The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Introduction

This passage was written by the American novelist Philip K. Dick in 1980. Taken alone, the handful of lines might seem to be an extract from a lucid and elegant fugue on metaphysics and ontology—an inquiry, in other words, into matters of being and the purposes of consciousness, suffering, and existence itself. This particular passage would not strike anyone versed in philosophical or theological discourse as violently original, apart from an intriguing sequence of metaphorical slippages—printed, forged, extracted, converted—and the almost subliminal conflation of “the universe” with a work of art.

What makes the passage unusual is the context in which it arose and the other kinds of writing that surround it. Despite a tone of conclusiveness, the passage represents a single inkling, passing in the night, among many thousands in the vast compilation of accounts of his own visionary experiences and insights that Dick committed to paper between 1974 and 1982. The topics—apart from suffering, pity, the nature of the universe, and the essence of tragedy—include three-eyed aliens; robots made of DNA; ancient and suppressed Christian cults that in their essential beliefs forecasted the deep truths of Marxist theory; time-travel; radios that continue playing after being unplugged; and the true nature of the universe as revealed in the writings of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, in The Ti betan Book of the Dead, in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and in Robert Altman’s film Three Women.

The majority of these writings, that is to say, are neither familiar nor wholly lucid nor, largely, elegant—nor were they intended, for the most part, for publication. Even when Dick, who was an autodidact if ever there was one, recapitulates some chestnut of philosophical or theological speculation, his own philosophical and theological writings remain unprecedented in their riotous urgency, their metaphorical verve, their self-satirizing charisma, and their lonely intimacy (as well as in their infuriating repetitiveness, stubbornness, insecurity, and elusiveness). They are unprecedented, in other words, because Philip K. Dick is Philip K. Dick, one of the more brilliant and unusual minds to make itself known to the twentieth century even before this (mostly) unpublished trove now comes to light.

Dick came to call this writing his “Exegesis.” The process of its production was frantic, obsessive, and, it may be fair to say, involuntary. The creation of the Exegesis was an act of human survival in the face of a life-altering crisis both intellectual and emotional: the crisis of revelation. No matter how resistant we may find ourselves to this ancient and unfashionable notion, to approach the Exegesis from any angle at all a reader must first accept that the subject is revelation, a revelation that came to the person of Philip K. Dick in February and March of 1974 and subsequently demanded, for the remainder of Dick’s days on earth, to be understood. Its pages represent Dick’s passionate commitment to explicating the glimpse with which he had been awarded or cursed—not for the sake of his own psyche, nor for the cause of the salvation of humankind, but precisely because those two concerns seemed to him to be one and the same.

The attempt eventually came to cover over eight thousand sheets of paper, largely handwritten. Dick often wrote through the night, running an idea through its paces over as many as a hundred sheets during a sleepless night or in a series of nights. These feats of superhuman writing are astonishing to contemplate; they impressed even an established graphomaniacal writer like Dick, who had once written seven novels in a single year. The fundamental themes of the Exegesis come as no surprise. The body of work that established Dick’s reputation—his forty-odd realist and surrealist novels written between 1952 and his death in 1982—concerns itself with questions like “What is it to be human?” and “What is the nature of the universe?” These metaphysical, ethical, and ontological themes enmesh his work, even from its very beginnings in domestic melodrama, science fiction adventure, and humor, in an atmosphere of philosophical inquiry.

Dick increasingly came to view his earlier writings—specifically his science fiction novels of the 1960s—as an intricate and unconscious precursor to his visionary insights. Thus, he began to use them, as much as any ancient text or the Encyclopedia Britannica, as a source for his investigations. Never, to our knowledge, has a novelist borne down with such eccentric concentration on his own oeuvre, seeking to crack its code as if his life depended on it. The writing in these pages represents, perhaps above all, a laboratory of interpretation in the most absolute and open-ended sense of the word. When Dick began to write and publish novels based on the visionary material unearthed in the Exegesis, he commenced interpreting those as well. So, as these writings accumulated, they also became self-referential: the Exegesis is a study of, among other things, itself.

Fully situating this text’s genesis within the flamboyant and heartbreaking life story of Philip K. Dick is beyond our reach in this introduction. We commend you to Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, published in 1989 and thankfully still in print. Sutin’s biography finds its limitations only in the sense that neither he nor any other commentator in the years immediately following Dick’s death, however persuaded of the unique relevance and appeal of his writing, could have predicted the expansion in its reputation and influence in the subsequent decades.

What will be needed by a reader coming to the Exegesis, however, whether familiar or not with Dick’s great novels, is a brief encapsulation of what both Dick and Sutin call “2-3-74”—meaning, simply, February and March of 1974—for the simple reason that Dick’s endless sequence of interpretations derive from that initial period of visions and a handful of external experiences that surrounded them (some of which, frankly, challenge credulity).

Whether interpreting a happening, memory, vision, or dream, Dick in his haste rarely bothers to set down the source events as scrupulously as we might wish—testament to his eagerness to begin his fierce private excavation of their meaning. After all, he understood to what he referred. Except for those lucky instances when Dick retraces his steps to their source, or in the letters to others that (mercifully for the reader) represent this wild journey’s inception point, Dick explicates events, but rarely narrates them. Sutin observes:

So, what happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974? Among the mysterious events he chews over in these pages, the first, dark precursor to his visions was a break-in at his home in San Rafael, California, in November 1971 when someone blew up the file cabinet in his office. Candidates range from drug dealers to Black Panthers to various clandestine authorities, a few of which undoubtedly had Dick on their watch lists. Dick never settled on a single explanation for the break-in, but his fascinated, terrified rehearsals of this event set the stage for the deductive explosion to follow. It was then that Philip K. Dick’s life began to resemble, as many have observed, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Then to 1974: Dick now lived in Orange County, with a wife and young child. After receiving a dose of sodium pentothal during a visit to the dentist for an impacted wisdom tooth, Dick went home and later opened his door to a pharmacy delivery-girl bearing a painkiller and wearing a gold necklace depicting a fish, which she identified as a sign used by early Christians. At that moment, by his testimony, Dick experienced “anamnesis”—that sudden, discorporating slippage into vast and total knowledge that he would spend the rest of his life explicating, or exegeting.

Yet that doorway meeting with the fish necklace was only the first vision. In March Dick enjoyed two separate, unsleeping, nightlong episodes of visual psychedelia, the second of which he describes memorably as “hundreds of thousands of absolutely terrific modern art pictures as good as any ever exhibited . . . more than all the modern art pictures that exist put together.” Next, he found himself compelled to perform a home baptism on his son, Christopher. Then he was visited by a “red and gold plasmatic entity,” which he came to call, variously, Ubik, the Logos, Zebra, or the plasmate. He also heard dire messages on his radio (which played whether or not it was plugged into the wall).

Readers will learn here of the “Xerox missive”—a mailed broadside of some sort, possibly from an ordinary basement Communist organization, which Dick understood as a dire test of his new and visionary self-protective instinct: it needed to be disposed of. Dick believed that he was inhabited by another personality with different habits and character, someone more forceful and decisive than himself—in the Exegesis he auditions various candidates for this role—who steps in to fire his agent and field the Xerox missive. Our hero sees “Rome, Rome, everywhere,” in a vision of iron bars and scurrying outlaw Christians; he came to call this vision of the world the Black Iron Prison, or BIP for short. A cat died, and the apartment was flooded with memorial light. Most stirring, a pink beam informed Dick of a medical crisis that threatened the life of his son, a diagnosis confirmed by doctors.

Beyond 1974, he endured voices, visions, and prophetic dreams too numerous to list here—all to be enfolded, by the writer, into the cascade of interpretation of those earlier events. A reader will learn how readily and fluently a new revelation transforms Dick’s sense of the “core facts” of 2-3-74, which never sit still but adapt to a flux of analysis, paraphrase, and doubt. Illuminating them fully was Dick’s subsequent lifework. Why should it be simple for us?

The journey of the Exegesis from a chaos of paperwork stored, after Dick’s death, in a garage in Sonoma, California, to this (noncomprehensive) publication is still, if not as unlikely as its creation in the first place—what could be?—a saga in itself. When Dick died in 1982, the Exegesis was still a pile of papers in his apartment. Dick’s friend Paul Williams, then executor of his literary estate, sorted the fragments into the ninety-one file folders that still house it. (Williams’s provisional organizational choices, in the absence of other guides, remain evident in the form in which we present the material here.) The Exegesis spent the next several years in Williams’s garage in Glen Ellen.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Dick’s reputation had gone underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it had never been very far overground to begin with, and his stature with publishers was nonexistent. Working with Dick’s agent, Russ Galen, Williams found remarkable success inventing Dick’s posthumous career as we now know it, guiding the out-of-print novels into republication and a place in literary culture more secure than Dick probably ever imagined for himself. A number of unpublished novels—coherent, finished manuscripts that in almost every case had already made the publishers’ rounds and been rejected—were also brought to light.

The Exegesis, an unruly and unlikely “manuscript” that threatened to defy editorial ambition, remained terra incognita. Its first scholar, Jay Kinney, published a “Summary of the Exegesis Based on Preliminary Forays” in 1984. Estimating the document at two million words, Kinney defined requirements for its publication: transcription from the handwritten pages; an attempt at chronological resequencing; and “selecting out the most coherent portions.” He rightly called this prospect “staggering.” With Williams and a few volunteers, Kinney’s venture at least accomplished the photocopying and inventory of the eight-thousand-plus pages. At one point a distributed transcription effort was begun by mail—“swarm scholarship” before the Web. Kinney, in his article, also suggested that the published Exegesis could be the basis for the founding of a “Dickian religion,” mentioning the name L. Ron Hubbard. His intent may have been flippant, but the notion seeped into the chatter and proved more hindrance than incentive to scrupulous investigation of the material.

Next, biographer Lawrence Sutin edited 1991’s In Search of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, a volume that thrilled and frustrated a core of seekers for whom the text was increasingly taking on the status of legend. Less than three hundred pages long, In Search of Valis presented an array of enigmatic morsels that, for some, only raised questions as to what might be in the other 7,700 pages. When Paul Williams relinquished his role as literary executor in the mid-1990s, the Exegesis and other PKD manuscripts went into the custody of Dick’s children. For them, the unpublished trove was fraught, since it attracted unwelcome attention and threatened to undermine their father’s growing academic and literary reputation with its disreputable aura of high weirdness. For some of Dick’s admirers, even the novels written in the wake of the 2-3-74 revelations are at best a footnote to what they regard as his seminal writings and, at worst, an embarrassment. (An interesting Exegesis subplot consists of Dick’s reactions to meeting some of his earliest admirers in academia, whom he refers to as “the Marxists” and who were clearly perplexed by his metaphysical preoccupations. “I proved to be an idiot savant,” he writes, “much to their disgust.”)

The present editors have navigated this maze of perplexities in possession of a few useful axioms. One is that, putting aside any of the peculiarities earmarking his work or the circumstances of its creation, Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s great novelists. This makes the eventual public availability of his unpublished notes, journals, drafts, and other surviving papers not only desirable but inevitable. This is as true of Dick’s Exegesis as it is of the notebooks of Dostoyevsky or Henry James. If the fate of such material is to attract fewer readers than the writer’s novels—and who would wish otherwise?—it is nevertheless of clear importance that it emerge. Yet another axiom is this: the whole of the Exegesis is unpublishable, short of a multiple-volume scholarly edition issued at a prohibitive price or (more likely) in an online form.

Another belief we held going in: the Exegesis is terrific reading, of a kind. We might say, “If you take it for what it is,” or, “If you care for this sort of thing,” but those terms beg the question of what “sort of thing” “it” exactly is, and we are at a loss to answer that question. To give yourself to it completely, as Kinney and Sutin and ourselves—most especially the tireless Pamela—have done, demands a degree of mania and stupefaction we would not wish on another human (though we will undoubtedly not be the last). But to give yourself to it in part, at leisure, and in a spirit of curiosity can be entrancing. And to become entranced by it is—contradicting ourselves now—to want more. One last axiom, then: in the compromises and sacrifices that this effort, by its nature, imposed, we will satisfy no one. We have set another foot on Everest, reached a slightly higher station than others before us. But not the summit. That admission leads to a declaration: this book spearheads an effort to transcribe, reorganize (or, more rightly, “organize”), and, eventually, provide scholarly access to the entirety of the writing left behind by Philip K. Dick after his death. Much of what we excluded was repetitive and boring. Some was tantalizing but opaque, or defied excerpt. But no one will need to take our word for this forever.

or:

Science fiction writer Tim Powers recited these two limericks from memory, then explained, “He’d call you up at eleven in the morning and say, ‘I just figured out some stuff—I just figured out the universe—why don’t you come over.’ Possibly he’d written until six A.M., then slept from six to eleven. I’d say, ‘I’ve gotta go to work. Write it down so you don’t forget it.’ One day I said, ‘Oh, yeah, and can you write it as a limerick?’ When I showed up he gave me two versions.”

In the last decade of his life, Philip K. Dick’s friends and visitors became, one after the next, confidants of the iconoclastic human being who was both scribbling out the Exegesis and, in many senses, living it. These eyewitnesses offer evocative accounts that amplify the text’s human di mension; its tenderness, monologuing obsessiveness, irascibility, seductiveness, despair, irony, voraciousness, curiosity, anger, and wit, and above all its doubt and certainty, were Dick’s own.

Tim Powers continued: “Every day was starting again from zero. It was never cumulative. And every now and then he’d say: ‘It’s all nonsense. It’s all acid flashbacks.’ He’d be down, terribly depressed. For one thing it would mean he’d wasted years. Then he’d be off again. He called me one day and said, ‘Powers, my researches have led me to believe I have the power to forgive sins.’ I said, ‘Well, who have you forgiven?’ He said, ‘Nobody . . . I forgave the cat’s sins and went to bed.’ ”

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, then a young fan who considered Dick “the only living writer I wanted to meet,” made his first visit to Dick’s apartment in February 1974: “It was one week before the vision. I planned a trip from S. F. to L.A., but he wasn’t answering his phone. We did our day at Disneyland, then I thought: I can’t not ring his doorbell. I stayed for three days. He was charming, eager for someone to talk to about his work. Only later did I find out he’d been in a deep funk. We’d talk, I’d fall asleep, he’d go in and begin typing, and then I’d wake up and we’d begin talking again.

“I think I have one of the earliest manifestations of what became the Exegesis. I wish I could find it. We wanted a collaboration with Phil for Arcade magazine—he gave us something sort of essaylike, clearly religious. It concerned taking Christopher to the hospital. This was the first clue I had that he was off in that territory, but I can’t remember it being a very big deal in ’74–75. He didn’t seem obsessive, didn’t seem manic.

“Later, visiting to recruit him for Raw magazine, I thought: This guy’s on the skids somehow. The apartment was the worst version of the Philip Marlowe housing complex. But he was studying Aramaic. I was struck, thinking, That’s intense! There’s not too many people doing that. Yet it didn’t seem like a good influence on him—he seemed burdened by all this stuff. Crushed. I do remember expressing excitement about one idea, and he lit up. He’d figured out why evil exists on earth: we were in a bubble, and God couldn’t get to us. I liked that image, and we talked about it for a while.”

Painter and cartoonist Gary Panter offered a word-portrait: “Phil was pixieish and self-effacing, always ready to make himself the butt of the joke. He sat thinking with his head back and lips pursed a little. He smiled small before he smiled big. He had long fingers like a piano player’s. White hairy chest peeking over his top button. His skin was pale. His lips were red. His cheeks had a tiny blush. He was like a clever fox, but tired, like he didn’t sleep much. He told me more than once about the miracle of his intuiting his son’s potentially fatal internal hernia. He’d take a big breath before he spoke because he knew the sentences would be long. His hands were lithe and expressive, often mirroring each other palm to palm. He had soulful, heartful eyes. With other people he could’ve played other roles, because he was a theatrical and prankish person. He laughed a lot.”

Tim Powers alludes to a notion found in other accounts as well: that in its latter stages the Exegesis journey seemed to converge with a foreshadowing of its author’s death. “I do remember that around Christmas of ’81 he was convinced that the world would end in a couple of months. And it did, for him. I thought: Not bad—you were close.”

Anyone interested in suggesting a medical, psychiatric, neurological, or pharmacological context for the experiences and behavior surrounding Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis—and by “behavior” we mean, of course and above all, the writing of the thing itself—will be spoiled for choice. Dick offers a wealth of indicators suggestive of bipolar disorder, neurological damage due to amphetamine abuse, a sequence of tiny strokes (it would be a stroke that killed him in 1982), and more. Within these pages, Dick mordantly speculates on a few himself.

The decades since Dick’s death have been fertile ones for popular neurological case histories, frequently of creative people (call it the Oliver Sacks era). It is likely that had Dick lived longer, he would have been drawn to project his own neurological metaphors for his visionary experiences; in particular, it is hard to imagine that his restless mind would not have been eager to explore what Eve Laplante, in her 1988 article in the Atlantic Monthly, called “The Riddle of TLE” (temporal lobe epilepsy). The cause of electrical seizures in the brain less dangerous, and more diagnostically furtive, than grand mal epilepsy, TLE is associated in certain cases with hypergraphia (superhuman bouts of writing) and hyperreligiosity (“an unusual degree of concern with morality, philosophy, and mysticism, sometimes leading to multiple religious conversions,” in Laplante’s words). Among the historical figures whose profiles are suggestive of a retroactive TLE diagnosis are Dostoyevsky, St. Theresa of Avila, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Van Gogh.

Temporal lobe epilepsy has, reasonably enough, drawn attention from Dick’s biographers, and we should not hesitate to mention it here. Yet, given just a brief paraphrase of Dick’s history, neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, cautioned that one of any number of medical causes might easily account for Dick’s hypergraphia—a TLE diagnosis is far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it is worth noting that Dick described hallucinatory experiences of one kind or another going back as far as grade school; that his earliest writings prefigure the ontological and moral concerns exhibited after 2-3-74; and that his boggling literary productivity during his aspirant years and first ascendancy, from 1952 to 1964, could easily be labeled “hypergraphic.” Dick’s Exegesis is a site, then, where we reencounter one of the defining mysteries of our scientific age: the persistent elusiveness of a satisfying description of the full activities of “mind”—that is, consciousness—even as the mechanism of the biological brain yields itself increasingly to our understanding.

Dick’s pursuit of the truth of 2-3-74 was destined, like Zeno’s arrow, for no destination. Years before his death, it became apparent that these activities would not cease until the pen fell from his hands, no matter his periodic attempts at closure. “Here ends four years and six months of analysis and research,” Dick wrote. “Time is unmasked as irreal; 1,900 years are disclosed as aspect of one underlying matrix . . . my 27 years of writing the same themes over and over again fits into place; 2-74 and 3-74 is comprehensible, as is the overthrow of Nixon; the transtemporal constants have been explicated . . . perhaps I should destroy the Exegesis. It is a journey that reached its goal.” Dick wrote those words in 1978; they occur on the first page of an entry that would continue for sixty-two more.

In the end the Exegesis can be viewed as a long experiment in mind-regarding-itself. The puzzle that Dick can never solve in this effort is that of his own exegetical efforts. This mind writes—why? More and more it may seem as if in describing the macrocosm Dick describes the Exegesis: the two are coextensive. Each falls victim to repetition and entropy; each grows by reticulating and arborizing; each, for its renewal, requires divine intervention in the form of language. The same questions apply to both: What saves the universe from running in useless circles until it drops? What separates the living spark of meaning from the “inferior bulk” of chaos and noise? Does the universe evolve or devolve? If the system is closed, then where does “the new” originate?

We found ourselves struck by the notion that Philip K. Dick was, for all his garrulous explications, an aphoristic writer, in the vein of E. M. Cioran or Blaise Pascal. What disguises his aphoristic gift is, simply, the scaffolding he left in place. Every impulse, every photon of thinking collects on the page; it is left for the reader to isolate the spires.

Each of these fine provocations is embedded somewhere in the Exegesis’s pages, together with more extensive sequences of aphoristic invention and self-contained parables too lengthy to quote here. We invite readers to discover their own.