The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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* Like a lot of readers, I consider Dick an idea-man rather than a stylist. Generally he doesn't write sentences that hold within them whole worlds; rather, his collective work has to be taken together to add up to something—at which point, as in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, the House of Dick is bigger on the inside than out. But this sentence is one of Dick's most exquisite and enigmatic and feels full of wisdom, even as I'm not sure what it means no matter how many times I read it. The whiplash words, of course, are "yet accurate." Given how precisely stated the rest of the sentence feels, I must assume they have been phrased precisely as well—but they also feel not so much in juxtaposition with the rest of the sentence as like a virus of syllables that has invaded the others.—SE
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* Dick's Christianity is sometimes revolutionary; here it becomes Marxist. This is not quite the leftist Christianity of liberation theology, which was hitting its stride in the '70s. Dick's "dialectical materialistic mysticism" instead puts him in line with continental thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, whose visionary angel of history sees what we experience as time and progress as a mounting pile of wreckage (or kipple). Dick also anticipates the contemporary return to Christianity found in continental philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Central here is the notion of event. Dick elsewhere describes Christ as "an event in the reality field"—a radical rupture in the determined logic of history, and therefore the opportunity for a leap into actual change. For Badiou, our politics should be based in our fidelity to such moments; Dick's event, 2-3-74, is mystical but no less demanding. Equally relevant here is Dick's sometimes Žižekian twist on dialectical materialism. Some thinkers fetishize a final Hegelian Whole; though Dick is attracted to such totalizing unity, he also recognizes that there is always a remainder: the little guy, the discarded beer can, the questions left hanging by every theory, whose development into another theory he elsewhere compares to the sprouting of a mustard seed.—ED
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* In the following sections, Dick's holograph grows larger and increasingly frenetic.—PJ
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* These cosmic flip-flops are not sandals worn to an Orange County beach, but logic gates at the basis of computers, wherein the change of a single bit at a single gate can alter the entire meaning of a message. Dick's encounter with the Tao, reality as it is, occurs in perhaps equal measure to the planet's historical transformation into digital information and to his own horror of and fascination with simulation. By conceptualizing VALIS as both the Tao—an ancient model of two-state flux between yin and yang—and DNA—a double helical molecule organized in base pairs according to a triplet code—Dick again integrates the seemingly antithetical traditions of modern science and traditional mysticism even as he "harmonizes" the seeming opposition of life and death into a whole contained by each part.—RD
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* "Suppose ... time is round," Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly, speculating that as explorers once sailed west in order to circle the world to India, we might sail into the future only to shipwreck on the shores of Jesus's crucifixion two thousand years ago. Of course, the explorers didn't reach India, they reached America, an altogether different version of the past that came to be called the future. By the same token, we might suppose Dick's career was round as well; as he wrote his way into the future of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the mainland of science fiction receding behind him, he saw before him an altered version of his strange novels of the fifties, all the more singular for how they contextualized his cracked vision not in outer space but in the new American suburbia as saturated with madness as its front lawns were with water and fertilizer. Setting aside the cosmic and religious preoccupations of God and infinity, in a purely literary sense Dick's contemplation of the "infinite" also integrates his literary output, not to mention the vicissitudes of his career, into something coherent; though this might seem banal compared to God and infinity, to Dick such a consideration of literary identity was tantamount to formulating a sense of who he was and why—because a writer doesn't do, a writer is.—SE
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* This and the next two folders are largely taken up with examinations of the following "G-2 dream," and thus with various conspiracy theories concerning the Xerox missive, Soviet espionage, psychic weapons, and the like. In this they resemble a good deal of the nine-tenths of the Exegesis that is not represented in our abridged edition. While such paranoid speculations might delight fans of the cold war spy thriller or David Icke, they quickly become monotonous and, as Lawrence Sutin has written, produce "much heat but little light." Of more interest to the editors have been passages in which Dick struggles with or transforms, rather than succumbs to, the intense paranoia that clearly was one (but only one) of 2-3-74's effects.—PJ
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* Dick and his twin sister Jane were born six weeks prematurely. Dick's mother was unable to produce enough milk, and Jane died of malnutrition a little over a month after her birth. Culturally speaking, it may be the most significant instance of such trauma since Elvis Aron was haunted by Jesse Garon. The single strangest scene in all Dick's work comes in Dr. Bloodmoney when a young girl who has ongoing conversations with an imaginary friend is finally taken by her mother to a doctor, who discovers that living in the girl's side is a twin brother the size of a rabbit. Might they be considered conjoined, in that they share a body and brain? If they share a body and brain, do they share the memory that Dick now struggles for tens of thousands of words in the Exegesis to disown? If they share memory, do they share a soul—a possibility that potentially undermines Dick's attempt in the Exegesis to divide soul from memory? In any case, they have shared everything except birth, which Phil shared with Jane and the resulting duality of which is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, expressed in Presley's case by the division between heaven (gospel) and hell (rock-and-roll) and in Dick's by his literal sense of living two lives at the same time or, more precisely, in two times that coincide.—SE
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* Metaphysical paradoxes abound in these sections: first the comments on the reintegration of the divine and trash, and then this equation of defeat and victory. The latter image, illustrating multiple reversals, is the more complex: Christianity defeated the Empire with the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion, but the Empire won by reversing the early church's anti-authoritarianism. Then the church covertly won by its preservation of a hidden minority of true, rebellious Christians. Furthermore, the image of the sliced-up fish echoes the early church father Tertullian's statement that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." In both the "divine trash" comments and this eviscerated fish image, there is a sense of reality being the opposite of appearance: God is to be found, not in glory, but in abasement; the martyr's subjection to death is actually a great victory for life.—GM
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* This is exactly the kind of sophistication we need, desperately need, from our religious visionaries. No more stupid literalisms, which no one but the unthinking can believe anyway, but an unblinking recognition that whatever is coming through is, well, coming through. Put a bit less unclearly, what Dick is doing here is recognizing that (a) yes, something profound is indeed coming through, but (b) it is coming through the filters of his own socialized and encultured brain, personality, and upbringing. Dick is our teacher here. It is in this way that we can come to understand, finally, that extreme religious experiences are true and false at the same time, and that, sometimes at least, it is only in the symbolic modes of myth and metaphor that the deepest truths can appear at all. This, by the way, is precisely what Mircea Eliade intended with his language of hierophanies (a term that Dick used often)—that i
s, real appearances of the sacred through the contexts and conditions of the local culture and personality. We have two teachers here, then: Philip K. Dick and Mircea Eliade.—JJK
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* These wonderful passages on Beethoven almost make one wish Dick had been a music critic, and if one senses more authority on behalf of classical than pop, well, who needed another rock writer in 1979? Why not someone to make a case for the modern relevance of Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, and Schubert? Among other music he mentions in the Exegesis we find Eno (Discreet Music), the Beatles ("Strawberry Fields Forever," through which God speaks to him), David Bowie (more the cinematic Bowie than the musical one), Neil Young (though he doesn't know it's Young, referring to a cover version by a band called Prelude), and Paul McCartney, on whose first solo album he blames a "psychotic journey," surely the only time McCartney has been credited with such a thing.—SE
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* Nineteenth-century writer Thomas Carlyle, writing of his own Valis-like experience in his semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, asks, "How paint to the sensual eye ... what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man's Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?" Exhausting the quest to describe the extraordinary unity of what is, we can focus our awareness on ordinary reality and explore not only the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" but the unmistakable actuality of the unity of our subjective experience. In focusing on the unity of self, we glimpse the unity of reality. For Dick, this discovery is the occasion for the world flipping inside out, "reverting." His Palm Tree Garden is akin to the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Luke—a way of training the mind to perceive both the eternal and the particular aspects of experience, both external reality and internal subjection. Search for this inner kingdom continuously, and we no longer see simply "through a glass darkly," but instead perceive the immanent and eternal order of the cosmos as the unity of within and without. This possibility shifts the burden of Dick's inquiry—and it shifts often, as if dancing—to an inquiry, not into the nature of Valis and the "essence" of all things, but into the realm of this space and time.—RD
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* This dream spawned the fractured fairy tale The Divine Invasion (1981), a broken novel leaking visionary gems. One of these is the "holoscope," a layered, three-dimensional holographic Bible, pulsing with red and gold, that can reveal fresh messages depending on the reader's interactive angle of view. In some ways a model for the Exegesis itself, the holoscope is also drawn from the Exegesis, or at least from the hypnagogic vision Dick records a few pages after this apocalyptic dream, on [48:839]: a luminous red-and-gold tetragrammaton (YHWH), resembling the plasmate, that pulses along to the repeated phrase "And he is alive." Less groovy is this second coming dream, which drips with the satanic panic and homophobia popular among the more rabid of America's fringe Christians. Dick sometimes shared in this deeply unfortunate strain of the Christian imagination: a tendency to demonize made possible in part by the concept of a conspiratorial Satan. Elsewhere in these late folders, Dick pines for the return of the "rightful king" who will be recognized only by the "elect"; in March 1981, he records a dream in which "God (Valis)" is finally in total control and "the separation of the sheep from the goats has begun."—ED
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* The work of Martin Heidegger becomes progressively more important to Dick as the Exegesis unfolds. Dick has a sense of Heidegger's question of Being and its link to the question of time through Dasein, which is Heidegger's term of art for the human being and the key concern of Being and Time (1927). Dick shows an understanding of some of the key concepts in Being and Time, especially thrown-ness (Geworfenheit), anxiety (Angst), and uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Dick also references the concept of authenticity, the condition for which is Heidegger's notion of being-toward-death, a crucial element as well in the existential psychology that influenced Dick. Dick shows some sense of what is at stake for Heidegger in the recovery of Parmenides' fragment "It is the same thing to think and to be," with its suggestion of the sameness or unity of noein and einai, thinking and being. Yet, Dick's reading of Heidegger is singular, to say the least. Here Dick wants to identify Heidegger's concern with Being with God in the form of the Hebraic YHWH, which is something that would have alarmed Heidegger, as he was prone to a certain deafness regarding the Judaic God. Elsewhere, Dick identifies Sein with the universe and states that in creating the universe the godhead was forced into sin. Through his reading of Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion, Dick also persistently connects Heidegger's thinking to the radical stances of early Christianity and Gnosticism.—SC
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* Dick refers to Luther specifically here, but he's speaking more broadly of a number of Christological theories that propose that Christ's crucifixion constituted the punishment deserved for all of the sins of the world. In Dick's formulation, it is not a question of Christ suffering a necessary penalty, but rather of his disrupting the very machinery by which the punishment of sin operates. Christ tricks the system, not by substituting himself in the place of the individual sinner, but by convincing the system that no wrongdoing has occurred that merits punishment. It is a substitution, not of one being in place of another, but of misinformation in place of accurate data. The reason for the substitution is mercy: Christ's realization that the justice meted out by the system is not just.—GM
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* Dick's opposition to the concept of determinism is here carried to its most extreme: opposition to the very idea of natural law. Dick places the moral value of the individual (the means) above the selfish genes that drive the organism to reproduce (the end): the being itself is greater than its programmed purpose. Dick refuses to accept a mechanistic or deterministic explanation of life; to do so in his view is to ignore the actual experience of living. If a mechanistic principle underlies human life, he suggests, then it is a fetter to be burst.—GM
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* This passage displays an odd eerie resemblance to Plato's description in the Phaedrus (at 247c) of how the immortals travel up and outside in order to stand on the backside of the heavens, which is imagined as a revolving sphere from which they can contemplate what lies beyond, that is, what exists outside the sphere. Here, perhaps, we find Dick walking on the balloon of the cosmos. Dick, of course, saw all sorts of profound connections and similarities between his own experience of Valis and ancient writers like Plato and Plotinus. Here is another.—JJK
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* The idea of God as a constantly evolving dialectic is perhaps Dick's most intriguing theological proposition, and here he gives a possible origin for this self-conflicted deity: the question of means versus ends. The top-level good (an orderly and harmonious cosmos) requires a base-level evil (the suffering of individual beings). The paradox of the greatest good requiring the greatest evil and the corresponding split in the godhead constitutes a major advance from a more simplistic dualism. Put into the matrix of Christianity, this God in crisis becomes the Father (the original creator of reality and author of the Law) and the Son (the redeemer whose mercy fulfills and abrogates that Law). The notion of a dialectically evolving God also resonates strongly with the ideas of other twentieth-century theologians, most notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom Dick mentions frequently) and process theologians like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (who appear later in the Exegesis).—GM
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* There is a rich and sophisticated literature drawing parallels between quantum physics and various forms of mystical experience. Most trace this literature back to the appearance of Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics in 1975, the book to which Dick is alluding in this passage. Capra gave these parallels real cultural traction via his eloquent writing, his own revelatory altered states of consciousness and energy, and, perh
aps most of all, his ingenious illustrations demonstrating the complementarity of mind and matter. Having said that, it must also be observed that the physics/mysticism complementarity has a much longer history. The American anomalous writer Charles Fort, for example, was already naming the "teleporting" (a word that he coined) behavior of subatomic quanta a matter of "witchcraft" in the early 1930s. The pioneering quantum theorist Niels Bohr was so impressed with the similarities between the double nature of light (at once particle and wave) and Chinese Taoism that he chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms. And the physicist Wolfgang Pauli engaged in a quarter-century correspondence with C.G. Jung in order to pursue a similar both-and vision of physics and psychology—a friendship, moreover, that produced one of the most productive parapsychological notions of all time: "synchronicity." All of this is wrapped up in Dick's "I knew...."—JJK
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* This is the mystical, even paranormal, flip side of the postmodern insight. In a world in which almost everything is constructed, plastic, and malleable, what (or who) is doing all of this constructing and shaping? Here Dick takes a cue from anthropology (the "participant-observer" in the field), Kantian philosophy ("you can never know the universe as it really is"), and literary studies (the hermeneutic fusion of interpreter and interpreted) in order to suggest that such a both-and situation points to vast potentials and powers. The real question, of course, is what constitutes those "certain circumstances" under which these potential powers might manifest. Dick's own certain circumstances had a name: "Valis."—JJK