The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  Into deep and rocky gorges

  A false light lured me down.

  I neither care nor worry

  How I shall get out again.

  I have often lost my way,

  And every path has had its goal.

  Our pleasures, our sorrows,

  All is game to the will-o-the-wisp.

  Down the dry bed of the stream

  I wind my way quite calmly.

  Every stream will reach the sea

  As every path will find its grave.

  I was just saying to Tessa last night: "This spirit is wearing me out. Killing me by exhausting me." But when the trip hit me last night, as I sat before my statue (ikon) of the very ancient wooden saint communing, and saw the vines clustered and growing and swirling, I thought, "Well, he's saying, You should have more fun. Ol' Erasmus sure was a prankster. He sure liked number games." I saw all around me everywhere numbers. "That's why he's bubbling over with mirth," I thought. "That I've figured out who he is, at last. He is so into puzzles and riddles and puns—he's laughing." The spirit who had been animating me was laughing and bubbling over, and vines swirled with dark-colored clusters, up the vestments of the saint. If Erasmus was indeed a person who saw fun in everything, then this was Erasmus; at the time I convinced the spirit to identify itself finally, and to my complete surprise. That it was truly Erasmus, the great scholar of the Bible, I didn't doubt at the time; I kept saying to Tessa, "He's an astrologer." For some reason that seemed important; maybe because seeing the Arabic numerals and knowing he was an astrologer linked him to the Renaissance and not to Greece: to the revival of learning (of Greek). But of course astrologers were everywhere in the ancient world. Still, at the time, last night I mean, I was delighted; I'd never guessed he'd not been to Greece either. His head, filled with thoughts and knowledge of Greece, had fooled me into thinking I was in Greece; what pleased him most ... I'm very tired.... What pleased him most (Erasmus) was that I had mistaken him, a scholar, for a god! (Dionysos.)

  But today, recalling the intoxication (which it was), my mirth, the advice, "You take all these scholarly things too seriously; you should have fun ..." Well, who of the two does that sound like? And the cluster of vines on the vestments of the saint—they just are not there, and that is what I saw. He was playing games again, and I must say, he runs away, Claudia honey, runs away from the stark sight of the man in fawn robe lying face down dead, murdered ... and wouldn't you? He was so happy; he had been so innocent and happy—

  Last night as I listened to the phono I found myself sitting close to a color photo of Victoria Principal, and her tawny skin and long black hair got to me ... and then I saw she was on a leopard skin rug, with the same dappled spots.* Beneath the dapple of the fawn is the dapple of the leopard; both are protective coloration, and the god of fawns has two sides. Do you really think Erasmus would have been so filled with mirth? "Hence vain melancholy—" etc. Vain deluding. Left out key (ah, how key!) word. But maybe Erasmus, that pious Christian scholar, studying Greek, was the first, the very first, in our world, to resurrect Dionysus, as he labored at his scholarship. I had reckoned that the Holy Spirit seemed to have returned to our world about the time of Martin Luther, and Erasmus was a contemporary of his. Also, you will find the words "perfect" and "fool" in my most recent notes, and Erasmus wrote "In Praise of Folly" which is about the fool who is Christ. And Parsifal is a "perfect fool"; that is what those Arabic words mean ... think of Godspell, which enchanted me.

  Item. We generate the horizontal time to keep order in what we encounter. But ah! The utility has made it progressively more and more difficult for us to experience the infinitude of transparent laminations which we bind together with the energy we call time—if we could release them—a trillion butterflies out of each object! And each object (form) can travel back for us as the transparencies unpeal, back (unpeel) back and back, to earlier forms, to uncover them, as in Ubik. They are there because they are accretional; they really are there. Oh, that Antique world. At one instant, early in my trip, I saw an old man bending over me (the Wise King, from the dream in Tears) and I saw a Saxon haircut, and Saxon clothing. I had uncovered I know authentic bits from the world around me and in my head (I am a part of the world around me) remnants sleeping from the past:

  What lies hiding within each object? A garden, so to speak: the enchanted garden, but they relate to the past. Studying one photo of Victoria Principal, I noticed that her hairstyle made her look very much like the Mona Lisa, and then I saw that beneath it (Being) there was the Egyptian hairstyle of women. When I had seen the shot of her, which first drew me to her, it was because, I thought, she reminded me of Kathy. But the hairstyle contains bits of past words, much like pulp paper has fragments of colors from older sheets of paper. The "paper" remains; the sheets give way to successive pulping.

  Sadly, I decline into the mundane (i.e., this second in time). I see something fascinating, though: the "vines" on the vestment of the saint ... he had been painted with a simple design over and over again. Like this: ( • ) Big deal. Anyhow, over the years or even a century or two, dirt (can you believe it?) dirt has obscured the purity of the white, and has contaminated the repeated simple design, to connect many of the repetitions of the design, in wild, flowing "patterns." His triangle-inverted white front is no longer white; the ( • ) is in color, and those, plus the dirt—his front is alive with the grape vines of Spring, and I'm sure he knows it, because I had just prayed to him for help. That it was my daughter Laura's birthday and I phoned her again and again with no luck ... and felt so alone, and got loaded, and then went in to commune (read that as appeal to my friend). The gentle saint is underneath maybe white and pure, but he laughed out into color; he tripped out, and all the world was alive with giggling high for me. The high is gone, but the solution as to why we see time along the wrong axis (and much stronger proof that we do) remains ... plus the memory of happiness in a world of dappled pelts and music and love and number-games of the most delightful complexity hiding—the smiling, murdered god.

  N.B. I just want to add: we see time to anchor our world of "buzzing, blooming" experience.49 We must anchor it; I couldn't type this to tell you, and I wouldn't know who I was or who you are, otherwise. But the time-axis along which forms (entelechies) grow to completion—that is orthogonal, and it is real. Remember you heard it here. But from whom, that I do not know.

  You must read Arthur J. Deikman's paper, "Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience."50 In Charles T. Tart's Altered States of Consciousness (Doubleday Anchor Books).* By my theory now, if you remove the imagi for a moment, remove a single imago from between you and the sense ob ject, then you see it (loss factor) unrelated to it-prior and it-after; i.e., the thing with no time involvement; the (gain factor) is that you can gaze at it and peel away all its layers as Joe Chip saw objects revert; you can find the billions of related transparencies within (sp and fuck it).

  You can also see each sense object or form where it stands placed, in the static structure of the universe (the mystical experience of being outside of time). If you want that. But to me what is more exciting is to peel away time, the accretions; and this is orthogonal time. But deautomatization in Deikman's sense must take place first (turn on and do it).

  In seeing the pattern of sense objects, where they're located, you see structure. In peeling away the layers you see into Being, but you do not see the forward growth of the entelechy of the form you peel away; you are going in the opposite direction, although along the proper axis. "What is underneath" or "what is within or below" are the previous steps in sequence (remember, I pointed out, sequence is very real; sequence is all important: it is pattern). This is the growth up to now, to the stage where it is vis-à-vis you. If you are to see what comes next you must move along the true (orthogonal) time axis in harmony with it: into the future, as all forms grow (as each "frame" is replaced by the next further-grown "frame"). They are a sequence of static frames for each entelechy, one edola
following the next. Seeing what transparencies lie ahead is like the difference between stripping away successive layers of paint on an old bureau, or digging down through the strata of a buried city, versus imagining what layers would/will come next. Only the Logos can and does that; you can see the difference between previous layers in an Indian garbage mound, one after the other, and the hypothetical "layers to come in the future." This is real time (orthogonal time). But I think you and I et al. are limited to peeling back or looking back; we cannot see how forms will grow, because as they do grow they inter-relate, which is what we call the cosmos, and to see the future stage of the Plan is to see something which would elevate us and abolish us as we now exist. From my metaphor of the hurried artists sketching the one person sitting, at Disneyland, you can see that I believe that Christ is the completed form toward which all men move, this approximation, and it's getting closer and closer—we can guess, but we do not really know what Christ looks like, surely not those cruddy pictures of him all goopy-eyed. When we achieve that perfection—as we do—we may not recognize, not see, where it agrees, because (1) we are the sketches, not the artists, and (2) we cannot see the person being sketched ... and yet, that person is ourselves. How strange ... the sketches can't see the person being sketched, only the woman (the what?), the workman's hand as he sketches. But presumably the person being sketched looks like we, the sketches, do, and with "woman" I return to the fawn-skin run in the woods of Arcady will the long dances/typing/madness/enthusiasm ever end?

  Signed,

  Eurypides, and other hard-working/driven turned-on-ees

  [4:243] The reality of orthogonal time, cyclic time, would make it possible for the Golden Age (the time before the fall) to return, restoring all which has been lost. There is a direct link between the hope of that return and the idea of orthogonal time; also, there is a similar link between the possibility of that hope being fulfilled and the fact that orthogonal time exists which it indeed does.

  Is not one of our present concepts or visions of that Golden Age, perhaps our most powerful and authentic one, the vision of "The Woods of Arcady" which Yeats wrote of?51 And was it not indeed these woods, the Isle of the Blest, which I at last experienced as I moved deeper into the Being, the heart of, orthogonal time? Did I not at last see the moonlight and the pale water, the arch, the quiet and harmony and beauty, of exactly that which Yeats said is gone and which we dream of still? ("Yet still she turns her restless head.")

  Would it be unreasonable to speak of my first orthogonal vision, that of Urbs Roma, as the Age of Iron? And under that I found—what's next? Silver? That would be my first glimpse of the Hellenistic world which came before (linear time) or beneath (orthogonal), and then, at last, the absolute simplicity of what must be the Golden Age: the forests, which Euripides spoke of in the Bacchae ("Will they ever come to me ever again ..."). Each age of rotation retrograde was better; iron to silver to gold, whatever metaphor. Roma certainly was iron; no doubt. And—the fish sign which I saw: it was made of gold. [...]

  If our age is an extension of Urbs Roma (Tears being a paradigm, a map of a territory which is Roma, Washington, Moscow, Berlin: one map for all) then that view of Roma was a rollback, and insight into the heart—not of an age prior to ours—but to ours itself. But then the previous age emerged beneath ... while I was in the hospital, just as Nixon resigned, the same day I went into surgery and was repaired. Yet already I had glimpsed the archway leading to the quiet places of sea and moonlight. (One does not build buildings out of gold, there are none, it is all too soft. It would be jewelry, etc., objects of beauty and adornment; there are no gold prisons.) [...]

  I did not remember my previous state (anamnesis): I was restored to that state; which means someone restored me. That is God and God's grace. He brought it back to me or me back to it, rejoined or gave back. The Christian (Eucharist) anamnesis deals specifically with "Do this in recollection of me," i.e., Jesus Christ.* The event is anamnesis; the agency which causes it is adventitious and is the Savior. No man has intrinsically the capacity, by no knowledge or magic, to accomplish this restoration. In my case I detect evident pre-destination; first, it was impressed on me, this anticipation of the dark-haired stranger girl at the door; I used to expect the Paraclete coming to the door at any time, to render aid. From the beginning of my life, He laid down the necessary efficient causes to bring the transformation/restoration about. There was always evident intent, and on His part, not mine. It took an entire life time to bring me to that point in 3-74. Step after step; led me, directed me. Not the girl at the door but that as the climax, the moment, and at the moment of extremity of peril for me, of the "very desperate" where no hope existed for me of being saved in any fashion unless all these steps had already been laid down. Her appearance at the door had that effect only as mere triggering release and because of manifold almost infinite preparatory steps. This was a life time process, not a single event. As an infant I was given dreams and experiences (e.g., with fish, the "tunny,"52 the shark dreams, later on the Tiberius fish teeth necklace dream), without which her appearance and that fish necklace would have done nothing; it wasn't a magic amulet, as if the power resided in its intrinsic shape or properties. I could as easily have been engrammed on a—well, whatever He chose. It's like answering the question, "How does your car obtain the capacity it has to perform all that it does?" with the answer, "By putting in this particular key, the one with the square end, and turning it to the right for a second." The car key unlocks a gigantically intricate mechanism but that is all it does; it causes so-to-speak the potential vehicle (car static) to become actual car (car in motion). Whoever built the car probably also had the key in mind—anticipated its existence and use.

  The analogy is a good one, because by holding back the key the car can be kept in a state of mere potentium throughout a theoretically unlimited period of lineal time. A person seeing it only in this potential mode might never guess what would happen when activated; better yet, there is really no way just by looking at a radio to tell what it does when turned on. The simple switching from off to on is no more than bringing into existence the true function of what was only an object; what it is has been revealed to be what it does. Teleology is all-important in this: its end-purpose. The metasystems perhaps can best be understood by this cybernetics model, by asking, "What are they for?" The answer is obtained by observing the process as it unfolds. We are back to the concept of entelechy, of growth. All these are the unfoldings of living organisms which themselves are portions of an over-all organism, no doubt. A Greek might proudly say that he causes his own heart to beat and his own brain or mind to think, but it seems more likely that both are in the deepest and final sense caused by a designer of that heart and brain, who holds all in the palm of His hand; we can't see Him, but we can't see gravity either; we measure it by its effects. This is the sad, sad Greek error of man over nature, man above the cosmos, controlling it; this is his hubris. He will guard, in the esoteric rites and gnosis of his mystery cult, the secret fact that God lies within everyone and everything equally, and steers all. Greeks and foreigners alike.

  The really carefully guarded secret of the priests of all the religions, which they will never voluntarily relinquish to the world, is that priests are not needed, nor what priests know or what initiates do or what the devout believe—practices and sacraments, anything. The truth is that God inhabits without limit; wherever the real is or the actual does, He is it. Special knowledge of how to get in touch with him is that same knowledge which carries the bee home to its hive each night; who sells that knowledge to the bee? If we have no money, if we can't read or be wise, are we abandoned? Does He abandon the lowly insects because they are virtually no more than reflex machines? Just as truth cannot really be suppressed, at least not forever, it neither can be hoarded. We are taught day and night, as all living entities are: ceaselessly. God did not begin to govern and inform the cosmos when writing and money were invented.

  The deepe
r and deeper penetration into ontological realms, experienced as dokos fading to reveal Urbs Roma—those were into a region prior in lineal time to Jesus, to Christianity, but not to Greek mystery religious as such. But finally I saw the building Santa Sophia, the palm trees, which was the Levant (that word came to me, an archaic term). That last was as real as the first. What linked them? The last was not fundamentally a Greek area, but acquired by Alexander in conquest. Each however was seen in holy terms, viewed as if sanctified, viewed through its religion. It was as if God ranged through an axis neither of time nor space as we know it but built out of both. Orthogonal space, too? A space-time axis of Being in which resemblances linked each frame rather than being together in either time or in space, but because they rose toward God Himself and all He represents. It was an axis of holy solemnity, maybe; that worship and relatedness to God is the final axis, in which one when entering that realm moves from religion to religion as if they are all one. It is as if the state of grace generates, or anyhow generates the perception of and the participation in, the Region of the Sacred. But not just the sacred parts of each culture were retrieved; with them came the rest, everything, as in the taco-stand which served as a doorway to all Mexico. When dokos, the veil, lifts away from our external world we see the Absolute, but it is whatever God wills it to be, causes it to be; most likely, thinks it into being. We think along with him of first this and then that, so we are here, then there. Worlds are made and unmade. The Absolute is absolutely plastic and manifold and real only as He forms and reforms it; He expresses himself directly through it and in it. [...]