“Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.”
In “A Scanner Darkly”, Philip K. Dick offers a glimpse into the lives of those suffering from substance abuse. Consumerism is used as a central role in the day-to-day of the cast of characters in order to display the similarities between the “straights” and the “heads” in the hope of instilling a sense of empathy and compassion toward human beings who experience tragedy.
“Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.”
This story is rife with love-it-or-hate-it scifi-concept mentions like malls that repel those without credit cards, where the juxtaposition between mundane conversations and in-depth descriptions of neurochemistry help drive the book’s main plot--which follows the deterioration of an undercover narcotics agent’s psyche while reporting on himself--by symbolizing the way one’s intellectual brain cannibalizes itself and its creative counterpart during addiction, with a focus on the individual’s altered conscious experiences over the medical jargon.
“‘How do we stop them, sir?’ ‘Kill the pushers,’ Arctor said…”
An emphasis on the effects of paranoid episodes attempt to shed light on the biological or evolutionary functions of these hindrances, on how paranoia could both prepare one to defend themselves while also leading to complete dissociation or to the belief of vivid fantasies. Consumption leads to compulsion which leads to addiction and ends in death, and Philip K. Dick argues that this is true of any substance, from D to weed to McD’s, and that one must find a way to rise above this. Good examples of the duality of paranoia were shown whenever Bob Arctor had formed assessments of Barris’s activities.
“After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen…”
The flip side of this paranoia can be seen all throughout the story in the form of Bob and Fred’s split and decline, where we witness him watching his own intellect toiling as his psyche burnt away so that he functioned merely as an eye for others. Twists related to this are well teased through the story with the descriptions of cop cars and inconsistencies in characters. If there’s a prevalent message here, it’s that one has to find the philosophical ‘good’ in everything, that there’s a use for even the worst of human suffering, up to and including the different forms of Death.
“And the black-and-white wolf had never complained; he had said nothing even when they shot him. His claws had still been deep in his prey. For nothing. Except that that was his fashion and he liked to do it. It was his only way. His only style by which to live. All he knew. And they got him.”
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Allen W. McLean
...
These Goodreads poems will be collected in a future edition of the HaikuPrajna Collection. More can be found on Medium and Goodreads. “Hector Blake” is also free to read online alongside book reviews and articles: https://haikuprajna.medium.com
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If anyone reading this has a Medium account and needs followers to stay in the Medium Partner Program, I am asking you to please follow me and I'll follow you back! Thanks to you guys, I've reached 100 followers! #MediumWriter #Medium
Need more Bite-sized Insights to relieve your stress and suffering? Get book previews and mindful meditation haiku \ scifaiku poetry from my metaphysical and magical realism stories (like the sci-fi superhero novel "Escape Perennial City", available on #KindleUnlimited!) sent to your inbox for free Alchemic Wisdom from @electricarmchair and @haikuprajna via the emailing list over here: https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/p/follow-on-social-media.html
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