A2

Introductory Text

Ah, the Simple Nemesis
The Author's Narrative Part 02 Second Post from the Author Posted 26 April 2016 at 17:20:45 EDT Link to original

When novelist Philip K. Dick was 42 years old, his fourth wife left him. Lonely and devastated, he opened his home to whoever wanted to stay there. This being San Francisco in 1971, the house quickly became filled with drug users. Dick himself was heavily abusing amphetamines, eating pills by the literal handful and forgoing sleep for days. The mood in the house quickly became paranoid, and at one point, multiple occupants were sleeping with guns under their pillows. The house was broken into, and Dick suspected government involvement, thinking he had gotten too close to some kind of secret in one of his novels. He moved away shortly after.

But his time at the house hadn't been all paranoia and firearms. There were also many good times. Dick was a mesmerizing conversationalist, with an easy command of facts and theories about art, religion, philosophy, and numerous esoteric subjects. He and his new friends, usually kids in their early twenties, would rap for hours and days about everything under the sun. He grew close to many of them. Many of them were runaways or otherwise clinging to the margins of society. After the break-in, Dick went to rehab and quit speed, but as time went on, many of his friends fell victim to the drugs.

In the epilogue to A Scanner Darkly, a fictionalized account of this time, he wrote:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed -- run over, maimed, destroyed -- but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. We were forced to stop by things dreadful."

In the grip of withdrawal, I read that epilogue many times. Read it and wept. I remember, after a week-long binge, lying in my bed, weeping, nightmares crowding my mind, my hands shaking, the mental suffering unbearable, thinking to myself, "Should I really be punished like this? What have I done that was so horrible? Was it so wrong to drink? To want to feel comfortable? To want to feel OK? To want to forget about things for a while? Was it so horribly wrong? Such a crime, that I should go through this mind-crucifying torment?"

But it wasn't really a matter of right and wrong.

It was simply a matter of cause and effect.

My brain had adapted to the inhibitory effects of alcohol, and once the alcohol had been removed, it had entered a state of hyperactivity. The adaptation had become a maladaptation. That was all. There was nothing out there administering this suffering as a punishment. My only 'crime' had been knowing that this would happen and drinking anyways.

I had been a child playing in the street.

Dick wrote in his epilogue, "In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street."

There was no magical fate causing my suffering. Just the impersonal cruelty of causal law.

That was my only Nemesis. Perhaps one day, they will invent a substance which prevents the neuro-adaptation to alcohol, and we will be able to drink forever, like the Greek God Dionysus. We will drink and dance and laugh, and there will be no nightmares.

We will be made children again, and we will play forever on a street where there are no cars.

Until then, there will be suffering beyond belief.