The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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* 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
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* The single most lucid sentence in the entire book.—SE
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* "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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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 origina
l 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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† 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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
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* 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 st
amp 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
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* 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