Philip Dick: Confessions of a Crap Artist

In high school I had some nice clothes, and that made it possible for me to step out and be popular. In particular I had one blue cashmere sweater that I wore for almost four years, until it got to smelling so bad the gym instructor made me throw it away. He had it in for me anyhow, because I never took a shower in gym.

It was from the American Weekly , not from any magazines, that I got my interest in science.

Possibly you remember the article they had, in the May 4th 1935 issue, on the Sargasso Sea. At that time I was ten years old, and in the high fourth. So I was just barely old enough to read something besides funny books. There was a huge drawing, in six or seven colors, that covered two whole opened-up pages; it showed ships, stuck in the Sargasso Sea, that had been there for hundreds of years. It showed the skeletons of the sailors, covered with sea weed. The rotting sails and masts of the ships. And all different kinds of ships, even some ancient Greek and Roman ones, and some from the time of Columbus, and then the Norsemen’s ships. Jumbled in together. Never stirring. Stuck there forever, trapped by the Sargasso Sea.

The article told how ships got drawn in and trapped, and how none ever got away. There were so many that they were side by side, for miles. Every kind of ship that existed, although later on when there were steamships, fewer ships got stuck, obviously because they didn’t depend on wind currents but had their own power.

The article affected me because in many ways it reminded me of an episode on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, that had seemed very important to me, having to do with the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard. I remember that Jack had had a metal key that, when struck, resonated strangely, and was the key to the graveyard. For a long time I knocked every bit of metal I came across against something to make it resonate, trying to produce that sound and find the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard on my own (a door was supposed to open in the rock somewhere). When I read the article on the Sargasso Sea I saw an important resemblance; the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard was sought for because of all the ivory, and in the Sargasso Sea there was millions of dollars worth of jewels and gold, the cargoes of the trapped ships, just waiting to be located and claimed. And the difference between the two was that the Elephants’ Lost Graveyard wasn’t a scientific fact but just a myth brought back by fever-crazed explorers and natives, whereas the Sargasso Sea was scientifically established .

On the floor of our living room, in the house we rented back in those days on Illinois Avenue, I had the article spread out, and when my sister came home with my mother and father I tried to interest her in it. But at that time she was only eight. We got into a terrible fight about it, and the upshot was that my father grabbed up the American Weekly and threw it into the paper bag of refuse under the sink. That upset me so badly that I had a fantasy about him, dealing with the Sargasso Sea. It was so disgusting that even now I can’t bear to think about it. That was one of the worst days in my life, and I always held it against Fay, my sister, that she was responsible for what happened; if she had read the article and listened to me talk about it, as I wanted her to, nothing would have gone wrong. It really got me down that something so important, and, in a sense, beautiful, should be degraded the way it was that day. It was as if a delicate dream was trampled on and destroyed.

Neither my father nor mother were interested in science. My father worked with another man, an Italian, as a carpenter and housepainter, and, for a number of years, he was with the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the maintenance department at the Gilroy Yards. He never read anything himself except the San Francisco Examiner and Reader’s Digest and the National Geographic . My mother subscribed to Liberty , HERE and then, when that went out of business, she read Good Housekeeping . Neither of them had any education scientific or otherwise. They always discouraged me and Fay from reading, and off and on during my childhood they raided my rooms and burned everything in the way of reading material that they could get their hands on, even library books. During World War Two, when I was in the Service and overseas fighting on Okinawa, they went into my room at home, the room that had always belonged to me, gathered up all my science-fiction magazines and scrapbooks of girl pictures, and even my Oz books and Popular Science magazines, and burned them, just as they had done when I was a child. When I got back from defending them against the enemy I found that there was nothing to read in the whole house. And all my valuable reference files of unusual scientific facts were gone forever. I do remember, though, what was probably the most startling fact from that file of thousands. Sunlight has weight. Every year the earth weighs ten thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That fact has never left my mind, and the other day I calculated that since I first learned the fact, in 1940, almost one million nine hundred thousand pounds of sunlight have fallen on the earth.

And then, too, a fact that is becoming more and more known to intelligent persons. An application of mind-power can move an object at a distance! This is something I’ve known all along, because as a child I used to do it. In fact, my whole family did it, even my father. It was a regular activity that we engaged in, especially when out in public places such as restaurants. One time we all concentrated on a man wearing a gray suit and got him to reach his right hand back and scratch his neck. Another time, in a bus, we influenced a big old colored woman to get to her feet and get off the bus, although that took some doing, probably because she was so heavy. This was spoiled one day, however, by my sister, who when we were concentrating on a man across a waiting room from us suddenly said,

“What a lot of crap.”

Both my mother and father were furious at her, and my father gave her a shaking, not so much for using a word like that at her age (she was about eleven) but for interrupting our mind concentration. I guess she picked up the word from some of the boys at Millard Fillmore Grammar School, where she was in the fifth grade at that time. Even that young she had started getting rough and tough; she liked to play kickball and baseball, and she was always down on the boys’ playground instead of with the girls. Like me, she has always been thin. She used to be able to run very well, almost like a professional athlete, and she used to grab something like, say, my weekly package of Jujubees that I always bought on Saturday morning with my allowance, and ran off somewhere and ate it. She has never gotten much of a figure, even now that she’s more than thirty years old. But she has nice long legs and a springy walk, and two times a week she goes to a modern dance class and does exercises. She weighs about 116 pounds.

Because of being a tomboy she always used men’s words, and when she got married the first time she married a man who made his living as owner of a little factory that makes metal signs and gates. Until his heart attack he was a pretty rough guy. The two of them used to go climbing up and down the cliffs out at Point Reyes, up where they live in Marin County, and for a time they had two arabian horses that they rode. Strangely, he had his heart attack playing badminton, a child’s game. The birdie got hit over his head—by Fay—and he ran backward, tripped over a gopher hole, and fell over on his back. Then he got up, cursed a blue streak when he saw that his racket had snapped in half, started into the house for another racket, and had his heart attack coming back outdoors again.