I'm making scrap soup and thinking about entropy.
Let's start with the basics - scrap soup is made from green or brown lentils, and whatever I have in the fridge or garden. Beetroot, kale and broccoli leaves. Garlic scapes. Spring onions gone to seed. Broad bean tips. The vegetables that don't look pretty, often. A few wilted mushrooms fried in olive oil with smokey paprika. A spoonful of miso, a can of tomatoes. Scrap soup is for when I've run out of everything. It'll last two days, til I can sell something on Marketplace for more groceries.
I'm also listening to Ubik, by Phillip K Dick, thanks to a reminder by to get into this extraordinary sci fi writer again. It's absolutely brilliant. I think when I was reading him as a teenager, I struggled to understand the metaphysics of his texts. Many years later, I know stuff. The disintegrating world of Ubik, both physical and psychological, is poignant and magical, a little like the universe we live in. We construct realities that are constantly being torn apart. We are often unsure if we might be living in a constructed reality, trying to wake up from a dream. We don't know if the reality that we experience is the same as other. It's delightfully absurd. Listening to it on audio adds a little something to - the nasally whine of the door asking for 'five cents please' to open is hilarious. Listening to that whilst dealing with bills from various providers for various reasons is a little surreal. I think 'five cents please' will be my mantra every time some fucker asks me for money for existing.
Even if you've read it, do yourself a favour and listen to the audio.
Dick was thus preempting things that are a reality for us today, such as paid subscriptions for basic functions of our lives - listening to music, reading, even electricity. Technology, he believed, was to be suspicious of, especially as it relates to consumerism - I mean what doesn't - and pervades every corner of our lives. Poor Joe Chip, utterly broke, and not able to do basic things like make coffee. 5 cents, please! Every action, a micro transaction.
There's also the 'half life' concept, which the novel opens with, where people are caught in a kind of limbo, not quite dead, but their consciousness slowly fading. The author would have been fascinated by the new concept of cryogenics, wondering whether frozen people dreamed. Is dreaming a sign of life? In Ubik, the half life people could think and communicate, but time moves differently for them. You're never really sure whether the characters are in half life or in reality.
Is Dick also musing on memory and death here? It's incredibly poignant if you 'read' the text this way. I'm reminded of older people or alzheimers patients not remembering what they did today but remembering in detail the events of their early years. When we lose someone, we keep them in memory, speaking to them, remembering them - but the memories fade and distort, slip. Thinking of my late father, for example, and trying to reconstruct him in my brain and doing pretty badly. My constructed reality of my father through memory is different to my sisters, my mothers.
In Ubik, the half lifers reality disintegates and communication weakens - just like memory. Memory is thus entropy too - at first you remember vividly, but then things become merely fragments, ghostly. We try to hold onto the dead as they dissolve into the past. But in Ubik, it's also us disintegrating when we die - or perhaps as we head toward death, dissolving but not quite gone. It's enough to make your head go all wobbly.
Then there's the UBIK of the title, advertised at the start of every chapter, and probably short for 'ubiquitious' - ie it's everywhere, and you can't avoid it. It's sold in various forms, like a spray can, and can combat time and decay, but it's also said to be a metaphor for God or ultimate reality - who knows. It's just another ambiguity in the story that makes you work for it. It's 200 pages - or seven hours of audio - and its fun to grapple with intellectually.
Ubik has become art in reality, too. You can buy cans of it - or, the cans. What is it is probably worse than the ingredients in the fictional UBIK. Perhaps if we just believe and use as directed?
And don't even get me started on the clothes - they're just delightfully bonkers. A'cowboy hat, black lace mantilla, and bermuda shorts' or a 'floral mumu and Spandex bloomers'? F
I can't even explain this book adequately. When I read it as a kid, I wouldn't have got it - it's wildly metaphysical. The pace is frenetic, wild - I mean Dick was known to take amphetamines (who didn't, in the '60's?) and wrote something like 20 books in ten years. I listened to afew reviews on Youtube and one Irish guy laughed and said he didn't know what the fuck was going on in this book. Perhaps that's partly the point - in life, does anyone know what reality is?
It's quite something to be doing domestic chores - making soup, doing the washing, making muesli - and to be immersed in the wild musings of PKD.
Now where's that bottle of UBIK? I need to add some to the soup...
With Love,
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