The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Well, there I went and said it. Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb—that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully ... which only reinforces that particular Lie. I imagine that if Sweet Jesus is listening to me He is becoming very angry now, but if He follows his own philosophy He will fold his hands, look tragically toward heaven, and do nothing.

  Meanwhile, I am trying to bring back an affirmative view of life, as was stamped out furiously wherever it appeared in history, and all I can hope is that I won't get caught. Well, I will be, but hopefully not too soon. It's a nice world and I'd like to stick around and enjoy it for a long time ... but I got to say what I think is so, right? Whatever the consequences.

  Love,

  Phil

  July 8, 1974: The First Day of the Constitutional Crisis

  (Enclosure, letter to Claudia Bush, July 16, 1974)

  But the state of things is so dreary here in the U.S.—they say the elderly and poor are eating canned dog food, now, to stay alive, and the McDonald hamburgers are made from cows' eyes. The radio also says that today when Charles Colson, the President's former counsel, went into jail he still wore his Richard M. Nixon tie clasp. "California dreaming is becoming a reality," is a line from a Mamas and the Papas song of a few years ago, but what a dreadful surreal reality it is: foglike and dangerous, with the subtle and terrible manifestations of evil rising up like rocks in the gloom. I wish I was somewhere else. Disneyland, maybe? The last sane place here? Forever to take Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and never get off?*

  The landscape is deformed out of recognition by the Lie. Its gloom is everywhere, and we encounter nothing we recognize, only familiar things without the possibility of accurate identification. There are only shocks, until we grow numb, are paralyzed and die. When I suddenly stopped believing in the Lie I did not begin to think differently—I saw differently, as if something was gone from the world or gone from between me and the world which had always been there. Like a scrambling device that had been removed: deliberate scrambling. All, suddenly, was clear language. God seemed to seek me out and expressed things through things and what took place. Everywhere I saw signs along a path, marking His presence.

  Any lying language creates at once in a single stroke a pseudo-reality, contaminating reality, until the Lie is undone. As soon as one lies one becomes separated from reality. One has introduced the falsification oneself. There is one thing no one can force you to do: to lie. One only lies for one's advantage. It is based on an inner decision invisible to the world. No one ever says to you, "Lie to me." The enemy says, You will do and believe certain things. It is your own decision to falsify, in the face of his coercion. I am not sure this is what the enemy wants, or anyway the usual enemy. Only a Greater Enemy, so to speak, would want that, one with greater objectives, and a clearer idea of what the ultimate purpose of all motion is.

  Sometime in the past, about three months ago, I must have become aware for the first time in my life that the cause of my misery was the Lie and that the enemy, the real enemy, was a liar. I remember somewhere along the line saying loudly, "He is a liar; he is a liar," and feeling it to be very important, that discovery. I forget—or rather I guess it does not matter—what specific lie by which person made it all change. There was a person, there was a lie. A week after I realized that with no possibility of evading it everything altered radically for me, and the world began to talk, in a true language of signs: silently. The Lie had slipped away. The Lie deals with talk, written or spoken. Now it's gone. Something else shines forth at last. I see the cat watching at night, for hours. He has seen it all his life; it is the only language he knows.

  I think a lot about my early childhood and remember events in it vividly, which I guess is a sure sign of senility. Also events that took place within the past ten years seem dim and not really a part of me. Their sadness is gone: used up. I encounter new fresh sadnesses in my remote past, like stars that burst into life when I notice them. When I pass on, they again are forgotten. Usually, however, senility is a gradual process; mine came on abruptly when I noticed the cat trying to discern what was causing me pain (I had stomach flu) and then what he could do to help me. He finally got up on my abdomen transversally and purred. It helped, but then when he jumped down the pain returned, whereupon the cat got up again. He lay on me for hours, purring, and finally the disturbed rhythm of my stomach began to match the pace of his purrs, which made me feel much better. Also, the sight of his jowly face gazing down at me with concern, his keen interest in me his friend—that changed me, to suddenly open my eyes (I had been lying for an hour on the couch) and see his concerned large furry face, his attention silently fixed on me. It was not an illusion. Or, put another way, his field of energy, his strength, was at that moment greater than mine, small as he was, since mine had dimmed from the flu and his was as always. Perhaps his soul was at that unusual moment, that critical moment, stronger than mine. It is not usual for a small animal's soul to be larger than a man's. He warmed me and I recovered, and he went his way. But I changed. It is an odd senility, to be comforted and healed by a small animal who then goes on as always, leaving you different. I think of senility as a loss of contact, a drop in perception, of the actual reality around one. But this was true and in the present. Not a memory.

  The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It's best not to talk about this. I've tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can't find any. I'm trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can't discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.

  But nevertheless something shines in the dark ahead that is alive and makes no sound. We saw it once before, but that was a long time ago, or maybe our first ancestors did. Or we did as small children. It spoke to us and directed and educated us then; now perhaps it does so again. It sought us out, in the climax of peril. There was no way we could find it; we had to wait for it to come to us.

  Its sense of timing is perfect. But most important it knows everything. It can make no mistakes. It must be back for a reason.

  [4:41] The best psychiatrist I ever saw, Dr. Harry Bryan attached to the Hoover Pavilion Hospital, once told me that I could not be diagnosed, due to the unusual life I had led. Since I saw him I have led an even more unusual life and therefore I suppose diagnosis is even more difficult now. Something strange, however, exists in my life and seems to have for a long time; whether it comes from my odd lifestyle or causes the lifestyle I don't know. But there it is.

  For years I've felt I didn't know what I was doing; I had to watch my activities and deduce, like an outsider, what I was up to. My novels, for example. They are said by readers to depict the same world again and again, a recognizable world. Where is that world? In my head? Is it what I see in my own life and inadvertently transfer into my novels and to the reader? At least I'm consistent, since it is all one novel. I have my own special world. I guess they are in my head, in which case they are a good clue to my identity and to what is happening inside me: they are brain prints. This brings me to my frightening premise. I seem to be living in my own novels more and more. I can't figure out why. Am I losing touch with reality? Or is reality actually sliding toward a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god's sake why? Am I responsible? How could I
be responsible? Isn't that solipsism?

  It's too much for me. Like an astrophysicist who by studying a Black Hole causes it to change, I seem to alter my environment by thinking about it. Maybe by writing about it and getting other people to read my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my books. Someone suggested that.

  I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.

  My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them; it's a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they—my books—are already there. Whatever that means.

  The most ominous element from my books which I am encountering in my actual life is this. In one of my novels, Ubik, certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment. In my novel what broke through was the presence of a man who had died. He speaks to them through several intermediary systems and hence must still be alive; it is they, evidently, who are dead. What has been happening to me for over three months is that a man I knew who died has been breaking through in ways so similar to that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead and he is alive, or—well, as in the novel, I can't figure it out. It makes no sense.

  Even scarier is that this man, before his death, believed that those who are dead can "come across" to those who are alive. He was sure his own son who had recently died was doing this with him. Now this man is dead and it would seem he is "coming across" to me. I guess there is a certain logic in this. Even more logical is that I and my then wife Nancy participated as a sort of disinterested team observing whether Jim Jr. was actually coming through. It was our conclusion that he was.

  On the other hand, I wrote Ubik before Jim Pike died out there on the desert, but Jim Jr. had already died, so I guess my novel could be said to be based on Jim Jr. coming through to his father. So my novel Ubik was based on life and now life is based on it but only because it, the novel, goes back to life. I really did not make it up. I just observed it and put it into a fictional framework. After I wrote it I forgot where I got the idea. Now it has come back to, ahem, haunt me, if you'll pardon me for putting it that way.

  The implication in Ubik that they were all dead is because their world devolved in strange ways, projections onto their environment of their dwindling psyches. This does not carry across to my own life, nor did it to Jim's when his son "came across." There is no reason for me to project the inference then of the novel to my own world. Jim Pike is alive and well on the Other Side, but that doesn't mean we are all dead or that our world is unreal. However, he does seem to be alive and as mentally enthusiastic and busy as ever. I should know; it's all going on inside me, and comes streaming out of me each morning as I—he—or maybe us both—as I get up and begin my day. I read all the books that he would be reading if he were here and not me. This is only one example. It'll have to do for now.

  They write books about this sort of thing. Fiction books, like The Exorcist. Which are later revealed to be "based on an actual incident." Maybe I should write a book about it and later on reveal that it was "based on an actual incident." I guess that's what you do. It's convenient, then, that I'm a novelist. I've got it made.

  There have been more changes in me and more changes in my life due to that than in all the years before. I refer to the period starting in mid-March (it's now mid-July) when the process began. Now I am not the same person. People say I look different. I have lost weight. Also I have made a lot of money doing the things Jim tells me to do, more money than ever before in a short period, doing things I've never done, nor would imagine doing. More strange yet, I now drink beer every day and never any wine. I used to drink only wine, never beer. I chugalug the beer. The reason I drink it is that Jim knows that wine is bad for me—the acidity, the sediment. He had me trim my beard, too. For that I had to go up and buy special barber's scissors. I didn't know there even was such a thing.

  Mostly, though, what I get is a lot of information, floods of it night after night, on and on, about the religions of the Antique World—from Egypt, India, Persia, Greece and Rome. Jim never loses interest in that stuff, especially the Zoroastrian religion and the Pythagorean mystery cult and the Orphic cults and the Gnostics—on and on. I'm even being given special terms in Greek, such as syntonic. I'm told to be that. In harmony with, it means. And the Logos doctrine. All this comes to me in dreams, many dreams, hundreds of dreams, on and on, forever. As soon as I close my eyes information in the form of printed matter, visual matter such as photographs, audio stuff in the form of phonograph records—it all floods over me at a high rate of print-out.

  These dreams have pretty well come to determine what I do the next day; they program me or prepare me. Last night I dreamed that I was telling people that J.S. Bach was laughing at me. I imitated J.S. Bach's laugh for them. They were not amused. Today I find myself putting on a Bach record, rather than Rock. It's been months, even years since I automatically reached for Bach. Also last night I dreamed that I took the microphone away from Ed McMahon, the announcer on Johnny Carson's show, because he was drunk. Tonight when Ed McMahon came on I automatically got to my feet and switched the TV off, my desire to watch it gone. This fitted in fine because my Bach record was playing anyhow.

  I should mention that I have become completely sophisticated now, having withdrawn all my projections from the world. I am mature and am no longer lachrymose nor sentimental. My spelling is as lousy as ever.

  There is no known psychological process which could account for such fundamental changes in my character, in my habits, view of the world (I perceive it totally differently, now), my daily tastes, even the way I margin my typed pages. I have been transformed, but not in any way I ever heard of. At first I thought it to be a typical religious conversion, mostly because I thought about God all the time, wore a consecrated cross and read the Bible. But that evidently is due to Jim's lifestyle. I also drive differently, much faster, reaching for an air vent on the dashboard that is not there. Evidently I'm used to another car entirely. And when I gave my phone number the last two times I gave it wrong—another number. And to me the weirdest thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never heard of before. I'm afraid to call them; I don't know why. Perhaps in some other part of Orange County someone else is giving my phone number as his, drinking wine for the first time in his life and listening to Rock; I don't know. I can't figure it out. If so, I have his money. A lot of it. But I got it from my agent, or rather ex-agent, since after 23 years I fired him. To explain the totally different tone and attitude of my letters I told my agent I had my father-in-law, a CPA, working with me. At the time this was to my mind a lie, but looking back I can see a thread of truth in it. Someone was and is working with me on all business matters, making my attitude tough and shrewd and suspicious. I am hard boiled and I never regret my decisive actions. I can say No whenever I want to. Jim was that way—no sentimentality. He was the shrewdest Bishop I ever knew.

  Perhaps he is collaborating in the writing of this right now. [...]

  Maybe I, Phil Dick, have just abreacted to a past personality, formed up to the mid-fifties. Lost skills and heartaches that came after that.

  Well then we have here a sort of time travel, rather than someone who is dead "coming across" from the Other Side. It is still me, with my old, prior tastes and skills and habits. Mercifully, the sad recent years are gone. Another form of my odd and chronic psychological ailment: amnesia, which my head learned after my dreadful auto accident in 1964.*

  Come to think of it, it is the memories laid down since 1964 which have dimmed. I recall saying to Tessa that it seemed to me that precisely ten years of memory was gone. That would take it right bac
k to that day in—my god, almost ten years to the day—when I rolled my VW in Oakland on a warm Spring Saturday. Perhaps what happened that day was that from the physical and mental shock an alternate personality was struck off; I did have extraordinary amnesia during the months afterward. So that might make an excellent hypothesis: the trauma of that auto accident started a secondary personality into being, and it remained until mid-March of this year, at which time for reasons unknown it faded out and my original "real" personality returned. That makes sense. More so than any other theory. Also, it was in 1964 that I first encountered Jim Pike—the letter I wrote him for Maren. He was a vivid personality in my life at that time. It was only a few days after writing that letter for Maren that I suf fered the auto accident. No wonder I have Jim interwoven with this restored personality; he was on my mind at the time it was abolished. I've just picked up where I left off in 1964.

  I've explained everything but the preference for beer over wine. I never drank beer. And the business shrewdness; I never was shrewd. And the general health kick, the religious kick, the lack of sentimentality, the resolution, the ability to discern a lie, the intention and determination never to lie, the vastly higher level of effectiveness in all fields, the trimming my beard so expertly—everything is explained but those; also I still have to explain the constant written material which I see in dreams every night, including Greek and Latin and Sanskrit and god knows what else, words I never knew but have to look up. This abreaction to before the auto accident explains some things, but it doesn't explain others. Could it be that I now am what I would have been had the accident never occurred? As if I've shifted over to a sort of alternative world where I grew naturally and normally to this mature and responsible character-formation, not derailed tragically by first the accident, then the involvement with Nancy et al., which of necessity followed? This, then, would be a sort of personal alternate universe. Ananke ... another Greek word flashed up to me in sleep; the compulsion which determines the outcome of even the gods' lives. There is an ananke for me which decreed that I would become what I am now, and that weird unfortunate sidetracking cannot abolish it as my destiny.