Dyslexia and Dick

I'm dyslexic, something I didn't know until college. Before this I thought I was just "dumb,” as I was told many times. As I write this, the computer program superimposes letters, flashes red lines and strains to come up with solutions. Yet, I find myself most attracted to writing — maybe it's the challenge of it, maybe it's my anti-authoritarian nature. Reading, too, is a process, and it can be a months-long ordeal to get through a book.

Rhythm seems to be key — a writer who can flow in the same strange systems my brain does — an organic reworking and restructuring. Fragmented minds and meanings have always struck me. As a child I found science fiction, immediately I fell for Phil.  

Philip K. Dick imagines worlds extrapolated from fear and cultivated in Kafka. His universe is often cold and lonely, paranoid in its stillness. A hologram of a simulacra; a child alone. Perfect.

If you can't already tell, my reading difficulty has imbued me with an outsider perspective. I hold on to it, almost as a friend — one of my “little black dogs”; a magnetic north.

There are souls in this world that can’t be shaken, that won’t be removed. They are too close to something, too near a truth to leave us. I imagine we are navigated toward people who are right for us, maybe we simply hang on when we find them.

For me, that relentlessness of being is perfectly personified in Phil's writing. An amalgamation of philosophy and feeling. I never knew there could be so much truth in fiction before I read Phil — steeped in a cumulation of inter-dimensional, extra-galactic entities. At times you have to absorb his thoughts between words; to take in the beam of energy latent in his prose. At twelve I read “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I’ve tried to read all of Dick's forty-four novels since, a thing distinctly difficult yet relentlessly rewarding.

I'm almost embarrassed to speak of my cosmic entanglement with Dick. Each time I read what he has left us, I feel it intertwining with my current journey — I dare say I have become a spiritual person in his wake. When I get to his last writings, will I find myself on my deathbed? Will I be too frightened to thumb through the penultimate work? Am I, like so many of his protagonists, a joke? Do I exist? I expect Phil knows the answers to these pretentious pointless questions.

In “Divine Invasion,” Dick embarks on a theory that the universe is something internal as much as it is external. This theory plays an important part in his later works; it seems his way of making sense of our world. His parting and piecing together fits into my “dumb” brains, wormhole-ing through the written world and this one — one that can feel much like a hologram. One where I feel alone, removed and confused. One that I hope I share with Phil.