The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  "I knew a guy who hot-wired one of those new Porsches," he said, "and got it out on the Riverside Freeway and pushed it up to one seventy-five—wipe-out." He gestured. "Right into the ass of a semi. Never saw it, I guess." In his head he ran a fantasy number: himself at the wheel of a Porsche, but noticing the semi, all the semis. And everyone on the freeway—the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour—noticing him. Noticing him for sure, the lanky big-shouldered good-looking dude in the new Porsche going two hundred miles an hour, and all the cops' faces hanging open helplessly.

  "You're shaking," Donna said. She reached over and put her hand on his arm. A quiet hand that he at once responded to. "Slow down."

  "I'm tired," he said. "I was up two nights and two days counting bugs. Counting them and putting them in bottles. And finally when we crashed and got up and got ready the next morning to put the bottles in the car, to take to the doctor to show him, there was nothing in the bottles. Empty." He could feel the shaking now himself, and see it in his hands, on the wheel, the shaking hands on the steering wheel, at twenty miles an hour. "Every fucking one," he said. "Nothing. No bugs. And then I re alized, I fucking realized. It came to me, about his brain, Jerry's brain."

  The air no longer smelled of spring and he thought, abruptly, that he urgently needed a hit of Substance D; it was later in the day than he had realized, or else he had taken less than he thought. Fortunately, he had his portable supply with him, in the glove compartment, way back. He began searching for a vacant parking slot, to pull over.

  "Your mind plays tricks," Donna said remotely; she seemed to have withdrawn into herself, gone far away. He wondered if his erratic driving was bumming her. Probably so.

  Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent: He saw, first, a big parked Pontiac with a bumper jack on the back of it that was slipping and a kid around thirteen with long thatched hair struggling to hold the car from rolling, meanwhile yelling for assistance. He saw himself and Jerry Fabin running out of the house together, Jerry's house, down the beer-can-littered driveway to the car. Himself, he grabbed at the car door on the driver's side to open it, to stomp the brake pedal. But Jerry Fabin, wearing only his pants, without even shoes, his hair all disarranged and streaming—he had been sleeping—Jerry ran past the car to the back and knocked, with his bare pale shoulder that never saw the light of day, the boy entirely away from the car. The jack bent and fell, the rear of the car crashed down, the tire and wheel rolled away, and the boy was okay.

  "Too late for the brake," Jerry panted, trying to get his ugly greasy hair from his eyes and blinking. "No time."

  " 'S he okay?" Charles Freck yelled. His heart still pounded.

  "Yeah." Jerry stood by the boy, gasping. "Shit!" he yelled at the boy in fury. "Didn't I tell you to wait until we were doing it with you? And when a bumper jack slips—shit, man, you can't hold back five thousand pounds!" His face writhed. The boy, lit tle Ratass, looked miserable and twitched guiltily. "I repeatedly and repeatedly told you!"

  "I went for the brake," Charles Freck explained, knowing his idiocy, his own equal fuckup, great as the boy's and equally lethal. His failure as a full-grown man to respond right. But he wanted to justify it anyhow, as the boy did, in words. "But now I realize—" he yammered on, and then the fantasy number broke off; it was a documentary rerun, actually, because he remembered the day when this had happened, back when they were all living together. Jerry's good instinct—otherwise Ratass would have been under the back of the Pontiac, his spine smashed.

  The three of them plodded gloomily back toward the house, not even chasing the tire and wheel, which was still rolling off.

  "I was asleep," Jerry muttered as they entered the dark interior of the house. "It's the first time in a couple weeks the bugs let up enough so I could. I haven't got any sleep at all for five days—I been runnin' and runnin'. I thought they were maybe gone; they've been gone. I thought they finally gave up and went somewhere else, like next door and out of the house entirely. Now I can feel them again. That tenth No Pest Strip I got, or maybe it's the eleventh—they cheated me again, like they did with all the others." But his voice was subdued now, not angry, just low and perplexed. He put his hand on Ratass's head and gave him a sharp smack. "You dumb kid—when a bumper jack slips get the hell out of there. Forget the car. Don't ever get behind it and try to push back against all that mass and block it with your body."

  "But, Jerry, I was afraid the axle—"

  "Fuck the axle. Fuck the car. It's your life." They passed on through the dark living room, the three of them, and the rerun of a now gone moment winked out and died forever.

  Visit your favorite store to purchase the book.

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  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

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  † 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

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  * 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

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  * 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

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  † 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

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  * 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

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  * 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

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  * 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

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  * 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

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  * 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

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  * 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 unconsc
ious 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

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  * 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 , 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 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 of an decal affixed to his window transformed into a palm tree—a fitting invocation of southern California as much as the ancient Levant.—ED

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  * 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