MARIA BAMFORD AND PHILIP K. DICK
We are currently living in a future largely predicted by Philip K. Dick’s work and we are headed for some of the even more abstract, inhumane predictions. Other science fiction writers who described dystopian futures like Huxley and Orwell put more emphasis on the prowess of state control and saw technology only as a means to solidify that control. Dick concentrated on the technology itself and saw many possibilities for future tools, both liberating and bleak. His was a paranoid, fractured future where technologies changed and evolved in the hands of countless parties with countless agendas and the conflicts between these parties continue as they always have, simply with increased intricacy and mechanization.
Dick had a constantly fluctuating mental state, at times believing the products of his mind to be genuinely transcendent premonitions facilitated by extra dimensional beings. At other times he saw these as products of mental illness and yet others, he didn’t see any significant distinction between the two.
Maria Bamford’s comedy is unlike that of any other artist. Though I have many thoughts about it, I find analysis of comedy to be mostly terrible so I will not try that here. All I will say is that the remarkable urgency, honesty, vulnerability and insight that flows so freely from her appears, at least in part, to be coming from a mind in similar fluctuation. One that at times produces abstraction and thought disorder and is at other times grounded enough to reflect on that abstraction.
Both of these artists create magic gifts that help us all understand ourselves and our world.