramatic than they appeared to others? Solipsism, after all, is a somewhat lonely business. It’s bound to be mis-interpreted.
Nonetheless, Carrere ‘gets’ Dick when he comments “Some people charm snakes; Phil Dick charmed ideas. He made them mean whatever he wanted them to mean, then, having done that, got them to mean the exact opposite.” In so doing he revealed the “perfidious betrayal or to the falsely familiar.” And for many, including me, he still does. It is not an absence of talent that prevented Dick from creating attractive and admirable heroes and heroines. He avoided such characters because they created the possibility for the establishment of cultic power. Like my experience of the events on Seeley Lake - a situation which certainly would have qualified as Phildickean in the 60’s - all Dick’s characters and situations are surprising, evocative, even bizarre; but they are never quite stable in their meaning. They tend to float and alight on various interpretations depending on the mood of the reader on a particular day. I like this technique as an excuse for meditative reverie. For this I am grateful. 317 I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: Reality is Stranger than Fiction
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Anyone familiar with the SF novels of Philip K. Dick and the many films inspired by his works knows that he was one strange and visionary guy. Certainly the SF genre is filled with works of bizarre worlds, aliens, characters, and slippery reality. But it’s generally accepted by authors and readers alike that these fictional creations are just that — works of the imagination by writers who are generally considered sane and share the consensus view of reality. In the case of PKD, however, the line between reality and fiction, sanity and madness, redemption and damnation, revelation and delusion is very blurred indeed. In fact, the person most likely to question such distinctions would be PKD himself, if I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005) is to be believed.
If you have not read any of PKD’s major works, I would stop right now and rectify that situation. In my opinion, his most iconic and important works are The Man in the High Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), UBIK (1969), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and VALIS (1981). So assuming you have now read those books and been absolutely amazed by the reality-bending visions that this man has brought to bear while using some of the most hackneyed conventions of Golden Age SF, then perhaps you are ready to take the next step.
PKD was one of the most iconic, troubled, and hard-suffering SF writers ever to grace the field. His books subvert our everyday reality, question what is human, and explore paranoia and madness, all with a uniquely unadorned and blackly-humorous style. In classic starving artist fashion, he only gained recognition and cult-status late in life, and much of his fame came after passing away at age 53.
In his prolific career he published 44 novels and 121 short stories, and in 2014 - 2015 I read 10 of his novels, 7 audiobooks, and 3 short story collections. There’s something so enticing about his paranoid, darkly-comic tales of everyday working-class heroes, troubled psychics, bizarre aliens, sinister organizations, and obscure philosophical concepts. He was a very eclectic reader, showing intense interest a wide range of philosophies including Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being.
If you are keen to understand PKD himself and what kind of life and mind would create such works, there is a wealth of resources. I would recommend starting with Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989). This is an excellent and well-structured book that takes the conventional approach of studying his childhood, early years as a writer, his messy romantic life, mysterious religious experiences, battles with depression and suicide attempts, and his final eight years pouring out thousands of pages of rambling, contradictory, deranged hard-written notes trying desperately to make sense of it all, which eventually was distilled by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem to just 944 pages as The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (2011).
Emmanuel Carrier’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (English edition 2005; original French edition published in 1993) covers the same biographical territory as Sutin’s book, and Carrère cites it as one of his resources, along with many interviews with people close to PKD and many of his at-the-time unpublished journal entries that make up the The Exegisis. Given such similar source materials, Carrère takes a different approach. Rather than a standard biography, he describes it as follows:
I have tried to depict the life of Philip K. Dick from the inside, in other words, with the same freedom and empathy — indeed with the same truth — with which he depicted his own characters. It’s a trip into the brain of a man who regarded even his craziest books not as works of the imagination but as factual reports. This is a book about the mind, its alterations, its remotest and most dangerous territories. It’s about drugs and mystics, about the Zeitgeist of the sixties and the seventies and its legacy to our New Age.
So if you have read Sutin’s book, much of the narrative is already very familiar, but written as if we are in PKD’s head as a character in a book. This means Carrère can take some major liberties that conventional biographers might hesitate to do. Granted, he is incorporating a lot of PKD’s own journal entries, essays, and interviews with friends, journalists, ex-wives, etc. It’s the mosaic approach, and he doesn’t pretend that he has an infallible perspective. Although I didn’t find it off-putting, it does blur the lines between reality and fiction, but we’re talking about PKD here, so if that were acceptable for anyone it would be for him.
I Am Alive and You Are Dead gets into very interesting territory when PKD has his bizarre religious experience with a pink laser beam of pure info in “2-3-74” and starts to write his Exegesis journals in order to understand this experience. This is where Carrère borrows liberally from PKD’s fictional account of his own life and this seminal event, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985), which is essentially a self-examination by PKD of his life via two alter-egos, Nicholas Brady (who has the bizarre religious experience) and the SF writer Philip K. Dick, who is skeptical but sympathetic.
As you might expect, this was not a very commercial book and only emerged as a by-product of Dick’s all-night writing sessions for the Exegesis. So he decided to re-write it after a publisher rejected it, and ended up with a masterpiece of sorts for hard-core PKD fans, VALIS (1981). This book, to my mind, is his most accessible and moving attempt to understand all the philosophical struggles he faced throughout his life. It’s remarkably similar in structure to Radio Free Albemuth, to the point that PKD’s alter egos are named Horselover Fat (derived from the German and Latin roots of his name) and the SF author Philip K. Dick. The big difference between the two books is that VALIS has a much stronger sense of irony and self-reflection. It treats with bittersweet irony topics such as drug abuse, suicide, mysticism, religious delusions, marital problems, and essentially mirrors the duality that Gnosticism and Manichaeism represent. I think that can only really be appreciated by readers who have already read and absorbed his most famous SF books, because they are much more biographical and probably don’t make much sense as fiction. But if you have read this far into the review, I’ll assume you are such a fan.
Another thing that struck me throughout I Am Alive and You Are Dead is that Carrère wasn’t afraid to show the sad and pathetic side of PKD’s relationships with women. He really was the most sad-sack hopeless loser when it came to romance and falling willy-nilly in love with almost every woman who stepped through the door. Charming and debonair one moment, withdrawn and depressed the next, desperate for love and shamelessly lecherous, but also so transparently vulnerable, it’s hard to imagine whether most women felt more revulsion or pity.
And yet PKD managed to get married five times (the first time hardly counts, though), as he could not function without a female companion to support his obsessions, and often seemed like a petulant child. It’s hard to view a man as both a brilliant writer and total sloppy emotional wreck, but it can’t be denied in his case. He was that and much more, and that’s why his life and works have inspired so much literary study and speculation. In my opinion, he is the most complicated, brilliant, deranged, and unique figure to ever grace the SF field, and though his life may not have been a happy or stable one, it was certainly unique and memorable. 317