Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(proving once again that ppl who can create wonderful stuff are not
necessarily kind/evolved souls.)
  

    
PKD's abandonment issues and flashes of anger are a clue that he
might've had BPD, I wonder if he was ever diagnosed?
  

    
super drifty, but i dont think bpd was much
understood/documented/discussed back then.

also, afaik, there is no real RX for bpd; it's mostly a label for
others to help understand such a person.
  

    
Thank you so much for that post, mag/tiff, saying so clearly what I
have never exactly been able to put into words without blaming
myself.

Phil, never apologized specifically for the violence. referring to
it as  "the trouble between us."  He did address it, I think,
somewhat obliquely, in a subsequent letter, while also pointing out
how we were both complicit:

"Dear Linda,

"I have so much regretted the trouble between us, Linda, that caused
the breakdown of our relationship.  We are both troubled people,
dark and clouded; like you I have my own periods of fire mixed with
ice in which the intensity of my feelings gets too strong.  Like you
I sometimes withdraw.  Like you I now and then reject another person
because I am becoming too involved with that person and hence too
dependent.  I thought I saw you today --Sunday-- at the wheel of
your car and the sight of you did me in.  There you were again,
beautiful and little and bright.  But I can't handle you, Linda;
every time we're together you do a number on my head.  I'd like to
withdraw any criticism I've made of you, though, really..."

There's more, but copyright, etc...

I don't know that there has ever been a clear, definitive diagnosis.
Paranoia, schizophrenia, along with a host of phobias have been
mentioned.  I never heard BPD mentioned, though.  According to the
Bristol University Press, it didn't appear in the DSM until 1980. 
All of this happened in the 70's.  He died in 1982; I don't know if
the diagnosis would even have been common enough back then to have
been considered.

<druid> writes:  "I don't know half of the relevant details, but
from what's been said here I would surmise that "the dark-haired
girl" is PKD's anima archetype and that he had major issues with his
own feminine side."

Apparently, the search for the dark-haired girl stems from the fact
that he had a twin sister who died six weeks after they were born. 
His mother said that she had dark-hair.  Subsequently, stories have
emerged that his mother was unable to produce enough milk for both
of them, that Phil got the lion's share, and that Jane died of
malnutrition.  From what I've heard, she was unable to get the
medical and emotional support she needed to feed them.  She called
the doctors asking about formula - remember, this was the 1920's; I
don't know that commercial formula was even widely available -
although a medical team was dispatched, it's not known what they
recommended, and Phil's father had ensconced himself at his office
so that he didn't have to hear the babies cry.  Also, to complicate
things, at that time the advice to young mothers was to let babies
cry, not to pick them up or comfort them, which went against all of
her maternal instincts.  I feel the utmost sympathy for her.  Phil
paints her as evil when he talks about her.  He thought she should
have been "put out to sea."  But, like everything, it was
complicated.   
  

    
Speaking of his twin sister...they are both buried in Ft. Morgan,
Colorado, where the 3rd International Philip K. Dick Festival starts
on Friday.  A visit to the gravesite is included as one of the
events.  If you watched the video I posted, you know that when Jane
died, a double headstone was created, engraved with Jane's dates of
birthday and death on the left side side, and with Phil's date of
birth on the right side, just waiting for his date of death to be
added.  
  

    
That was less weird in the era of the family burial plot than it
sounds today. (Still a little weird, though.)
  

    
To address Tessa's claims that I, a "certain Linda Levy" am not "the
dark-haired girl" and that Phil in love several times a day, and
that the beating did not take place.

I have never claimed to be *the* dark-haired girl.  I am *a*
dark-haired girl.  We know that there were many, but four of us were
specifically identified.  

Later, Tessa said she claimed the beating never took place because
she didn't want their son, Christopher, to read that about his
father.

I didn't know that I was one of the dark-haired girls until after
Phil died and Paul Williams came to see me in El Toro where I was
living then. He told me about the book The Dark-Haired Girl and
asked if it was okay to use my real name.

Paul wrote the introduction to the book; it is VERY long, and so
well-written that I want to quote all of it, but here are a few bits
and pieces:

"I was hired in 1983 by Dick's estate to be his "literary executor":
my primary task has been to supervise publication of his unpublished
writings.  In November 1984 I assembled the book you see here, 
adding what I felt to be related pieces (related in in spirit,
subject matter, and/or theme) to Dick's original manuscript THE
DARK-HAIRED GIRL...I was in 1972 the first editor to whom the book
was submitted...

[...]

"Adding 'Man, Android and Machine' [the title of the speech that
Phil gave in Vancouver, his original purpose in traveling there]
followed logically, since even the title of the essay says it is
further musings on the theme of the earlier lecture.  That leaves
the poem and the letters and this part of the process bordered on
the mysterious:  Philip K. Dick when he died left behind an enormous
pile of papers, including thousands of pages of letters and carbons
of letters.  As I worked on this book (it started as a casual,
long-term project, but suddenly I was pulled into it almost
violently, unable to do anything else for three or four days in a
row) letters seemed to leap out at me as I flipped through the
files.  The little story that ends this book, originally written as
a letter to Linda Levy, amazed me because I had never seen it
before, never noticed there was this delicious, unpublished short
story hiding among the correspondence, until the day I found myself
putting together this book, at which point it all but jumped from
the files and put itself into my hands."
  

    
Introduction to The Dark-Haired Girl, continued...

"But what is disturbing to me about this book doesn't have to do
with how it put itself together.  Rather it has to do with how
openly Philip K. Dick shares his own troubled state of mind herein. 
His was in many ways, much of the time, a dysfunctional life. 
That's a loaded word; often we use it as though there were such a
thing as a normal, or non-dysfunctional, life, which of course there
isn't.  And certainly, if we judge (ahem) Dick's life in terms of
his art, of what he has given us his readers, we must regard it as
extremely functional.  It sure did allow him to produce a lot of
great writing.

"But it also caused him tremendous pain and confronted him with
repeated failure in the area that he himself identified (in his
writing) as being of primary importance:  human relationships. 
There are passages in this book that document this rather starkly. 
And there are also passages, and this is what I find most
disturbing, that show that Dick was not particularly conscious of
the extent of his own self-absorption and consequent cruelty to
those closest to him (wives, girlfriends, children, parents).  I
believe that Dick was often unaware that when he wrote (as he does
so eloquently in the present volume) about the split between the
human and the inhuman, between the empathetic person and the
schizoid, he was in fact writing about the struggle inside himself.

[...]

"This is a tale told by an unreliable narrator, who recognizes his
own unreliability and yet at the same time believes everything he
says.  If you in turn allow yourself to believe uncritically
everything he says, you are a damn fool.  Watch out.  Especially if
you think you are not a damn fool, watch out."
  

    
Introduction to The Dark-Haired Girl, continued...

"On December 1st, 1972, Dick wrote in a letter to Roger
Zelazny:'What his all has been is an identify crisis such as Jung
spoke of:  it hits you in middle life, all your values go to pieces,
you can't work or function, you just wander off.  When I flew to
Vancouver in February I knew no one there, had never been to Canada.
If ever anyone could be said to have lost their identity, I did:  at
X-Kalay they thought I was some dope fiend in there off the street
-- they knew me only as Phil, which was fine.  I was stacking lumber
on East Sunday in another country with two other riffraff types, one
from the Mafia.  After we piled the lumber I sat for a time on the
curb watching the cars go by, and I felt really happy; I had for
sure shaken the past.  I was a man without a history.  What a relief
and a release; all my fears were gone and I could relax.  I could do
or be anything.  What supplied my continuity, however, was one goal
that didn't disappear from me:  my search for the dark-haired girl,
which I wrote about in letter after letter, often to the dark-haired
girl herself (Kathy in San Rafael, Jamis in Vancouver, then later on
Linda in Fullerton).  I've now put together 127 pages of these
letters, written from Feb to Nov of this year, and sent them to my
agent as a sort of journal.'  He told another correspondent that he
was starting work on a new novel, to be entitled Kathy-Jamis-Linda.

"The manuscript send to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency was
entitled THE DARK-HAIRED GIRL:  A SEARCH FOR THE AUTHENTIC HUMAN
BEING."
  

    
Introduction to The Dark-Haired Girl, continued...

"The title page of the first draft has the title of the book as THE
DARK-HAIRED GIRL: A SEARCH FOR THE OTHER.  This draft includes an
interpolated page, 1-A which reads:

'Note:

'These are actual girls, actual letters, actual events and places
and miseries & actual final joy.  The period covered is from March
1972 to October 1972, eight months in which I searched for -- and
found -- the dark-haired girl again whom I had left behind I thought
forever.  Her name is KATHY-JAMIS-LINDA-TESSA. She is sitting beside
me now, wondering why the hell I am spending my time writing this
stuff.  In my novel WE CAN BUILD YOU, Louis Rosen found her and then
lost her.  I did it the other way.'"
  

    
I've been mulling over three of the letters, all of which I think
are from mid- to late June 1972 and begin "I'm so sorry," "I'm sorry
if the two postcards bothered you," and "I have so much regretted
the trouble between us." I'm struck by what an apology means to PKD,
or what he hopes to gain by apologizing, and how his apology or
regret is mixed with a vision of you, Linda, as someone sitting
still or driving past. Either way, you are unavailable to him.
You're not really real.

In the "I'm so sorry" letter, he mentions "how you looked Sunday
morning in that dress, with your eyes so dark and sad." He says that
Joe (from the Tustin Rap Center) also remembered seeing you, "both
with me and that first time you came in." And all he can see in his
mind is "you sitting in your living room when I came over Sunday
morning." Sitting there, not saying anything.

In the "Sorry if the two postcards bothered you" letter, he thinks
he saw you "wave at me as you drove by," and in the "I have so much
regretted" letter he thinks he saw you "at the wheel of your car."
You're whizzing past, just a vision speeding by. 

That letter is more interesting than the others because it includes
this bit of self-analysis: "Like you I sometimes withdraw. Like you
I now and then reject another person because I am becoming too
involved with that person and hence too dependent."

I'm not concluding anything about you or PKD based on these three
letters, but they are interesting to look at as apologies and how
they depict you the apologizee. 

In "I'm so sorry," he doesn't mention what he's apologizing for but
he does say he was "just tired, very tired." And he declares that,
after his conversation with Joe, his vision of you "blots out every
other feeling and thought I have or ever had."

In the "Sorry if the two postcards" letter, he's apologizing for
sending "some trippy stuff, weird stuff." But the underlying message
of this apology seems to be a plea for you not to worry: "Don't be
afraid so much; don't worry and all will go okay." He seems to be
humoring your for being bothered.

In the "I have so much regretted" letter, PKD's depiction of your
relationship definitely seems set in the past. What he regrets is
"the trouble between us, Linda, that caused the breakdown of our
relationship." He seems to have given up on any reconciliation since
"I can't handle you, Linda; every time we're together you do a
number on my head." He describes any possible reunion as a fanciful
communication, nothing directly from you but "a note in a bottle . .
. skywriting . . . an ad . . . a piece of junkmail." He offers his
love but there's something blithe and cheerful about it, like he's
not expecting you to do anything with it and that's fine.
  

    
I did talk a little about one of those apologies in response 129, in
which he talks about how we both are, and how that makes me
complicit, in his behavior.  Looking at these apologies with a
sorrywatch.com checklist, which I can never avoid these days, he
never says what he's apologize for, with the exception of the
postcards.

I love your analysis.  I'm always sitting, saying nothing, or
speeding by.  That is fascinating to me.  I've been reading these
letters for over 50 years and never saw the symbolism in that.

It looks like I'm an object to be described, talked, or written
about but never allowed to speak for myself.  That makes me perfect
to be projected upon.   Until I'm being excoriated, of course, for
speaking to Tessa and what I say doesn't match the projection.  Not
that my advice isn't appropriate, but it wasn't part of the script,
and when that happened the rest of the projection falls apart and
reveals my true, evil intent.  What else could my speaking up be but
something designed to destroy Phil?

Here are the postcards, BTW.

Postcard 1, side 1
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53783367523/in/dateposted-public/
Postcard 1, side 2
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53782216277/in/dateposted-public/

Postcard 2, side 1
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53783575820/in/dateposted-public/
Postcard 2, side 2
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemznbeadz/53782216272/in/dateposted-public/

I wonder if he went all the way to Knott's Berry Farm to get them.
  

    
I'd be a little bothered by those postcards too, if I got them! 

He seems to have sent them to you "so maybe you'd come by and we
could be friends again." Did he think the references to masturbation
and "vaginal politics" would make you desire him and visit him?
  

    
There's one more in the vitriol category, that I was hoping
<ohbejoyful> would come by and mention, but it fits perfectly here,
so I will post about it.

It's handwritten on lined paper.  The message is brief.  

"Dear Linda,

"These are very nice people - you go and talk to them & you'll feel
a lot better, once you share your problems with them.  You need
professional help.  [underlined.]  They can & will help you,
especially Mrs. Hilliard.  

Cordially,
Phil

Mrs. Hilliard's card is helpfully enclosed.  She works for the
Department of Mental Health in Fullerton.  There's a date on the
back; maybe he has made an appointment for me.
  

    
it sounds terrifying to have been on the receiving end of all this
  

    
Well, it was certainly different from what of the rest of the gang
experienced.  

Maer Wilson, one of the Quartz Lane neighbors, wrote a book called
The Other Side of Philip K. Dick: A Tale of Two Friends, with a
forward by Tim Powers.

Here's what it says on Amazon:

"As a literary figure, Philip K. Dick is popularly perceived as a
crazed, drug-addled mystic with a sinister Third Eye. Nothing could
be further from the truth - the Phil I knew was a warm, humane, very
funny man. Maer Wilson understands these truths far better than I,
and The Other Side of Philip K. Dick casts a welcome shaft of
daylight upon the real PKD, as opposed to the dark, distorted
caricature Dick has become.” Paul M. Sammon, Author of Future Noir:
The Making of Blade Runner What is the truth behind the legend of
Science Fiction great, Philip K. Dick? In spring, 1972, Phil Dick
moved to Fullerton, CA, where he met Theatre student Mary (Maer)
Wilson. Amid marriage proposals, marathon talk-fests and a love for
music and films, they forged a strong friendship that would last the
rest of his life. Wilson’s quirky, yet unflinchingly honest, memoir
reveals a funny, compassionate and generous man. She captures an
inside view of one of our literary greats – a brilliant writer who
gave the world some of its most revered Science Fiction. “I found
this book engrossing and authentic – a truthful and serious account
of the last part of Phil Dick’s life by someone who was a
fundamental part of it and who has the skill to write about it.
There is evident love and friendship in this book, but also honesty.
This was the Phil Dick I knew.” James P. Blaylock, World Fantasy
Award-Winning Author"

As different as night and day.  Phil used to spend Thanksgiving with
Maer's family.  She never saw the side of Phil that I did, and I
mostly didn't see the side she did.  As simplistic as this sounds: 
she was a redhead.
  

    
Linda and Tim, did either of you ever connect with "Kathy in San
Rafael" or "Jamis in Vancouver"?
  

    
I didn’t.
  

    
Jon, no, I never met them or had any contact with them.  I seem to
recall that there was some talk of Kathy flying down to visit, but
it never came to anything.

     
  

    
Hi all. I want to leap in briefly. First, say how grateful I am to
Linda for her persistent grace in carrying this terrible knowledge,
carrying it through time and placing it so simply before us. Your
kindness to PKD, now and then, is remarkable under the
circumstances.

At a moment where readers of this thread may be somewhat stunned
into silence by the revelations about "our hero", I'll say that I'm
thinking a lot about this stuff in light of my current renewed
researches on PKD before the Festival this coming weekend, where
I'll try to put some of this in the context of his writing life.

I want to say something that I hope will not seem flippant or odd:

The cruelty and coldness you experienced from Dick may not have been
so much a bug as a feature.

That's to say, the argument about android v. machine in him was also
taking place in his life, in his body, in his own choices and
responses. Even if he failed to accept this and instead projected it
onto others -- and so often, and tragically, he projected it onto a
woman. A dark-haired girl.

So when you say "she was a redhead", what you're saying is that in a
very sad way, hair-color was a kind of dumbed-down Voight-Kampf Test
he was applying. Without understanding that he was actually looking
in a mirror. So, that the coldness he thought he detected in you was
a terror-vision of the empathy-devoid android self he most feared in
himself.

So -- perhaps the same thing he processed so powerfully for us in
his art (even if processed incompletely, by definition) was inverted
into a nightmare in his behavior.
  

    
watching pkd being consistently a coherent sociable self with maur
must have been painful because it implied he had some conscious
control about when/how to given into his demons.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 11 Jun 24 19:59>
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 11 Jun 24 19:59>
  

    
I will say more later, but for now, quickly...

Jonathan, regarding feature versus bug, I'm wondering if you saw
what I posted in response 84?

>>It becomes apparent very quickly that Phil is mentally ill.

But it’s part and parcel of his genius.  Without his unique vision
we wouldn’t be talking about him today.  Without his difficult to
consistently categorize brand of insanity, there would be no vision,
and we wouldn’t be talking about him today.<<

>>watching pkd being consistently a coherent sociable self with maur
must have been painful because it implied he had some conscious
control about when/how to given into his demons.<<

Paulina, I wouldn't have known anything about it until Maer wrote
about it.  I thought it was interesting that he did have some
conscious control, he would have had to have had [now there's a
grammatical brain twister for a non-Native English speaker] in order
to navigate the world and his professional life.  But he was
triggered by strong feelings that he calls love regarding
dark-haired girls that resulted in anger and acting out. 
  

    
when did you find out about maer's mostly-positive experiences?

and yes, that is one of the dilemmas with our culture of
therapy/pathologizing so much: if we medicate away the bumpy bits or
the people who have them, then...'listening to prozac' touched on
this.