Footnotes
* Logos is an important concept that litters the pages of the Exegesis. An ancient Greek word with a wide variety of meanings, Logos can mean word, speech, reason (in Latin ratio) or giving an account of something. For Heraclitus, to whom Dick frequently refers, Logos is the universal law that governs the cosmos, of which most human beings are somnolently ignorant. Dick certainly has this latter meaning in mind, but most importantly, Logos refers to the opening of the Gospel of John, which invokes the word that becomes flesh in the person of Christ. The human faculty for the intuition of Logos is nous (or noös, as Dick transliterates it) or “intellection,” which also appears all over the Exegesis. But the core of Dick’s vision is gnostic: it suggests a specifically mystical contact with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with Logos and who can communicate in the form of a ray of light, non-objective graphics, or some other visionary transfer. The novelty of Dick’s gnostic vision is that the divine communicates through information that has a kind of electrostatic life of its own.—SC
† Neoplatonism is crossed with thermodynamics to provide a framework for Dick to think through his experiences here. The entire universe can be comprehended as subject to an imperative: more entropy! While entropy is usually associated with the negativity of disorder, here it functions as something like a revelation: the bare bones, so to speak, of our world are revealed. And while the revelation is a “regression,” it enables an insight into the nature of reality. The divine, “Atman,” is perceived within all things for Dick even as the vehicle of this revelation is entropy—in the guise of noise, he receives a clarifying signal.—RD
* Until the mid-1960s, Dick’s novels explored isolation, entropy, and psychological withdrawal. But with Ubik (1966), his work becomes progressively more concerned with redemption and rebirth. After a team of anti-telepaths is injured in an explosion, the novel develops a dreamlike quality inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As the reality around them devolves, the characters begin to succumb to entropy themselves. A magical cure-all product begins to show up in advertisements: Ubik, which comes in an aerosol spray can and promises to combat the forces of encroaching chaos. Ubik is clearly an allegory for the Christian concept of “grace”; author Michael Bishop has written that Ubik is “whatever gets you through the dark night of the soul.” In the Exegesis, Ubik becomes shorthand for redemption.—DG
* This word information has become so commonplace that it is important to mark out its history here. Dick is writing a quarter of a century after Claude Shannon published his Mathematical Theory of Communication with Warren Weaver, wherein he defined the quantity of “surprise value” contained in any message as its “entropy.” Shannon named this value entropy because he was using equations drawn from the thermodynamic measure of entropy in a system—Maxwell’s equations. The paradox here—one that Dick grappled with—is presented by the fact that information, whose etymology suggests the existence of a pattern or “form,” is found to be mathematically equivalent to the amount of disorder in a closed system. That is, entropy is both the measure of the content of a message and a measure of its disorder. Maximum entropy is maximum message. The Exegesis is a working-through of this paradox: was Valis signal or noise?—RD
† The paradox of “entropy” as a measure of disorder and order is, for Dick, temporarily overcome. It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”—language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality. John 1:1 is additionally instructive because of what information theory would describe as the sentence’s “redundancy.” The semantic content of “In the beginning” reiterates the line’s formal content, since “In the beginning” is indeed in the beginning of the gospel. “In the beginning was the word” is, of course, in words, so here too the signal repeats itself through its own self-reference. In this passage Dick is treating this threefold redundancy as the Logos itself, out of which any message at all might emerge. Thus, when Dick receives this “letter from the future,” it is felt as salvation. The question of whether Valis is signal or noise is abstracted another level, as information “from the future” pours into the present, revealing the unreal nature of linear time.—RD
* Here Dick acknowledges that, as he comes to terms with 2-3-74, he can choose different maps for his exploration, since “any such terms will do.” He regards the present as a “continual informational print-out” in which he nonetheless and simultaneously has “free will,” a perception that is in accord with the thinking of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the chief architects of the informatic paradigm Dick is experiencing. Schrödinger, whose idea of the “code-script” in DNA gave birth to the concept of the genetic code, grapples in What Is Life? with the simultaneously mechanistic and free characteristic of human experience: “(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.” Notice that to perceive this twofold nature of the human being requires an act of contemplation on Dick’s part: “I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.”—RD
* When he wrote this sentence, Dick sat less than ten miles away from Disneyland, a geographic synchronicity that reminds us how regional a writer Dick was. Unlike most California writers, however, he bridged the “two hemispheres” of the bipolar Golden State. Before moving to the tacky conservative sprawl of Orange County, Dick lived for decades in the Bay Area, absorbing the lefty bohemia of Berkeley and Marin County. In 1973 he wrote Stanislaw Lem: “There is no culture here in California, only trash.” But as Dick’s own work proves, trash can achieve a visionary intensity, even a kind of escape velocity. After all, California was also the petri dish of our digital age, spawning the Internet, biotechnology, the personal computer, and geosynchronous satellite communication. And California has long encouraged the restless, eclectic, and sometimes wacky search for spiritual authenticity that drives the Exegesis. There is no more Dickian a Mecca than Disneyland. Indeed, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride offers a model for the entangled plots of a Phil Dick novel: a fantastic contraption that careens through a variety of trapdoors and false fronts and deposits you in a kind of surreal hell. But then the doors open once again, and you face the blank blue sky.—ED
* The year 1964 was a bad one for Dick. Burned out after writing seven novels in twelve months, Dick suffered a serious bout of depression. Writer’s block and two bad acid trips took their toll. After separating from his wife and leaving bucolic Point Reyes, Dick got an apartment in East Oakland, a gritty neighborhood he referred to as “East Gak-ville.” In July, Dick flipped his car, dislocating his shoulder. After the accident, Dick languished in a body cast, and then wore a sling for two months. Unable to type, Dick was forced to dictate notes for a long-planned sequel to The Man in the High Castle (1962). Here Dick acknowledges that, basically a decade later, he found himself in exactly the same circumstance. After reinjuring his shoulder and undergoing surgery to repair it, Dick was once again dictating notes for a sequel to High Castle that would also integrate his 2-3-74 experiences into the novel. Eventually the notes he was dictating became Radio Free Albemuth, published posthumously in 1985. Dick never completed the sequel to The Man in the High Castle, arguably the most successful book of his career, and a high point he seemed determined to revisit, especially when he was down on his luck.—DG
* In the Exegesis, one of the great themes of Dick’s work—memory—is being reconsidered, if not radically recast. The theme of memory runs from In Milton Lumky Territory to Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? to A Scanner Darkly; up until the Exegesis, Dick’s work has formed a multivolume epic that might be called “Remembrance of Time Irreal.” In this work, memory serves as the nexus between reality and humanity, but in the Exegesis Dick’s past and future seem to bleed into the present, creatively and psychologically, and one feels his effort to make memory not so much irrelevant as meaningless, maybe even nonsensical. It is no longer part of humanity’s cosmic DNA—the Lincoln robot in We Can Build You is as human as the real Lincoln not because he looks and acts like a real Lincoln, but because he remembers like one. Dick suspects that the person he remembers being for the previous ten years was a “secondary” incarnation that supplanted the real one that now has returned. If this is true, to what extent is the Exegesis not just an elaboration on Dick’s previous work, but a rebuttal? Has Dick ceased to be the parallel Proust and become the anti-Proust?—SE
* It should be noted that everything Dick describes in this passage is only a slightly crazier version of something that every novelist experiences—the sense that he or she is not creating the work but someone or something else is. (Or as Dick has put it earlier, “My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them. . . .”) Many authors have had the experience of returning to earlier work with no recollection of having written it or of what the person who wrote it could possibly have been thinking. I’m not disputing Dick’s insightful assessment of the cleavage between an artist’s conscious and unconscious selves, nor am I even necessarily disputing the theories behind that assessment. I’m just saying that Dick’s sense of a freely, independently functioning unconscious that manifests itself in imagination and words is not unique, even as he has taken this meditation several steps further than most.—SE
* Dick’s experience of 2-3-74 has sometimes been interpreted as auditory and visual hallucinations, perhaps induced by repeated transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), or temporary strokes. We know that he was experiencing dangerously high blood pressure during this period, so a stroke would not be unlikely. If a stroke did occur, some of the changes he recorded in his personality in 1974 suggest that the neural circuitry normally associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, possibly in ways that strengthened the connections between consciousness and what recent research in neuroscience has been calling “the new unconscious,” or “the adaptive unconscious.” Distinct from the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious catches the overflow of sensations and perceptions too abundant to be processed through the bottleneck of conscious attention. Far from surfacing only in dreams, it is constantly at work to help set priorities, direct attention, and change behaviors in ways adaptive to the environment. Dick’s observation that he had become more “shrewd” about business matters—more practical, so to speak—indicates that the adaptive unconscious may have been guiding his actions more directly than was usual with him. Much of his theorizing about the events of 2-3-74 could also derive from his previous experience, as he himself recognized; for example, his extensive reading about classical Rome may have surfaced in his conviction that he had somehow been transported backward in time to Rome in 100 C.E.—NKH
* We all know the Christian fish, multiplied and mutated across millions of automobile bumpers in an endless ideological war. Sometimes the icon includes the word ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for fish and an acrostic—used by early Christians along with the symbol—of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Popular accounts of ΙΧΘΥΣ often suggest that the sign was once used by persecuted Christians to recognize one another—a believer would draw one arc of the fish, which a fellow acolyte would then complete. Though this account inspired Dick, there is no historical evidence for such secret winks. More relevant is the symbol’s modern revival by the countercultural Jesus Movement, for whose adherents the symbol replaced the stark rectilinear cross and invoked an alternative Christianity, radical and earthy. In Orange County, Dick was surrounded by the ambient vibes of Jesus Freakery, an originally Californian movement whose local avatar was the remarkably named Lonnie Frisbee. By 1974 Frisbee’s youth evangelism and “surf’s up” baptisms had helped groovify Calvary Chapel and other local mainline congregations. In one of Dick’s later visions, the Υ of an ΙΧΘΥΣ decal affixed to his window transformed into a palm tree—a fitting invocation of southern California as much as the ancient Levant.—ED
* In the Phaedo, Plato recounts the death of Socrates, which is famously administered by drinking hemlock. Socrates’ enigmatic final words are, “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asklepios.” Asklepios was the god of healing, and people suffering from an ailment would offer sacrifice before sleep in the hope of waking up cured. Thus, Socrates’ final words seem to imply that death is a cure for life, a kind of restorative slumber. It is significant, then, that Dick identifies his tutor here as Asklepios—as the god of healing—for perhaps we can think of the Exegesis as a kind of attempted cure of the soul, an extended therapeutic extrapolation of a mystical experience. A temple to Asklepios, called Asklepieion, was constructed on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, right next to the Theater of Dionysos, the billy-goat god who also makes frequent appearances in the Exegesis.—SC
* In his 2006 article “Entoptic Vision and Physicalist Emergentism,” the cognitive scientist Jean Petitot demonstrated that visual hallucinations reported by a number of subjects can be modeled mathematically through neural net feedback in the visual cortex. One of these subjects was blind, so in this case it was clear that there was no perceptual input but rather stimulation through other kinds of neural activity, perhaps a stroke. Images hand-drawn by subjects closely resembled mathematical models of neural net stimulation and feedback. Dick mentions that the graphics he saw were abstract and symmetric; they may have been like the ones Petitot studied or perhaps variations on them. (Changing the parameters yields a number of variations in the mathematical models.) For Petitot, the point is that it is possible in this instance to link a mathematical model of neural activity directly with reported experiences. In Dick’s case, the point is rather that his report of visual phenomena correspond with hallucinations reported by others in which the visions were internally caused by neural stimulation not related to external perceptions.—NKH
* The single most lucid sentence in the entire book.—SE
* Dick often writes as if he assumes that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do not normally communicate with one another. Perhaps this misperception grew out of Roger Sperry’s work on split-brain perceptions in the late 1960s, one of a number of studies that inspired the popular discussion of the lateralization of brain function in books like Robert Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), which Dick was familiar with. However, Sperry’s work was done with patients in whom the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres, had been surgically severed as a treatment for otherwise incurable epilepsy. In normal brains, there is continuous communication across the hemispheres. Dick’s belief that it may be possible to boost brain efficiency, although not technically correct with respect to the right and left hemispheres, is right on the mark with regard to reparative plasticity, in which neural circuits are repurposed to make up for deficiencies in normal brain function caused by an injury or trauma. Reparative plasticity may have been precisely at issue in his own brain function, if indeed he did suffer from TIAs and had his own neural circuitry rearranged as a result.—NKH
* The reference here is to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, where the playwright explains the origin of love (eros) with the myth that the first human beings were akin to conjoined twins of opposite sex—bound face to face, hands to hands, feet to feet—who became separated; the fire of desire flows from the attempt to retrieve our lost unity. Here as elsewhere, the Exegesis can be seen as a long tug-of-war with Plato. There are constant references to Plato’s theory of anamnesis or recollection, which is the remembrance of the forms—the pure core of reality perceived within the soul through the activity of intellection or nous—that were allegedly forgotten due to the painful trauma of our birth. Dick also refers to Plato’s analogy of the cave from Republic, and to the true universe as idea or form (eidos), of which phenomenal reality is a mirror, or scanner, through which we see darkly. Later in the Exegesis, Dick also finds reason to harshly reject Plato, who, he will declare, is “180 degrees wrong.”—SC
* Ursula Le Guin (1929-) is an SF and fantasy writer from Berkeley. Though she and Dick were nearly the same age and attended the same high school, the two never met, but they did correspond as friends and colleagues throughout the 1970s. In February 1981, Le Guin gave a lecture at Emory University attended by author and critic Michael Bishop. Le Guin made some disparaging comments about Dick’s later work, specifically the treatment of women in VALIS (1981). Le Guin wondered aloud if Dick was “slowly going crazy in Santa Ana, California.” When Bishop passed Le Guin’s remarks on to Dick in a letter, Dick responded publicly, writing an angry letter to Science Fiction Review. Le Guin apologized but had clearly hit a nerve. Dick took Le Guin’s criticisms seriously, and in many ways Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), with its deep, intelligent, and charming female first-person narrator, Angel Archer, was written in response.—DG
* “Since I last wrote you, the magnitude of the despotic gang of professional, organized criminals who came to power legally (as did Hitler in Germany) is increasingly revealed to the U.S. public. We Americans are now faced with precisely the situation the German people of the 1930s faced: we elected a criminal government to ‘save us from Communism,’ and are stuck. . . . This brings up the question of the proper moral response and attitude of the U.S. citizen who did not know this” (from Dick’s September 1973 public letter to an Australian fanzine). These musings continue in an unabatedly secular vein and reveal, just scant months before 2-3-74, how Dick already describes Watergate in terms of an epochal breach, yet interpreted here purely in twentieth-century political terms.—JL
* The term “immanent mind” recurs throughout these pages. Immanence can be understood as experiential and manifest as opposed to transcendental. Dick here identifies immanent mind with the extraterrestrial intelligence we can intuit in an experience of gnosis; elsewhere immanence is linked to Spinoza’s idea of a God identified with and wholly internal to nature. There is a tension throughout the Exegesis between this monistic view of the cosmos (which also appears in Dick’s references to Hegel’s dialectic and Whitehead’s idea of reality as process) and a dualistic or gnostic view of the cosmos, with two cosmic forces in conflict. In his monist mood, Dick argues that the universe is a single living organism or God; at other times, Dick seems to tend toward a Platonic or Neoplatonic theory of emanation of the divine reality into the world. But again, this is in constant tension with a tendency toward dualism, which holds that the phenomenal world is a prison governed by corporations, archons, or malevolent political forces. The way I read Dick, this latter view wins out.—SC
* In this and the following letters, Dick explores Christianity as an ancient mystery cult. The various mysteries of the Greco-Roman period were characterized by secret and mystical rituals in which initiates sacramentally relived their god’s experiences, which often involved death and rebirth. The central rites of the early Christian church bear much similarity to these rituals, particularly baptism, the agape or love feast, and the Eucharist. Indeed, in the Eastern Orthodox Church the sacraments are still referred to as “mysteries.” What separated the early church from the mysteries—and what led to its persecution—was its exclusivity: unlike followers of most other mysteries, the Christian faithful refused to participate in the imperial state religion.—GM
* Cultural critic, rock-and-roll journalist, and founder of Crawdaddy magazine, Paul Williams (1948-) is a singularly important figure in the second half of Dick’s life. Besides giving a copy of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch to both John Lennon and psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, Williams wrote the profile “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick,” which ran in the November 6, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone. The piece, which focuses on Dick’s various theories regarding the 1971 break-in and makes no mention of the 2-3-74 events, introduced Dick to his widest counterculture audience yet. The two became good friends, and Williams managed to get one of Dick’s earlier (and best) mainstream fiction books, Confessions of a Crap Artist, published in 1975, an accomplishment for which Dick was eternally grateful. Upon Dick’s death, Williams was made literary executor of Dick’s estate.—DG
* This passage comes from book 2, chapter 2 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted here in John Allen’s translation. The idea that prelapsarian human beings had extraordinary abilities is not unique to Calvin—indeed, the text quoted here is preceded in the original by an attribution of the idea to Augustine. Dick latched onto Calvin as the idea’s primary proponent, both here and elsewhere in the Exegesis, and his name becomes shorthand for the concept of preternatural abilities.—GM
* In many of Dick’s stories, collectors build encapsulated re-creations of places that once held special meaning for them. In Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Virgil Ackerman re-creates the city of his childhood, Wash-35 (Dick lived in Washington, D.C., in 1935). For Dick, these nostalgic places serve as staging grounds for a ceaseless replay of events, “lovingly composed,” in the words of critic Fredric Jameson, “for a human activity which has disappeared.” In his descriptions of ancient Rome superimposed on Orange County, Dick may also have created a past space of redemptive activity, running parallel to, but separate from, our fallen world. While the Empire and the Black Iron Prison are present in this space too, the underground Christian resistance is dedicated in their opposition. God seems closer in that world than he does in this one. Dick sometimes describes Rome, as he does here, as sinister, dangerous, and overrun with spies. But in Dick’s vision, ancient Rome transcends the petty concerns that addle the plastic-fantastic fakeness of Orange County in the 1970s, and in this way it can be read as a kind of sacred urban fantasy that replaces a vapid reality.—DG
* Dick speaks often, as here, of his 2-3-74 experience as a kind of healing, specifically a healing of neural circuits. Contemporary neural science is providing the “scientific explanation” for what Dick sensed intuitively. Recent work in neuroscience has found that the brain is much more plastic than previously supposed, a fact that Oliver Sacks demonstrates throughout The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other accounts of patients who have suffered brain injury or trauma. In his recent work, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls the narrating voice of consciousness the “autobiographical self.” How the narrating self relates to the neuronal circuits of the brain is not well understood, but neural circuits can restructure and repurpose themselves when normal brain function is disrupted.—NKH
* Interpreting his repurposed neural circuits as the emergence of a mind connected to all other minds, Dick here is quite right to note that the awakened mind (which I hypothesize is the adaptive unconscious) “has a job to do.” As he surmises, it is indeed not a separate entity, although in a different sense than he imagines.—NKH
* Here Dick is quoting the voice he refers to variously as his tutor, his unconscious, the Spirit, or the Sybil; later he largely calls it the AI Voice (see Glossary). Throughout the Exegesis we find unsourced quotations like this one; often it is unclear whether Dick is quoting the Voice, the Bible, an imperfectly remembered line of poetry, the encyclopedia, or his own Exegesis. The Exegesis is a mishmash of external voices; the Voice itself is only one of them, though its gnomic utterances have a peculiar power to stop Dick in his tracks or springboard further exegesis.—PJ
* 2-3-74 marks a turning point away from Dick questioning the nature of reality in his fiction, but without providing unambiguous answers, and toward generating an astonishing efflorescence of theories that do not merely question but instead make assertions about the nature of reality. The drive of his theorizing in the Exegesis seems always to be toward incorporating more and more ideas into a single synthetic scheme, without definitively eliminating or disqualifying any one of them. Not surprisingly, then, the synthesis grows wilder and more ideationally unstable as he proceeds.—NKH
† In Dick’s stories, amid all the anxiety over disintegrating universes and unstable realities, there is always the sense of an ultimate reality underlying the fakery. The absolute shines through the cracks in the walls of the universe, and the hand of God—or Ubik, or the Walker-on-Earth, or Wilbur Mercer—reaches through to help us. This is Dick’s basic ontological faith: contrary to appearances, something is actually real. Whether that something is comprehensible to the human intellect is another question entirely, but even in this doubt Dick can be located in the tradition of apophatic mystics like Meister Eckhart or the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing.—GM
* Here Dick poignantly reflects on being a student in a philosophy class whose instructor dogmatically insisted that Plato’s world of forms was no longer intelligible or useful to us. In the face of this intolerance, Dick rightly quit the class (and, soon enough, the university). Dick is evidently not an academic or professional philosopher, but an amateur, or perhaps that most splendid of things, what Erik Davis calls a garage philosopher. As someone who gets paid to teach philosophy for a living, I find Dick compelling as a philosopher because, whatever he lacks in scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and in rich lateral and cumulative associations. Indeed, if one defines a philosopher along the lines offered by Deleuze and Guattari—namely, as someone who creates concepts—then Dick is a philosopher. The naïveté of Dick’s approach to philosophy, like his use of secondary sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Paul Edwards’s fantastically useful Encyclopedia of Philosophy, permits a rapidity of association and lends a certain systematic coherence to his concerns. If Dick had known more, it might have led to him producing less interesting chains of ideas.—SC
* Here Dick ponders the notion of the “Kingdom” found in Luke 17 alongside a Sufi insight. In Luke 17:20, Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be found by inspecting empirical reality or by watching for signs of its imminent arrival. So too in the Vedic tradition one finds the practice of “neti, neti,” which looks at the world and recalls—over and over—that the divine is “not this, not this.” In Luke 17:21, Jesus follows his first negation with another: “Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘Lo there!’ ” In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is neither “here” nor “there” precisely because it is not the spatial, external world. Being neither here nor there, the Kingdom is what Dick would describe as “ubiquitous.” Hence Jesus then asks us to “behold,” to look with awareness: “for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” We are directed to behold what St. Theresa called our “interior castle,” our consciousness, the virtual “space” of contemplation. If we follow William Penn and “look within, look within,” we find, in the contemplative tradition Dick is writing in and through, that “within” and “without” form a unity.—RD
* The Acts of the Apostles from the New Testament tells the story of the early church, focusing largely on the ministry of the apostle Paul. Dick speaks frequently about the presence of “Acts material” in his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, though Dick claims not to have read Acts at the time the novel was written. Dick focuses on two incidents from the biblical narrative: Paul’s trial before the procurator Marcus Antonius Felix (24:1-27) and Philip the Evangelist’s conversion of an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch (8:26-40). The former connection largely hinges on the similarity of names: in Tears, Felix Buckman interrogates Jason Taverner, just as the procurator Felix interrogates Paul. The latter incident shows a more striking correlation: Philip, traveling south from Jerusalem, passes an Ethiopian who is studying a passage from the Book of Isaiah. Philip interprets the passage for the eunuch, who then asks to be baptized. Dick saw a remarkable similarity between this story and the conclusion of Tears, in which Buckman is overcome by compassion and love for a stranger—a black man at an all-night gas station. Dick was also struck by Philip the Evangelist’s name, no doubt particularly since the scene that closes Tears was based on an event in his own life.—GM
* Here Dick provides a concrete analogy that helps illuminate his generally Platonic take on “orthogonal time.” The eternal forms sit on a circular drum and stamp themselves onto a moving strip of time, literally “informing” the linear flow and creating the “two-source” time that we misrecognize as a single fusion of novelty and repetition, change and return. Essentially, Dick is describing a Platonic typewriter—one thinks in particular of the IBM Selectric model popular in the 1970s, an electric typewriter whose type elements, rather than being attached to separate bars, rest on a single “golfball” that rotates and pivots before striking the ribbon and impressing ink on the page. Dick’s metaphysics of media tech here shows how much he saw writing of any kind as a dream machine that models cosmic processes.—ED
* The concept of an underground revolutionary Christian church occurs frequently in the Exegesis and is essential to understanding Dick’s conception of Christian theology. His is not the institutional, conservative church, but the early, persecuted, apostolic community. Dick gravitates toward rebellious Christian thinkers like Joachim of Fiore, Martin Luther, and George Fox, and his conception of the Black Iron Prison—the Empire that symbolizes all injustice—owes more than a little to the apostolic-prophetic depiction of Rome as Babylon. Dick’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit draws on the Book of Acts, which depicts the Spirit’s protection of the early church from its persecutors. But this emphasis also puts him in the territory of anti-authoritarian religious and millenarian movements like the Joachimites, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the early Quakers. For Dick, true Christianity implies or even requires a subversive attitude: as long as persecution and oppression are possible, the true church exists within the resistance to that oppression.—GM
* Empedocles is mentioned throughout the Exegesis, along with other pre-Socratic thinkers, notably Heraclitus and Parmenides. Empedocles wrote two works, both lost, one on nature and the other called Katharmoi or Purifications. In a fragment of the latter, addressing himself to the citizens of Acragas in Sicily, Empedocles declares himself “an immortal god, no longer a mortal, held in honor by all.” In the end, Empedocles both rejected and was rejected by the people and threw himself in despair into Mount Etna in the hope of being transformed into a god. Sadly, a sandal was thrown out of the volcano in confirmation of his mortality. One suspects some identification between Dick and Empedocles, where the latter declares himself divine and is persecuted for his hubris.—SC
* The Hymn of the Soul, also known as the Hymn of the Pearl, is a numinous fable of spiritual homecoming that captures, more than any narrative of antiquity, Dick’s noetic vision of anamnesis. The Acts of Thomas was a third-century apocryphal Christian text, most likely of Syriac origin, but the hymn, sung by Thomas in prison, is clearly an interpolation. Though it shows the influence of the New Testament, some scholars think it is a Mesopotamian fairy tale, or possibly the remnant of a pre-Christian Gnostic tradition whose very existence remains controversial. Of particular importance for an understanding of Dick is the role of the letter; when the occluded hero breaks the seal, “the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read.” Making his way home, the hero finds the letter again, “lying in the road,” like a beer can or a piece of trash. (Later in the Exegesis, Dick discusses the “Xerox missive” in terms influenced by the Hymn, though the values are inverted.) Once home, the hero puts on holy robes that, in Barnstone’s translation, “quiver all over with the movements of gnosis” and that mirror him like a divine twin: “two entities but one form.”—ED
* While Schrödinger discovered the informatic character of living systems, Dick predates the invention of the discipline of artificial life here by positing the possibly living and sentient character of information itself. Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky had already coined the term “noösphere” as a label for the effects of focused attention on the biosphere—the living film of the planet—which itself had emerged from the lithosphere, the mineral substrate of our planet. But Vernadsky did not yet have the modern concept of information with which to push his concept further, as Dick does. While others (Le Roy, Teilhard) took the idea in a more theological direction, all characterized the noösphere as an instance of evolutionary change driven by the dynamics of attention and information.—RD
* Linear time has a rather immediate purchase on our perception. Our finite experience of time—no moment can be simultaneous with any other moment—persuades us that moments actually “follow” one another. But Dick’s experience of what he often describes as divine reality—eternal time in which moments overlap or superimpose themselves—was equally persuasive to him, forcing him to grapple with the possibility that what he had previously perceived as reality was in fact fiction or camouflage. In this passage, Dick floats the rather alarming and counterintuitive idea that the future could alter the present, and he does so by way of orthodox Christian theology, which in his view takes this rather science-fictional concept of time as doctrine. Crucially, Dick effects this movement to the eternal aspect of time through his perception of unity: “I think it’s all the same thing, one found inner, one found outer.” By making all of space and time—the Kingdom of Heaven—“one thing,” Dick resolves the paradox of whether his experience is coming from within or without—a Möbius strip that provides further demonstration of the integration of “inner” and “outer” into “one thing.”—RD
* In his later years Dick limited his drug use to scotch, snuff, and the occasional joint. In his teens, Dick was given the stimulant Semoxydrine as an antidepressant. Between 1952 and 1972, Dick became notorious for his prodigious use of amphetamines, which he reportedly consumed by the handful to keep up his nearly inhuman writing pace. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dick’s house in Santa Venetia became a well-known hangout for teenagers and eventually for serious addicts and pushers; Dick’s experience with the drug scene is chronicled with humor and compassion in his novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Though Dick’s mescaline trip in May 1970 inspired Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, it is not true, as many believe, that Dick wrote while on LSD—a claim that Harlan Ellison made in his introduction to the Dick story “Faith of Our Fathers,” which appeared in his influential new wave SF collection Dangerous Visions (1967). Dick took LSD only two or three times, once suffering a terrible trip spent envisioning an angry god tormenting him “like a metaphysical IRS agent.”—DG
* Victoria Principal (1950-) is a Hollywood actress (Earthquake, Dallas) and one of Dick’s many “dark-haired girls.” Dick was drawn to this particular subset of brunettes throughout his life, sometimes suffering intense crushes on women he had never met (cf. Linda Ronstadt). Dick was especially drawn to Principal, whom he believed could capture the cold sensuality of his android femme fatale character Rachel Rosen in the cinematic adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dick began taping up pictures of Principal around his apartment and sent letters and a copy of Ubik to her. He was heartbroken when she failed to respond. Dick also pushed for Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick to play Rosen. Dick’s penchant for these women inspired his collection of poems, essays, and letters The Dark Haired Girl, published by Mark V. Ziesing in 1989.—DG
* This is the book, published in 1969 by the pioneering parapsychologist Charley Tart, that introduced the phrase “altered states of consciousness” into the already humming counterculture. Although the phrase had already been used by Arnold M. Ludwig a few years earlier, it was this book, and probably this book title, that made the phrase a common stock of the Zeitgeist. As with so much other mystical literature, however, what we really encounter in the Exegesis are altered states of consciousness that are also altered states of energy. That is, what we finally encounter is Conscious Energy.—JJK
* An early reference to the Eucharist, which grows in importance throughout the Exegesis. Here Dick frames the Lord’s Supper as a memorial reenactment rather than a mystical rite; later he will focus on the issue of transubstantiation.—GM
* A contemplation of God’s nature occupies virtually all of Dick’s late-period work, but as he grapples with theology, what is startling are not the more far-fetched notions—anyone who has read Dick’s earlier work expects these—but the more conventional ones. The God who reveals Himself in Dick’s thinking often is very much the familiar humanized Judeo-Christian God. This God acts personally and responds personally in the ways of both the Old and New Testaments; note a few paragraphs earlier, in a passage that is practically biblical, the “trust” that Dick’s God places in “special men” and “prophets.” The upcoming reference to God/Jesus as “Zebra” is first deeply curious, then forehead-smackingly obvious—and fabulous anyway; nothing is more indicative of just how unconventional Dick’s mind is than that his most conventional notions seem most unconventional of all. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, Dick tries to reconcile his own particular God teased out of the fabric of reality and time with the God of millennia worshipped by millions. Which is to say that consciously and unconsciously, herein Dick is finding his place in civilization.—SE
* “The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to set it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if not, then not. . . . my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness—but not complexity, if you see what I mean. The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes—it only emerges by stages and degrees” (from a twelve-page letter to Eleanor Dimoff of the Meredith Agency, February 1, 1960). Here, Dick is just declaring himself, at a time when his major writing was barely evidenced. The glimpse of the future author of the Exegesis is evocative, to say the least.—JL
* With few exceptions, the Exegesis was not a journal where Dick would summarize his daily affairs. As a result, many of the crucial events of 2-3-74 were not written about as they happened, and so it is difficult to know how significant these events were for Dick when they transpired. One day before writing this letter to Claudia, Dick wrote a frantic letter to the FBI, saying that two days earlier (March 18) he had received a registered letter from Estonia, a letter he knew “was a trap, frankly by the KGB.” He makes no mention of that here. Similarly, in a letter written to his daughter on March 17, 1974, the day after “vivid fire” released Dick from “every thrall,” he makes no mention of his life-changing circumstances. March 20 also appears to be the day Dick received the “Xerox missive,” which was to play a crucial role in his later theorizing. This envelope, sent from New York, contained two book reviews with certain words highlighted in red and blue pen. Dick worried that they were coded death messages. The importance of these events waxed and waned significantly in Dick’s life, so much so that even a major event like the arrival of the Xerox missive might go unreported for weeks or months in the Exegesis.—DG
* From this point forward, Dick only occasionally included letters, and hardly ever dated his Exegesis entries. The obsessive, recursive nature of the work and the dearth of references to events in the outside world sometimes make establishing precise chronology difficult, if not impossible. Even if a definitive chronology is someday established, the Exegesis cannot be fully reconstructed as written, since it is clear that at times Dick reorganized his own pages.—PJ
* While this self-encounter occurs as an idea for a plot, it offers an uncanny description of Dick’s own journey. Under the influence of his own writing, and by putting as much of himself as possible into that writing, Dick seems to have seen himself as an abstraction—not in the sense of a deadened thing taken out of its context, but in the sense that software engineers discuss “layers of abstraction”: an act of metacognition or description that at once detaches from and observes other layers of the system. In the Exegesis, Dick observed himself being what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop.” Dick later recognizes that this operation of “meta-abstraction” identifies something about reality—that the world itself is looped with the language we use to describe it. In The Divine Invasion, the child god Emmanuel manifests something like this loop when he performs the “Hermetic transform.”—RD
* Doris Sauter was a dark-haired girl Dick met in 1972 when she was dating his friend (and fellow SF writer) Norman Spinrad. The two later bonded over their growing interest in Christianity, Doris sharing her conversion story with Dick, and Dick relaying the events of 2-3-74 to her. Eventually the two paired up for charity work. In May 1975, Sauter was diagnosed with advanced lymphatic cancer, which she survived. In January 1976, Dick asked Sauter to marry him (although his fifth wife, Tessa, and young son Christopher would not move out of the apartment for several months). Sauter refused. Later that year, when Sauter’s cancer returned and Dick’s health issues—including high blood pressure and heart problems—became more serious, they decided to live together. Doris became the character model for Sherri Solvig in VALIS (1981). Later she moved next door to Dick and became the inspiration for the character in Rybus Romney in “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” (1979) and The Divine Invasion (1981). Sauter was forced to move out when the apartment building converted to condominiums, but the two remained friends until Dick’s death.—DG
* It is not clear from the Exegesis to what extent Dick’s path crossed with that of Theodore Sturgeon, the author of the science-fiction novels Venus Plus X and More Than Human, who herein is mentioned a number of times (as are the SF authors Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Stanislaw Lem). Dick’s and Sturgeon’s outlaw kinship—their shared anarchic spirit, their common ambivalence about the technology that wowed most other science-fiction writers, their subversion of physical and temporal reality in pursuit of emotional or even metaphysical truths—makes sense considering that both aimed for the literary “mainstream” before they were vortexed into genre. Perhaps Sturgeon will become the next Dickian vogue among the literati, notwithstanding his introduction here amid odd ruminations on a reincarnated cat.—SE
* In passages like these, it is impossible to ignore Dick’s obvious and sometimes self-confessed psychopathology—in other words, that the guy often appears, well, crazy. It is tempting to collapse Dick’s mystical realizations into this craziness, as if Valis were nothing more than a symptom of Dick’s alleged schizophrenia, temporal lobe seizures, or whatever. But we must be more careful, and more sophisticated, here. Dick himself thought poignantly and deeply about these and related issues and came to a conclusion that many other thoughtful people—from William James and Henri Bergson to Aldous Huxley—have come to, namely, that the brain may be a kind of “filter,” “transmitter,” or “reducer” of consciousness. When this filter-brain is temporarily shut down or suppressed by whatever means (mental illness, psychedelics, political torture, meditative discipline, a car wreck, a profound sexual experience, heart surgery), other forms of consciousness and reality, many of them cosmic in scope and nature, can and often do shine through. Trauma, we might say, can lead to transcendence, but—and this is the key point—the transcendent state cannot be reduced to or explained by the traumatic context. As with the material brain and its relationship to the irreducible nature of consciousness, the trauma does not produce transcendence. It lets it in.—JJK
* Such lines announce a continuous meta-theme in Dick’s Exegesis—what I have elsewhere called the mytheme of Mutation. This is the notion that paranormal powers and mystical experiences are expressions of the emerging buds or limbs of an evolving human supernature. Although this idea was endlessly explored in the pulp fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, found some of its most sophisticated mystical expressions in the human potential movement, and later found a wide popular audience in the counterculture with its “mutant” hippies and pop-cultural “X-Men,” it is much older than all of these. Indeed, the idea’s deepest roots lie in elite academic British culture, and more especially in the London Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), with figures like the Cambridge classicist Frederic Myers, who saw psychical abilities like telepathy (a word that he coined) as “supernormal” expressions of our “extraterrene evolution.” Further back still, Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of evolutionary theory with Darwin, asserted that there was a second spiritual line of evolution organized and directed by a higher power working toward its own ends. In short, the mytheme of Mutation goes back a century and a half to the very origins of evolutionary biology itself.—JJK
* Dick consistently seeks to uncover some trace of the so-called unwritten doctrine that Aristotle associates with Plato in the Physics, an association that some see as “outing” Plato as a secret Pythagorean for whom ultimate reality is revealed by number. Dick also seeks to identify Plato’s doctrine of the forms with Parmenides’s idea of being as a well-rounded sphere opposed to the nothingness of nonbeing. This notion seems linked in Dick’s mind with another borrowing from Parmenides to which he makes frequent allusion, the famous fragment 3: “For it is the same thing to think and to be.” Also important to Heidegger, whose radical interpretations of the pre-Socratics may have influenced Dick, this fragment identifies the activity of intellection, noesis or noös, with the essential being of things. We might also take one further step and cite Empedocles’s fragment 28, which appears to allude to Parmenides: “But he [God] is equal in all directions to himself and altogether eternal, a rounded sphere enjoying a circular solitude.” The kernel of Dick’s vision is the mystical identification of the soul’s capacity for intellectual intuition with the being of the divine.—SC
* In his extraordinary German sermons, Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) described the kingdom in the soul as the divine spark (vünkelîn), a term that appears elsewhere in the Exegesis. He also called this kingdom the godhead (gôtheit). Such views were condemned by the Avignon Pope as heretical two years after Eckhart’s death. Eckhart’s “heresy” was considered close to the much-feared Heresy of the Free Spirit that, some historians claim, was like an invisible empire across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The core of this heresy consisted in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us, but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God, but of the malevolent demiurge. Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. We might link this to Dick’s view that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age—the time before the fall—to return. In the text of Eckhart’s papal condemnation, we find quasi-gnostic utterances such as: “All creatures are one pure nothing. I do not say they are a little something, but that they are pure nothing.” All this can be linked to Dick’s later Eckhartean allusion to humans as “corruptible sheaves around divine sparks.”—SC
* Dick’s approach to the concept of being “born again” is quite different from the interpretation that developed among evangelical Protestants in the twentieth century. For evangelicals, being “born again” depends on a personal decision, an intellectual/emotional acceptance of a soteriological proposition. For Dick, it refers to a passive event, an invasion—possibly even a victimization—by an outside force. Dick’s “second birth” was not the result of his conversion experience, but its cause. He was personally transformed, but not as a result of his own volition.—GM
* What else was going on in the world in March 1974? As reality’s fabric ripped apart in Fullerton, a jumbo jet fell out of the sky outside Paris, killing more than three hundred people; an Arab oil embargo produced the most pronounced gasoline shortage ever in America, with cars lined up at stations for miles; and the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to restore the death penalty that the Supreme Court recently had ruled unconstitutional. Overshadowing even these unsettling events was the kidnapping in northern California of the heiress of a millionaire publishing family by a band of domestic terrorists; though there is no evidence that Dick shared the rest of the country’s fascination with this incident, which took place in his own backyard, the subsequent conversion of Patty Hearst to the radicals’ cause sounds like a novel that Dick might have written in the fifties or might yet write toward the end of his life. Most prominently, virtually all of Richard Nixon’s immediate political circle in the White House, including his attorney general and chief of staff, were indicted in the Watergate scandal, which had reached critical mass, and the president himself was named a co-conspirator by a grand jury. To Dick, and to the country at large, this was the moment when the Nixon presidency—five months before its end—was at its most toxic.—SE
* The term “exegesis” is most commonly used to describe a thorough interpretation of a biblical text, often based either on its historical context and language or on the revelation of its hidden meanings. Dick’s use of the term implies that he considered his experiences themselves to be a form of scripture, a story to be revealed, explored, and understood. Moreover, his exploration of those experiences is itself a form of continuous revelation, with no clear line between experience and interpretation. But since the experience is ongoing, the Exegesis itself becomes a key part of the narrative. In the Exegesis, Dick is telling a story to himself, and exploring the meaning of that story, in ever-expanding circles of narrative and interpretation.—GM
* The introduction of Zebra brings us close to the center of Dick’s mystical vision. With the “discovery” of Zebra as a mimicker of forms, Dick thinks that he has found his deus absconditus— his hidden God concealed in the phenomenal world. Elsewhere, Zebra is described as a “cosmic Christ” and as a giant brain that utilizes us as crossing stations in his vast relay network of living information. Chains of associated identifications structure the argument of the Exegesis: Zebra equals Christ, and Christ equals God; the mind’s union with Zebra is the union with God, where “you are God.” The kernel of Dick’s mystical “heresy” may be located here: union with the divine.—SC
* The turning point here seems to include not only a positive vision of what reality is but a figure who can intervene to direct events so as to bring reality to fruition in a positive sense. There seems to be a continuing oscillation in Dick’s thought during this period about whether such a reality exists now (and has always existed and will continue to exist into the future), or whether it must be realized through arduous effort and the validation of his vision.—NKH
* After searching in reference books and other sources for analogies to his experiences in 2-3-74, Dick now seems to accept that it may be unique, or nearly so. The discovery is no doubt bittersweet: if others have had similar experiences, his vision would be validated; but if not, his status as a lone visionary is enhanced even more. There is, of course, another way to interpret the realization that an explanation “will have to derive from what I saw”—namely, that it was internally generated as a cerebral event, accompanied by the rearrangement of his neural circuitry.—NKH
* Much of the 1977 Exegesis is taken up with pages like these, in which whole encyclopedia entries are copied out by hand. Taken together they provide a fascinating map of autodidactic study; Dick is led from one thing to the next not to master a field of study or a philosophical system but to try to figure out his own experience. The hunger for legitimacy in these passages is striking—no less an authority than Hegel agrees with him!—but no more so than the insistence with which he returns again and again to ground the inquiry in his own experience and need to understand. Dick was well aware of the idiosyncratic and unauthorized nature of his intellectual quest, as VALIS in particular shows. The novel piles up sources and citations from Dick’s own researches while posing the question of whether the path of Horselover Fat leads to anywhere but the nuthouse. But what the novel does—what it both intends to do and actually does—is extend an invitation. As Fat’s shrink tells him at a low point, “you are the authority.” It is a wonderful gift of permission, and the novel offers it in turn to any reader who needs it. Go forth and pursue knowledge! Even if you’re totally wrong! You are the authority! And more important perhaps, you are not alone.—PJ
* In November 1971, Dick’s San Rafael house was burglarized. The intruders used explosives to blow open Dick’s fireproof safe. Manuscripts and canceled checks were stolen along with a stereo and a gun. Dick speculated for years about the identity and motivation of the intruders; in many ways this endless theorizing prefigures 2-3-74 and his writing of the Exegesis. Dick would construct an elaborate theory about the burglary, complete with motivation and method, only to cast his carefully crafted theory aside when another entered his mind. From Paul Williams’s Rolling Stone profile, it appears that Dick’s obsession with the event grew over time and eventually began to take over his life. The most Dickian suggestion was made by the police: Dick had committed the burglary himself. When Dick could no longer get the police to return his phone calls, he fell into another depression, writing to Williams, probably only partially in jest, “Ever since the police lost interest in me, there’s been nothing to live for.”—DG
* Among all of Dick’s books, including the “important” ones, some of the most haunting remain the early so-called failures: Confessions of a Crap Artist, with its savant regarding the world from the perspective of science journals, comic books, and bondage magazines; In Milton Lumky Territory, in which a man falls in love with an older woman only to realize that she was the second-grade teacher who terrorized and humiliated him as a child; and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, where an archaeological hoax transforms a fraudulent artifact into irresistible destiny (a theme Dick picked up a year later in writing The Man in the High Castle). All were rejected by American publishers and remained unknown for years. It is worthy of one of his own stories to wonder what parallel career would have awaited Dick—perhaps heading off his shift into genre—had these utterly original novels found the readership they deserved when they were written. For a while he was the West Coast’s answer to Cheever and Updike, except, of course, for that Borgesian streak no one yet identified as Borgesian because Ficciones had not yet appeared in English as Labyrinths. What is most striking about Dick’s fiction around the Exegesis is the return to this fifties hybrid: A Scanner Darkly, part confession and part postmortem of an identity crisis, in a near-future where identity is as commodified as anything else; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, beginning in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination and striving for an answer in the rubble of smashed suppositions.—SE
* Virtually all of Dick’s references to computers are metaphorical or part of his new religious terminology. They are rarely technological in the strict sense. It is paradoxical, or at least ironic, that Dick found his natural audience in the digital age, given not only that he died at the era’s outset but also that home computers, I strongly suspect, would only have aggravated his paranoia. I picture him peering deeply into the screen, trying to see who on the other side is watching back; would there have been any doubt in his mind that someone was there? Even Arthur C. Clarke’s more theological meditations (as alluded to earlier herein by Dick himself) accept technology’s role in our growing collective insight as a species, albeit while acknowledging the tension that technology begets. But the digital age has engendered a more widespread consideration and acceptance of the possible alternative realities that earlier readers of Dick’s fiction relegated to the realm of drug-induced hallucination. The eighties cyberpunks who mapped the emerging computer culture, like Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, and Sterling, counted Dick as among their most prevalent influences, even as Dick might well have wondered what the hell Neuromancer was all about.—SE
* With this important concept, Dick presents the visible universe as a moral test. The challenge is to perceive the injustice of the system of the world and to refuse to cooperate with it. The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear indication that it deserves to be rejected. The impetus to “withdraw assent” must come from a transcendent point of view that impels immediate disobedience: the word “balk” implies gut instinct rather than intellectual decision. Moreover, one cannot be aware that the visible universe is a test, because this would lead to calculated action in light of an expected reward. Dick gives one concrete example of his own balking: his participation in the tax strike organized by Ramparts magazine in 1968. By “this-worldly” standards, this was an illogical decision that led to personal hardship, but by “other-worldly” standards, his refusal was simply the right thing to do.—GM
* The flip side of these feelings of self-importance was, for Dick, debilitating paranoia. Many of Dick’s theories placed him at the center of vast, cosmic scenarios, and these preoccupations were often coupled with feelings of persecution. An exaggerated sense of self-importance is common among paranoiacs, who often reason that they must be important if people are out to get them. In a speech to a Vancouver science-fiction convention in 1972, Dick famously noted that any formulation “that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis about what the universe is about” is a “manifestation of paranoia.” Throughout the period of 2-3-74, Dick was also peppering the FBI with increasingly bizarre letters outlining the various plots he felt were at work against him. While in the long run the 2-3-74 experiences seem to have mellowed Dick out, his enlightenment did not come without many a dark night of the soul.—DG
* Discreet Music is the album I’ve listened to most often in the past thirty-five years since buying it when it was released in 1975. Brian Eno (affectionately also called “Brain One”) conceived of Discreet Music as something that might accompany a dinner party, and it was followed up by other soundscape experiments like Music for Airports and Music for Films. Eno’s extraordinary title piece is truly a machine composition; employing an early digital sequencer, looped tape machines, and other oblique strategies, it generates the music algorithmically. Intended to push at the threshold of audibility, Discreet Music is arguably the genesis of ambient music; certainly it and its creator inspired Dick to create the character Brent Mini, the electronic composer who appears in VALIS.—SC
* In this extraordinary passage, the recursive, self-referential quality of the Exegesis goes loopy. The Exegesis is an exegesis after all, which means that it is obsessed with commentary and Talmudic cross-referencing. In addition to Dick’s interminable analysis of his own corpus, there is his regular use of footnotes, which here go haywire. At the top of the page Dick places an asterisk that refers to a small chunk of related text, between which lies the brief description of a dream in which Dick opens one of his own books and discovers a footnote that reads: “this is a gloss in the text for ‘I love you.’ ” Dick then parenthetically defines the term “gloss” as a difficult term needing explanation, a definition that nonetheless requires another explanation, a footnote now using his usual bracketed numeral (1). This footnote offers a variant reading of the meaning of “gloss,” defining it not as the explanation of an obscure term—rather like the explanation that you, reader, are now reading—but instead the obscure term itself—in this case, the cypher-text Felix. A parenthetical amendment about the Greek variant glossa in turn spawns another reference mark, a circled ⊗ that leads to yet another repetitive definition. Finally, Dick reiterates that Felix is such a glossa: a glossy obscurity whose invisible message is, at least in its original context, “at odds with what is apparent.” And what is apparent here, and odd, is the Exegesis reading and writing itself, like a book in a dream.—ED
* This passage reveals much about the logic of the Exegesis and rewards close scrutiny. Here Dick is in great joy: the masterful A Scanner Darkly is hot off the press, and Stevie Nicks is in the headphones. (It must be “Dreams” from Rumours: “I see the crystal visions.”) Yet only one page before, Dick is in full metaphysical despair. He scribbles a lamentation in German; the second half is drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake. At the bottom of that page, as an unnumbered footnote, he declares that this “prayer” had been answered when he subsequently stumbled across the Britannica entry on Jacob Boehme. Though it is hard to imagine how one reads an encyclopedia passage “by mistake,” this random access is important to Dick because it removes his will from the equation, implying cosmic intention. In other words, God answered his lament by guiding him to Boehme, in whom he discovered a secret sympathy across time. However, this whole episode is complicated by the appearance sixty-four pages earlier (entry 50:19 above) of the unusual phrase “divine ‘abyss.’ ” This is a fundamental term in Boehme’s mystical scheme, where it denotes the emptiness of the Urgrund, the God beyond God. Its appearance earlier in this folder, particularly in quotation marks, strongly suggests that Dick had begun reading about Boehme sometime before uttering, in writing, his German prayer. This is a common pattern in the Exegesis: a motif is casually introduced and later blooms into a matter of such great significance that it changes the visionary narrative in retrospect.—ED
* Dick is likely referring to Colossians 1:18–20, which states that “God wanted . . . all things to be reconciled through [Christ] and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.” More specifically, Dick is probably referring to the footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation first published in 1966 and containing extensive theological annotations written by a committee of Jesuit scholars. Dick frequently quotes from this version’s footnotes, suggesting that it was his preferred study Bible (though he is also known to have owned an annotated copy of the New Testament in the New English Version). The notes for this passage of Colossians declare that Christ is “head not only of the entire human race, but of the entire created cosmos, so that everything that was involved in the fall is equally involved in the salvation.”—GM
* While the Exegesis is largely concerned with Western philosophy, Western religion, and Western science, Dick was strongly influenced by his (rather typically Californian) encounter with the East. Hinduism gave him a powerful language in which to think about the absolute and the problem of illusion; his embrace of paradox, organic process, and “the lowly” was deeply marked by his reading of Zen and Taoism, and especially his obsessive use of the I Ching—the ancient Chinese book of changes. The I Ching uses a binary system—yin and yang, broken and solid lines, respectively—to express and model the myriad phases of growth and decay. Like many oracles in Dick’s fiction (including The Man in the High Castle, which was partly written using the I Ching), the book’s messages—a mixture of Taoist, Confucian, and shamanic lore—are accessed through the throw of coins or other randomizing techniques. Indeed, with its computer-like code, its relentless oscillation of opposites, and its reliance on synchronicity, the I Ching gave Dick an early experience of an organic and mystical information entity—Valis before the name. Here the two hexagrams depict the “trash dialectic” that so concerned Dick, graphically figured through the loss and return of a single yang line between the two figures. In the Wilhelm/Baynes edition that Dick regularly used, the movement between these two hexagrams is described thus: “When what is above is completely split apart, it returns below.”—ED
* The Invisible Landscape (1975) was Terence and Dennis McKenna’s attempt to theorize the bizarre high-dose psilocybin experiences they underwent in the Colombian Amazon in 1971. As Dick notes, their text shares many concerns with the Exegesis, which should remind us that Dick was hardly alone in his heady speculations. Throughout the 1970s, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Jack Sarfatti, and many others explored a mode of associative and interdisciplinary theorizing that combined weird science, psychoactive inspiration, occult semiotics, and what can only be called garage philosophy. While sometimes resembling the isolated and obsessional literature of cranks and conspiracy theorists, these speculations also served an underground social function by bringing heads together through a shared language and style. A moment later here, Dick writes, with good reason, that he lived out the process the McKennas described, while Terence later proclaimed, in the afterword to Lawrence Sutin’s 1991 abridgement of the Exegesis: “I Understand Philip K. Dick.” Such mutual resonance also forms the perfect platform for stoned, late-night bull sessions—for friendship, in other words, like the friendships and conversations that fueled Dick’s writing throughout his time in Orange County.—ED
* Between 1947 and 1951, Dick worked for Herb Hollis at University Radio and later at Art Music in Berkeley, jobs that helped him make the difficult transition from awkward teenager to self-sufficient adult. A straitlaced father figure, Hollis served as a kind of mentor for Dick, while his coworkers served as models for Dick’s future characters. Whether with the futuristic ad agency in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the family-run android business in We Can Build You, or the anti-telepathy Prudence Organizations in Ubik, Dick’s fiction constantly recasts his formative years working for Hollis, often focusing on the plight of a small business operation struggling against a more powerful, but less upstanding, competition. In 1977 Dick told interviewer Uwe Anton that “the ultimate surrealism . . . is to [take] somebody that you knew, whose life ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future utopia or dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia.” Dick’s thematic concern for the “little guy,” as opposed to the galactic royalty featured in space opera, was one of the defining features of his work.—DG
* Dick’s higher and lower realms mirror the important distinction he draws in his fiction between man and machine. While machines are predictable, man is not; moreover, the machine is cold and unfeeling, cut off from the plight of those around it. Similarly, in the Exegesis the lower realm is incapable of empathy. Like an android programmed to react in a predetermined way, the spurious world is a deterministic “maze” of unthinking causation that cannot by its nature care about anyone stumbling blindly through its passages. Like the heroes in Dick’s fiction, the true reality of the higher realm is based on its ability to love.—DG
* Here again we meet Dick’s mystical mutants. More importantly, we see the multiple influences that helped shape his zapped imagination of these figures. First, we see a book, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians (originally Les Matins des Magiciens, 1960), which employed the tropes of mutants, superhumans, even Superman, to advance a countercultural occultism inspired largely by the books of the American Charles Fort. Second, we see the importance of Dick’s auditions, psychical experiences (the “tutelary telepathic link”), and dreams, and their profound influence on his writing life. Also significant here is the fact that the first American edition of The Morning of the Magicians was published by Avon, the same publisher that would later publish an edition of Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth. In short, we see here within Dick’s paperback world a mind-bending feedback mechanism or “loop” of pop culture and altered states of consciousness arcing back on itself through countless acts of reading, dreaming, and writing: a morphing superconsciousness published or “made public” in the only form of our culture that will have it—fantastic literature.—JJK
* Here Dick nails two crucial features of the paranormal: (1) the “fantastic” or both-and paradoxical structure of its appearances, which leave the reader, and even the experiencer, in a state of profound hesitation or confusion over the event’s reality; and (2) the manner in which these paradoxical events organize themselves around narrative, story, or, to be more traditional about it, myth. Hence Dick’s “secret narrative” comes first to shape reality, even the physical universe, around its patterns and meanings. Seen in this light, it is a serious mistake to approach a paranormal experience with an up-down vote, as if it were a simple object “out there” that could be measured and controlled. This is to miss its wildly living function and fierce message, which are all about pulling us into its own drama and shattering our either-or thinking through story and symbol. In short, the paranormal is about paradox, not proof; about meaning, not mechanism; about myth, not math. Most of all, however, the paranormal is about the “coincidence” or fundamental unity of mind and matter. Two of Dick’s favorite scholars captured this truth in two Latin sound bites: the mysterium conjunctionis, or “mystery of conjunction,” of C. G. Jung and the coincidentia oppositorum, or “coincidence of opposites,” of Mircea Eliade.—JJK
* Dick’s fiction establishes an unusually strong connection between the author and his characters, and specifically his protagonists: men who are down on their luck and forced to encounter, once again, the inscrutable apathy of the universe. These characters give voice to Dick’s own existential concerns; his third wife, Anne, called his writing “surrealist autobiography.” In a 1970 letter to SF Commentary, Dick wrote, “I know only one thing about my novels. In them, again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength . . . against the universal rubble.” Part of Dick’s charm as a writer is precisely his similarity to his characters; barely eking out a living, languishing as an underappreciated artist, Dick is nonetheless determined to move forward against overwhelming odds. As Dick’s public persona has grown following his death—a persona based in part on his life and in part on the plight of his characters—he has become increasingly mythological. Later reprint editions of his novels often picture Dick on their covers, staring out at potential readers, part author, part fiction, trapped in the half-life of his own stories.—DG
* Dick is often read by literary scholars as a “postmodern” writer. Postmodernism is a complex of concepts that assert that all our constructs are just that, constructs; that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is necessarily a limited and local one. Here Dick realizes that such a way of thinking, which he himself has championed in dozens of novels, is a half-truth, in the sense that its claims rely on a non-duped subjectivity and a privileged claim, which, ironically, is itself a grand narrative or abiding truth. Dick, then, was finally no postmodern thinker, not at least in the sense in which that label is commonly understood. In his own mind at least, his body of work constituted both a demonstration that the sensory and social world is an illusory simulation and a revelation of another order of mind and being from outside this maze of cognitive and cultural tricks. As Dick puts it later on in the Exegesis: “Valis proves there is an outside.”—JJK
* The editors were tempted to cut out several of the numbered points on the preceding list, which, like much of the Exegesis, goes on a bit longer than we might wish. But in a year already full of lists, this one stands out for length and exuberance and deserves to be represented. Paradoxically, the impulse to circumscribe and define unleashes a manic flow of ideas culminating in a lyrical explosion. As is often the case, Dick also writes right through his most breathtaking moments, not even noticing the climax: in the original, the striking number 39 is followed by points 40 to 42, which were enough of a letdown that we could no longer resist the temptation to excise them—even as we opted to include the footnote that continues the flow. All of which is to say that the most difficult decisions we faced in editing Dick’s Exegesis involved how and when to cut him off. It’s tempting to give him the punch lines he doesn’t have time to stop for, and often we have done so. On the other hand, we felt that sometimes we should let the ideas tumble on. We wanted readers to experience a bit of what it’s like to read the original manuscript, page after page after page. It wouldn’t be the Exegesis if there wasn’t too much of it.—PJ
* Anticipating the insights of artificial life, Dick posits a phase transition that he delightfully terms “thresholding.” Just as liquid water must be heated past the threshold of 100 degrees centigrade if it is to become a gas or cooled below 0 centigrade if it is to solidify, so too must the “initial living info bit” undergo a quantitative change if it is to undergo a qualitative change. And this qualitative change entails a change in consciousness such that the self becomes aware of a Möbius strip-like continuity between itself and Christ. Dick deploys the concept of the hologram to make sense of this simultaneously individual and cosmic aspect of human nature, possibly under the influence of psychologist Karl Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. For both Pribram and Dick, one of the most salient and suggestive features of the hologram is that each “bit” or fragment taken from a hologram contains information about the whole. Dick’s reference to the “Swarm of Bees” brain is also resonant with Timothy Leary’s notion of the “hive mind,” but the holographic model, along with numerous entries on free will and volition, suggests that for Dick this collective mind in fact requires free will to function.—RD
* Readers skeptical about Dick’s sanity after reading the Exegesis should pay careful attention to this passage, where he explores the possibility that the events of 2-3-74 were a schizophrenic hallucination. In interrogating the veracity of his visions, Dick examines his own psychological makeup and analyzes what was going on in his life at the time. Simply put, crazy people do not question their own sanity like this, at least as a general rule. I find this one of the most moving passages of the entire Exegesis because, in it, Dick places the cosmic scope of his vision in relation to the lack of love and excitement in his own life and goes so far as to suggest that this loneliness may have given rise to delusions of grandeur. Such honesty is refreshing and points to the sincerity that underlies Dick’s belief in the authenticity of his experiences, as well as his desire to determine whether those experiences were generated internally, as a manifestation of his psyche, or externally, by an encounter with the divine.—DG
* Dick’s mystical vision or apparent psychosis seems to put him in touch with the eternal feminine. This is one of the many moments when the Exegesis resonates with Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), where the erstwhile high court judge became convinced that his body took on breasts and female genitalia in order to be properly penetrated by the rays of God and to redeem the universe. The fusion with the divine is here conceived (poor choice of word, I know) as a kind of transsexual bliss, a penetration (a repeated word in the Exegesis) by the divine. We should also note Dick’s later affirmation of Christianity as the experience of being “the intended bride” of Christ. In 1910, Freud had a lot of fun writing up his interpretation of the Schreber case, although Freud’s text finishes with the wonderfully honest confession that it will be for posterity to judge whether there was more delusion in Schreber’s (or indeed Dick’s) paranoid vision than in Freud’s own theory of psychoanalysis.—SC
* Dick was in many ways a genius and visionary, but this Rome business is just stone screwy. In VALIS, which has the good sense to pretend it might be fiction, an alternate-reality Rome can be accepted as an imaginative conceit. Here it raises the obvious question: Did Dick really believe this? Or is he half-consciously assuming a guise of madness, not so much for the sake of the reader as for his own sake, so as to get—à la the most romantic nineteenth-century notions of madness—at some truth?—SE
* One of the great failures of futurism—whether science fiction or professional prognostication—is the fact that few saw anything like the Internet coming. Though Dick opens Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) with a couple of lonely cubicle workers wasting time on a translation game they play through an absurd information network, Dick’s fiction was no more predictive on that score than anyone else’s. But the Exegesis, here and in many other places, can be seen as an eerie and in some ways optimistic prophecy of our absorption into an all-consuming, endlessly arborizing, weirdly disincarnating information network. With the spread of smart phones, sensors, and GPS devices, the Internet is now reconfiguring physical reality very much the way Dick describes Valis using the world of objects to organize and extend itself as an intentional information system. We still have food, music, and friends (though books are beginning to dissolve), but an increasing chunk of our lives—love and play as much as work and thought—is given over to intensified, cybernetic information processing, what Dick earlier calls the “ ‘Swarm of Bees’ brain.” Though Dick puts a liberating spin on it, his words here also anticipate the grim prophecy of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who wrote that the individual has now become “only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.”—ED
* In this short list, Dick reaches his most succinct and quotable formulation of the gnosis of his fiction. So perhaps this is the time to stand up for Dick’s fiction, in all its waywardness and contradiction and humor, and point out that as infectious as Dick’s readings are, they don’t do justice either to his fiction or to the astonishing intermingling of narrative and reality, fiction and experience, that Dick lived through in, and after, 3-74. As he writes elsewhere, 3-74 keeps changing—as if the experience itself were alive. In fact, it is alive, partly because he keeps feeding it through his fiction. It gets Ubikified. It gets Scannerified. It gets Mazeified. It gets more like the novels as the novels get more like it. How do we get outside this feedback loop of reality and fiction to what really happened? We can ask the novels about that. They say (contra PKD in the Exegesis) there is no outside. It’s all inside—but if you’re lucky, out of that inside a savior of sorts might be born.—PJ
* In this and the subsequent folder, we can feel VALIS (1981) rising on the horizon as specific ideas and even characters in the novel begin to take shape. Messages from the AI Voice intensify in frequency and apparent significance, and a flurry of concepts emerge that Dick will pour into his manuscript, and especially into the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” that appends the novel.—PJ
* Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian scholar of comparative religion who helped develop a school of thought known as the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. This quote draws from Eliade’s early work on yoga, especially his doctoral dissertation turned into a major book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958). If Dick read this particular tome, he would have received a rich education in the history and philosophy of yoga and Tantra in their Indian sources and pan-Asian histories, as well as long literate passages (Eliade was also a fiction writer) on the yogi’s deconditioning and quest for spiritual transcendence and the abolishment of time—a major theme, of course, in Dick’s own Exegesis.—JJK
* Dick’s use of “occlusion” in this passage, directly correlated with the concept of rebellion against God, shows that he is using the term as a substitute for the more traditional terminology of sin. In this, he is largely in keeping with twentieth-century theologians like Paul Tillich, who emphasized that sin, rather than simply a bad or disobedient deed, is more like an ontological state. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich uses the word “estrangement” to illustrate this aspect of sin—a term that emphasizes the essential relationship between created and Creator. Dick’s term “occlusion” makes the separation from God a matter of perception and knowledge, rather than of potential relationship.—GM
* Dick was a passionate, intelligent, and deeply knowledgeable fan of classical, Romantic, and early music. With Bach, Beethoven, and Linda Ronstadt, Dick’s most important musical touchstone in the Exegesis is Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Mostly Dick references Parsifal, Wagner’s final and most religious opera, which pairs an aestheticized sense of Christian ritual redemption with a world-denying, Schopenhauerian view of Buddhism. In VALIS and the Exegesis, Dick quotes Gurnemanz, a wise Knight who enigmatically describes the environs of the Grail castle to the holy fool Parsifal: “Here my son, time turns into space.” But Dick’s imagination was also shaped by Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle, which, after all, features semi-divine (and incestuous) twins, the disastrous forgetting of true identity, and a profound meditation on freedom and fate. Perhaps the most important thing Dick readers can learn from Wagner, however, is the dynamics of the leitmotiv: the recurrent musical phrases that Wagner used to invoke characters, objects, and ideas. The persistent archetypes of Dick’s fiction, as well as the author’s endlessly rehashed metaphysical concerns in the Exegesis, unfold through the repetition, transformation, and recombination of such familiar elements. Just as Wagner philosophized through music, Dick philosophized through fiction—and, in the Exegesis, made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return.—ED
* This is the first explicit mention in the Exegesis of the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura,” the treatise of “hidden writing” published as an appendix to the novel VALIS. From the Exegesis it is clear that the raw material that Dick would shape into the “Tractates” was already in existence before the novel itself was written. Some entries of the published “Tractates” are direct quotations from the AI Voice (including 7 and 9), but beyond these, the published document does not quote the Exegesis so much as refine it, showing, as do subsequent entries, that Dick clearly thought of the “Tractates” as a distinct document designed for public consumption (and, he no doubt hoped, illumination). Dick struggled with how to integrate the text into his novel, as well as how to think about their relationship. Once the manuscript for VALIS was completed, a few portions of the “Tractates” were in turn cited in the Exegesis.—PJ
* The first six pages of folder 9 consist of manuscript pages from VALIS. Coming thousands of pages into the Exegesis, they cut like a knife. Where did this voice come from? One almost expects the handwriting to be different, but it isn’t; equally disconcerting is that in the midst of these passages that end up almost word for word in the published novel, Dick breaks into exegesis again to briefly explore one of his multiple time-track models of 3-74. Then it’s back to that voice. In future Exegesis entries, Dick will sometimes treat the novel as little more than a vehicle for the Tractates, which he grants the authority of scripture. But the novel gives us much more than that, as this excerpt shows: a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic, heated imagination that is both ruthlessly realistic and sympathetic, even tender, toward the lost soul he understands himself to be. It reminds us that in the end what we have here, all gods aside, is a human being just trying to write himself into a better place.—PJ
* Dick is most likely referencing Rudolf Otto’s comparative study of Meister Eckhart and Sankara, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1932). Otto (1869–1937) was a major German scholar of comparative religion who helped introduce the term “the holy” or “the sacred” (das Heilige) into the field, by which he meant, in his Latin phrase, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, a mystical presence at once terrifying and alluring (an idea that Dick clearly draws on in other parts of the Exegesis). “Master” Eckhart (1260–1327) was a Dominican scholar and preacher whose most radical mystical teachings were condemned shortly before he died. Sankara (eighth–ninth century) was one of the most important expositors of Advaita Vedanta or idealist “nondualism” in medieval India. Stunned by his own paradoxical experience of the inside being outside and the outside being inside, Dick was picking up on the similarities between the two intellectual mystics here, which he could now see and understand precisely through his own experiences.—JJK
* This compelling but cryptic passage represents Dick’s recovery of one of Schopenhauer’s key aims: salvation from the world of illusion, and the attainment of intuitive access to what Nietzsche, in his early Schopenhauerian phase, saw as the mysterious and Dionysian unity of being that is the unconscious will, whose blind urgings Dick here identifies with God. If the core of the Exegesis is a blissful recovery of intellectual intuition, of gnosis, then a corresponding Schopenhauerian theme that emerges is that our existence in the phenomenal world is an experience of suffering and pain. Human life is a kind of mistake, a detour on the way to life’s goal: death. Indeed, a recurrent feature of the lives of mystics is the experience of dejection and depression, understood as distance from God. Such despair occurs repeatedly in the Exegesis and with greater frequency in the later years, as in [90:69]: “When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.”—SC
* We see not unity but an “exploded” chaos. Dick sees a world of suffering, including his own, yet Valis offers reintegration through “entelechy”—the actualization of divine potential akin to the development of an embryo. Shattered, we dwell in an explosion of false categories, divided from the eternal in space and time. Despite this rhetoric of “explosion”—resonant with the 1971 burglary of Dick’s Marin County house and the explosion of his fireproof file cabinet, something like the Big Bang of Valis—the divine reality remains to be integrated through a consciousness willing to “go there.” Fragments of trash become what Gabriel Mckee calls the “god in the gutter,” as the most abject or insignificant phenomenon becomes a “splinter” connected in reality to the One. Here even suffering and evil can be creatively understood as a finger pointing elsewhere—beyond the dispersed consciousness of our splintered selves and toward the collective eternal Noös, a communion of mind that can only be discovered by each of us in our own particularity. This is perhaps a calling in a triple sense: Dick calls—names—the perception of the integrated Noös “Valis,” and the articulation of this perception is also, clearly, his calling, his vocation—and perhaps ours.—RD
* Faced with the problem of how to map time and space when they no longer obey the logics of linearity and extension, Dick turns to more virtual models of infodynamics. Note that in this instance information is viewed as an “aspect” of reality rather than its essence. One of Dick’s refrains in his contemplation of 2-3-74 is a line from Wagner’s Parsifal: “Here, my son, time turns into space.” Here Dick posits a continuity between all time and space through recourse to a higher order of abstraction: the informational aspect of reality. But Dick avoids the usual opposition between “information” and reality.—RD
* Dick’s handwriting changes here, midpage, to a wild, overheated scrawl. Such moments are scattered throughout the Exegesis. Here and in many cases, Dick’s rush of ideas seems to reflect the labile intensity of his holograph, as if a distinct shift in consciousness has taken place.—PJ
* The difference between “is” and “does” underlies a good deal of Dick’s theorizing as he navigates between traditional philosophical questions about the essence of things (ontology) and a process paradigm based on genetics, informatics, and cybernetic systems theory. Within this latter paradigm, with its heuristic emphasis on process, experiment, and rules of thumb, philosophical questions about the “true nature” of things just get in the way of exploring the possibilities and problems in any given situation. After all, the skepticism that Dick also favors can always undermine notions of God and Being, but has a tougher time denying the evident fact that, even if you cannot know what the world really is, you still have to deal with it. And dealing with it means that, on some level anyway, your options are open because you have choice. Process leads toward pragmatism—the philosophical equivalent of the handyman who recurs throughout Dick’s fiction. In the following folder [6:44], Dick will make this point more explicit. Acknowledging there that truth is plastic—even and especially in a “metaphysical” zone like the bardo—one still faces the most concrete of questions: “I ask, not, ‘What is true?’ but, ‘What modulations shall I imprint on the stuff around me?’ ”—ED
† We can detect a new mood in the Exegesis that deepens as Dick’s thinking evolves: a dialectical mood. Whether this is conscious or not, Dick seems to be close to Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the historical process, through which new shapes of Spirit appear and dissolve, is a highway of misery. Crucially, however, the highway does not end in despair, but in the self-consciousness of freedom understood as self-determination. This insight might be linked to Dick’s later references to history as an engine of pain and suffering that culminates in the achievement of human freedom, or the closing entry of the Exegesis, on the dialectic of pain and hope.—SC
* Here Dick identifies his thinking with the Marxist idea that history is a dialectic that will culminate in communist revolution. In part, Dick is attempting to engage the leftist literary critics whose interest in his work in the 1970s both pleased and unnerved him. At the same time, Dick’s thinking already employs dualistic motifs that cast history as a dialectical conflict between the forces of Empire and those who struggle for freedom—what is described elsewhere in the Exegesis as the struggle between God and Satan. We should also note Dick’s frequent identification of true Christianity as revolutionary and Christ as a revolutionary figure. In this way, Dick retrieves the historical link that has often bound together rebellious quasi-gnostic movements, like the Cathars or the Heresy of the Free Spirit, with forms of insurgent political populism and indeed communism. Giordano Bruno, one of the other “heretics” to whom Dick is attracted, also professed a charismatic yet hermetic pantheism that has long been linked to forms of radical anti-Church insurgency. That is why, in many small Italian towns, a statue of Bruno, often erected by the local Communist Party, stands facing the principal Catholic church.—SC
* What an odd, and incredibly paranoid, idea. And a popular one. We see something similar with the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We see an even closer version of this extraterrestrial mind-control computer in John A. Keel’s The Eighth Tower (1975), a book that Dick easily could have read. The “eighth tower” is Keel’s mythical way of referring to the machinelike origin-beacon of something he calls the superspectrum, an electromagnetic spectrum of physical and metaphysical energies that produces all the occult and paranormal phenomena found in folklore and the history of religions—from the angels and demons of medieval lore to the Big Foot and UFOs of today. For Keel, this same technology also produces the “devil theories” of history, that is, the religious revelations that claim to be final truths when in fact they are no such thing. The result is endless wars. Unless we can stop being fooled by the signals of this superspectrum, violence and absurdity will continue. Keel is obviously performing a kind of thought experiment here of the most radical sort. So was Dick.—JJK
* Just as the Exegesis responds to Dick’s calling, so readers of the Exegesis may be called on to investigate Dick’s claims, to test them through what B. Alan Wallace dubs “contemplative science.” This means that, along with Dick, we must be wary of treating our investigations as anything more than models of reality. The “Son” discussed elsewhere by Dick is born out of the “immaculate conception” of thought—the removal or emptying of previous thought formations. This path of contemplative science can be hard going—Dick asks us to consider the idea that our sense of historical ground does not exist, where nothing important has changed since ancient Rome. Humans suffer, are exploited by large-scale institutions, grow old, become ever more confused, and die. Buddhism describes this as Samsara, the “wheel of dharma.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra describes the repetition driving history as the most terrifying thought—the thought of eternal return—but Dick suggests that it is through practices of contemplation and exegesis that the real horror—the false perception of linear time—is overcome. This is not the Rapture predicted by fundamentalist Christianity, but the corrected perception of our nature as both human and eternal.—RD
* Dick’s realization that the deity he describes is a projection of his own beliefs leads him to the conclusion that God has manifested Himself in precisely the form he had already accepted and was prepared to believe in. What lines of reasoning insulate Dick from the other obvious conclusion: that what he has described not only takes the form of his projection but is his projection? There seem to be two answers to this question: first, his prior commitment to the existence of the deity; and second, his earlier theory about the deity’s ability to mimic reality in all kinds of ways. A deity that can mimic what we take to be reality becomes, in effect, bulletproof against any objection, for any deviation or change in what (for us) constitutes reality can be explained by the difference between a deity that simply is reality and one that mimics reality.—NKH
* Despite what we are repeatedly told by the dogmatic debunkers, there is a rich and impressive scientific literature on precognition. Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been one of the real pioneers here, particularly around what he calls “presentiment,” a kind of Spidey-sense that many people appear to possess that allows them to sense dangers or desires a few seconds into the future—in short, a humble form of Dick’s future modulation. What is perhaps most significant here, and not always recognized, is that the parapsychological literature strongly suggests that most psychical functioning takes place unconsciously (or in dreams), that is, below the radar and range of our conscious selves or functioning egos. We are Two, and our second self is a Super Self.—JJK
* When W. Y. Evans-Wentz first prepared the Bardo Thödol for its English edition in 1927, he called it The Tibetan Book of the Dead in order, one suspects, to link it to the popular Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dick owned the 1960 edition of the text, which had been reissued with a new introduction by Carl Jung. A funerary text designed to be read at the bedside of the dead, the Bardo Thödol is more accurately called Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The intermediate state in question is the bardo, the spectral halls of transformation that lie between the death of the body and the almost inevitable rebirth of one’s mind-stream: most souls are made so variously terrified and lustful by the apparitions that they are inevitably sucked back for another round. For the Buddhist practitioner, release lies in recognizing the emptiness of these projections, which are nothing other than one’s own mind. Dick’s insight here—that the bardo is actually our world—is perfectly in sync with traditional teachings, as the “intermediate state” refers not only to the afterlife but also to sleeping, dreaming, sneezing, and life itself. We are always in a liminal zone. For the Tibetans, an escape of sorts lies in the clear light of nonconceptual mind; Dick’s more wayward light is pink, which is also, in Tibetan iconography, the color of the supreme lotus of the Buddha.—ED
* Here Dick suggests the radically liberatory possibility that reality, the Tao, the Palm Tree Garden, can break through the present if “you” will “destroy” prior thought formations, including those that separate “you” from the One. Here Dick resonates with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who wished only to awaken from the nightmare of history, an awakening later perhaps achieved by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Readers familiar with Zen, or Korzybski’s notion that “the map is not the territory,” or the “stillness” in which the divine can manifest in Quaker or Vedic traditions, will recognize some of the practices appropriate for a world mediated and constituted by the multiple “objectified” mistakes of language and other previous thought formations. In this sense Valis “comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law” (Mt 5:17) by overturning prior concepts like so many tables in the temple. “For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:20). Righteousness here is anything but self-righteousness. It is instead the humility and practice necessary to silence the mind in order to perceive reality, a “causal field” unmistakably affected by the language by which we model it.—RD
* Dick’s holograph is notably erratic throughout this folder, pulsing in waves of ecstasy and calm. Given the manic diagramming throughout the folder (a full-page example is included in this volume’s insert), as well as his invocation of Diana and the fairies, this may well represent the “superdope” episode to which Dick refers in a later folder [83:60].—PJ
* As noted in other annotations, Dick’s line of speculation here is remarkably similar to the vision of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), who imagined that God wanted to change him into a woman and impregnate her with sunbeams so that their offspring could save the world. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) wrote one of his most famous case studies about Schreber in Three Case Histories: Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911), basing his diagnosis on Schreber’s detailed memoir Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Though the two never met, Freud diagnosed Schreber as a paraphrenic paranoid suffering from—surprise!—repressed homosexual desires. While Dick’s vision here is remarkably similar to Schreber’s, he makes no mention of the judge anywhere in the Exegesis, though Dick could well have encountered the case given his extensive knowledge of psychology.—DG
* As noted earlier, Mircea Eliade was a well-known and much-read scholar of comparative religion who was at his professional height when Dick read him in the 1970s. Here he is referring to one of Eliade’s major early books, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), a massive survey of the anthropological literature as it existed around 1950, organized around Eliade’s own glosses and comparative reflections. Eliade focuses especially on the initiatory illness, magical powers, healing function, poetic gifts, and mystical experiences of the shaman and, perhaps most of all, on the shaman’s role as a psychopomp. Eliade also emphasizes the quest for the recovery of sacred time before the “Fall” into history, here understood in the most general sense as linear temporality, finitude, and mortality. This abolishment or transcendence of time, of course, is also a central concern of Dick’s. Hence, I suspect, his deep admiration for Eliade’s work.—JJK
* Another new mood is here announced in the Exegesis: a tragic dialectics. Dick has come across Coleridge’s understanding of tragedy, which adapts the early ideas of F.W.J. Schelling. Schelling held that the essence of tragedy consists in a collision between the tragic hero, who is free, and fate, which is the limitation of freedom, the realm of necessity. The sublimity of tragedy consists in the demonstration of freedom in the confrontation with that which destroys it. This is what we see, for example, in the tragedy of Oedipus. Tragedy is here linked to the idea of suffering leading to an experience of truth, as when Aeschylus says repeatedly in the Oresteia, “We must suffer, suffer into truth.” These tragic insights might also be linked to Dick’s repeated references to Euripides’ Bacchae, in particular the collision between King Pentheus (bad) and the god Dionysos (good). These also look forward to a closing passage in this collection where Dick describes the Exegesis as a collision between himself and “what oneself has writ.” On this view, the Exegesis might be interpreted as the entirely self-conscious enactment of a tragic dialectics that moves between the poles of suffering and salvation.—SC
* In this act of perceiving the “ultra-thought,” Dick is very close to another California sage, Franklin Merrell Wolff. Wolff, a Harvard mathematician who gave up a position at Stanford in order to study in India in the 1930s, deduced a series of axioms about human nature that follow from his first axiom: “Consciousness without an object is.” “Consciousness without an object” is consciousness “beholding” nothing but itself, which is palpably not an object but is experienced as fact. Wolff’s experiences of “recognition” are instructive for comprehending (and therefore experiencing) the invisible landscape of Dick’s epic quest. So too does Dick’s passage here reflect the other aspect of this inner beholding—“reality as knowledge.” Once one has looked within, one contemplates external reality and inner reality as the “same thing.” Astronomer Carl Sagan repeated biologist Julian Huxley’s phrase that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Dick’s investigations of the concepts and practices of the noösphere in the Exegesis emerge out of this perception of ourselves as physical manifestations of thought.—RD
* Like a lot of readers, I consider Dick an idea-man rather than a stylist. Generally he doesn’t write sentences that hold within them whole worlds; rather, his collective work has to be taken together to add up to something—at which point, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the House of Dick is bigger on the inside than out. But this sentence is one of Dick’s most exquisite and enigmatic and feels full of wisdom, even as I’m not sure what it means no matter how many times I read it. The whiplash words, of course, are “yet accurate.” Given how precisely stated the rest of the sentence feels, I must assume they have been phrased precisely as well—but they also feel not so much in juxtaposition with the rest of the sentence as like a virus of syllables that has invaded the others.—SE
* Dick’s Christianity is sometimes revolutionary; here it becomes Marxist. This is not quite the leftist Christianity of liberation theology, which was hitting its stride in the ’70s. Dick’s “dialectical materialistic mysticism” instead puts him in line with continental thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, whose visionary angel of history sees what we experience as time and progress as a mounting pile of wreckage (or kipple). Dick also anticipates the contemporary return to Christianity found in continental philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Central here is the notion of event. Dick elsewhere describes Christ as “an event in the reality field”—a radical rupture in the determined logic of history, and therefore the opportunity for a leap into actual change. For Badiou, our politics should be based in our fidelity to such moments; Dick’s event, 2-3-74, is mystical but no less demanding. Equally relevant here is Dick’s sometimes Žižekian twist on dialectical materialism. Some thinkers fetishize a final Hegelian Whole; though Dick is attracted to such totalizing unity, he also recognizes that there is always a remainder: the little guy, the discarded beer can, the questions left hanging by every theory, whose development into another theory he elsewhere compares to the sprouting of a mustard seed.—ED
* In the following sections, Dick’s holograph grows larger and increasingly frenetic.—PJ
* These cosmic flip-flops are not sandals worn to an Orange County beach, but logic gates at the basis of computers, wherein the change of a single bit at a single gate can alter the entire meaning of a message. Dick’s encounter with the Tao, reality as it is, occurs in perhaps equal measure to the planet’s historical transformation into digital information and to his own horror of and fascination with simulation. By conceptualizing VALIS as both the Tao—an ancient model of two-state flux between yin and yang—and DNA—a double helical molecule organized in base pairs according to a triplet code—Dick again integrates the seemingly antithetical traditions of modern science and traditional mysticism even as he “harmonizes” the seeming opposition of life and death into a whole contained by each part.—RD
* “Suppose . . . time is round,” Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly, speculating that as explorers once sailed west in order to circle the world to India, we might sail into the future only to shipwreck on the shores of Jesus’s crucifixion two thousand years ago. Of course, the explorers didn’t reach India, they reached America, an altogether different version of the past that came to be called the future. By the same token, we might suppose Dick’s career was round as well; as he wrote his way into the future of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the mainland of science fiction receding behind him, he saw before him an altered version of his strange novels of the fifties, all the more singular for how they contextualized his cracked vision not in outer space but in the new American suburbia as saturated with madness as its front lawns were with water and fertilizer. Setting aside the cosmic and religious preoccupations of God and infinity, in a purely literary sense Dick’s contemplation of the “infinite” also integrates his literary output, not to mention the vicissitudes of his career, into something coherent; though this might seem banal compared to God and infinity, to Dick such a consideration of literary identity was tantamount to formulating a sense of who he was and why—because a writer doesn’t do, a writer is.—SE
* This and the next two folders are largely taken up with examinations of the following “G-2 dream,” and thus with various conspiracy theories concerning the Xerox missive, Soviet espionage, psychic weapons, and the like. In this they resemble a good deal of the nine-tenths of the Exegesis that is not represented in our abridged edition. While such paranoid speculations might delight fans of the cold war spy thriller or David Icke, they quickly become monotonous and, as Lawrence Sutin has written, produce “much heat but little light.” Of more interest to the editors have been passages in which Dick struggles with or transforms, rather than succumbs to, the intense paranoia that clearly was one (but only one) of 2-3-74’s effects.—PJ
* Dick and his twin sister Jane were born six weeks prematurely. Dick’s mother was unable to produce enough milk, and Jane died of malnutrition a little over a month after her birth. Culturally speaking, it may be the most significant instance of such trauma since Elvis Aron was haunted by Jesse Garon. The single strangest scene in all Dick’s work comes in Dr. Bloodmoney when a young girl who has ongoing conversations with an imaginary friend is finally taken by her mother to a doctor, who discovers that living in the girl’s side is a twin brother the size of a rabbit. Might they be considered conjoined, in that they share a body and brain? If they share a body and brain, do they share the memory that Dick now struggles for tens of thousands of words in the Exegesis to disown? If they share memory, do they share a soul—a possibility that potentially undermines Dick’s attempt in the Exegesis to divide soul from memory? In any case, they have shared everything except birth, which Phil shared with Jane and the resulting duality of which is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, expressed in Presley’s case by the division between heaven (gospel) and hell (rock-and-roll) and in Dick’s by his literal sense of living two lives at the same time or, more precisely, in two times that coincide.—SE
* Metaphysical paradoxes abound in these sections: first the comments on the reintegration of the divine and trash, and then this equation of defeat and victory. The latter image, illustrating multiple reversals, is the more complex: Christianity defeated the Empire with the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion, but the Empire won by reversing the early church’s anti-authoritarianism. Then the church covertly won by its preservation of a hidden minority of true, rebellious Christians. Furthermore, the image of the sliced-up fish echoes the early church father Tertullian’s statement that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” In both the “divine trash” comments and this eviscerated fish image, there is a sense of reality being the opposite of appearance: God is to be found, not in glory, but in abasement; the martyr’s subjection to death is actually a great victory for life.—GM
* This is exactly the kind of sophistication we need, desperately need, from our religious visionaries. No more stupid literalisms, which no one but the unthinking can believe anyway, but an unblinking recognition that whatever is coming through is, well, coming through. Put a bit less unclearly, what Dick is doing here is recognizing that (a) yes, something profound is indeed coming through, but (b) it is coming through the filters of his own socialized and encultured brain, personality, and upbringing. Dick is our teacher here. It is in this way that we can come to understand, finally, that extreme religious experiences are true and false at the same time, and that, sometimes at least, it is only in the symbolic modes of myth and metaphor that the deepest truths can appear at all. This, by the way, is precisely what Mircea Eliade intended with his language of hierophanies (a term that Dick used often)—that is, real appearances of the sacred through the contexts and conditions of the local culture and personality. We have two teachers here, then: Philip K. Dick and Mircea Eliade.—JJK
* These wonderful passages on Beethoven almost make one wish Dick had been a music critic, and if one senses more authority on behalf of classical than pop, well, who needed another rock writer in 1979? Why not someone to make a case for the modern relevance of Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, and Schubert? Among other music he mentions in the Exegesis we find Eno (Discreet Music), the Beatles (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” through which God speaks to him), David Bowie (more the cinematic Bowie than the musical one), Neil Young (though he doesn’t know it’s Young, referring to a cover version by a band called Prelude), and Paul McCartney, on whose first solo album he blames a “psychotic journey,” surely the only time McCartney has been credited with such a thing.—SE
* Nineteenth-century writer Thomas Carlyle, writing of his own Valis-like experience in his semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, asks, “How paint to the sensual eye . . . what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man’s Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?” Exhausting the quest to describe the extraordinary unity of what is, we can focus our awareness on ordinary reality and explore not only the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but the unmistakable actuality of the unity of our subjective experience. In focusing on the unity of self, we glimpse the unity of reality. For Dick, this discovery is the occasion for the world flipping inside out, “reverting.” His Palm Tree Garden is akin to the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Luke—a way of training the mind to perceive both the eternal and the particular aspects of experience, both external reality and internal subjection. Search for this inner kingdom continuously, and we no longer see simply “through a glass darkly,” but instead perceive the immanent and eternal order of the cosmos as the unity of within and without. This possibility shifts the burden of Dick’s inquiry—and it shifts often, as if dancing—to an inquiry, not into the nature of Valis and the “essence” of all things, but into the realm of this space and time.—RD
* This dream spawned the fractured fairy tale The Divine Invasion (1981), a broken novel leaking visionary gems. One of these is the “holoscope,” a layered, three-dimensional holographic Bible, pulsing with red and gold, that can reveal fresh messages depending on the reader’s interactive angle of view. In some ways a model for the Exegesis itself, the holoscope is also drawn from the Exegesis, or at least from the hypnagogic vision Dick records a few pages after this apocalyptic dream, on [48:839]: a luminous red-and-gold tetragrammaton (YHWH), resembling the plasmate, that pulses along to the repeated phrase “And he is alive.” Less groovy is this second coming dream, which drips with the satanic panic and homophobia popular among the more rabid of America’s fringe Christians. Dick sometimes shared in this deeply unfortunate strain of the Christian imagination: a tendency to demonize made possible in part by the concept of a conspiratorial Satan. Elsewhere in these late folders, Dick pines for the return of the “rightful king” who will be recognized only by the “elect”; in March 1981, he records a dream in which “God (Valis)” is finally in total control and “the separation of the sheep from the goats has begun.”—ED
* The work of Martin Heidegger becomes progressively more important to Dick as the Exegesis unfolds. Dick has a sense of Heidegger’s question of Being and its link to the question of time through Dasein, which is Heidegger’s term of art for the human being and the key concern of Being and Time (1927). Dick shows an understanding of some of the key concepts in Being and Time, especially thrown-ness (Geworfenheit), anxiety (Angst), and uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Dick also references the concept of authenticity, the condition for which is Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, a crucial element as well in the existential psychology that influenced Dick. Dick shows some sense of what is at stake for Heidegger in the recovery of Parmenides’ fragment “It is the same thing to think and to be,” with its suggestion of the sameness or unity of noein and einai, thinking and being. Yet, Dick’s reading of Heidegger is singular, to say the least. Here Dick wants to identify Heidegger’s concern with Being with God in the form of the Hebraic YHWH, which is something that would have alarmed Heidegger, as he was prone to a certain deafness regarding the Judaic God. Elsewhere, Dick identifies Sein with the universe and states that in creating the universe the godhead was forced into sin. Through his reading of Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, Dick also persistently connects Heidegger’s thinking to the radical stances of early Christianity and Gnosticism.—SC
* Dick refers to Luther specifically here, but he’s speaking more broadly of a number of Christological theories that propose that Christ’s crucifixion constituted the punishment deserved for all of the sins of the world. In Dick’s formulation, it is not a question of Christ suffering a necessary penalty, but rather of his disrupting the very machinery by which the punishment of sin operates. Christ tricks the system, not by substituting himself in the place of the individual sinner, but by convincing the system that no wrongdoing has occurred that merits punishment. It is a substitution, not of one being in place of another, but of misinformation in place of accurate data. The reason for the substitution is mercy: Christ’s realization that the justice meted out by the system is not just.—GM
* Dick’s opposition to the concept of determinism is here carried to its most extreme: opposition to the very idea of natural law. Dick places the moral value of the individual (the means) above the selfish genes that drive the organism to reproduce (the end): the being itself is greater than its programmed purpose. Dick refuses to accept a mechanistic or deterministic explanation of life; to do so in his view is to ignore the actual experience of living. If a mechanistic principle underlies human life, he suggests, then it is a fetter to be burst.—GM
* This passage displays an odd eerie resemblance to Plato’s description in the Phaedrus (at 247c) of how the immortals travel up and outside in order to stand on the backside of the heavens, which is imagined as a revolving sphere from which they can contemplate what lies beyond, that is, what exists outside the sphere. Here, perhaps, we find Dick walking on the balloon of the cosmos. Dick, of course, saw all sorts of profound connections and similarities between his own experience of Valis and ancient writers like Plato and Plotinus. Here is another.—JJK
* The idea of God as a constantly evolving dialectic is perhaps Dick’s most intriguing theological proposition, and here he gives a possible origin for this self-conflicted deity: the question of means versus ends. The top-level good (an orderly and harmonious cosmos) requires a base-level evil (the suffering of individual beings). The paradox of the greatest good requiring the greatest evil and the corresponding split in the godhead constitutes a major advance from a more simplistic dualism. Put into the matrix of Christianity, this God in crisis becomes the Father (the original creator of reality and author of the Law) and the Son (the redeemer whose mercy fulfills and abrogates that Law). The notion of a dialectically evolving God also resonates strongly with the ideas of other twentieth-century theologians, most notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom Dick mentions frequently) and process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (who appear later in the Exegesis).—GM
* There is a rich and sophisticated literature drawing parallels between quantum physics and various forms of mystical experience. Most trace this literature back to the appearance of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics in 1975, the book to which Dick is alluding in this passage. Capra gave these parallels real cultural traction via his eloquent writing, his own revelatory altered states of consciousness and energy, and, perhaps most of all, his ingenious illustrations demonstrating the complementarity of mind and matter. Having said that, it must also be observed that the physics/mysticism complementarity has a much longer history. The American anomalous writer Charles Fort, for example, was already naming the “teleporting” (a word that he coined) behavior of subatomic quanta a matter of “witchcraft” in the early 1930s. The pioneering quantum theorist Niels Bohr was so impressed with the similarities between the double nature of light (at once particle and wave) and Chinese Taoism that he chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms. And the physicist Wolfgang Pauli engaged in a quarter-century correspondence with C.G. Jung in order to pursue a similar both-and vision of physics and psychology—a friendship, moreover, that produced one of the most productive parapsychological notions of all time: “synchronicity.” All of this is wrapped up in Dick’s “I knew. . . .”—JJK
* This is the mystical, even paranormal, flip side of the postmodern insight. In a world in which almost everything is constructed, plastic, and malleable, what (or who) is doing all of this constructing and shaping? Here Dick takes a cue from anthropology (the “participant-observer” in the field), Kantian philosophy (“you can never know the universe as it really is”), and literary studies (the hermeneutic fusion of interpreter and interpreted) in order to suggest that such a both-and situation points to vast potentials and powers. The real question, of course, is what constitutes those “certain circumstances” under which these potential powers might manifest. Dick’s own certain circumstances had a name: “Valis.”—JJK
* Despite his idea that this is a new revelation, Dick is close here to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, whereby the material world evolves toward spiritual communion. While Teilhard writes of the increasing “complexity” of evolution, Dick here writes of “negentropy,” a concept first developed by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the effort of living systems to create order to offset their production of entropy. While thermodynamics compels all closed systems to dissipate exergy (useful energy), living systems seem to increase order in the course of development; in Schrödinger’s terminology, they “feed” upon negentropy. Significantly, Schrödinger turned to the Vedic concept of Brahman or Self to make sense of an important local instance of negentropy—his own consciousness. Dick’s treatment of reality as a “very advanced game of Go” also anticipates the cellular automata models of physicist Stephen Wolfram, though the model goes back at least to John von Neumann’s 1947 discussion of “self reproducing automata,” a concept that would later help manifest Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—RD
* Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century theologian, was the most influential apocalyptic thinker of the medieval period. He believed the world was on the verge of a golden age in which all men would be monks in direct communion with God. This third age would be governed by the Holy Spirit, replacing the earlier ages of the strict Father and the intermediary Son. Though Joachim himself does not seem to have considered himself a revolutionary—indeed, he only wrote his ideas down at the urging of the pope—his followers in later centuries were often sharply anticlerical, and some were antinomians and anarchists. It’s easy to see how his idea of a procession of ages leading from subjugation to absolute freedom could have revolutionary applications. Though he does mention “religious anarchists,” Dick here doesn’t focus on rebellion so much as the flow of divine information and the source of religious authority: the third age means the loss of all intermediaries between the individual human being and God.—GM
* Latin for “in that time,” that is, mythical or sacred time, as in the stock phrases “in the beginning” or “once upon a time.” Mircea Eliade used the expression to refer to traditional religious attempts to escape or annul “profane time” (understood here as linear temporality or what we now call “history”) and return to the “sacred time” referenced in myth and reenacted in religious ritual. Always capable of being “remembered” and so reactualized (hence Dick’s constant invocation of anamnesis) within the narratives of myth and the actions of ritual (like the Eucharist), sacred time is essentially no-time or beyond time. We might say, then, that what Eliade imagined in his comparative theorizing Dick seems to have realized in his experience of Valis. But this may be much too simple, as Eliade once noted that his own dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him “the reality of experiences that cause us to ‘step out of time’ and ‘out of space’ ” (Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude Henri-Rocquet, 1982). In short, there was also an experiential subtext to Eliade’s theorizing. He was not simply speculating. He was also confessing. And it was this experiential, essentially mystical subtext that I think Dick was intuiting, illo tempore, as it were, in his repeated embrace of Eliade.—JJK
* This folder is over three hundred pages long and combines handwritten notes, beginning with number 498, and typed, dated pieces. Dick grouped these into sections marked I through XVIII, a Roman numbering system that continues for several more folders. Because of the complexities introduced, we have opted to use sheet numbers beginning with 1. This folder begins with a conceptual breakthrough about “meta abstraction” and peaks with a theophany on November 17, 1980, which appears at [1:262] below. At the close of that extensive entry, Dick writes the resounding word “END”—which is immediately followed up with a footnote and more discourse. At some point after this theophany, Dick also composed the title page that begins this folder, whose original is unfortunately missing.—PJ
* This “involuntary chain of mental events” is crucial because it captures the way in which Valis is simultaneously something that Dick experienced in the freedom of his own consciousness and something that seemed to happen to him. And what happened to him, here at least, was One thing. Plotinus’s “One” is consonant with that other philosopher of the Perennial Philosophy, Sankara, who referred to reality as “one without a second.” In other words, despite appearances, everything we perceive in the world, including ourselves, has the attribute of unity. This is both a message—“Monistic Newsflash: Tomatoes, Tomahtoes, It’s All One!”—and a feeling: the self becomes an attribute of something immeasurably larger than itself. This insight is at once immensely obvious and notoriously ineffable: one either perceives the unity of all things or not, and Dick very much has. The experiences of “aha” that pepper the Exegesis are moments of immense creativity as well as insights into the inner realms.—RD
† The terms reticulation and arborizing explain the meshed and often baroque nature of reality, which is, pace the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, the “same as it ever was.” Apparently destroyed by its transformation into “bits” of information, the collective remains whole as “God’s memory,” another level of abstract topology that integrates the apparently chaotic multiplicity of the world through an infolding, outfolding, and branching of reality that resembles physicist David Bohm’s notion of the “implicate order” out of which all of reality emerges. Focusing our attention on this reticulation, as Dick does, affects reality itself via the noösphere: “As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order.”—RD
* Just as the manifestation of Valis is one of organizations, patterns of meaning, neural networks, and the collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries—that is, just as Valis is a revelation of hyperconnections—so too now works the radiated mind of Dick himself. Dick has in effect become a super-comparativist, and so he is able to draw connections and organize disparate patterns of information, like Valis, through huge stretches of space and time. And why not? Paradoxically, Valis works through history and yet exists, as a hyperdimensional presence, outside the box of history. This “abolishing of time” is especially evident in the history of religions and, more precisely, comparative mystical literature, to whose patterns and similarities Dick is powerfully drawn. In this particular passage, the double-edged sword of the comparative imagination is evident: bits of truth can indeed be found everywhere, but the full truth is nowhere to be found; religious systems are both true (as approximations or reflections) and false (as final and complete answers) at the same time. Today a much simpler form of this double-notion is crystallized in the oft-heard quip “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Such a position is often demeaned as fuzzy, as narcissistic, as “New Agey.” In fact, it constitutes a quiet, but radical, rejection of religion in all its dogmatic and dangerous forms.—JJK
* Among the many exotic and ominous diagnoses that may be proposed by those inclined to put Dick’s visions into a medical or neurological framework, one simple and relatively benign description hides everywhere in plain sight. “Micropsia” is the name for a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and of vast reorientations of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it’s a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. I suffered it myself, came to cherish it, and felt bereft when the episodes ended. I’ve subsequently been fascinated by how many different writers I care for—Julio Cortázar, J.G. Ballard, William Blake, Christina Stead, and certainly Dick (and Swift)—seem at some point to be attempting to gloss the micropsia sensation in imagery or metaphor.—JL
* The following description of Dick’s November 17, 1980, “theophany” is arguably the single most important entry in the entire Exegesis: it offers a fully developed interpretation of Dick’s mode of theoretical exploration, expressed in some of the most beautiful prose he ever wrote. In the face of despair at the interminability of his theological exploration, Dick meets a vision of a God at play: this entire theological exercise is presented as a game between omnipotent deity and created being. Moreover, the infinitude of Dick’s theories itself becomes proof that God is the beginning and end of his experiences. In light of the ideas presented in the theophany itself, Dick’s conclusions at the end of the entry—that 2-3-74 was caused by Satan and that the Exegesis is therefore a diabolical “hell-chore”—are surprising. Perhaps we can read these remarks not as Dick’s final conclusion, but rather the development of another theory about 2-3-74, and thus the beginning of another infinitely tall pile of computer punch cards.—GM
* The visionary episode of November 17, 1980, is one of the peaks of the Exegesis, as sublime a modern parable as Kafka’s “Before the Law.” These pages are also bona fide mysticism—not because Dick had authentic mystical experiences (whatever those are) but because Dick produced powerful texts that twist and illuminate vital strands of mystical discourse. Here we are in the apophatic realm of the via negativa, which, like Dick’s game-playing God, deconstructs all names and forms in the obscure light of the infinite. Elsewhere Dick tips his hat to Eckhart and Erigena, but the apophatic mystic his writing most invokes here is Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). By analyzing paradoxes, Cusa pushed reason toward a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) that blooms finally into the coincidentia oppositorum, or coincidence of opposites—a mystic coincidence that Dick achieves here through a manic and corrosive intensification of the dialectic. But perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of Dick’s 11/17/80 account is that his God here has nothing to do with the divine abyss of the negative mystics. Instead, he is a character in a story: part playful guru, part Palmer Eldritch, and part Yahweh, screwing around with Adam because there is nothing better to do.—ED
* Not surprisingly, Philip K. Dick scholars have been keen to defend the author against the popular (and also understandable) stereotype that he was just a druggy. It’s true that Dick gobbled pills and drank amphetamine shakes; his psychedelic use, though infrequent, was also important, as was the nitrous oxide trip at the dentist’s office that revealed Valis “as an arborizing, reticulating vine.” Here, the quaint reference to “Mary Jane” (marijuana) reminds us that, just as speed amplified his productivity, so too did cannabis amplify his visionary capacity, both on and off the page. For Dick, cannabis served as an engine of creative perception, but like all visionary drugs, it also staged a visionary paradox that lies at the heart of the Exegesis (and much of Dick’s fiction): whatever freedom and sublimity is on offer requires a passive submission to perceptual machinery. Drugs can push the mind toward infinite speeds and meditative slownesses. But they also, like Valis itself, possess their own alien logic. The arborizing chains of associations that striate the Exegesis, and that cannabis and other drugs insistently multiply, may just as readily bind as liberate.—ED
* Dick focuses on agape, a Greek term for total love, as a guideline for navigating those realities that are enmeshed with our thoughts about them. Agape calls us to cherish beings for what they are, and for nothing else. Over and over, Dick insists that his monistic vision is not pantheism, for his vision depends upon the very difference between self and other, world and the divine, that makes agape possible. Nondualistic in its essence, agape acts like a kind of mantra whose very utterance makes us quiver or stridulate in a vibrational intensity of self-other interaction. Agape makes us say it out loud, act like a fool, not knowing what is up or down, inside or out. It welcomes what Dick elsewhere calls the “integrity of the einai of the other.” Does Dick offer Valis, the ultimate other, this integrity as well? Perhaps the Exegesis could be seen as a cherishing of the einai of Valis, an act of radical love. Dick offers life to Valis in the Exegesis, and this agape extends to the world itself.—RD
* A lot of Dick’s cosmology boils down to loving and being loved, something that was difficult for him throughout his life and especially his five marriages. Dick’s writing often depicts his own struggle to open up and make himself vulnerable to the people around him. In his 1975 essay “Man, Android, and Machine” he writes, “A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. . . . He stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that ‘No man is an island,’ but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.” Given how fully the Exegesis is committed to a God who cares, I suspect that some of Dick’s obsessional speculation may have been a form of therapy, a way of working through his problems, of assisting himself in his quest to become a better person and connect with others. Part of this transformation involved altering the way he saw the world. No longer an adversarial place that might squash his hopes and dreams, it becomes a divinely infused garden, a safe place for him to share his fragile self with the world.—DG
* Even in his most megalomaniac moments Dick never suggests that the Exegesis itself will ever be read. But the fact that, improbably, we are reading these lines gives the question he poses here and elsewhere—what is the value of all this thinking?—a certain urgency for us as well. If the Exegesis is his delusion and “hell-chore,” it is now ours too. Dick is never more honest, nor more passionate, than when he’s questioning, then defending, the solitary path of inquiry that has become his life. As bitterly as he complains of the emotional and physical cost, again and again he reaffirms his commitment to tracing this maze that is also a work of art and a route to God. But what is it for us? This question was often in my mind as I read the eight thousand manuscript pages that shared my Berkeley apartment these past years. How many exegeses are tucked away in attics, never to be read? Should they be read? Might some of them be as brilliant as Dick’s, and no more delusional? It is Dick’s larger life’s work that has rescued these traces of an intellectual journey that most likely would otherwise have been consigned to the recycling bin. Thus, his solitary path becomes, for a while, our own. The first rule of this particular ordeal is: you must go where the inquiry leads. Yet that means, of course, that you must question the inquiry itself. The temptation—I frequently felt it myself—will be to come down on one side or the other of the dilemma that Dick here states in characteristically metaphysical terms: hell-chore or road to God? But the dilemma may be unresolvable—one of those matched pairs of irreconcilable opposites that Dick loves to discover are driving the universe: it is road to God and hell-chore, divine path and curse.—PJ
* Dick’s take (or one of his takes, at least) on the question of law and grace is not too dissimilar from that of John Calvin, who distinguished between the Hebrew Bible’s “covenant of works” and the New Testament’s “covenant of grace.” In Dick’s formulation, the Torah is an all-too-strict mechanistic system, based on an inflexible equation of transgression and punishment. As elsewhere, Dick is preoccupied with determinism, which he considers an evil; love/grace/mercy breaks through the requirements of normal causality. Compare this statement on the rigidity of Torah with Dick’s comment in the essay “The Android and the Human” that the android mind is characterized by “the inability to make exceptions.”—GM
* One of the great charms of the Exegesis is the presence of Dick’s ballpoint diagrams, which remind me of the blackboard drawings that Rudolf Steiner sketched during his metaphysical lectures. Most of Dick’s drawings are abstract illustrations—flow charts, Venn diagrams, intersecting 3-D planes—that lend a concrete form to his ever-mutating conceptual schemas. But others focus on the fish sign, his persistent icon of downloading divinity. Formally, the shape invokes the vesica piscis or mandorla, a geometric pattern often found in the almond-shaped auras of Christian iconography. Variations appear throughout the Exegesis, where the fish morphs into everything from a third eye to a vagina dentata to the mysterious “whale mouth sign” of Albemuth. This doodle shows a distinct development of the form, which, according to a February 14, 1978, letter to Ira Einhorn, reflects its original visionary disclosure as a “series of graphic progressions” from fish to one-eyed mandorla to spiral DNA. Like most sacred geometric forms, the power of Dick’s fish sign lies partly in its “Platonic” ability to replicate itself through a variety of concrete situations. But a more unusual aspect lies in this animated quality—the sign’s DNA-like potential for differentiation, for transforms that unfold stories about the (double) ties that bind.—ED
* Given Dick’s leap into what he calls meta-abstraction, it is perhaps predictable that he would imagine a life form that, rather than embodying information in a substrate, is pure information itself. The conceptual trajectory he traces here grew steadily in Western scientific culture from the 1930s to the 1990s, drawing in genetics (DNA as the information carrier and the “book of life”), information theory (where information is treated as a dimensionless probability distribution), computational theory (where the computer hardware is often treated abstractly as an ideational form rather than a physically present device), and a host of other fields. Writing in 1981, Dick did not live to see the countermovement toward embodiment that took place in the late 1990s among scientists and philosophers grappling with information, biology, and systems theory. At the same time, Dick himself insisted on the sensory immediacy of his experiences in 2-3-74. He may have thought he glimpsed a life form that was pure information, but he himself was keenly aware of the embodied nature of his own thought.—NKH
* In this passage, Dick anticipates some of the most revolutionary physics of the late twentieth century, especially Edward Fredkin’s idea that underlying quantum mechanics and particle physics is a digital substructure, from which the former phenomena emerge as a result of its computations. There is an interesting tension between imagining the computer as the lowest, most fundamental level of reality, which is Fredkin’s position, and Dick’s vision here that the computer is somehow above the phenomenal world. While one may suppose that Dick’s meta-computer would be the ultimate cognitive machine (hence Dick’s identification of it with “God”), the implication of intentionality and meta-consciousness would not be a necessary (or even a possible) consequence of Fredkin’s notion of a computer at the lowest level of reality. In both cases, however, the positing of a digital machine leads to the important consequence that reality is fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. Time and space, in Fredkin’s view, operate like the frames of a movie. Rather than the continuous fabric of reality we think we experience with time and space, both are actually discrete, and the illusion of continuity is created because the frames flash too fast for us to detect.—NKH
* With this folder, Dick returns to handwriting, and from here on out the folder contents are increasingly scattered. One folder may include chunks of several distinct entries, suggesting an indeterminate amount of missing material. At least some of the rearranging is clearly deliberate: several long folders (81, 89, 90, 91) continue to use the Roman numerals that started with folder 1, as if he is picking and choosing from Exegesis entries with some editorial purpose (though the logic of these choices is, unsurprisingly, enigmatic). He also begins to introduce alphabetic letters to his numbering system, which significantly help the work of sequencing, though questions remain: there are at least three distinct alphabetical sequences in 1981 and ’82, none of them complete. Rather than attempt to reconstruct the scattered entries, we have opted in almost every case to present existing folders as is; exceptions will be noted.—PJ
† Throughout this folder, Dick reflects on VALIS in light of the novel’s publication in February 1981.—PJ
‡ Dick’s claim for the “revolutionary and political purpose in the style” strikes me as astute, if immodest. This reminds us again how Dick’s late-life novelistic triumphs in VALIS and Transmigration, as well as in A Scanner Darkly earlier, depend on his reintegration of his abandoned mainstream aspirations and therefore display “anamnesis” of his earlier study of his would-be midcentury cohort. In a 1962 letter he advised an aspiring science fiction writer: “Read great writers like James Joyce and Pascal and Styron and Herb Gold and Philip Roth.” He added: “Avoid other people interested in writing.”—JL
* Dick is no more a philosopher or theologian than were Vincent van Gogh or L. Ron Hubbard. Dick was one of the most important American novelists of the last half of the twentieth century, and what he offered wasn’t the clarity and rigor of a philosophical vision but the imagination and ambiguity of a literary one. The “philosophy” is erratic, even crackpot; but joined to the act of storytelling—and more importantly, joined to the act of creating characters as fucked up as their author—the result was a synthesis of imagination and idea that spoke more profoundly than any “philosophy” to the questions of Dick’s work: What’s the nature of reality? What’s the nature of humanity? What’s the nature of God?—SE
† There is something deeply illuminating about Dick’s declaration that he is not a novelist but a fictionalizing philosopher whose concern is not art but truth. We are here in an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but a consequence of fiction and a work of fiction. I think this puts Dick in the same neighborhood as that other self-consciously fictionalizing philosopher: Nietzsche.—SC
* After seven years of spinning an astonishing plethora of theories, the fact that Dick can now admit to his “failure” to provide a “workable” explanation is remarkable. His insight here that the abstract emerges from the noisy particulars of the world, rather than, as in the Platonic model, from an ideal reality of which empirical reality is a flawed copy, is a growing realization in science studies as well. In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) Nancy Cartwright argues that all that ever actually exists is the noise of the world, from which scientific “laws” are abstracted. In a very different sense, contemporary interpretations of quantum mechanics provide similar insights. Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and his collaborator James Hartle have proposed that in the “quantum fog” represented as probability clouds, certain consistent world histories “decohere” (assume definite trajectories) and stabilize at a coarse-grained level of reality larger than the quantum scale. We might analogize their vision to tiny demons knitting the fabric of the universe according to different instructions. As such, the stabilities that constitute scientific “laws” emerge from a probabilistic froth at the quantum level in which different kinds of world trajectories are encoded. In this view, the froth counts as the ultimate reality and the stability as the epiphenomenon, as Dick intuited.—NKH
* This passage presents a supernaturalist theory of divine action: Christ acts on the world only by miracle, and never as a result of predictable, materialist, or mechanical causes. More fundamentally, however, it shows Dick’s preoccupation with freedom from determinism: Christ is not constrained by the same forces that limit created beings and objects. He is an effect without a cause. We see this same rejection of determinism throughout the Exegesis: even when presenting reality as a moral test with a “right” answer, Dick is concerned to show that we must not be aware of the test, lest our actions be guided by the knowledge of a reward. For all his searching for the rules that govern reality, Dick is deeply dubious that God would impose unappealable rules on his creations. This issue will arise again later in Dick’s consideration of the replacement of the Creator’s rigid law with Christ’s merciful love.—GM
* Dick here refers to Charles Hartshorne, who developed Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy into a full-fledged school of theological thought. Whitehead described a reality made up not of things but of a procession of events. Hartshorne, picking up from Whitehead’s own theological exploration of this idea, depicts God as an absolute being in constant flux, relationally connected with and constantly affected by the universe. Dick’s conception of the dialectical nature of both reality and deity dovetails strongly with process theology. But Hartshorne also insisted on the absolute free will of the universe and all within it—an idea that the more deterministic Dick does not seem to carry over into his subsequent exploration of reality as a binary system.—GM
* Here we see Dick’s impulse toward synthesis shift into hyperdrive; he assembles multiple systems of thought and references as if they can be seamlessly joined without contradiction. What we gain from such a loose assemblage is a vague sense that these multiple systems have something in common, but the details of exactly how they can be articulated together remain elusive. For example, Capra argues that the field model of quantum mechanics posits the field as the fundamental entity in reality, in which the appearance of particles can be understood as “knots” or places where the field intensifies and begins to manifest itself as particles rather than waves. Hence it posits reality as an underlying continuum. This is in direct opposition to the basic assumption of the computational model of the universe, which argues that the ultimate nature of reality is discrete, not continuous. It is difficult to see how we can reconcile the sharp contrast between these two fundamental premises, not to mention the many other contradictions and irresolvable conflicts that arise as the assemblage grows.—NKH
* Here Dick compares the binary forking model (derived from a computational model of the universe) to the “two slit” experiment that famously demonstrated that electrons can manifest as both waves and particles. When electrons are beamed at a single slit behind which sits a detector screen, they manifest as particles. However, when a second slit is added, interference waves appear. Depending on the experimental setup, then, electrons can appear as either waves or particles. Dick’s analogy is based on the indeterminacy that a binary forking model and the two-slit model both imply. Subatomic particles demonstrate an indeterminacy expressed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in which the momentum and position cannot be co-specified with an accuracy greater than Planck’s constant. With the binary forking model, indeterminacy arises because of the complexity of interactions between multiple independent agents acting simultaneously, as in a cellular automata model. In the former case, the observer becomes implicated in the supposedly “objective” state of the particle because he chooses the experimental setup; in the latter case, it is not the presence of the observer that prevents accurate prediction but rather the complexity of the simultaneous interactions. The two cases have different epistemological consequences and lead to different kinds of questions about the nature of reality. Again, we see here a suggestive gesture that, if worked out in rigorous details, raises more issues than it solves.—NKH
* For all its eccentricity, the Exegesis is ultimately a rational exercise: Dick develops a hypothesis, applies its framework to his experience, and examines how well the theory fits the facts of his experience (or at least his current shaping of those facts). Dick was never a writer of hard science fiction, and his stories don’t generally adhere to a strict standard of scientific plausibility. But here he applies a loose variation on the scientific method to explain and rationalize his experiences. In this respect, the Exegesis shows more “scientific” influence than Dick’s science fiction.—GM
* Here Dick offers what is perhaps the most striking rationale for his theorizing: the ability to formulate and conceptualize an experience so that the affect associated with the experience can be captured and re-evoked by meditating on the theory. Without doubt, a theory that does this would have utility for the person who evolved it; the question then is whether it would have the same or similar effect on people who did not have the original experience. I doubt that it would work this way for most people reading Dick’s theories. By contrast, his fiction, with its rich contexts, suggestive characterizations, and haunting themes, clearly has this kind of power. His theorizing is important, then, not so much on its own account as for the insight it gives into his creative processes and the deep unconscious motivations that drive his fiction.—NKH
* I feel Dick struggling to reassure himself that God is at once more and less rational than Dick himself—whichever prospect seems less threatening at the moment. Dick spent many years and books trying to figure out God, his clearest and most vivid take (and, perversely, maybe most hopeful) up until the Exegesis probably being the utilitarian divine spray-can of Ubik. But for all of Dick’s apparent attempts to reconcile a good god and a bad world, his creation of an altogether more malevolent alternate world—in which there persists not only the Roman Empire but its manifestation in the form of Richard Nixon, and in which God is doomed to be even more hapless and ineffectually benign—raises questions as to whether Dick really is looking for reconciliation or to expose a God who at least has failed us all, if not actually betrayed us. Or is He, as we’ve suspected all along, just not fully in charge?—SE
* The assertion that Dick’s last three novels, in many (important) ways so divergent, should be read as a “trilogy” is annoying, to me anyway. As novels, they simply don’t add up that way (nor is Divine Invasion at the level of the other two), yet the term sticks; here, Dick shows unmistakable investment in it himself. On the one hand, keep in mind that in the wake of Star Wars and Tolkien, what publishers called “Sci-Fi” briefly enjoyed a weird boom that made best-sellers out of some of the long-suffering writers Dick could view as peers—Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, and others—and that nearly all of their commercial hits were in the form of declared “trilogies” (even if some of those involved four or more books). Why not ride the unlikely gravy train? On the other hand, here was a mind more than a little prone to view things as interconnected. He’d begun to see his long shelf of earlier works forming a single tapestry of meaning. Shouldn’t these new ones braid together as well?—JL
* United Artists picked up an option for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in September 1973, netting Dick a check for $2,500. When it was announced that Ridley Scott would direct Harrison Ford in the $25 million movie, it was clear that Blade Runner, as it was to be titled, was designed to cash in on the success of Star Wars. Though Dick was skeptical of Hollywood, he was excited about the project, especially after seeing footage from the film. The movie’s backers wanted Dick to write a novelization of the film based on the screenplay, which differs markedly from his novel. Dick was promised a $50,000 advance as well as a large cut from all print tie-ins if he would rewrite the book to more closely resemble the movie. Though the deal might have earned Dick as much as $400,000, the contract also stipulated that the original version of his book be taken out of print. After much soul searching, Dick turned down the offer and instead accepted a $7,500 advance on the mainstream novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Sadly, both The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Blade Runner debuted after Dick’s death.—DG
* Here Dick confronts one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of mysticism. On the one hand, some modern thinkers assert that mystical experience—here rendered in the language of the human potential movement as Maslow’s “peak experiences”—enables us to transcend conceptual thought and to directly glimpse reality as it is. In contrast, more skeptical voices insist that mystical experience is, like everything else, a construction; our groks are mediated by cultural expectations, conceptual filters (including linguistic signs), and the peculiarities imposed by the structures of human consciousness. Here Dick embraces this latter Kantian argument, but pushes it in the direction of more traditional claims of revelation. Peak experiences are not real in themselves, but neither are they simply projections or hiccups of the individual mind. Like everything else, experiences are signs. But through meta-abstraction, we can intuit them as a special kind of sign: an “ultra-real” (or hyper-real) sign that points, not back to our own language or neural hardwiring, but to an ineffable ground that eludes both words and “things.”—ED
* When Dick claims that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is his best novel, in and of itself the statement is meaningless because every writer wants to believe this about his most recent work. So it’s profoundly satisfying, in no small part because the book will prove to be his last novel as well, that one can make as compelling a case for Transmigration as for The Man in the High Castle or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Paradoxically, for all its theology and philosophical aspirations, and for all the visionary craziness of Dick’s work as a whole, Transmigration becomes a contender for his masterpiece even as it’s the most earthbound of his books. The reason is clear. Though Dick is fascinated at the outset with Bishop Timothy Archer, Angel Archer takes over. Over and over Dick argues that Angel is just a creation of style, which is why in a nutshell authors shouldn’t waste two seconds trying to understand their own books. Elsewhere he lets out the real secret and the Exegesis’s bombshell: that Angel is his twin sister Jane. Smart, sardonic, and unsentimental, strong and compassionate and unflaggingly honest, surrounded by death and suicide, she is Dick’s greatest character, pursuing salvation and reliving its revelations, and concluding, “You will remember the ground again.”—SE
* This is an impossibly rich passage in which the theme of eucharistic transubstantiation (the blood of Christ) is linked to Valis (the plasmate), a kind of human-divine hybridization (the interspecies symbiosis and cross-bonding), and the dual-brain Double God (Ditheon), all of which are in turn linked to the registers of sexual union (the hierogamy or “sacred marriage”) and, in true Phil Dickian style, the act of reading. Through these different registers Dick presents the hermeneutical acts of reading and interpreting the New Testament as an esoteric process of mystical union and erotic divinization.—JJK
* The radical interconnection Dick perceived between himself and the cosmos extended to the natural world—what I have elsewhere called the “ecodelic” insight that we are not separable from the biosphere in which we live. In this sense, 2-3-74 enabled Dick to look beyond the illusion of our separation from each other and the biosphere. This revelation was anything but comfortable. Ordinary consciousness is essentially predicated on this separation; when it becomes palpably false, ecstasy and panic can follow in equal measure. Even as Dick was beginning to experience a modicum of financial success, his insight into our interconnection had much greater impact on him than his growing income, so much so that he feared for his health.—RD
* Here Dick extends his ecodelic insight to the population of the planet, whose spiritual and ecological destinies have now become one. This “leverage,” however, must be recognized and experienced if it is to have any effect. The years since Dick penned this line have been a mixture of recognition and denial. Is it still possible to tune in to Valis’s ecodelic frequency? Might we receive the Valis transmission today?—RD
* The mind-body split here allows the formulation of two seemingly distinct entities (mind on the one hand, body on the other) to be worked into an analogy of humans as mind, ecosphere as body. Thus the poisoning of the ecosphere becomes the mind poisoning the body, without which it too will perish. Dick realizes, on the contrary, that mind and body are an indivisible whole. It therefore follows that the poisoning of the ecosphere means that it is his body being wounded by the activity of other humans, a conclusion consistent with his view of himself as an avatar or surrogate of Christ. The connections here are implicit rather than explicit, but they help to explain why he sees the “investiture by Christ” as the crucial element in seeing the ecosystem as sacred.—NKH
* This notion of reversing signs and reading backward comes remarkably close to the position of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), a German philosopher who helped found the modern study of religion by pioneering its central theory of projection, that is, the notion that all statements about the deity or the transcendent are in fact statements about human nature and its needs, wishes, and fears. In his The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach performs reversals and backward readings very similar to those Dick calls on here, reading, for example, the biblical notions that “God created man in his own image” as “man created God in his own image,” or “God is love” as “love is God,” and so on. Whereas the later Feuerbach was certainly an atheist and a materialist, it is not so clear that the early Feuerbach was. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Feuerbach can be read as a modern Gnostic thinker who sought to reverse and reduce orthodox claims back to their original base in human nature, which he, paradoxically, considered to be infinite and divine. So the divine projection is “reduced” to its projector, who is secretly divine.—JJK
* There is no way to overestimate or repeat enough this exegetical fact: for Dick, writing and reading are the privileged modes of the mystical life. Writing and reading are his spiritual practices. His is a mysticism of language, of Logos, of the text-as-transmission, of the S-F novel as coded Gnostic scripture. The words on the page, on his late pages at least, are not just words. They are linguistic transforms of his own experience of Valis. They are mercurial, shimmering revelations. They are alive. And—weirdest of all—they can be “transplanted” into other human beings, that is, into you and me via the mystical event of reading. Here, in this most stunning of Dick’s notions, the cheap S-F novel becomes a Gnostic gospel, words become viral, reading a kind of mutation, and the reader a sort of symbiote.—JJK
* Another “defeat is victory” paradox. Though Dick does not seem to have made the connection himself, these statements are reflective of Martin Luther’s “theology of the cross”—the idea that God conceals his glory within the humiliation of the crucifixion. Compare Luther’s notion with, for example, Dick’s earlier statement in the Exegesis that the deity “will be where least expected and as least expected” ([16:14]). Here there is an added level of complication, with the evil in which good hides itself pretending to be good: a classic example of the Dickian “fake fake.”—GM
* Does the divine camouflage itself to allow us our freedom? Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit articulates the epic quest of self-knowledge through the lens of German Idealist philosophy, scolded readers and told them to go back to the Greek Mysteries if they fell prey to the world’s ultimate camouflage: “the truth and certainty of the reality of objects of sense.” For those who believe that everything simply is as it seems, Hegel recommends that they “be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learnt the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.” This scolding, too, just might be an act of agape, as Hegel points to the same sacred site as Dick: Eleusis, where the quarry, again, would seem to be prior thought formations that must be destroyed. The Exegesis asks us to look beyond the camouflage of everyday reality toward the One—“the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine.”—RD
* This quotation is from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion (1958), an important overview of Gnosticism that shows the force and persistence of the idea of enlightenment by a ray of divine light. For Jonas, this direct contact with the divine divinizes the soul in turn and allows it to see the vile world for what it is: nothing. At the core of Gnosticism, for Jonas, is an experience of nihilism, namely, the view that the phenomenal world is nothing and the true world is nothing to be seen phenomenally, but requires the divine illumination reserved for the few. In the epilogue, Jonas shows how postwar existential philosophy and particularly the work of Heidegger can be seen as the modern transposition of this Gnostic teaching. Here the world is no longer the creation of a malevolent God, but simply the series of phenomenal events that are causally explained by natural science. Of course, these explanations don’t solve the problem of nihilism; they shift and deepen it, leading the modern self to oppose itself to an indifferent or hostile nature and to try to secure for itself a space for authentic freedom. For Jonas, although Gnosticism embodies a powerful temptation for a soul thirsty for God in the desert of the world, it is a temptation that must be refused. For Dick, things are not so clear.—SC
* Novelists have always wrestled with the great Selling Out to Hollywood Moral Dilemma, but I’m not sure any have ever escalated (or plunged) it to such a metaphysical (or hysterical) paroxysm. These passages are also at odds with claims made by others that Dick told director Ridley Scott the movie was exactly the way he imagined the novel; clearly he had other feelings. For better or worse, however, there’s no underestimating the impact of Blade Runner, not merely on the public recognition of Dick but also on the perception of his writing. The movie gave a visual identity to work that never was especially imagistic (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said comes closer visually to Blade Runner than does Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Even for those readers who were familiar with Dick’s work before the film, recollection of his books now takes a visual form that is equal parts Dick’s imagination and Scott’s advertising background in London. In a way that, of all people, Dick might understand—that what’s perceived is a collaboration between who has created it and who has perceived it—Dick himself has become a collaborated invention. All that said, and his histrionics aside, props to Dick for the artistic integrity and courage to resist Hollywood’s efforts to usurp the original novel and re-“novelize” it.—SE
* Picking up again on the theme of tragedy, here Dick discusses Hamlet in terms of the duality between the usurper king (Claudius) and the true king (Hamlet himself, both the murdered father and the mourning son, who share the same name), who is “mad” and a fool. It is not difficult to imagine some identification between the character of Hamlet and Dick himself; after all, “mad” Hamlet declares that the world is a prison (act 2, scene 2). And the idea of a usurper on the throne is consistent with the Gnostic bent of Dick’s worldview, where the false king of Empire has marginalized the true king through an act of murder. Dick identifies a similar dualism in the opposition between Pentheus (the illegitimate king) and Dionysos (the true king) in Euripides’ The Bacchae.—SC
* The very fact of Dick’s obsession with forming this overview of his work is noteworthy: though I question whether it’s healthy—there’s a point beyond which a novelist is better off not thinking too much about what he’s doing or why—in retrospect it’s astonishingly prescient; we know that in a few months Dick will be dead. Did he sense it as well? Is the pell-mell urgency of the Exegesis driven not only by madness or revelation (whichever you believe) but by a ticking of the universe’s clock in his ears? The ego behind all this is off the charts and accounts for how Dick can formulate a cosmic view that places himself at the center; without it, however, we probably wouldn’t have Flow My Tears, Scanner Darkly, or Transmigration, never mind the Exegesis (which was more crucial to its author than to the reader). So the flip side of what must seem megalomania to a reasonable person is the audacity on which nothing less than artistic survival depends, the defiant assertion that, in the face of his own obscurity, in the course of a life during which the Library of America hadn’t yet found the foresight or cultural imagination to acclaim him (and wouldn’t for another quarter-century), he mattered.—SE
* In early November 1981, Dick made a difficult personal decision, choosing to stay in Fullerton to be near Tessa and Christopher rather than moving to the Bay Area to continue a relationship with a married woman. This decision is framed here in terms of biblical morality. 2-3-74, he says, transformed him into someone who could not continue down the path the relationship was leading him. Though elsewhere Dick is deeply concerned with free will’s absolute victory over determinism, he presents this as a decision made by God on his behalf, asserting that he really had no choice. Compare this with his statements on the assistance he gave to Covenant House, which he described as a “new act” not governed by normal rules of incentive or even causation. In any case, it’s clear that Dick believed that a pre-1974 PKD would have made a very different decision in this situation.—GM
* The moral vision that ties all of Dick’s work together is rooted in the redemptive power of empathy. This emotional connection—the ability to experience the feelings, particularly the suffering, of others—counteracts the temptation to withdraw from the risk of loving others and into the safety of ourselves. When Dick’s characters struggle to determine what’s real, they ultimately have to rely on the people who care about them; stable reality in Dick’s work is always predicated on the sincerity of the emotions that pass between people. In his fiction, Dick famously asks two questions: what is real, and what is human? It could be said that his work provides a single, connected answer to both: what is real is what we perceive when we are emotionally engaged in the world, and what is human is what allows us to make an empathetic connection to the world. Tagore’s connection to the biosphere, in which the young boy takes on the suffering of the planet in the form of wounds that riddle his body, is a profoundly empathetic relationship. Similarly, when Dick learned that Anwar Sadat had been assassinated, he crushed a soda can and dragged the edge against his inner arm until he drew blood. For Dick, the reality of that moment involved pain, and truly connecting with that moment involved sharing the suffering.—DG
* In this abridgement of the Exegesis, we have included all references to The Owl in Daylight, Dick’s last, unfinished project. What follows is his most extensive account of the novel’s plot elements. Characteristically, this material differs considerably from the account of Owl that Dick gave Gwen Lee and Doris Sauter in January 1982; that account draws considerably from folder 53, especially the entries beginning with [53:E-1].—PJ
* This entry commences with a short burst of wild handwriting.—PJ
† Dick is voicing a common theme in paranormal literature, particularly as it found expression in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, which he collected and adored. This literature in turn was deeply influenced by the American writer Charles Fort (1874–1932), who popularized any number of paranormal themes, including the phenomena of fish, periwinkles, nebulous biological matter, and rocks falling from the sky. Reflecting on such things, Fort speculated that we are like fish in an ethereal sea upon which a more advanced civilization is dropping crap. Later, the pulp fiction editor Ray Palmer (1910–1977), whose Amazing Stories magazine was a staple in the 1940s S-F world, posited something he called the “atmospherea,” basically an ether-like extension or “ocean” of the earth in which various occult critters and objects swim and fly, including those that came to be known in 1947 as “flying saucers.” Numerous writers have since identified the latter manifesting mysteries as extradimensional as opposed to extraterrestrial, much as Dick does here.—JJK
* This is the ever-popular “ancient astronaut” or paleo-contact thesis, which reads the history of religions as a coded story about humanity’s interaction with extraterrestrials, which were mistaken within our mythologies as gods from the sky. There are multiple forms of this theory, some of which have us as biological hybrids intentionally created through primate-alien interbreeding (a theory that returned in a darker form in the 1980s through hypnosis-related abduction narratives and subsequent fears of an alien hybridization program). The origin of this complex of ideas is often attributed to Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), though in fact it had already existed for decades among various English, American, and French intellectuals, not to mention a whole host of occult groups. The public intellectual and science advocate Carl Sagan even voiced a version of the thesis as a thought experiment in 1966, speculating, for example, about an alien base on the far or dark side of the moon. Dick would have been very familiar with these ideas, as they were very much “in the air” in the 1970s.—JJK
* A strictly materialist or historical understanding of the human being is not part of the solution. It is part of the problem. It is part of the trap. To make any real sense of our place in the cosmos and, more importantly still, to change that place, we must be open to genuine transcendence and the abolition of time through its conversion into space. Does this make any sense to our sense-based understanding and its three-dimensional categories? No. If it did, it would not lie outside these three dimensions, would it? In the end, then, Dick’s gnosis as expressed here is not an argument or a thesis. It is a revelation. And this, of course, is exactly what he claimed.—JJK
* According to Henri Bergson, the discourse of the mystic “is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable.” Deep readers of the Exegesis will be tempted at times to arrest the flow by succumbing to the same impulse that Dick himself gives in to over and over: the impulse to declare, “This is it! This is the key to the Exegesis!” Well, here is my key: that inquiry—skeptical and speculative and interminable as the Exegesis (or life) itself—is truly divine.—ED
* By its very nature, the Exegesis has no conclusion. And yet here, so close to the final pages Dick wrote, he hits upon a definitive truth of his experiences and their interpretation. Whatever the reigning theory of the moment, Dick is always concerned with deliverance, liberation, rescue. Whatever bonds might restrict the individual being—karma, astral determinism, sin, demiurgic imprisonment—Dick wants to see them broken and the being released into an absolute, ontological freedom. The Exegesis is a record of a human soul in search of salvation.—GM
* Given its placement toward the close of the Exegesis, we cannot help but read this poetic condensation of Dick’s visionary experiences as a green flash on the horizon as the sun sinks down. Shorn of theory, of the need for theory, his words are reduced to the frog-plop haikus of barest memory, to “fish sign and light.” These glints return with an admission: Dick was not blasted with sci-fi laser pinkness after all, but simply a sunbeam that left a phosphene glow. Jacob Boehme was also illuminated, according to some accounts, by light bouncing off a pewter dish, and he is the most Dickian of mystics: a melancholic peasant-class cobbler who rode the dialectic into the divine abyss. He is pared here with a fiction, Mr. Tagomi. If Angel Archer is the greatest of Dick’s characters, Tagomi is the most singular. Toward the end of The Man in the High Castle, he sits down on a park bench to examine a small silver triangle that eventually “disgorges its spirit: light.” The jewelry’s “shimmering surface” gives Tagomi a brief glimpse of the real world—or our world anyway, the one outside the alternative history that enfolds him. And now, near the end he cannot see, Dick glimpses that light again, the quiver of gnosis from another (fictional) time that also shines, for a moment, into your eye. The medium is the message, but don’t try to figure it out. As Tagomi tells the dumb cop who interrupts his vision, it is “not a puzzle.”—ED
* Given the central role that Dick’s dead twin Jane Charlotte Dick played in the novels of the 1960s and early 1970s, it is significant that she surfaces here through a miswriting, a slip of the pen that inscribes “sister” instead of “savior.” Dick interprets this as the “ultimate abolition” of his karma, a final erasure of his guilt over her death. (“Somehow I got all the milk,” he said of her inadvertent death as an infant through malnutrition.) Given his intense identification with Christ during this period, the slip also aligns her with Christ and consequently with Dick’s feeling that Christ is in him and, in a certain sense, is him. Hence the slip also signifies the “ultimate restoration of what was lost.”—NKH
* Ultimately the value of the Exegesis lies not in its ideas but rather in the glimpse it provides into a creativity at once visionary and fractured, at once coming apart and striving heroically, in the only way a novelist can strive for such a thing, to keep himself together as a life nears its end in shambles, haunted by a dead twin sister whose own life was a month long, and defined by bouts of psychosis, a diorama of drugs, five marriages, suicide attempts, and financial destitution, real or imagined stalking by the FBI and IRS, literary rejection at its most stupid (which is to say destructive), and a Linda Ronstadt obsession. One takes the Exegesis seriously because one takes Dick seriously, not the other way around—because it’s his fiction that constitutes as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last sixty years, and because it’s his fiction that persuades us that Dick may be someone we remember who has yet to exist, writing books published around the time of the printing press, which was invented before the wheel and after voice-mail.—SE
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