I’m working on pretty much the same thing with my therapist, who I unfortunately seem to enjoy confusing and evading with my freeform personality more than I do being therapised by them. Shit, it’s my money.
VALIS and the Exegesis are a good look at his end state, but some of his non-sf work also gives a pretty clear insight into the man - “Mary and the Giant” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist” spring to mind. Actually so do “The Broken Bubble” and “In Milton Lumkey Territory”.
They’re all deeply uncomfortable and utterly palpable works - there’s real pain and anguish and alienation graved into the platens, stories of closeness morphing into terror and estrangement as a natural result of intimacy.
His whole thing was Baudrillardian, the real versus the consensus, perception versus reality - and his non-SF works lay it out bare, without any of the allegorical window dressing.
I love the man, and feel real empathy for him, as many of the questions which plagued him are those which are also ever present in my mind.
Should we ever have met, I am certain we would have hated each other, lovingly.
VALIS and the Exegesis are a good look at his end state, but some of his non-sf work also gives a pretty clear insight into the man - “Mary and the Giant” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist” spring to mind. Actually so do “The Broken Bubble” and “In Milton Lumkey Territory”.
They’re all deeply uncomfortable and utterly palpable works - there’s real pain and anguish and alienation graved into the platens, stories of closeness morphing into terror and estrangement as a natural result of intimacy.
His whole thing was Baudrillardian, the real versus the consensus, perception versus reality - and his non-SF works lay it out bare, without any of the allegorical window dressing.
I love the man, and feel real empathy for him, as many of the questions which plagued him are those which are also ever present in my mind.
Should we ever have met, I am certain we would have hated each other, lovingly.