Episode 90: 'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Weird Studies has so far devoted just one show to Philip K. Dick, and that was way back in April 2018, with episode 10, "Adrift in the Multiverse." Last fall, as another foray into Dickland began to feel urgent, Phil and JF talked about which of his books they should tackle. The answer that seemed obvious was VALIS, the semi/pseudo-autobiographical masterpiece that constitutes PKD's most explicit attempt to make sense of the theophanic experiences that altererd his life in 1974. But then Phil suggested The Owl in Daylight, a novel on which PKD worked feverishly in the last years of his life but left unwritten. And sure enough, reviewing and analyzing a book that doesn't exist proved to be the best way of getting to the heart of Dick's incomparable oeuvre. SHOW NOTES Gwen Lee, What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, volume 6 Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot Secondary qualities, philosophical concept Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings Burt Bacharach, American musician Philip K. Dick, "The Preserving Machine" Jorge Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" The Good Place, American television series Philip K. Dick, Valis Weird Studies, Episode 78 on John Keel's 'Mothman Prophesies' Richard Wagner, Parsifal Weird Studies, Episode 73 on Carl Jung Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martell.
0:53.4	Maybe Wilco's Jeff Tweedy said it best in the song
0:56.3	the late greats. The best song, he says, will never get sung. The best life never leave your lungs.
1:03.7	Recently, our discussions here on Weird Studies touched on the stoic idea that certain realities
1:08.4	can be without really existing. In art, there are works that are
1:13.3	legendary precisely because they were never made. Think, for example, of Alejandro Jodorovsky's
1:19.2	cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. As shown in the documentary dedicated to that
1:24.7	Herculean, not to say Sisyphian effort, the non-existence of Jodorovsky's
1:29.1	masterwork doesn't in any way limit its power to effect. On the contrary, it can be argued, and this is
1:35.9	the message of the documentary, that Jodorovsky's do and influence science fiction filmmaking
1:40.4	every bit as much as 2001 a Space Odyssey or Star Wars did, albeit in a harder to
1:46.0	quantify more subterranean fashion. Some things are all the more powerful for never having
1:52.5	existed, that is, for being incorporeal. This episode isn't about Jodoroski, but about the American
2:00.1	science fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose work we first explored all the way back in episode 10, adrift in the multiverse.
2:07.6	The Owl in Daylight, Dick's final and finally aborted literary effort, is another example of a book that doesn't need to exist in order to be.
2:16.6	Dick left enough traces and sketches of
2:18.8	his would-be magnum opus for us to almost see it. This episode of Weird Studies has us dissecting
2:24.6	a literary ghost that haunts Dick's body of work and finding much hidden within to puzzle over.
2:30.8	Stories within stories, worlds within worlds, concepts that can't be thought, music that
2:36.3	can't be heard. Basically, with this project, Dick was trying to push his philosophical ideas to
	...

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