The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
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* Despite his idea that this is a new revelation, Dick is close here to Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Omega Point, whereby the material world evolves toward spiritual communion. While Teilhard writes of the increasing "complexity" of evolution, Dick here writes of "negentropy," a concept first developed by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the effort of living systems to create order to offset their production of entropy. While thermodynamics compels all closed systems to dissipate exergy (useful energy), living systems seem to increase order in the course of development; in Schrödinger's terminology, they "feed" upon negentropy. Significantly, Schrödinger turned to the Vedic concept of Brahman or Self to make sense of an important local instance of negentropy—his own consciousness. Dick's treatment of reality as a "very advanced game of Go" also anticipates the cellular automata models of physicist Stephen Wolfram, though the model goes back at least to John von Neumann's 1947 discussion of "self reproducing automata," a concept that would later help manifest Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—RD
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* Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century theologian, was the most influential apocalyptic thinker of the medieval period. He believed the world was on the verge of a golden age in which all men would be monks in direct communion with God. This third age would be governed by the Holy Spirit, replacing the earlier ages of the strict Father and the intermediary Son. Though Joachim himself does not seem to have considered himself a revolutionary—indeed, he only wrote his ideas down at the urging of the pope—his followers in later centuries were often sharply anticlerical, and some were antinomians and anarchists. It's easy to see how his idea of a procession of ages leading from subjugation to absolute freedom could have revolutionary applications. Though he does mention "religious anarchists," Dick here doesn't focus on rebellion so much as the flow of divine information and the source of religious authority: the third age means the loss of all intermediaries between the individual human being and God.—GM
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* Latin for "in that time," that is, mythical or sacred time, as in the stock phrases "in the beginning" or "once upon a time." Mircea Eliade used the expression to refer to traditional religious attempts to escape or annul "profane time" (understood here as linear temporality or what we now call "history") and return to the "sacred time" referenced in myth and reenacted in religious ritual. Always capable of being "remembered" and so reactualized (hence Dick's constant invocation of anamnesis) within the narratives of myth and the actions of ritual (like the Eucharist), sacred time is essentially no-time or beyond time. We might say, then, that what Eliade imagined in his comparative theorizing Dick seems to have realized in his experience of Valis. But this may be much too simple, as Eliade once noted that his own dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him "the reality of experiences that cause us to 'step out of time' and 'out of space'" (Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude Henri-Rocquet, 1982). In short, there was also an experiential subtext to Eliade's theorizing. He was not simply speculating. He was also confessing. And it was this experiential, essentially mystical subtext that I think Dick was intuiting, illo tempore, as it were, in his repeated embrace of Eliade.—JJK
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* This folder is over three hundred pages long and combines handwritten notes, beginning with number 498, and typed, dated pieces. Dick grouped these into sections marked I through XVIII, a Roman numbering system that continues for several more folders. Because of the complexities introduced, we have opted to use sheet numbers beginning with 1. This folder begins with a conceptual breakthrough about "meta abstraction" and peaks with a theophany on November 17, 1980, which appears at [1:262] below. At the close of that extensive entry, Dick writes the resounding word "END"—which is immediately followed up with a footnote and more discourse. At some point after this theophany, Dick also composed the title page that begins this folder, whose original is unfortunately missing.—PJ
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* This "involuntary chain of mental events" is crucial because it captures the way in which Valis is simultaneously something that Dick experienced in the freedom of his own consciousness and something that seemed to happen to him. And what happened to him, here at least, was One thing. Plotinus's "One" is consonant with that other philosopher of the Perennial Philosophy, Sankara, who referred to reality as "one without a second." In other words, despite appearances, everything we perceive in the world, including ourselves, has the attribute of unity. This is both a message—"Monistic Newsflash: Tomatoes, Tomahtoes, It's All One!"—and a feeling: the self becomes an attribute of something immeasurably larger than itself. This insight is at once immensely obvious and notoriously ineffable: one either perceives the unity of all things or not, and Dick very much has. The experiences of "aha" that pepper the Exegesis are moments of immense creativity as well as insights into the inner realms.—RD
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† The terms reticulation and arborizing explain the meshed and often baroque nature of reality, which is, pace the Talking Heads' David Byrne, the "same as it ever was." Apparently destroyed by its transformation into "bits" of information, the collective remains whole as "God's memory," another level of abstract topology that integrates the apparently chaotic multiplicity of the world through an infolding, outfolding, and branching of reality that resembles physicist David Bohm's notion of the "implicate order" out of which all of reality emerges. Focusing our attention on this reticulation, as Dick does, affects reality itself via the noösphere: "As regards my writing: it will permanently affect the macrometasomakosmos in the form of reticulation and arborizing—and hence will survive in reality forever, in the underlying structure of the world order."—RD
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* Just as the manifestation of Valis is one of organizations, patterns of meaning, neural networks, and the collapse of temporal and spatial boundaries—that is, just as Valis is a revelation of hyperconnections—so too now works the radiated mind of Dick himself. Dick has in effect become a super-comparativist, and so he is able to draw connections and organize disparate patterns of information, like Valis, through huge stretches of space and time. And why not? Paradoxically, Valis works through history and yet exists, as a hyperdimensional presence, outside the box of history. This "abolishing of time" is especially evident in the history of religions and, more precisely, comparative mystical literature, to whose patterns and similarities Dick is powerfully drawn. In this particular passage, the double-edged sword of the comparative imagination is evident: bits of truth can indeed be found everywhere, but the full truth is nowhere to be found; religious systems are both true (as approximations or reflections) and false (as final and complete answers) at the same time. Today a much simpler form of this double-notion is crystallized in the oft-heard quip "I am spiritual, but not religious." Such a position is often demeaned as fuzzy, as narcissistic, as "New Agey." In fact, it constitutes a quiet, but radical, rejection of religion in all its dogmatic and dangerous forms.—JJK
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* Among the many exotic and ominous diagnoses that may be proposed by those inclined to put Dick's visions into a medical or neurological framework, one simple and relatively benign description hides everywhere in plain sight. "Micropsia" is the name for a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and of vast reorientations of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it's a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. I suffered it myself, came to cherish it, and felt bereft when the episodes ended. I've subsequently been fascinated by how many different writers I care for—Julio Cortázar,
J.G. Ballard, William Blake, Christina Stead, and certainly Dick (and Swift)—seem at some point to be attempting to gloss the micropsia sensation in imagery or metaphor.—JL
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* The following description of Dick's November 17, 1980, "theophany" is arguably the single most important entry in the entire Exegesis: it offers a fully developed interpretation of Dick's mode of theoretical exploration, expressed in some of the most beautiful prose he ever wrote. In the face of despair at the interminability of his theological exploration, Dick meets a vision of a God at play: this entire theological exercise is presented as a game between omnipotent deity and created being. Moreover, the infinitude of Dick's theories itself becomes proof that God is the beginning and end of his experiences. In light of the ideas presented in the theophany itself, Dick's conclusions at the end of the entry—that 2-3-74 was caused by Satan and that the Exegesis is therefore a diabolical "hell-chore"—are surprising. Perhaps we can read these remarks not as Dick's final conclusion, but rather the development of another theory about 2-3-74, and thus the beginning of another infinitely tall pile of computer punch cards.—GM
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* The visionary episode of November 17, 1980, is one of the peaks of the Exegesis, as sublime a modern parable as Kafka's "Before the Law." These pages are also bona fide mysticism—not because Dick had authentic mystical experiences (whatever those are) but because Dick produced powerful texts that twist and illuminate vital strands of mystical discourse. Here we are in the apophatic realm of the via negativa, which, like Dick's game-playing God, deconstructs all names and forms in the obscure light of the infinite. Elsewhere Dick tips his hat to Eckhart and Erigena, but the apophatic mystic his writing most invokes here is Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). By analyzing paradoxes, Cusa pushed reason toward a "learned ignorance" (docta ignorantia) that blooms finally into the coincidentia oppositorum, or coincidence of opposites—a mystic coincidence that Dick achieves here through a manic and corrosive intensification of the dialectic. But perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of Dick's 11/17/80 account is that his God here has nothing to do with the divine abyss of the negative mystics. Instead, he is a character in a story: part playful guru, part Palmer Eldritch, and part Yahweh, screwing around with Adam because there is nothing better to do.—ED
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* Not surprisingly, Philip K. Dick scholars have been keen to defend the author against the popular (and also understandable) stereotype that he was just a druggy. It's true that Dick gobbled pills and drank amphetamine shakes; his psychedelic use, though infrequent, was also important, as was the nitrous oxide trip at the dentist's office that revealed Valis "as an arborizing, reticulating vine." Here, the quaint reference to "Mary Jane" (marijuana) reminds us that, just as speed amplified his productivity, so too did cannabis amplify his visionary capacity, both on and off the page. For Dick, cannabis served as an engine of creative perception, but like all visionary drugs, it also staged a visionary paradox that lies at the heart of the Exegesis (and much of Dick's fiction): whatever freedom and sublimity is on offer requires a passive submission to perceptual machinery. Drugs can push the mind toward infinite speeds and meditative slownesses. But they also, like Valis itself, possess their own alien logic. The arborizing chains of associations that striate the Exegesis, and that cannabis and other drugs insistently multiply, may just as readily bind as liberate.—ED
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* Dick focuses on agape, a Greek term for total love, as a guideline for navigating those realities that are enmeshed with our thoughts about them. Agape calls us to cherish beings for what they are, and for nothing else. Over and over, Dick insists that his monistic vision is not pantheism, for his vision depends upon the very difference between self and other, world and the divine, that makes agape possible. Nondualistic in its essence, agape acts like a kind of mantra whose very utterance makes us quiver or stridulate in a vibrational intensity of self-other interaction. Agape makes us say it out loud, act like a fool, not knowing what is up or down, inside or out. It welcomes what Dick elsewhere calls the "integrity of the einai of the other." Does Dick offer Valis, the ultimate other, this integrity as well? Perhaps the Exegesis could be seen as a cherishing of the einai of Valis, an act of radical love. Dick offers life to Valis in the Exegesis, and this agape extends to the world itself.—RD
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* A lot of Dick's cosmology boils down to loving and being loved, something that was difficult for him throughout his life and especially his five marriages. Dick's writing often depicts his own struggle to open up and make himself vulnerable to the people around him. In his 1975 essay "Man, Android, and Machine" he writes, "A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake.... He stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man." Given how fully the Exegesis is committed to a God who cares, I suspect that some of Dick's obsessional speculation may have been a form of therapy, a way of working through his problems, of assisting himself in his quest to become a better person and connect with others. Part of this transformation involved altering the way he saw the world. No longer an adversarial place that might squash his hopes and dreams, it becomes a divinely infused garden, a safe place for him to share his fragile self with the world.—DG
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* Even in his most megalomaniac moments Dick never suggests that the Exegesis itself will ever be read. But the fact that, improbably, we are reading these lines gives the question he poses here and elsewhere—what is the value of all this thinking?—a certain urgency for us as well. If the Exegesis is his delusion and "hell-chore," it is now ours too. Dick is never more honest, nor more passionate, than when he's questioning, then defending, the solitary path of inquiry that has become his life. As bitterly as he complains of the emotional and physical cost, again and again he reaffirms his commitment to tracing this maze that is also a work of art and a route to God. But what is it for us? This question was often in my mind as I read the eight thousand manuscript pages that shared my Berkeley apartment these past years. How many exegeses are tucked away in attics, never to be read? Should they be read? Might some of them be as brilliant as Dick's, and no more delusional? It is Dick's larger life's work that has rescued these traces of an intellectual journey that most likely would otherwise have been consigned to the recycling bin. Thus, his solitary path becomes, for a while, our own. The first rule of this particular ordeal is: you must go where the inquiry leads. Yet that means, of course, that you must question the inquiry itself. The temptation—I frequently felt it myself—will be to come down on one side or the other of the dilemma that Dick here states in characteristically metaphysical terms: hell-chore or road to God? But the dilemma may be unresolvable—one of those matched pairs of irreconcilable opposites that Dick loves to discover are driving the universe: it is road to God and hell-chore, divine path and curse.—PJ
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* Dick's take (or one of his takes, at least) on the question of law and grace is not too dissimilar from that of John Calvin, who distinguished between the Hebrew Bible's "covenant of works" and the New Testament's "covenant of grace." In Dick's formulation, the Torah is an all-too-strict mechanistic system, based on an inflexible equation of transgression and punishment. As elsewhere, Dick is preoccupied with determinism, which he considers an evil; love/grace/mercy breaks through the requirements of normal causality. Compare this statement on the rigidity of Torah with Dick's comment in the essay "The Android and the Human" that the android mind is characterized by "the inability to make exceptions."—GM
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* One of the great charms of the Exegesis is the presence of Dick's ballpoint diagrams, w
hich remind me of the blackboard drawings that Rudolf Steiner sketched during his metaphysical lectures. Most of Dick's drawings are abstract illustrations—flow charts, Venn diagrams, intersecting 3-D planes—that lend a concrete form to his ever-mutating conceptual schemas. But others focus on the fish sign, his persistent icon of downloading divinity. Formally, the shape invokes the vesica piscis or mandorla, a geometric pattern often found in the almond-shaped auras of Christian iconography. Variations appear throughout the Exegesis, where the fish morphs into everything from a third eye to a vagina dentata to the mysterious "whale mouth sign" of Albemuth. This doodle shows a distinct development of the form, which, according to a February 14, 1978, letter to Ira Einhorn, reflects its original visionary disclosure as a "series of graphic progressions" from fish to one-eyed mandorla to spiral DNA. Like most sacred geometric forms, the power of Dick's fish sign lies partly in its "Platonic" ability to replicate itself through a variety of concrete situations. But a more unusual aspect lies in this animated quality—the sign's DNA-like potential for differentiation, for transforms that unfold stories about the (double) ties that bind.—ED
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* Given Dick's leap into what he calls meta-abstraction, it is perhaps predictable that he would imagine a life form that, rather than embodying information in a substrate, is pure information itself. The conceptual trajectory he traces here grew steadily in Western scientific culture from the 1930s to the 1990s, drawing in genetics (DNA as the information carrier and the "book of life"), information theory (where information is treated as a dimensionless probability distribution), computational theory (where the computer hardware is often treated abstractly as an ideational form rather than a physically present device), and a host of other fields. Writing in 1981, Dick did not live to see the countermovement toward embodiment that took place in the late 1990s among scientists and philosophers grappling with information, biology, and systems theory. At the same time, Dick himself insisted on the sensory immediacy of his experiences in 2-3-74. He may have thought he glimpsed a life form that was pure information, but he himself was keenly aware of the embodied nature of his own thought.—NKH