More on Palmer K. Eldritch
Oct. 24th, 2004 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI posted a brief bit on the book The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Eldritch
on the ATPO board this weekend. It addresses in a nutshell why this book continues to haunt me and scared me as much as it did. I honestly think viewing or reading art is a completely subjective experience by the way. What we get out of it has to do with what we ourselves are experiencing or have experienced. Who we are. As much as it has to do with the creator. My brother, a conceptual artist, once told me that all art was an interactive experience.
The artist is interacting with the viewer of the art. So that each person takes away something completely different.
Below is my experience or what I got from Philip K. Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Eldritch and why I recommended and continue to recommend others read it.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Aldritch - is in some ways a horror tale of what happens when you escape completely into an unreal world.
In the novel, people escape their world. They escape into fantasy. They do this by chewing a drug known as Can-D.
When they chew Can-D, they leave their bodies and fall into the action figures and personas of favorite characters, from a long-dead television series. Perky Pat. Perky Pat and her boyfriend and their high-school escapades. They write fanfic in their heads. They live Perky PAt's existence with their friends, husbands, neighbors. But not their own. They live in their heads.
But the Perky Pat existence is a limited one. It's just Perky and her boyfriend and her nice clothes, nice beach.
Nicer than the world these people have certainly. These poor folks live on desolate worlds. And the one they left is over-populated, over-heated (you can't go outside)and overcome with merchandise.
But the world is fine and good, as long as they can escape into Perky PAt. As long as I can escape into this world I'm fine. I don't have to deal with my life. The addiction note, is not the drug Can-D, but the escaping from physical reality from life into a fantasy world where you control the characters and you can be this other person.
A friend of mine read an article on fandom recently and the parasocial relationships fans develop with characters and each other through a medium. These relationships are safer than real relationships - no one gets hurt. You develop a relationship with the character - and at first you can't control it - since the character is someone elses, but then through writing fanfic, he/she/it becomes yours and your best friend. Expand this, bring in other people, and you begin to interrelate with each other through the characters or rather your obsession with them. Taken to extreems, the fan begins to visualize themselves in love with the character, they want to either be the character or live vicarously through them. In some cases this may transfer to the actor or actress playing the role - and they begin to create stories about the actors, worlds that the actor inhabits, fantasies around the actors, and may in fact even attempt to make those fantasies real.
Now imagine a drug in which you can literally do that. At least in your head. Can-D, you chew and you become Perky Pat and your significant other becomes her boyfriend. And corporations make money off of your craving for that escape.
Yet, it's limiting, because you are *just* Perky Pat.
Enter Palmer K. Eldritch, who offers a new substance Chew-Z, this substance allows you to create your own world, own dream vision. That long lost love you wanted? Well you can live happily after with him or her in surround a vision.
You can live your dreams or nightmares. But the price is - once in, you can't get out. Yes, your body keeps moving, you do your work, like a robot almost, but your mind is in another world. It's not a real world. It's a world of your creation and control. And by giving into the temptation to escape, you allow the fungus, Palmer K. Eldritch, to take root in you, you become him and he becomes you and he in essence controls your reality. The Three Stigmata - is Palmer's false eye, false teeth and false hand that manifests after each person ingests the drug or fungus that makes it possible to escape into a world of imagination. They worship that world as they reluctantly worship Palmer who creates it - he becomes their god, and they take on his characteristics. They in effect become part of him. It's about addiction really - how you think you are in control but in reality it is the substance you are addicted to that has taken control over your life.
People think addictions are only oral substances - like alchol or drugs. What Philip K. Dick demonstrates in Eldritch is the addiction is the desire to escape from your world. Your reality. To adore something. To worship something. To obsess. To the extent that everything else falls away. And you are bathed in the light of it, high, and comfortably numb. And the risks involved in doing so.
That's one theme.
The other theme - is the desire to become perfect, better.
To evolve. And do whatever it takes to do so. Yet is the evolution worth the price? Are we better off? And is this desire for perfection - yet another way of avoiding what is?
Why can't we be happy with what we've got?
The main protagonist (forget his name) ex-wife and her new husband use their earnings from selling artistic pottery to a Chew-Z manufacturer to evolve. What happens is the new husband does evolve - his brain expands, he grows a shell to protect from sun, but his wife devolves, she loses her artistic creativity, she is remaking things she made before.
And the new husband loses the one thing he loved most, her and her art - by trying to quickly become better.
Then we have the consumerism - Leo, the corporate magnate,creator of Can-D, who keeps coming up with new products to sell to the world.
Who wants to be the savior, yet in many ways is the one causing the problem. He ironically is the one who introduces his competitors product on the market and ironically the first to fall under it's influence. He too is wrapped up with escape, escaping who is, lying to himself.
The book is about how we escape our lives and the price paid for doing it.
At least those were things I took from it - how it influenced me and flipped me upside down, and why it still haunts me now.
on the ATPO board this weekend. It addresses in a nutshell why this book continues to haunt me and scared me as much as it did. I honestly think viewing or reading art is a completely subjective experience by the way. What we get out of it has to do with what we ourselves are experiencing or have experienced. Who we are. As much as it has to do with the creator. My brother, a conceptual artist, once told me that all art was an interactive experience.
The artist is interacting with the viewer of the art. So that each person takes away something completely different.
Below is my experience or what I got from Philip K. Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Eldritch and why I recommended and continue to recommend others read it.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer K. Aldritch - is in some ways a horror tale of what happens when you escape completely into an unreal world.
In the novel, people escape their world. They escape into fantasy. They do this by chewing a drug known as Can-D.
When they chew Can-D, they leave their bodies and fall into the action figures and personas of favorite characters, from a long-dead television series. Perky Pat. Perky Pat and her boyfriend and their high-school escapades. They write fanfic in their heads. They live Perky PAt's existence with their friends, husbands, neighbors. But not their own. They live in their heads.
But the Perky Pat existence is a limited one. It's just Perky and her boyfriend and her nice clothes, nice beach.
Nicer than the world these people have certainly. These poor folks live on desolate worlds. And the one they left is over-populated, over-heated (you can't go outside)and overcome with merchandise.
But the world is fine and good, as long as they can escape into Perky PAt. As long as I can escape into this world I'm fine. I don't have to deal with my life. The addiction note, is not the drug Can-D, but the escaping from physical reality from life into a fantasy world where you control the characters and you can be this other person.
A friend of mine read an article on fandom recently and the parasocial relationships fans develop with characters and each other through a medium. These relationships are safer than real relationships - no one gets hurt. You develop a relationship with the character - and at first you can't control it - since the character is someone elses, but then through writing fanfic, he/she/it becomes yours and your best friend. Expand this, bring in other people, and you begin to interrelate with each other through the characters or rather your obsession with them. Taken to extreems, the fan begins to visualize themselves in love with the character, they want to either be the character or live vicarously through them. In some cases this may transfer to the actor or actress playing the role - and they begin to create stories about the actors, worlds that the actor inhabits, fantasies around the actors, and may in fact even attempt to make those fantasies real.
Now imagine a drug in which you can literally do that. At least in your head. Can-D, you chew and you become Perky Pat and your significant other becomes her boyfriend. And corporations make money off of your craving for that escape.
Yet, it's limiting, because you are *just* Perky Pat.
Enter Palmer K. Eldritch, who offers a new substance Chew-Z, this substance allows you to create your own world, own dream vision. That long lost love you wanted? Well you can live happily after with him or her in surround a vision.
You can live your dreams or nightmares. But the price is - once in, you can't get out. Yes, your body keeps moving, you do your work, like a robot almost, but your mind is in another world. It's not a real world. It's a world of your creation and control. And by giving into the temptation to escape, you allow the fungus, Palmer K. Eldritch, to take root in you, you become him and he becomes you and he in essence controls your reality. The Three Stigmata - is Palmer's false eye, false teeth and false hand that manifests after each person ingests the drug or fungus that makes it possible to escape into a world of imagination. They worship that world as they reluctantly worship Palmer who creates it - he becomes their god, and they take on his characteristics. They in effect become part of him. It's about addiction really - how you think you are in control but in reality it is the substance you are addicted to that has taken control over your life.
People think addictions are only oral substances - like alchol or drugs. What Philip K. Dick demonstrates in Eldritch is the addiction is the desire to escape from your world. Your reality. To adore something. To worship something. To obsess. To the extent that everything else falls away. And you are bathed in the light of it, high, and comfortably numb. And the risks involved in doing so.
That's one theme.
The other theme - is the desire to become perfect, better.
To evolve. And do whatever it takes to do so. Yet is the evolution worth the price? Are we better off? And is this desire for perfection - yet another way of avoiding what is?
Why can't we be happy with what we've got?
The main protagonist (forget his name) ex-wife and her new husband use their earnings from selling artistic pottery to a Chew-Z manufacturer to evolve. What happens is the new husband does evolve - his brain expands, he grows a shell to protect from sun, but his wife devolves, she loses her artistic creativity, she is remaking things she made before.
And the new husband loses the one thing he loved most, her and her art - by trying to quickly become better.
Then we have the consumerism - Leo, the corporate magnate,creator of Can-D, who keeps coming up with new products to sell to the world.
Who wants to be the savior, yet in many ways is the one causing the problem. He ironically is the one who introduces his competitors product on the market and ironically the first to fall under it's influence. He too is wrapped up with escape, escaping who is, lying to himself.
The book is about how we escape our lives and the price paid for doing it.
At least those were things I took from it - how it influenced me and flipped me upside down, and why it still haunts me now.