The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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* Dick's approach to the concept of being "born again" is quite different from the interpretation that developed among evangelical Protestants in the twentieth century. For evangelicals, being "born again" depends on a personal decision, an intellectual/emotional acceptance of a soteriological proposition. For Dick, it refers to a passive event, an invasion—possibly even a victimization—by an outside force. Dick's "second birth" was not the result of his conversion experience, but its cause. He was personally transformed, but not as a result of his own volition.—GM
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* What else was going on in the world in March 1974? As reality's fabric ripped apart in Fullerton, a jumbo jet fell out of the sky outside Paris, killing more than three hundred people; an Arab oil embargo produced the most pronounced gasoline shortage ever in America, with cars lined up at stations for miles; and the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to restore the death penalty that the Supreme Court recently had ruled unconstitutional. Overshadowing even these unsettling events was the kidnapping in northern California of the heiress of a millionaire publishing family by a band of domestic terrorists; though there is no evidence that Dick shared the rest of the country's fascination with this incident, which took place in his own backyard, the subsequent conversion of Patty Hearst to the radicals' cause sounds like a novel that Dick might have written in the fifties or might yet write toward the end of his life. Most prominently, virtually all of Richard Nixon's immediate political circle in the White House, including his attorney general and chief of staff, were indicted in the Watergate scandal, which had reached critical mass, and the president himself was named a co-conspirator by a grand jury. To Dick, and to the country at large, this was the moment when the Nixon presidency—five months before its end—was at its most toxic.—SE
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* The term "exegesis" is most commonly used to describe a thorough interpretation of a biblical text, often based either on its historical context and language or on the revelation of its hidden meanings. Dick's use of the term implies that he considered his experiences themselves to be a form of scripture, a story to be revealed, explored, and understood. Moreover, his exploration of those experiences is itself a form of continuous revelation, with no clear line between experience and interpretation. But since the experience is ongoing, the Exegesis itself becomes a key part of the narrative. In the Exegesis, Dick is telling a story to himself, and exploring the meaning of that story, in ever-expanding circles of narrative and interpretation.—GM
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* The introduction of Zebra brings us close to the center of Dick's mystical vision. With the "discovery" of Zebra as a mimicker of forms, Dick thinks that he has found his deus absconditus— his hidden God concealed in the phenomenal world. Elsewhere, Zebra is described as a "cosmic Christ" and as a giant brain that utilizes us as crossing stations in his vast relay network of living information. Chains of associated identifications structure the argument of the Exegesis: Zebra equals Christ, and Christ equals God; the mind's union with Zebra is the union with God, where "you are God." The kernel of Dick's mystical "heresy" may be located here: union with the divine.—SC
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* The turning point here seems to include not only a positive vision of what reality is but a figure who can intervene to direct events so as to bring reality to fruition in a positive sense. There seems to be a continuing oscillation in Dick's thought during this period about whether such a reality exists now (and has always existed and will continue to exist into the future), or whether it must be realized through arduous effort and the validation of his vision.—NKH
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* After searching in reference books and other sources for analogies to his experiences in 2-3-74, Dick now seems to accept that it may be unique, or nearly so. The discovery is no doubt bittersweet: if others have had similar experiences, his vision would be validated; but if not, his status as a lone visionary is enhanced even more. There is, of course, another way to interpret the realization that an explanation "will have to derive from what I saw"—namely, that it was internally generated as a cerebral event, accompanied by the rearrangement of his neural circuitry.—NKH
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* Much of the 1977 Exegesis is taken up with pages like these, in which whole encyclopedia entries are copied out by hand. Taken together they provide a fascinating map of autodidactic study; Dick is led from one thing to the next not to master a field of study or a philosophical system but to try to figure out his own experience. The hunger for legitimacy in these passages is striking—no less an authority than Hegel agrees with him!—but no more so than the insistence with which he returns again and again to ground the inquiry in his own experience and need to understand. Dick was well aware of the idiosyncratic and unauthorized nature of his intellectual quest, as VALIS in particular shows. The novel piles up sources and citations from Dick's own researches while posing the question of whether the path of Horselover Fat leads to anywhere but the nuthouse. But what the novel does—what it both intends to do and actually does—is extend an invitation. As Fat's shrink tells him at a low point, "you are the authority." It is a wonderful gift of permission, and the novel offers it in turn to any reader who needs it. Go forth and pursue knowledge! Even if you're totally wrong! You are the authority! And more important perhaps, you are not alone.—PJ
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* In November 1971, Dick's San Rafael house was burglarized. The intruders used explosives to blow open Dick's fireproof safe. Manuscripts and canceled checks were stolen along with a stereo and a gun. Dick speculated for years about the identity and motivation of the intruders; in many ways this endless theorizing prefigures 2-3-74 and his writing of the Exegesis. Dick would construct an elaborate theory about the burglary, complete with motivation and method, only to cast his carefully crafted theory aside when another entered his mind. From Paul Williams's Rolling Stone profile, it appears that Dick's obsession with the event grew over time and eventually began to take over his life. The most Dickian suggestion was made by the police: Dick had committed the burglary himself. When Dick could no longer get the police to return his phone calls, he fell into another depression, writing to Williams, probably only partially in jest, "Ever since the police lost interest in me, there's been nothing to live for."—DG
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* Among all of Dick's books, including the "important" ones, some of the most haunting remain the early so-called failures: Confessions of a Crap Artist, with its savant regarding the world from the perspective of science journals, comic books, and bondage magazines; In Milton Lumky Territory, in which a man falls in love with an older woman only to realize that she was the second-grade teacher who terrorized and humiliated him as a child; and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, where an archaeological hoax transforms a fraudulent artifact into irresistible destiny (a theme Dick picked up a year later in writing The Man in the High Castle). All were rejected by American publishers and remained unknown for years. It is worthy of one of his own stories to wonder what parallel career would have awaited Dick—perhaps heading off his shift into genre—had these utterly original novels found the readership they deserved when they were written. For a while he was the West Coast's answer to Cheever and Updike, except, of course, for that Borgesian streak no one yet identified as Borgesian because Ficciones had not yet appeared in English as Labyrinths. What is most striking about Dick's fiction around the Exegesis is the return to this fifties hybrid: A Scanner Darkly, part confession and part postmortem of an identity crisis, in a near-future where identity is as commodified as anything else; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, beginning in the aftermath of John Lennon's assassination and striving for an answer in the rubble of smashed suppositions.—SE
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* Virtually all of Dick's references to computers are metaphorical or part of his new religious terminology. They are rarely technological in the strict sense. It is paradoxical, or at least ironic, that Dick found his natural audience in the digital age, given not only that he died at the era's outset but also that home computers, I strongly suspect, would only have aggravated his paranoia. I picture him peering deeply into the screen, trying to see who on the other side is watching back; would there have been any doubt in his mind that someone was there? Even Arthur C. Clarke's more theological meditations (as alluded to earlier herein by Dick himself) accept technology's role in our growing collective insight as a species, albeit while acknowledging the tension that technology begets. But the digital age has engendered a more widespread consideration and acceptance of the possible alternative realities that earlier readers of Dick's fiction relegated to the realm of drug-induced hallucination. The eighties cyberpunks who mapped the emerging computer culture, like Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, and Sterling, counted Dick as among their most prevalent influences, even as Dick might well have wondered what the hell Neuromancer was all about.—SE
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* With this important concept, Dick presents the visible universe as a moral test. The challenge is to perceive the injustice of the system of the world and to refuse to cooperate with it. The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear indication that it deserves to be rejected. The impetus to "withdraw assent" must come from a transcendent point of view that impels immediate disobedience: the word "balk" implies gut instinct rather than intellectual decision. Moreover, one cannot be aware that the visible universe is a test, because this would lead to calculated action in light of an expected reward. Dick gives one concrete example of his own balking: his participation in the tax strike organized by Ramparts magazine in 1968. By "this-worldly" standards, this was an illogical decision that led to personal hardship, but by "other-worldly" standards, his refusal was simply the right thing to do.—GM
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* The flip side of these feelings of self-importance was, for Dick, debilitating paranoia. Many of Dick's theories placed him at the center of vast, cosmic scenarios, and these preoccupations were often coupled with feelings of persecution. An exaggerated sense of self-importance is common among paranoiacs, who often reason that they must be important if people are out to get them. In a speech to a Vancouver science-fiction convention in 1972, Dick famously noted that any formulation "that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis about what the universe is about" is a "manifestation of paranoia." Throughout the period of 2-3-74, Dick was also peppering the FBI with increasingly bizarre letters outlining the various plots he felt were at work against him. While in the long run the 2-3-74 experiences seem to have mellowed Dick out, his enlightenment did not come without many a dark night of the soul.—DG
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* Discreet Music is the album I've listened to most often in the past thirty-five years since buying it when it was released in 1975. Brian Eno (affectionately also called "Brain One") conceived of Discreet Music as something that might accompany a dinner party, and it was followed up by other soundscape experiments like Music for Airports and Music for Films. Eno's extraordinary title piece is truly a machine composition; employing an early digital sequencer, looped tape machines, and other oblique strategies, it generates the music algorithmically. Intended to push at the threshold of audibility, Discreet Music is arguably the genesis of ambient music; certainly it and its creator inspired Dick to create the character Brent Mini, the electronic composer who appears in VALIS.—SC
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* In this extraordinary passage, the recursive, self-referential quality of the Exegesis goes loopy. The Exegesis is an exegesis after all, which means that it is obsessed with commentary and Talmudic cross-referencing. In addition to Dick's interminable analysis of his own corpus, there is his regular use of footnotes, which here go haywire. At the top of the page Dick places an asterisk that refers to a small chunk of related text, between which lies the brief description of a dream in which Dick opens one of his own books and discovers a footnote that reads: "this is a gloss in the text for 'I love you.'" Dick then parenthetically defines the term "gloss" as a difficult term needing explanation, a definition that nonetheless requires another explanation, a footnote now using his usual bracketed numeral (1). This footnote offers a variant reading of the meaning of "gloss," defining it not as the explanation of an obscure term—rather like the explanation that you, reader, are now reading—but instead the obscure term itself—in this case, the cypher-text Felix. A parenthetical amendment about the Greek variant glossa in turn spawns another reference mark, a circled ⊗ that leads to yet another repetitive definition. Finally, Dick reiterates that Felix is such a glossa: a glossy obscurity whose invisible message is, at least in its original context, "at odds with what is apparent." And what is apparent here, and odd, is the Exegesis reading and writing itself, like a book in a dream.—ED
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* This passage reveals much about the logic of the Exegesis and rewards close scrutiny. Here Dick is in great joy: the masterful A Scanner Darkly is hot off the press, and Stevie Nicks is in the headphones. (It must be "Dreams" from Rumours: "I see the crystal visions.") Yet only one page before, Dick is in full metaphysical despair. He scribbles a lamentation in German; the second half is drawn from Bach's Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake. At the bottom of that page, as an unnumbered footnote, he declares that this "prayer" had been answered when he subsequently stumbled across the Britannica entry on Jacob Boehme. Though it is hard to imagine how one reads an encyclopedia passage "by mistake," this random access is important to Dick because it removes his will from the equation, implying cosmic intention. In other words, God answered his lament by guiding him to Boehme, in whom he discovered a secret sympathy across time. However, this whole episode is complicated by the appearance sixty-four pages earlier (entry 50:19 above) of the unusual phrase "divine 'abyss.'" This is a fundamental term in Boehme's mystical scheme, where it denotes the emptiness of the Urgrund, the God beyond God. Its appearance earlier in this folder, particularly in quotation marks, strongly suggests that Dick had begun reading about Boehme sometime before uttering, in writing, his German prayer. This is a common pattern in the Exegesis: a motif is casually introduced and later blooms into a matter of such great significance that it changes the visionary narrative in retrospect.—ED
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* Dick is likely referring to Colossians 1:18–20, which states that "God wanted ... all things to be reconciled through [Christ] and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross." More specifically, Dick is probably referring to the footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation first published in 1966 and containing extensive theological annotations written by a committee of Jesuit scholars. Dick frequently quotes from this version's footnotes, suggesting that it was his preferred study Bible (though he is also known to have owned an annotated copy of the New Testament in the New English Version). The notes for this passage of Colossians declare that Christ is "head not only of the entire human race, but of the entire created cosmos, so that everything that was involved in the fall is equally involved in the salvation."—GM
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* While the Exegesis is largely concerned with Western philosophy, Western religion, and Western science, Dick was strongly influenced by his (rather typically Californian) encounter with the East. Hinduism gave him a powerful language in which to think about the absolute and the problem of illusion; his embrace of paradox, organic process, and "the lowly" was deeply marked by his reading of Zen and Taoism, and especially his obsessive use of the I Ching—the ancient Chinese book of changes. The I Ching uses a binary system—yin a
nd yang, broken and solid lines, respectively—to express and model the myriad phases of growth and decay. Like many oracles in Dick's fiction (including The Man in the High Castle, which was partly written using the I Ching), the book's messages—a mixture of Taoist, Confucian, and shamanic lore—are accessed through the throw of coins or other randomizing techniques. Indeed, with its computer-like code, its relentless oscillation of opposites, and its reliance on synchronicity, the I Ching gave Dick an early experience of an organic and mystical information entity—Valis before the name. Here the two hexagrams depict the "trash dialectic" that so concerned Dick, graphically figured through the loss and return of a single yang line between the two figures. In the Wilhelm/Baynes edition that Dick regularly used, the movement between these two hexagrams is described thus: "When what is above is completely split apart, it returns below."—ED
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* The Invisible Landscape (1975) was Terence and Dennis McKenna's attempt to theorize the bizarre high-dose psilocybin experiences they underwent in the Colombian Amazon in 1971. As Dick notes, their text shares many concerns with the Exegesis, which should remind us that Dick was hardly alone in his heady speculations. Throughout the 1970s, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Jack Sarfatti, and many others explored a mode of associative and interdisciplinary theorizing that combined weird science, psychoactive inspiration, occult semiotics, and what can only be called garage philosophy. While sometimes resembling the isolated and obsessional literature of cranks and conspiracy theorists, these speculations also served an underground social function by bringing heads together through a shared language and style. A moment later here, Dick writes, with good reason, that he lived out the process the McKennas described, while Terence later proclaimed, in the afterword to Lawrence Sutin's 1991 abridgement of the Exegesis: "I Understand Philip K. Dick." Such mutual resonance also forms the perfect platform for stoned, late-night bull sessions—for friendship, in other words, like the friendships and conversations that fueled Dick's writing throughout his time in Orange County.—ED