The Writing Life Too

I'm up late after falling asleep watching Grey Gardens--this is the second time I fell asleep watching it. Trust me,the performances are amazing--it's just me. But I'm going to take advantage of this midnight quiet to write and send out a few emails. I was thinking about my columns I'm going to write to launch the new year and ran across this interesting quote by Philip K. Dick.

Dick whose novels have been adapted into Bladerunner and six other movies, thought deeply about human nature, the human condition, and a host of other questions. Between 1959 and 1964, at his creative peak, he wrote sixteen SciFi novels that were published, as well as mainstream novels that were never published, much to his dismay.

Dick wrote: “So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe--and I am dead serious when I say this-- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things."