The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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* Empedocles is mentioned throughout the Exegesis, along with other pre-Socratic thinkers, notably Heraclitus and Parmenides. Empedocles wrote two works, both lost, one on nature and the other called Katharmoi or Purifications. In a fragment of the latter, addressing himself to the citizens of Acragas in Sicily, Empedocles declares himself "an immortal god, no longer a mortal, held in honor by all." In the end, Empedocles both rejected and was rejected by the people and threw himself in despair into Mount Etna in the hope of being transformed into a god. Sadly, a sandal was thrown out of the volcano in confirmation of his mortality. One suspects some identification between Dick and Empedocles, where the latter declares himself divine and is persecuted for his hubris.—SC
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* The Hymn of the Soul, also known as the Hymn of the Pearl, is a numinous fable of spiritual homecoming that captures, more than any narrative of antiquity, Dick's noetic vision of anamnesis. The Acts of Thomas was a third-century apocryphal Christian text, most likely of Syriac origin, but the hymn, sung by Thomas in prison, is clearly an interpolation. Though it shows the influence of the New Testament, some scholars think it is a Mesopotamian fairy tale, or possibly the remnant of a pre-Christian Gnostic tradition whose very existence remains controversial. Of particular importance for an understanding of Dick is the role of the letter; when the occluded hero breaks the seal, "the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read." Making his way home, the hero finds the letter again, "lying in the road," like a beer can or a piece of trash. (Later in the Exegesis, Dick discusses the "Xerox missive" in terms influenced by the Hymn, though the values are inverted.) Once home, the hero puts on holy robes that, in Barnstone's translation, "quiver all over with the movements of gnosis" and that mirror him like a divine twin: "two entities but one form."—ED
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* While Schrödinger discovered the informatic character of living systems, Dick predates the invention of the discipline of artificial life here by positing the possibly living and sentient character of information itself. Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky had already coined the term "noösphere" as a label for the effects of focused attention on the biosphere—the living film of the planet—which itself had emerged from the lithosphere, the mineral substrate of our planet. But Vernadsky did not yet have the modern concept of information with which to push his concept further, as Dick does. While others (Le Roy, Teilhard) took the idea in a more theological direction, all characterized the noösphere as an instance of evolutionary change driven by the dynamics of attention and information.—RD
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* Linear time has a rather immediate purchase on our perception. Our finite experience of time—no moment can be simultaneous with any other moment—persuades us that moments actually "follow" one another. But Dick's experience of what he often describes as divine reality—eternal time in which moments overlap or superimpose themselves—was equally persuasive to him, forcing him to grapple with the possibility that what he had previously perceived as reality was in fact fiction or camouflage. In this passage, Dick floats the rather alarming and counterintuitive idea that the future could alter the present, and he does so by way of orthodox Christian theology, which in his view takes this rather science-fictional concept of time as doctrine. Crucially, Dick effects this movement to the eternal aspect of time through his perception of unity: "I think it's all the same thing, one found inner, one found outer." By making all of space and time—the Kingdom of Heaven—"one thing," Dick resolves the paradox of whether his experience is coming from within or without—a Möbius strip that provides further demonstration of the integration of "inner" and "outer" into "one thing."—RD
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* In his later years Dick limited his drug use to scotch, snuff, and the occasional joint. In his teens, Dick was given the stimulant Semoxydrine as an antidepressant. Between 1952 and 1972, Dick became notorious for his prodigious use of amphetamines, which he reportedly consumed by the handful to keep up his nearly inhuman writing pace. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dick's house in Santa Venetia became a well-known hangout for teenagers and eventually for serious addicts and pushers; Dick's experience with the drug scene is chronicled with humor and compassion in his novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Though Dick's mescaline trip in May 1970 inspired Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, it is not true, as many believe, that Dick wrote while on LSD—a claim that Harlan Ellison made in his introduction to the Dick story "Faith of Our Fathers," which appeared in his influential new wave SF collection Dangerous Visions (1967). Dick took LSD only two or three times, once suffering a terrible trip spent envisioning an angry god tormenting him "like a metaphysical IRS agent."—DG
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* Victoria Principal (1950-) is a Hollywood actress (Earthquake, Dallas) and one of Dick's many "dark-haired girls." Dick was drawn to this particular subset of brunettes throughout his life, sometimes suffering intense crushes on women he had never met (cf. Linda Ronstadt). Dick was especially drawn to Principal, whom he believed could capture the cold sensuality of his android femme fatale character Rachel Rosen in the cinematic adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dick began taping up pictures of Principal around his apartment and sent letters and a copy of Ubik to her. He was heartbroken when she failed to respond. Dick also pushed for Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick to play Rosen. Dick's penchant for these women inspired his collection of poems, essays, and letters The Dark Haired Girl, published by Mark V. Ziesing in 1989.—DG
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* This is the book, published in 1969 by the pioneering parapsychologist Charley Tart, that introduced the phrase "altered states of consciousness" into the already humming counterculture. Although the phrase had already been used by Arnold M. Ludwig a few years earlier, it was this book, and probably this book title, that made the phrase a common stock of the Zeitgeist. As with so much other mystical literature, however, what we really encounter in the Exegesis are altered states of consciousness that are also altered states of energy. That is, what we finally encounter is Conscious Energy.—JJK
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* An early reference to the Eucharist, which grows in importance throughout the Exegesis. Here Dick frames the Lord's Supper as a memorial reenactment rather than a mystical rite; later he will focus on the issue of transubstantiation.—GM
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* A contemplation of God's nature occupies virtually all of Dick's late-period work, but as he grapples with theology, what is startling are not the more far-fetched notions—anyone who has read Dick's earlier work expects these—but the more conventional ones. The God who reveals Himself in Dick's thinking often is very much the familiar humanized Judeo-Christian God. This God acts personally and responds personally in the ways of both the Old and New Testaments; note a few paragraphs earlier, in a passage that is practically biblical, the "trust" that Dick's God places in "special men" and "prophets." The upcoming reference to God/Jesus as "Zebra" is first deeply curious, then forehead-smackingly obvious—and fabulous anyway; nothing is more indicative of just how unconventional Dick's mind is than that his most conventional notions seem most unconventional of all. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, Dick tries to reconcile his own particular God teased out of the fabric of reality and time with the God of millennia worshipped by millions. Which is to say that consciously and unconsciously, herein Dick is finding his place in civilization.—SE
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* "The intuitive—I might say, gestalting—method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to 'see' the whole thing at once. Evidently there is a certain historical validation to this method; Mozart, to name one particular craftsman, operated this way. The problem for him was simply to set it down. If he lived long enough he did so; if
not, then not.... my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness—but not complexity, if you see what I mean. The idea is there in the first jotting-down; it never changes—it only emerges by stages and degrees" (from a twelve-page letter to Eleanor Dimoff of the Meredith Agency, February 1, 1960). Here, Dick is just declaring himself, at a time when his major writing was barely evidenced. The glimpse of the future author of the Exegesis is evocative, to say the least.—JL
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* With few exceptions, the Exegesis was not a journal where Dick would summarize his daily affairs. As a result, many of the crucial events of 2-3-74 were not written about as they happened, and so it is difficult to know how significant these events were for Dick when they transpired. One day before writing this letter to Claudia, Dick wrote a frantic letter to the FBI, saying that two days earlier (March 18) he had received a registered letter from Estonia, a letter he knew "was a trap, frankly by the KGB." He makes no mention of that here. Similarly, in a letter written to his daughter on March 17, 1974, the day after "vivid fire" released Dick from "every thrall," he makes no mention of his life-changing circumstances. March 20 also appears to be the day Dick received the "Xerox missive," which was to play a crucial role in his later theorizing. This envelope, sent from New York, contained two book reviews with certain words highlighted in red and blue pen. Dick worried that they were coded death messages. The importance of these events waxed and waned significantly in Dick's life, so much so that even a major event like the arrival of the Xerox missive might go unreported for weeks or months in the Exegesis.—DG
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* From this point forward, Dick only occasionally included letters, and hardly ever dated his Exegesis entries. The obsessive, recursive nature of the work and the dearth of references to events in the outside world sometimes make establishing precise chronology difficult, if not impossible. Even if a definitive chronology is someday established, the Exegesis cannot be fully reconstructed as written, since it is clear that at times Dick reorganized his own pages.—PJ
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* While this self-encounter occurs as an idea for a plot, it offers an uncanny description of Dick's own journey. Under the influence of his own writing, and by putting as much of himself as possible into that writing, Dick seems to have seen himself as an abstraction—not in the sense of a deadened thing taken out of its context, but in the sense that software engineers discuss "layers of abstraction": an act of metacognition or description that at once detaches from and observes other layers of the system. In the Exegesis, Dick observed himself being what Douglas Hofstadter calls a "strange loop." Dick later recognizes that this operation of "meta-abstraction" identifies something about reality—that the world itself is looped with the language we use to describe it. In The Divine Invasion, the child god Emmanuel manifests something like this loop when he performs the "Hermetic transform."—RD
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* Doris Sauter was a dark-haired girl Dick met in 1972 when she was dating his friend (and fellow SF writer) Norman Spinrad. The two later bonded over their growing interest in Christianity, Doris sharing her conversion story with Dick, and Dick relaying the events of 2-3-74 to her. Eventually the two paired up for charity work. In May 1975, Sauter was diagnosed with advanced lymphatic cancer, which she survived. In January 1976, Dick asked Sauter to marry him (although his fifth wife, Tessa, and young son Christopher would not move out of the apartment for several months). Sauter refused. Later that year, when Sauter's cancer returned and Dick's health issues—including high blood pressure and heart problems—became more serious, they decided to live together. Doris became the character model for Sherri Solvig in VALIS (1981). Later she moved next door to Dick and became the inspiration for the character in Rybus Romney in "Chains of Air, Web of Aether" (1979) and The Divine Invasion (1981). Sauter was forced to move out when the apartment building converted to condominiums, but the two remained friends until Dick's death.—DG
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* It is not clear from the Exegesis to what extent Dick's path crossed with that of Theodore Sturgeon, the author of the science-fiction novels Venus Plus X and More Than Human, who herein is mentioned a number of times (as are the SF authors Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Stanislaw Lem). Dick's and Sturgeon's outlaw kinship—their shared anarchic spirit, their common ambivalence about the technology that wowed most other science-fiction writers, their subversion of physical and temporal reality in pursuit of emotional or even metaphysical truths—makes sense considering that both aimed for the literary "mainstream" before they were vortexed into genre. Perhaps Sturgeon will become the next Dickian vogue among the literati, notwithstanding his introduction here amid odd ruminations on a reincarnated cat.—SE
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* In passages like these, it is impossible to ignore Dick's obvious and sometimes self-confessed psychopathology—in other words, that the guy often appears, well, crazy. It is tempting to collapse Dick's mystical realizations into this craziness, as if Valis were nothing more than a symptom of Dick's alleged schizophrenia, temporal lobe seizures, or whatever. But we must be more careful, and more sophisticated, here. Dick himself thought poignantly and deeply about these and related issues and came to a conclusion that many other thoughtful people—from William James and Henri Bergson to Aldous Huxley—have come to, namely, that the brain may be a kind of "filter," "transmitter," or "reducer" of consciousness. When this filter-brain is temporarily shut down or suppressed by whatever means (mental illness, psychedelics, political torture, meditative discipline, a car wreck, a profound sexual experience, heart surgery), other forms of consciousness and reality, many of them cosmic in scope and nature, can and often do shine through. Trauma, we might say, can lead to transcendence, but—and this is the key point—the transcendent state cannot be reduced to or explained by the traumatic context. As with the material brain and its relationship to the irreducible nature of consciousness, the trauma does not produce transcendence. It lets it in.—JJK
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* Such lines announce a continuous meta-theme in Dick's Exegesis—what I have elsewhere called the mytheme of Mutation. This is the notion that paranormal powers and mystical experiences are expressions of the emerging buds or limbs of an evolving human supernature. Although this idea was endlessly explored in the pulp fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, found some of its most sophisticated mystical expressions in the human potential movement, and later found a wide popular audience in the counterculture with its "mutant" hippies and pop-cultural "X-Men," it is much older than all of these. Indeed, the idea's deepest roots lie in elite academic British culture, and more especially in the London Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882), with figures like the Cambridge classicist Frederic Myers, who saw psychical abilities like telepathy (a word that he coined) as "supernormal" expressions of our "extraterrene evolution." Further back still, Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder of evolutionary theory with Darwin, asserted that there was a second spiritual line of evolution organized and directed by a higher power working toward its own ends. In short, the mytheme of Mutation goes back a century and a half to the very origins of evolutionary biology itself.—JJK
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* Dick consistently seeks to uncover some trace of the so-called unwritten doctrine that Aristotle associates with Plato in the Physics, an association that some see as "outing" Plato as a secret Pythagorean for whom ultimate reality is revealed by number. Dick also seeks to identify Plato's doctrine of the forms with Parmenides's idea of being as a well-rounded sphere opposed to the nothingness of nonbeing. This notion seems linked in Dick's mind with another borrowing from Parmenides to which he makes frequent allusion, the famous fragment 3: "For it is the same thing to think and to be." Also important to Heid
egger, whose radical interpretations of the pre-Socratics may have influenced Dick, this fragment identifies the activity of intellection, noesis or noös, with the essential being of things. We might also take one further step and cite Empedocles's fragment 28, which appears to allude to Parmenides: "But he [God] is equal in all directions to himself and altogether eternal, a rounded sphere enjoying a circular solitude." The kernel of Dick's vision is the mystical identification of the soul's capacity for intellectual intuition with the being of the divine.—SC
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* In his extraordinary German sermons, Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) described the kingdom in the soul as the divine spark (vünkelîn), a term that appears elsewhere in the Exegesis. He also called this kingdom the godhead (gôtheit). Such views were condemned by the Avignon Pope as heretical two years after Eckhart's death. Eckhart's "heresy" was considered close to the much-feared Heresy of the Free Spirit that, some historians claim, was like an invisible empire across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The core of this heresy consisted in the denial of original sin: sin does not lie within us, but within the world, which is not the creation of the true God, but of the malevolent demiurge. Therefore, we must see through the evil illusion of this world to the true world of the alien God. We might link this to Dick's view that orthogonal time will make it possible for the golden age—the time before the fall—to return. In the text of Eckhart's papal condemnation, we find quasi-gnostic utterances such as: "All creatures are one pure nothing. I do not say they are a little something, but that they are pure nothing." All this can be linked to Dick's later Eckhartean allusion to humans as "corruptible sheaves around divine sparks."—SC