Posthuman Blues

Apparently "A Scanner Darkly" isn't showing anywhere close. Typical. I suppose I'll wait for the DVD.



"Scanner" was the first Philip K. Dick book I read. I digested it at a very strange time in my life, while suffering from an undiagnosed anxiety disorder that took the form of what I only much later discovered was termed "derealization" -- a horrific sense of my cognizance somehow detaching, leaving me viscerally frightened and, after several episodes, more or less convinced I was suffering from a tumor or else losing my mind.

(One doctor matter-of-factly told me I had temporal lobe epilepsy, a charge often leveled at people claiming alien abduction and ecstatic religious states. Some critics wonder if temporal lobe epilepsy was at least partly responsible for PKD's own "divine invasion.")

In "Scanner," the addictive "Substance D" results in a schism between brain hemispheres. At the time of my attacks, this seemed as likely an explanation for my problem as any, regardless of the fact that I'd never done any drugs -- let alone anything as exotically cyberpunk as Substance D.

But maybe having dealt with anxiety hasn't been an entirely bad thing. For one, I enjoy an enhanced appreciation for PKD's reality-bending fiction. I find I can relate to characters experiencing unpleasant altered states and can sense, if superficially, the dark, elusively fractal vein mined by authors ranging from Kafka to Pynchon.

But if I could undue my own brush with "D," I would.